Let's Read Tolkien 74: The Land of Shadow

Sam had just wits enough left to thrust the phial back into his breast.

Frodo and Sam flee down the road to Mordor, but orcs are approaching from all directions. In desperation, they drop off a bridge to avoid being caught, and end up in a thicket of thorny bushes. They're in a sort of gully running north along the mountains, and begin making their way along it. They have only very little water and some lembas left, and no idea where to find more. As they trudge northward, they are surprised to see daylight: it's the day of the Battle of Pelennor, and the clouds of Mordor have been driven back. They encounter an orc-patrol, a tracker and a soldier, but the orcs quarrel: the tracker shoots the soldier and escapes. Sam deduces from their talk that Gollum is still around.

Eventually the hobbits find a way east, onto the plains of Mordor. The land between them and Mount Doom is an ashen desert, but one that's crowded with armies of orcs and men. As they try to cross it, the hobbits are met by an orc-column, but because they're wearing orcish clothes, and apparently there's wide variety in orcish physiognomy, they're mistaken for orcs and whipped along with the column. The forced march takes them toward Mount Doom, and when the orcs stop and get into a fight with another unit, the hobbits escape.

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I sincerely hope that anyone reading this can take a moment to appreciate the best thing to come out of all of the various Lord of the Rings film adaptations: the song the marching orcs sing in the Rankin-Bass animation. I think this has to be regarded as the first-ever recorded orcish spiritual.



This chapter is also where we get one of our very few glimpses into the broader realm of Mordor, including Lake Núrnen, which was beautifully realised in Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. There's a lot we never got to find out about Mordor and Sauron, presumably because they were only really necessary to the story, rather than part of Tolkien's main creative ambitions.

I wondered earlier about the possible theological symbolisms of Frodo and Sam's journey, but here I think they become fairly obvious. I mean there's constant physical hardship, the shedding of physical burdens and wargear, and literal thorns. Frodo and Sam's journey through Mordor is an ascesis: a mortification of the flesh. The trip is tough on Sam, but much tougher on Frodo, because he is literally bearing Tolkien-capitalized Sin on his neck. This is Frodo at his most Christ-like, crawling to Golgotha to the mockery of orcs.

I quoted Tolkien earlier on the symbolism of lembas as the communion wafer, i.e. faith, and it becomes quite explicit here: after the provisions given by Faramir run out, the hobbits subsist on water they find in the wasteland, and faith. When they're caught by the orc-column, Frodo says they "trusted to luck, and it has failed us"; but he's wrong, because the forced march that culminates in a chaotic brawl actually gets them where they were going but couldn't find a way to. Like the quarreling orc-trackers, this is a case of evil fucking things up for evil, but it's hard to resist the interpretation that the hobbits "earn" this piece of luck (i.e. divine intervention) with their ascesis.

If you want to get all Kierkegaard on this, the hobbits dropping off the bridge at the beginning of the chapter is a leap of faith.

Taken together with the last chapters of Book Five, the theological message Tolkien wants to convey to us here is that he's given you a well-executed, exciting story of war, valor and sacrifice, and none of it really matters, because everything depends on a young gentlehobbit's spiritual via dolorosa through the desert of Mordor.

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Next time: more theology, more leaps.