14 december 2003
Return of the King countdown: three days
In rode the Lord of the Nazgûl. A great black shape against the fires he loomed up, grown to a vast menace of despair. In rode the Lord of the Nazgûl, under the archway that no enemy had ever passed, and all fled before his face.
All save one. There waiting, silent and still in the space before the Gate, sat Gandalf upon Shadowfax: Shadowfax who alone among the free horses of the earth endured the terror, unmoving, steadfast as a graven image in Rath Dínen.
“You cannot enter here,” said Gandalf, and the huge shadow halted. “Go back to the abyss prepared for you! Fall back into the nothingness that awaits you and your Master. Go!”
The Black Rider flung back his hood, and behold! he had a kingly crown; and yet upon no head visible was it set. The red fires shone between it and the mantled shoulders. From a mouth unseen there came a deadly laughter.
“Old fool!” he said. “Old fool! This is my hour. Do you not know Death when you see it? Die now and curse in vain!” And with that he lifted high his sword, and flames ran down the blade.
Gandalf did not move. And in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard of the City, a cock crowed. Shrill and clear he crowed, recking nothing of wizardry or war, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn.
And as if in answer there came from far away another note. Horns, horns, horns. In dark Mindolluin's sides they dimly echoed. Great horns of the North wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last.
—The Lord of the Rings, Book V, “The Siege of Gondor”
Taken as a group, Tolkien's scholarly critics are perhaps best described as bemused. Exhibit A is Harold Bloom, whose volume of “modern critical interpretations”—published in 2000—contains no essays more recent than 1982. (The cover art seems singularly appropriate).
Yet there are a few exceptions: Tom Shippey in particular, who once taught the same curriculum at Oxford as did Tolkien and hence knows more about JRRT's Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse sources than all of Bloom's ilk taken together. Shippey is particularly exercised over the inability of lit-crit types to appreciate Tolkien's deliberate use of various literary modes, ranging from low mimesis (in which the hero is very much like us), to high mimesis (“the level of most epic and tragedy”), to romance (in the literary sense—the hero clearly possesses some superhuman attributes), and finally to myth. The reason for this failure, Shippey argues, is that most literature of the last century operates either solely on the level of low mimesis, or descends yet further, to irony and the apotheosis of the anti-hero.
The hobbits are Tolkien's Everyman: earthy and very much human, in spite of (or perhaps because of) their small stature. Shippey argues that Tolkien's portrayal of the hobbits in this fashion was deliberate—without a good measure of low mimesis, a modern reader finds it difficult to stay engaged with the story. (If you have tried, and failed, to make it through The Silmarillion, this could help explain why.) But of course Tolkien wrote in the other modes as well; and even if transitions from one to another are sometimes forced—occasionally he tells the reader what the proper response should be, rather than evoking it—much more often he succeeds brilliantly.
So it is with the chapter from which the above passage is taken. The battle for Minas Tirith is presented as history—dramatic, certainly, but also grim and bloody and terrifying, as is all war. Then, at the end, the Witch-king rides forth: a wraith grown to immense dimensions, a sorcerer who through “words of power and terror” breaks down the City's gates, when a battering-ram carried by a horde of Orcs could not. Waiting within is Mithrandir, Gandalf the White, incarnate maia, emissary of the Valar of the West.
This is the stuff from which myth is made—myth, and great literature: the protestations of literary types be damned.
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