Let's Read Tolkien 60: The Stairs of Cirith Ungol

Gollum was tugging at Frodo's cloak and hissing with fear and impatience.

Frodo and company leave Ithilien behind, and enter the Morgul Vale. Soon, they sight Minas Morgul: former fortress of Gondor turned abode of the Ring-wraiths. They're transfixed by the horror of the city, and drawn by the Ring, Frodo momentarily loses his mind and starts stumbling toward it, but Sam and Gollum stop him.

The trio begin making their way up a path on the north side of the valley, but they're only a part of the way up when the Witch-king marches his army out of Minas Morgul. For a moment, the Witch-king stops, sensing the Ring, but Frodo manages to grab hold of the phial of Galadriel instead of putting it on. As the army marches on, Frodo weeps, believing he has tarried too long, and Sauron's armies will destroy everything.

When the army has marched past and the gates of Minas Morgul are shut, Sam rouses Frodo. Gollum leads them to a seemingly endless stair cut into the mountains. After a long climb, the hobbits reach a crevice along the stairway, where they talk and rest for a while. Gollum vanishes, and returns to find Frodo and Sam asleep. In a moment of tenderness, he touches Frodo, but Sam wakes and rebukes him for "sneaking". Gollum immediately returns to his old self and sneers at Sam. Frodo offers to release Gollum from his servitude, but Gollum insists he must lead them further, to the tunnel.

**

The description of Minas Morgul at the very beginning of the chapter, and especially Frodo's heedless running toward it, strongly recalls the House of Silence in William Hope Hodgson's Night Land. I wonder if Tolkien ever read it? I thought the otherwise disappointing Middle-earth: Shadow of War had a charming portrayal of Minas Ithil before it fell, even if the timeline made absolutely no sense whatsoever.

I talked about the Fall of Frodo earlier, when he used the Ring to demand Smeagol's submission. There's a highly significant choice of words here on the same theme, when Frodo sees the chief of the Ring-wraiths before Minas Morgul:

And as he waited, he felt, more urgent than ever before, the command that he should put on the Ring. But great as the pressure was, he felt no inclination now to yield to it. He knew that the Ring would only betray him, and that he had not, even if he put it on, the power to face the Morgul-king - not yet.

Who, exactly, is speaking here? Is the narrator conveying Frodo's thoughts? Is he really thinking ahead to a future in which he'll be strong enough to use the Ring to defeat the chief of the Nine? Maybe this explains why Frodo's plans for getting to Mount Doom are always a bit vague: maybe he had already decided against actually destroying the Ring.

In another literary association, although this one is chronologically impossible, the titular stairs remind me of the Thousand Steps that Stephen Maturin climbed on the fictional island of Pulo Prabang in The Thirteen-Gun Salute. I wonder if there's some theological meaning to the various ordeals Frodo and Sam go through on the journey to Mordor? I'm afraid I'm not enough of an expert in Catholic hagiography to tell; my theology education was boringly Protestant.

Finally, the scene where Sam rebukes Gollum was identified by Tolkien as a key moment for Gollum: "the tragedy of Gollum who at that moment came within a hair of repentance - but for one rough word from Sam" (Letters 96, also 181). I don't really find this at all convincing. Frankly, if Gollum was "within a hair of repentance" but is eternally doomed by Sam being a bit rude to him, I'm not convinced he was ever going to manage to repent if that's all it took to deter him. I read the scene as a tragic misunderstanding and an example of the internal conflict in Gollum - but nothing more.

Next time: I'm afraid it's spiders.