Let's Read Tolkien 67: The Ride of the Rohirrim

It was dark and Merry could see nothing as he lay on the ground rolled in a blanket; yet though the night was airless and windless, all about him hidden trees were sighing softly.

Merry and the Riders of Rohan are camped out in the woods on their way to Gondor. Merry eavesdrops on a discussion between Théoden, his captains and a leader of the Wood-woses, an indigenous people living in the woods at the foot of the White Mountains. The Wood-woses hate orcs and offer to guide the Riders to the outwall of Minas Tirith by an old, disused Númenoran road, bypassing Sauron's army. This is done, and the Riders arrive at the Rammas Echor, which they find Sauron's forces have wrecked and left unguarded. The Riders pass through and Théoden leads them in a charge on the unsuspecting main body of the Witch-king's army.

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So this chapter culminates in what I think must be the most famous cavalry charge in all of fantasy. I'm still a sucker for these parts of the Lord of the Rings; I think Théoden's restoration - almost resurrection - is still deeply moving, and it more or less culminates here, as he leads his riders into the greatest battle of the age. I love the water imagery Tolkien uses: the Riders pass through the broken outwall like a rising tide, and charge like a foaming wave.

There are a couple of messages here, so to speak. One is that Sauron and his orcs are such assholes that even the indigenous people, who have been treated the way indigenous people tend to be treated by white settlers, would rather help the settlers than Sauron's forces. The Wood-woses quite strongly recall Robert E. Howard's Picts: a crafty but strange, almost otherworldly and ugly native people; in other words, a lovely bit of racialized othering. The casual aside that the Númenorans and men of Rohan have hunted them like animals does get one wondering whether Sauron could have done more to get both the Dunlendings and the Wood-woses on his side.

The other is that Sauron and his captains actually aren't all that good at this. As Éomer points out, the outer wall could have been held against them for a long time, and that would presumably have won the battle for the Shadow. Instead they've blasted huge holes in it as they broke through, which seems kind of pointless: you'd think it would have been enough to tie up the Gondorian garrison as the main force made the breakthrough at Osgiliath, because soon enough they'd have to retreat or be encircled. This mistake is then compounded by bad planning: whoever made the decision to station a blocking force further north along the main road rather than at the wall itself was overly confident that the enemy would be taking the road and had no other path through.

Of course, this is all in keeping with Tolkien's theology: because evil is an imperfect mockery of good, they never do get things quite right, and inadvertently screw themselves over. "Our Enemy's devices oft serve us in his despite," as Éomer puts it - a recurring theme of the entire work.

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Next time: ships.