Gondor, the Pelennor Fields
March 15, 3019
The Mordorians only realized that they had been had when the brown splotch of Rohan’s army began spreading through the northern edge of the white fog blanketing the Pelennor Fields, while Gondor’s troops poured through the opened gates of Minas Tirith, quickly congealing into battle formations.
These chapters are quite short, so this time I'm doing three of them, because it means we can get through this military history fanfic and back to the actual story!
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We left off last time with the Mordor army camped in front of Minas Tirith. Gandalf's coup bought just enough time for the cavalry of Rohan to get into position and charge the Mordorians. The battle goes poorly for them, however, until a mystery force of undead warriors lands to the south. The Dúnadan leading them tricks the commander of Mordor's South Army into fighting a chivalrous duel with him - only for one of the walking corpses to stab the Mordorian officer in the back. It's a very appropriately dastardly thing to do.
That was chapter 7. In the next one, the battle is still raging; the Mordorians have figured out that incendiaries can stop the undead, and most of Aragorn's walking corpses are toast. They did, however, succeed in drawing off Mordor's catapults from Minas Tirith.
Next, Éomer rallies the rohirrim cavalry with a frankly strange and cringy speech about martyrs getting to go to heaven and have sex. In the translation, he talks about "houranies", by which we assume he means houri. It's a weird and orientalist interlude, and I don't really get where it fits in with the maniacal allegorism, where previously the Free Peoples had stood for a barbaric west and Mordor represented an enlightened east. I don't know if he's trying to pawn off orientalist stereotypes of Muslims onto westerners or what the idea is. In any case, I can't help thinking he'd have been better off just having Gandalf offer everyone an indulgence.
The combination of the undead attack and Rohan cavalry charge decides the battle. Éomer and Aragorn meet on the battlefield, and it turns out that Éowyn has fought in disguise as one of the rohirrim. She acts like a willful child and proclaims her love for Aragorn, who returns it and sends her off to be treated for her wounds in Minas Tirith. This leads abruptly into a brief retelling of the Last Debate, where it turns out she's being held as a hostage to ensure Éomer's submission to Aragorn. The final assault on Mordor is then recounted sort of off-hand: there is terrible slaughter, King Sauron is killed in combat, everyone lies about it afterward.
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So, whereas parts of the previous chapters read like badly written fan fiction, all of this does. The retelling of the battle of the Pelennor fields isn't really all that interesting, even when it isn't childish and orientalist. The first part really leans into Aragorn being an asshole and it works decently, but then the Last Debate fanfic very clumsily underlines how he's an asshole, and we got it the first time around. If the next chapters were more inept quasi-military history, I think I'd quit. But I don't have to. At the end of chapter 9:
However, the wizards of the White Council had somehow forgotten one factor: namely, that there is a certain Someone in the world Who rather abhors complete victories and assorted ‘final solutions,’ and is capable of showing His displeasure with same in the most improbable ways. Even now, that Someone was dispassionately surveying the vanquished – all that flotsam cast ashore by the passed storm – when suddenly He rested His gaze upon a couple of soldiers of the extinct South Army lost among the dunes of the desert of Mordor.
Next time: believe it or not, Haladdin and Tzerlag.
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