Let's Read Tolkien 70: The Houses of Healing

A mist was in Merry's eyes of tears and weariness when they drew near the ruined Gate of Minas Tirith.

Merry staggers into the city with Théoden's bier, but gets lost and collapses somewhere. Luckily Pippin finds him and gets word to the Houses of Healing, and Gandalf comes down to find them. Merry is taken to Minas Tirith's lazaret, where he, Faramir and Éowyn are struggling to recover from the Nazgûl. Ioreth, oldest of the healers, complains that if only there was a king, maybe he could heal them: Gandalf immediately fetches Aragorn.

Strider has decided to make camp outside the city, and has declined to claim the throne; Faramir is still officially Steward. He comes to the Houses of Healing, and after an altercation with an overly learned but useless herb-master, some athelas is finally found, and he gets to work reviving the wraith-casualties. Once they're done, he heads out into the city with the sons of Elrond, healing people as best they can.

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This is a great little chapter. Everybody gets some really good character stuff, especially Aragorn, who has some of the best lines in the whole book here.

The postmortem on Edoras is very good as well. When Aragorn is treating Éowyn, he and Gandalf very patiently explain to Éomer how she, too, suffered terribly from Saruman's corruption of Théoden's court, but because of patriarchy, she suffered far more.

"My friend," said Gandalf, "you had horses, and deeds of arms, and the free fields; but she, born in the body of a maid, had a spirit and courage at least the match of yours. Yet she was doomed to wait upon an old man, whom she loved as a father, and watch him falling into a mean dishonoured dotage; and her part seemed to her more ignoble than that of the staff he leaned on."

But go on, do tell me more about how Tolkien hated women.

The delightful episode with the herbalist harks back to Aragorn's first conversation with Éomer, where one of Éomer's Riders scoffed at fairy-tales. Both Gandalf and Aragorn praise Ioreth and name her wise-woman, because she remembers the old lore, while the useless herb-master has a great memory for names and rhymes, but understands nothing of them. Seeing as how Tolkien was an academic and a philologist, it seems impossible to not read this as a commentary on his own discipline at its worst: minutely cataloguing words and their appearances, while completely losing touch with the tradition they lived in, and in the end being completely useless.

The great theme of this chapter is, of course, Aragorn's kingship. He did the thing with the athelas at Weathertop already, and here he effectively uses it to prove to the people of Gondor that he's really the king. It's never entirely clear if the herb actually has special powers when used by him, though, or if he's just putting ranger herb-lore into action. I referred earlier to the History of Middle-earth books, which tell us that Tolkien at one point planned for Aragorn and Boromir to contest the rule of Gondor. It would have been interesting to see how Tolkien would have contrasted the two as prospective rulers. Certainly it's difficult to see Boromir going around the city at night healing people.

One of the points that Tolkien made with his analogy of Beowulf as a tower and in Aragorn's destruction of the herb-master was that language and stories are living things, not incomprehensible dead monuments. With that in mind, enjoy this outstanding quote from Ioreth, wise-woman of Gondor.

"Well now! Who would have believed it?" said Ioreth to a woman that stood beside her. "The weed is better than I thought. It reminds me of the roses of Imloth Melui when I was a lass, and no king could ask for better."

Weed fit for a king, indeed.

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Next time: a board meeting.