Rogue Trader: Welcome to the Acheron sector

Our Rogue Trader campaign, which started back in 2014, is still going on; we've spun it off into Warhammer 40,000 and are looking to recruit some new people, so I thought it would be high time to expand on the fairly meager bit of fluff I gave to our players so long ago. First, I'd like to introduce our setting: the Acheron sector.

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The Acheron sector lies far to the galactic north, in Segmentum Obscurus. In the 37th millenium, what is now the Acheron sector was the northernmost fringe of the Charon sector, one of the most remote reaches of Segmentum Obscurus. During the Age of Apostasy, the Charon fringe was barely under Imperial control. Its rulers were an immensely rich and corrupt noble family, who nominally accepted the authority of Holy Terra. Xenos pirates raided the Charon sector, while the lords of the fringes claimed to be powerless to stop them.

After the death of the tyrant Vandire brought the Age of Apostasy to a close in M37, Saint Isabella the Just turned her attention to the Charon fringe. One of the leaders of the newly founded Adepta Sororitas, Saint Isabella had been a junior leader in some of the first wars of the Age of Redemption, and now set out on a crusade of her own to rid the Charon sector of the alien menace.

When Saint Isabella arrived in the Charon fringe, it quickly became obvious that the local nobility was in league with the xenos and had in fact repudiated the authority of the Emperor. Saint Isabella's crusade exterminated both the xenos and the corrupt nobles utterly. The name of the ruling family of the Charon fringe was expunged from Imperial records, and a new sector was founded: the Acheron sector. Saint Isabella appointed one of her most loyal generals, Lady Devanshi Indriani, the first proconsul of the new sector. House Indriani has ruled the sector ever since.


The Acheron sector is officially defined as extending from the border of the Charon sector all the way into the halo stars and to the northern edge of the galaxy. In the first millenium of its settlement, expansion northward was practically restricted to the area south of the Acheron Typhoon: present-day Prima, Secunda and Tertia Pars of the sector. The Typhoon is a permanent warp storm, and navigating around it is very hazardous. On both its eastern and western sides lie large gulfs of what navigators call null-space: areas of space where warp travel is almost impossible. The phenomenon that causes this is unknown, but in null-space astropathic communication is cripplingly difficult and the Astronomican is imperceptible. These two gulfs, Lacuna Phlegethon to the west and Lacuna Cocytus to the east, cut off the outer parts of the sector almost completely.

This changed in M38, when the revered Saint Anastasia came to the Acheron sector. Driven by a vision from the Emperor, Saint Anastasia and navigator house Radha forged a path around the Acheron Typhoon and mounted a crusade against the xenos empire beyond. Saint Anastasia led her troops through battles so terrible that most chronicles simply refuse to speak of them, merely stating that Saint Anastasia vanquished the xenos. She led the crusade as far as the Anastasian Depths, named in her honor. Her consort, Saint Valeria, crossed the Depths to the west to eliminate a last xenos stronghold on the dead world Silentium. In a horrible battle beneath the planet's surface, the missionary Saint Electra was martyred, and the xenos were eradicated.

Saint Anastasia's conquests were consolidated as Ultra Pars of the Acheron sector. Vestigium Hanini is officially the southernmost system of Ultra Pars, and the start of the twin routes past the Acheron Typhoon known as the Holy Gates. The Holy Gates converge at Babylonia Typhonis, seat of the procurator of Ultra Pars and gateway to the northernmost reaches of the sector.

North of Babylonia Typhonis, a stable warp route leads to the Quattor Proci Benitahi, a group of four solar systems close to each other that includes the hive world Augereau and the forge world Oecus Centrifugo. In M41, Rogue Trader Laurenz Frunze blazed a new route to the east, where the House Frunze colony Sacrificatio Imperatori now stands. North of the Quattor Proci is an area of dense null-space known as the Desolatio Thanos, which is considered completely unnavigable.

From Quattor Proci Benitahi, ships bound west for the Phlegethon sector travel to the garden world of Lilium, famed for its brandy. From Lilium they must attempt the Valerian Gates via Sermones Saryoni, Nekromanteion and dread Silentium. The northern route passes by the mining world of Lapis Nova to Ignis and Fides, where the Weyland Transit leads to Clavis Coronae and beyond. It's possible to take either of these routes and make a circuit around the Anastasian Depths to Sancrist, a colony of Rogue Trader house Karanja and chief Imperial world beyond the Depths. There is also a direct route over the Depths, the Pons Separatoris from the shrine world Termina Anastasiae to Dos Umbrae, but only House Radha hold the secret to navigating it safely. Occasionally, a bold Navigator makes the attempt; it invariably ends badly for them.


Beyond the Anastasian Depths lies the uncharted expanse of Ultra Pars. West of Sancrist are the Acheron Badlands, a seemingly limitless area punctuated by patches of null-space. To the north is a human civilization that calls itself the Confederation; they maintain a lively trade as middle-men between Imperial merchants at Sancrist and unknown operators on the other side of the Cortina Noctis. To the east of the Confederation lie the Morbid Reaches, where few Imperial ships dare pass. Somewhere to the northwest are the homeworlds of the Ishi xenos, a fierce, predatory race whose raids sometimes extend into Tertia Pars.

It's rumored that there are stable routes across the Cortina Noctis in the Morbid Reaches, and somehow the Confederation traffic across it. What lies beyond the Cortina Noctis? Who knows! All the ancient stellar catalogues can reveal is names for regions and occasional individual stars; nothing else. Most star systems in Ultra Pars are known only by their stellar catalogue numbers: for example, O.Ac.U.2887; the O designates Segmentum Obscurus, Ac is short for the Acheron sector and U for Ultra Pars. The brightest stars are generally numbered first; Babylonia Typhonis, a blue giant, is O.Ac.U.1. Beyond that, to the Imperial explorer most systems in Ultra Pars are a meaningless number on a chart. The only way to find out what secrets they hold is to go and look...

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It's out here, in the unexplored depths of Ultra Pars, that Rogue Traders go to seek their fortunes, and it's here that our campaign is set. Later, I'll write a bit about some recent events, and introduce our Rogue Trader house.

Let's Play Star Wars: the Card Game

Back in 2017, we celebrated the fourth of May by getting a copy of Star Wars: the Card Game, but with everything that's been going on, it's taken me this long to get around to blogging about it. The game, of course, has been discontinued since, but I'm not letting that stop me.

Magali Villeneuve: Princess Leia

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A post shared by Michael Halila (@michaelhalila) on May 4, 2017 at 3:01pm PDT

Way back when we first bought the Lord of the Rings LCG, we also immediately bought the Dead Marshes adventure pack, because my partner insisted on Boromir. This time, it was my turn, so we bought Jump to Lightspeed for Arden Lyn, the Sith antagonist of the unforgettable Masters of Teräs Käsi.

I'm not sure I can adequately explain to a native English speaker how surreal and fantastically hilarious Teräs Käsi is. Supposedly a Star Wars martial art, it was apparently named by someone taking an English-Finnish dictionary and looking up the words for steel and hand. Never mind that "steel hand" in Finnish would be a compound word and therefore spelled teräskäsi, and that would still sound kinda lame. More than that, though, the name "Masters of Teräs Käsi" is somehow so amazingly ludicrous that when I first saw it, I flatly refused to believe that such a game could possibly exist. Surely, I reasoned, this must be some bizarre joke. Reading an actual review of the game momentarily convinced me that it was real, but I promptly forgot it, no doubt because my brain dismissed it as completely absurd - meaning that I was stunned when I encountered it again after almost a decade. So once I learned that Arden Lyn was included in the Star Wars card game, how was I supposed to build a Dark Side deck without her?

One of the perennial hot-button issues of Finnish politics is whether and how much compulsory Swedish should be taught in our schools. Whatever the broader picture, for the purposes of this topic I'm delighted that we're a nation of bilingual illiterates, because it means that in addition to enjoying Teräs Käsi, we can also marvel at Hustru fönster, which is as ungrammatical and barely any less hysterical. I hope to one day see the card.

Finally, in the process of looking up those Wookiepedia links, I was reminded - I had mercifully forgotten this - that there is also a Teräs Käsi stance called "Förräderi". At this point, I feel quite comfortable in saying, on behalf of the Nordic countries, can you just fucking stop already.

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Since it was the fourth of May, we had to try a game. I picked the Sith starter deck, and my partner used the Jedi deck.

Since it was our first game ever, we misplayed some things and had barely the slightest idea of what we were doing. We had a lot of fun, though! A particular highlight of our game was C-3PO's rampage through Coruscant. I had initially drawn the Heart of the Empire objective, and it looked like it might be a fun idea to try playing it.

Despite these extra resources, I ended up heavily outnumbered, so I used Varys There Is No Escape to wipe the board. Next turn, my partner played C3PO, and finding no units on my side, attacked Coruscant with him. Now, C3PO has no damage icons, but since there were no defenders, he did one unopposed damage to Coruscant. So imagine, if you like, C3PO wandering around Coruscant, somehow doing 10% of the damage the rebels needed to wrest it from the Empire - because I eventually lost by losing Coruscant.

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While we were getting into the game last summer, Fantasy Flight announced the last adventure chapter Force pack cycle and its first instalment, Allies of Necessity. Since it featured Jyn Erso (a name straight out of the Knights of the Old Republic name generator) and my partner was a big fan of Rogue One, we had to get it. I was intrigued to notice there was also a dark side lady, a Doctor Aphra.

To find out who she was, I read her epynomous comic, and liked it enough to also get the Darth Vader comic it was a spinoff of. I highly recommend both! I find I very much enjoy Kieron Gillen's work: he writes an excellent Vader, and like the Dark Lord of the Sith himself, his stories move at a deliberate and purposeful pace, so far from the breathless rush that I find too many contemporary comics are consumed with.

Anyway, with both Jyn Erso and Doctor Aphra on board, we'll be getting into deckbuilding. That works very differently in Star Wars compared to the other Fantasy Flight LCGs: instead of selecting individual cards for your deck, you pick objectives, each of which comes with five preset player cards. This means there are less choices, but arguably they're far more significant ones: instead of agonizing over whether to have two or three copies of a single card in your deck, you're picking card sets and figuring how they're going to interact with each other. I think this was a good idea, and it wouldn't necessarily go amiss in other LCGs.

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Finally, a verdict: this was a fun enough game and it seems a real shame if Fantasy Flight doesn't follow it up with another Star Wars LCG. A co-operative Star Wars card game made to anything even remotely like the Lord of the Rings LCG standard would frankly be amazing. We can always hope?

Let's Read Tolkien 56: Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit

For the few hours of daylight that were left they rested, shifting into the shade as the sun moved, until at last the shadow of the western rim of their dell grew long, and darkness filled all the hollow.

Gollum leads the hobbits south, parallel to the mountains and the road, into Ithilien, an old part of Gondor that the malice of Sauron has yet to ruin. Tolkien names no less than sixteen kinds of plants that grow there in one paragraph alone. In this relative idyll, the hobbits make camp for the day. Sam asks Gollum if he could find them something to eat, and Gollum catches two rabbits for them.

To Gollum's horror, Sam makes a fire to stew the rabbits. Gollum complains that cooking will ruin the meat, and the fire will draw attention. Sam wants herbs and vegetables for his stew, naming potatoes ("taters") specifically, to Gollum's great confusion. Sam even mentions fish and chips!

Frodo and Sam eat the stew, but as Sam descends to the nearby stream to wash his cooking gear, he realizes to his horror that the fire is putting out a clearly visible pillar of smoke. He goes to douse it, but it's too late: four men have found their camp. Their leader introduces himself as Faramir, Captain of Gondor. Faramir briefly interrogates the hobbits, but as he's in a hurry to ambush a column of southerners heading for the Morannon, he leaves them behind, under guard. The hobbits witness the ambush, and Sam sees an Oliphaunt.

**

Food plays a major part in this chapter, so let's talk about it. The Middle-earth potato is another Tolkien anachronism, only imported to Europe in the 16th century; fish and chips even more so! Anachronisms are rarer in the Lord of the Rings than in the Hobbit, but they're still around.

In his comments to Forrest J. Ackerman on a completely ridiculous movie project (loosely!) based on the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien has this to say about lembas, the elven way-bread the hobbits have been subsisting on.

In the book lembas has two functions. It is a 'machine' or device for making credible the long marches with little provision, in a world in which as I have said 'miles are miles'. But that is relatively unimportant. It also has a much larger significance, of what one might hesitatingly call a 'religious' kind. This becomes later apparent, especially in the chapter 'Mount Doom'. (Letters, 210)

The script Tolkien is commenting on sounds uniquely terrible. He has a prophetic line: "Practically everything having moral import has vanished from the synopsis."

But lembas, then, is not just a storytelling device, but also, more importantly, a religious device. It sustains the hobbits, especially toward the end of their journey, but is completely unpalatable to Gollum. What lembas is, to cut some corners, is the communion wafer. Again, not by direct analogy, but by anticipation and metaphor. What sustains the hobbits, and remains completely alien to Gollum, is faith.

There's another boundary drawn by eating here, between Gollum and the hobbits. Gollum is horrified by cooking and declares it spoils meat. Gollum's dietary preferences, too, are disgusting to the hobbits, and in the internal dialogue that Sam overhears, the height of luxury Gollum's evil tendencies can imagine is eating fish every day.

Now, it should be remembered that Sméagol was originally a hobbit, and even if they weren't quite as bourgeois as the hobbits of Frodo's Shire, they seem to have lived a fairly civilized life. Gollum must have eaten cooked food. Now, though, after centuries of living under mountains and on whatever he could find, it repels him. Cooking has often been considered one of the defining features of civilization; what I think we're being told here is that the Ring has corrupted and debased Gollum so completely that he's almost become an animal.

Finally, leaving food behind, I think it's worth quoting Sam's experience of the ranger ambush, as one of the Southrons is killed right next to their hiding-place.

It was Sam's first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man's name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace

Again, Tolkien's relationship to war is an ambiguous one. Things like the orc-killing contest at Helm's Deep are very true to the bellicose saga traditions that are his main inspiration; passages like the above draw not only from his Christianity but a general humanity and, no doubt, a revulsion for war based on his own experience of the industrialized slaughter of the First World War. He never could reconcile the two, and I think the tension between them adds greatly to the whole work.

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Next time: an interrogation.

Warhammer 40,000: Beakies!

Since we don't actually have space in our apartment to play Warhammer, our campaigning season is restricted to the months when we can make use of our summer cottage. Therefore, I'll be doing a series of posts on modelling and painting while I wait for next summer.

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First, some Space Marines. Last summer, I found these guys stowed away in the attic, and after a little light cleaning with a soft toothbrush, they were fit for service.

They are what I think was originally a 1,000 point Space Marine army in 3rd edition Warhammer, which is the last time I played 40k before last summer! We're bringing them into the Imperial army as a Vanguard detachment to represent the Marines who took part in suppressing the Ignatian rebellion. I originally painted them up in the colors chosen for the rec.games.miniatures.warhammer chapter; we'll be fielding them as Raven Guard successors.

Punishers Space Marines

Tech-Marine

I had an old Tech-Marine model I made back in the day, but to be honest it was kinda boring. So I made a new one.

The body and backpack are from an old Devastator Sergeant; the axe, servo-arm and head are from Zealot Miniatures. I'm really happy with this model!

Sternguard Veteran Squad

With an Imperial Guard battalion detachment already finished and plans to upgrade it to a brigade underway, we decided that my old tactical Marines would be more useful as Veterans. The other option would have been to field them as Troops choices and take a patrol detachment, but a vanguard detachment gets the Imperial army a command point, and it feels more in character to have the Marines be a small elite force bolstering the much bigger Imperial Guard formation.

Vanguard Veteran Squad

By the same logic, my old Assault Marines were upgraded to Vanguard Veterans.

Terminator Squad

Our third and last elite choice is some Terminators. The 1993 Space Hulk video game was such a formative influence on me that there was simply no way that any Space Marine army I collect wouldn't have Terminators in it.

Vindicator

I have always unapologetically loved Vindicators. The reason my original 500pt army existed was that I realized I could fit a Vindicator and a Whirlwind into that amount. Obviously I hate that the 3rd edition ordnance template, i.e. the pie plate, is gone, and the Vindicator just isn't what it used to be. I hope we'll have a chance to find out what its current incarnation is like this summer.

Whirlwind

Full disclosure: I love artillery. Space Marines don't get a lot of it, which made it all the more important to get a Whirlwind. Again, I desperately miss the ordnance template, but I'm trying to think positively and remember that these days, I'm on the receiving end of this thing!

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So now we have almost 700 points of Space Marines to add to our Imperial army! Marines are in kind of a weird place; on the one hand, they're the most iconic representatives of Warhammer 40,000; on the other hand, they really are kind of boring. But we have good reason to be grateful to 8th edition: because nothing is as unimaginative and boring as Primaris Marines. Also, I want to complain: wargear choices for characters are more restricted in 8th edition than they were in 3rd, which means I can't use one of my favorite conversions:

Yes, a Librarian with lightning claws and a jump pack. If I remember correctly, in 3rd edition psychic powers like Smite were basically shooting attacks, so there was no point in taking a gun for a Librarian because they'd be using Smite anyway; hence the lightning claws. They're off some miniature I can no longer name, but it was a kind of dwarf with a single claw that our friendly local gaming store had on a clearance sale when they moved, so I got two and stuck the claws on an Assault Marine.

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I've still got some old and new loyalist miniatures to go through, and I'm also working on something new for the Ruinous Powers!

Let's Read Tolkien 55: The Black Gate is Closed

Before the next day dawned their journey to Mordor was over.

As commanded, Gollum leads the hobbits to a hollow where, at dawn, they can see the Black Gate that bars the northern entrance to Mordor. Heavily fortified and completely impregnable, it's clearly hopeless for them to enter Mordor this way.

Frodo, however, is determined to try, but Gollum tries to talk him out of it with the promise of an easier way into Mordor, through the valley of Minas Morgul to the south. Hilariously, when challenged by Sam, Gollum has a Trump moment:

"Sméagol has talked to Orcs, yes of course, before he met master, and to many peoples: he has walked very far. And what he says now many peoples are saying."

The hobbits spend most of the day sitting in the hollow, with Frodo trying to figure out what to do. At one point, they're disturbed by a column of Sauron's soldiers marching by. Gollum reports that they're black southerners, which prompts Sam to ask if they had an Oliphaunt with them. When Gollum asks what that is, Sam recites a poem that seems to describe an elephant. Frodo is cheered by this, and decides they'll head south and attempt Gollum's route into Mordor.

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This is a very short chapter where nothing much happens; one of the few points of real interest is our first encounter with southern men in Sauron's service.

"Dark faces. We have not seen Men like these before, no, Sméagol has not. They are fierce. They have black eyes, and long black hair, and gold rings in their ears; yes, lots of beautiful gold. And some have red paint on their cheeks, and red cloaks; and their flags are red, and the tips of their spears; and they have round shields, yellow and black with big spikes. Not nice; very cruel wicked Men they look. Almost as bad as Orcs, and much bigger.

Tolkien was, by our standards, very much a racist, and it's hardly a coincidence that in Middle-earth we find noble men from the north and west as the good guys, fighting the deluded and primitive easterners and southerners; Mordor may not be the Soviet Union, but it is most definitely the evil Orient. The black men marching to Mordor are very clearly described as evil, and compared to orcs.

Still, it's instructive to compare Tolkien's description of the southerners with some of his more hysterically racist contemporaries. Start with H.P. Lovecraft, two years Tolkien's senior, in The Horror at Red Hook:

It would not be the first time his sensations had been forced to bide uninterpreted—for was not his very act of plunging into the polyglot abyss of New York’s underworld a freak beyond sensible explanation? What could he tell the prosaic of the antique witcheries and grotesque marvels discernible to sensitive eyes amidst the poison cauldron where all the varied dregs of unwholesome ages mix their venom and perpetuate their obscene terrors?

Lovecraft shared Tolkien's ideas of pure blood and race, but again, it's worth remembering both that Tolkien's protagonists are of mixed descent themselves, and that he never expressed such a shrill horror for the racialized Other as Lovecraft did. Similarly, nothing in Tolkien's writings even remotely approaches the leeringly racist caricatures of the slightly younger Robert E. Howard in The Vale of Lost Women, or Conan the Barbarian's defiant white supremacy in that story:

"I am Conan, a Cimmerian, and I live by the sword's edge. But I am not such a dog as to leave a white woman in the clutches of a black man -- If you were old and ugly as the devil's pet vulture, I'd take you away from Bajujh, simply because of the color of your hide."

Again, this is not to make excuses for Tolkien's racism and orientalism, but to put them in their proper context. Read alongside his pulp contemporaries, it's worthy of note that Tolkien very rarely engages in the sort of abjectly racist exposition that they deployed. You might argue that it was his Christianity, but even the most cursory look at the history of racism will disabuse anyone of that notion.

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Next time: cooking.

Blood Bowl: Turboleague, part Deux

Back in 2012 (geez, really?!), we played a season of Blood Bowl. I coached a High Elf team, the Tor Achare Titans. The league was eventually abandoned; after the last game, the team with the most points was Braga's Brutes (Orc), with a 5-1-0 record, who were declared Hellbird Turbocup champions by default. My High Elves were second, going 3-3-0.

All in all, it was fun enough that I think we should do it again. I've even got bleachers and everything. Last time, we tried to have a very organized league, with everybody signing on beforehand to play a home-and-home series with everybody else and so on. What ended up happening is that people just sort of gave up on the whole thing, and we never did finish it. So this time around, I'm thinking of a far more flexible format, that can handle anything from just a couple of casual games to a full-blown league with multiple competitive teams. This is what I came up with.

Turboleague format

Each coach has one team, generated as usual with a starting treasury of 1 000 000 gold pieces. The team with the most points on 23.12. is the league champion. The next season starts 26.12. Points are awarded as follows:

  - four (4) points for a win
  - two (2) points for a tie
  - one (1) point for a loss

Tiebreakers: wins, head-to-head record, touchdowns scored, casualties scored, fatalities scored.

Teams may play each other any number of times, but only the best two results against any single opponent count for the standings. There is no challenge system; no-one is ever obliged to play anyone. Teams may join or leave the league at any time during the season. Anyone may apply to join the league by contacting the commissioner (me); applications are accepted at the discretion of the commissioner.

The objective of these league rules is not to deliver a finely balanced competition, but rather to organize a series of fairly random pick-up games into a semicoherent whole.

We will be using the Competitive Rules Pack (CRP), which is available online. If someone wants to play one of the new teams (Chaos Pact, Slann, Underworld), I don't see why not.

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Speaking of my bleachers, by the way, I found some fairly ancient space ork sprues with two bodies still on them, so:

Also, we ordered some stuff from Eureka Miniatures, and they were kind enough to give us a frog standard bearer as a free sample, so here they are, along with a member of the pirate lady gun crew:

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I'll be playing dark elves myself, with a slight variation on the all positionals starting roster.

6 × lineman (420,000)
2 × blitzer (200,000)
1 × assassin (90,000)
1 × runner (80,000)
1 × witch elf (110,000)

For a total of 900,000 gp, meaning we can have two re-rolls as well!

This is, in fact, the same lineup that Mephala's Murderers started the last time we played; I think it's the best dark elf starting option if you want to try all the different player types, which is my main goal this season. Also, I did just fine with two blitzers when I played high elves.

For miniatures, I got a Shadowforge Miniatures Wicked Elf Gridiron Team. They're maybe not the most exquisitely detailed models you could get, but I like them, they've got character, and the pricing is very competitive.

The Sheogorad Saints

#5: Jenassa Samarys, runner
#11: Barenziah Targaryen, witch elf
#33: Raven Dren, assassin
#37: Fieryra Targaryen, blitzer
#44: Irileth Targaryen, blitzer
#50: Methulu Ienith, line-elf
#55: Aralosea Romori, line-elf
#69: Darane Mencele, line-elf
#71: Hlireni Indavel, line-elf
#73: Brelda Quintella, line-elf
#77: Endroni Dalas, line-elf

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So here we are, ready to play a random number of Blood Bowl games! If and when we get around to it, I'll be posting game reports here.

Let's Read Tolkien 54: The Passage of the Marshes

Gollum moved quickly, with his head and neck thrust forward, often using his hands as well as his feet.

Gollum leads Frodo and Sam down through the hills and into the Dead Marshes. They move by night and rest by day, both to avoid detection and to suit Gollum's hatred of the sun. In the marshes, not only is their route and footing uncertain, but they're haunted by strange corpse-lights and apparitions of dead bodies below the surface of the water: the dead from the great battles of the previous war against Sauron. There's a moment of horror when a flying Ring-wraith passes near them, and Frodo begins to feel the malign will of Sauron more strongly as they near Mordor.

Beyond the marshes, the hobbits and Gollum arrive in a desolate wasteland at the foot of the Mountains of Shadow. As they rest, Sam overhears Gollum having an argument with himself, on whether to betray the hobbits or not. A sinister "she" is mentioned. The debate seems to come to no conclusion, and at dusk, Frodo commands Gollum to take them to Morannon, the Black Gate of Mordor.

**

The previous time Tolkien's war experience broke into the story directly was way back in the Hobbit, when Bard led a very anachronistic anti-aircraft defense of Lake-town against Smaug. Here, it's the titular marshes that are a memory of the bogs of the Somme. As Tolkien puts it (Letters, 226):

Personally I do not think that either war (and of course not the atomic bomb) had any influence upon either the plot or the manner of its unfolding. Perhaps in landscape. The Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme. They owe more to William Morris and his Huns and Romans, as in The House of the Wolfings or The Roots of the Mountains.

You'll notice they never quote that last sentence! For what it's worth, I agree with Tolkien: there's not a lot of either world war in the Lord of the Rings; Tolkien's ideas of war are far more Beowulf than Band of Brothers. But it really is difficult to read this chapter and not think of the mud of the Western Front. I was strongly reminded of Pat Barker's Regeneration.

From the Dead Marshes, the hobbits move on to an unmistakably modern industrial landscape.

Here nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rottenness. The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails upon the lands about. High mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of earth fire-blasted and poison-stained, stood like an obscene graveyard in endless rows, slowly revealed in the reluctant light.

It's not entirely clear what kind of industry could have produced this kind of devastation. Some of its features seem very modern, like the oily sump at the bottom of the hole where Gollum and the hobbits camp. But Tolkien was, if anything, a committed anti-modernist, so the association of industrial waste and mining slag with evil will, for him, have been a natural one. It was no accident that Tolkien named the sin of opposing God's will the Machine. In a sense, as the hobbits travel toward Mordor, they're traveling through Tolkien's personal psychogeography.

Finally, at the end of the chapter, we have Gollum's debate with himself. In many ways, it mirrors Frodo's struggle on Amon Hen: Sméagol, like Frodo, feels the malign influence of Sauron, and while some of him wants to fight it, his fallen will can't overcome the corruption of the Ring. Unlike Frodo, Sméagol doesn't get a divine intervention.

Finally, on a purely practical note: how are Frodo and Sam's clothes not completely falling apart by now? Do hobbits wear denim?

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Next time: poetry.