Mordor, the Teshgol boundary
April 9, 3019
“So why not wait until nightfall?” Haladdin whispered.
As you may or may not recall, Orocuen Sergeant Tzerlag of the Cirith Ungol Rangers and Umbarian Field Medic Second Class Haladdin are in Mordor, trying to evade the enemy and make it back home. We find them eying a small nomad camp in a hollow, and Haladdin sweats it out while Tzerlag investigates. Sadly, he finds that all of the civilian inhabitants of the camp have been murdered by the Western occupation forces. As they're burying the dead, Tzerlag finds a man buried up to his head in the sand and left to die. Haladdin diagnoses only mild dehydration, and they pull him out.
To their shock, the man is a Gondorian officer. He introduces himself as Baron Tangorn, a lieutenant in the Ithilien Regiment. The baron had been part of a patrol of Easterling mercenaries led by an elven officer, Eloar of Lórien, which was engaged in counterinsurgency operations, i.e. massacring civilians. It's a little sad to think that back in 1999 when the Last Ringbearer was written, neither the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan nor the Vietnam War were inpossibly distant memories, and in both, counterinsurgency did tend to mean exactly that. The English translation was published in 2010, when the USians were right in the middle of the so-called War on Terror, which was largely fought by murdering civilians. When Tolkien started writing the Lord of the Rings in 1937 or thereabouts, they didn't call it counterinsurgency yet, but the Royal Air Force had only recently been busy bombing Iraq to put down a revolution, and the Italians were butchering Ethiopians to build Mussolini's empire. So very unfortunately, this is timeless stuff.
The baron, it turns out, had tried to stop the elf-led patrol from murdering the civilians, and for his pains he was left to die in the desert. As he explains it, he has nowhere left to go: a usurper has taken over his homeland, and if the elves find him, they'll kill him. This is what he has to say about events in Gondor:
“Denethor died a horrible death; supposedly he immolated himself on a funeral pyre. The very next day there was a ready claimant to the throne. You see, there’s an old legend, which no one had taken seriously before, that the ruling House of Húrin is only taking care of the throne for the descendants of the mythical Isildur. Such a descendant has shown up – one Aragorn, of the northern rangers. To prove his dynastic rights he produced a sword, supposedly the legendary Andúril, although who had ever seen this Andúril? He also performed several healings by laying of hands, although all those healed were from among his northern followers … Prince Faramir, the heir apparent, retired to Ithilien and is supposedly a prince there under the eye of Captain Beregond – the same one who testified to Denethor’s ‘self-immolation.’”
Meanwhile, Aragorn's remaining undead keep everyone in line, and rumor has it that the real ruler is his elven-wife Arwen. In events closer to home for our protagonists, Barad-dûr has been razed and according to Tangorn, the elves are looking to "push your people back into the Stone Age." Another reference to the US military; the threat to bomb a country into the Stone Age is of Vietnam vintage, but the idea of occupying and "undeveloping" a country is reminiscent of the Morgenthau Plan, the US policy proposal that aimed at deindustrializing Germany after the Second World War.
So Tangorn doesn't have much of a home to go back to, and he asks if he can join the two Mordorians and get his revenge on the elf-officer. They agree, and the next chapter opens with Haladdin and Baron Tangorn discussing poetry as they prepare to attack the enemy camp.
First Tzerlag and Haladdin, serving as an archer, take out several sentries in a sequence straight out of Skyrim, and then Tzerlag and Tangorn storm the camp. Tzerlag accounts for several of the Easterling mercenaries, but he's outmatched by Eloar. Tangorn and the elf duel, and Tangorn is winning, until Eloar tricks him into into striking the elf's chest armor, which appears to be flimsy leather. Tangorn's sword, however, bounces off it, and Eloar gains the advantage, knocking Tangorn down. Haladdin, watching, decides there's nothing left to lose, and fires his arrow at the elf.
Remember that part about the Certain Someone I quoted at the end of the previous post? On this Middle-earth, divine grace is shooting an elf in the eye.
**
I'm delighted we've returned to the adventures of Haladdin and Tzerlag! The dialogue is still hokey, especially when they talk about poetry, but for the most part these chapters read like a proper adventure story. I hope there's more of this to come.
Next time: deliberations in the desert.
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