LotR -- Book 4 - Chapter 02 - The Passage of the Marshes

[Estelyn Telcontar]

We continue with Frodo, Sam and Gollum’s journey; Gollum’s help as their guide is shown to be invaluable. The alternate route is described twice in contrast to the way through the Marshes – it would have been impossible to hide there. Of course, it would have been equally impossible for them to find their way through the Marshes on their own.

One of Frodo and Sam’s problems is their need for sleep vs. their mistrust of Gollum. Another thing that Sam is concerned about is the shortness of their food supplies – he is thinking of the return journey, though Frodo has little hope that there will be one.

Gollum’s problem is lack of food; we find out that he does not want to/cannot eat lembas, another Elven creation that is apparently harmful to him. Any ideas why? A hungry Gollum could be a problem to the hobbits, Sam fears.

The Dead Marshes are described with the lights and dead faces, and their historical background is touched upon briefly. Let’s explore that more in the discussion.

I remember thinking that Gollum’s schizophrenic scene seemed overdone in the movie, but the book version is not really that much different. What I find chilling in the written account is the fact that it is not preceded by any negative actions on Sam or Frodo’s part (something we definitely need to take into account in any discussion of his redeemability), and the fact that we read of it from Sam’s point of view makes his suspicions seem well-founded indeed. His reaction is rather cunning in concealing his knowledge of Gollum’s self-dialogue. What do you make of the alternating pale and green light of Sméagol/Gollum’s eyes there?

More things we can discuss: winged wraiths; the weight of the ring; the description of the wastelands near Mordor; Frodo’s dream, which leaves no recalled memory, but a lingering positive emotional memory; and the bits of poetry at the beginning of the chapter, this time recited by Gollum and partly in memory of Bilbo’s riddle adventure.

(As always, this thread opens for posting early Monday morning.)

[Lalwendë]

I'm sure some people will draw connections between the Dead Marshes and the despoiled landscapes of the trenches of France and Belgium in WWI. But what this chapter always brings to mind is the wide and treacherous landscapes of our own marshlands in the UK. I'm thinking of tidal land close to estuaries, bogland, and the old marshes which have now largely been drained for farmland.

The hobbits soon found that what had looked like one vast fen was really an endless network of pools, and soft mires, and winding half-strangled water-courses. Among these a cunning eye and foot could thread a wandering path. Gollum certainly had that cunning, and needed all of it. His head on its long neck was ever turning this way and that, while he sniffed and muttered all the time to himself. Sometimes he would hold up his hand and halt them, while he went forward a little, crouching, testing the ground with fingers or toes, or merely listening with one ear pressed to the earth.

Those old marshes may have been drained but the land is still criss crossed with a network of deep and forbidding ditches, pools and winding paths. I remember my first reading would make me think of childhood adventures where you would find yourself being sucked into the very earth when playing around these watercourses. And they were full of writhing eels, much as the Dead Marshes seem to be:

There are snakeses, wormses, things in the pools.

Marsh lands also produce sulphorous natural gas (that smell will have been like rotten eggs), which is formed due to the rotting process of vegetation in marsh land which does not drain easily. This is one of the common 'explanations' for such phenomena as Will O The Wisp, and Sam himself encounters the naturally occuring substance:

He fell and came heavily on his hands, which sank deep into sticky ooze, so that his face was brought close to the surface of the dark mere. There was a faint hiss, a noisome smell went up, the lights flickered and danced and swirled.

But though the marshlands my have been drained, the old stories and folklore remain, and Tolkien makes use of tales of both Will O The Wisp and Jinny Greenteeth:

He first saw one with the corner of his left eye, a wisp of pale sheen that faded away; but others appeared soon after: some like dimly shining smoke, some like misty flames flickering slowly above unseen candles; here and there they twisted like ghostly sheets unfurled by hidden hands.

Cold clammy winter still held sway in this forsaken country. The only green was the scum of livid weed on the dark greasy surfaces of the sullen waters. Dead grasses and rotting reeds loomed up in the mists like ragged shadows of long-forgotten summers.

In HoME it states that Tolkien was actually trying to make use of stories of Corpse Candles; in the chapter, they are referred to by Gollum as 'candles of corpses'. From HoME:

Corpse Candle is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as "a lambent flame seen in a churchyard or over a grave, and supertitiously believed to appear as an omen of death, or to indicate the route of a coming funeral".

I wonder whether this was just an intriguing image or story which Tolkien wanted to include to add atmosphere to this part of the journey. Or did he want to use this to signify something else? After all, all our rational thought ought to tell us that this little group simply are not going to make it, that the odds are against them at this point, or if they do, they are not going to come back and are certainly on some kind of 'funeral march'.

Finally, two lines I particularly like. The following line is wonderfully descriptive and gothic:

Looking up they saw the clouds breaking and shredding; and then high in the south the moon glimmered out, riding in the flying wrack.

And this line makes me feel immense sadness for Gollum. It instantly makes you realise just how old he is, and that at one time, Gollum was just like an ordinary Hobbit, listening to fireside tales.

There was a great battle long ago, yes, so they told him when Smeagol was young, when I was young before the Precious came

[Boromir88]

Originally posted by Estelyn: What do you make of the alternating pale and green light of Sméagol/Gollum’s eyes there?

I wonder if there is a connection with the "green light," that was seen in the Ents eyes in the "Treebeard" chapter...

Any ideas why? A hungry Gollum could be a problem to the hobbits, Sam fears.

If we look in The Hobbit, when Bilbo meets Gollum...

He (Gollum) was anxious to appear friendly, at any rate for the moment, and until he found more about the sword and the hobbit, whether he was quite alone really, whether he was good to eat, and whether Gollum was very hungry.

I think that's a pretty good reason . Or maybe there's a touch of Bilbo in Sam...

"Very well," said Bilbo, who was anxious to agree, until he found out more about the creature, whether he was quite alone, whether he was fierce or hungry, and whether he was a friend of the goblins.

Perhaps Sam is playing a long (or atleast trying to) until he can figure out this Smeagol/Gollum.

Through the Smeagol/Gollum conversation we might be able to tell that it wasn't Faramir capturing him that got him to plan the hobbits' death, but he planned it from the very beginning...

"We wants it! But"-and there was a long pause, as if a new thought had wakened. "Not yet, eh? She might help. She might, yes."
"No, No! Not that way!" wailed Smeagol.
"Yes! We wants it! We wants it!
Each time that the secon thought spoke, Gollum's long hand crept out slowly, pawing towards Frodo, and then was drawn back with a jerk as Smeagol spoke again. Finally both arms, with long fingers flexed and twitching, clawed towards his neck.

For a while Gollum had changed, and now there's this battle between good and bad. At the end of it bad wins. Gollum is about to strangle Frodo. So, if it wasn't Faramir's capture that "set off" Gollum, what was it? What did the hobbits do to get Gollum thinking about "her?" Or maybe Gollum just cannot be "saved." This could go back to "The Hobbit," Gollum could just be putting on an act, being friendly, appearing to be friendly, until he finds out more about his companions.

I think from the previous chapter we can see that Gollum has changed, and in this chapter Frodo even notices the change, he just questions "how much" has Gollum changed?

To his (Sam's) simple mind ordinary hunger, the desire to eat hobbits, had seemed the chief danger in Gollum. He realized now that it was not so: Gollum was feeling the terrible call of the Ring.

Maybe the hobbits didn't do anything to get Gollum mad, and making him want to kill them. It's just the ring working on Gollum, and Gollum doesn't have a strong enough desire to resist it. The Ring worked on Boromir, well Boromir is sort of gone, now it concentrates on Gollum, another person who would be quite easy to tempt. The hobbits might not have done anything wrong to Gollum, it could just be the pull of the ring as Sam thinks.

[davem]

In the moon if you looked in some pools you saw your own face fouled & corrupt & dead. Describe the pools as they get nearer to Mordor as like green pools & rivers fouled by modern chemical works. (HoME p. 105)

These are interesting ideas, & I wonder why Tolkien chose not to pursue them. I suppose it could be argued that he did in the case of the desription of the pools & rivers, in so far as he could without anachonism - ie actually stating the comparison clearly. But in the case of the travellers seeing their own distorted & rotting reflections he seems to have changed his mind.

Perhaps he thought it might cause confusion, or lessen the impact of the images they did see.

The reason these early ideas struck me is that there is an automatic presumption nowadays that Tolkien is writing about the experience he must have had on the battlefields of WWI, seeing the rotting corpses of the fallen in the stagnant pools of nomansland. Perhaps there was something more ‘supernatural’ intended.

Yet it would have lead to confusion between the Hobbits seeing their own corpselike reflections as well as the images of the fallen from the Last Alliance in the same pools & he did try to get round this by the idea that they would see their own reflections by the light of the moon & the reflections of the fallen by the ‘corpse candles’.

All of which being said, I wonder if the original idea didn’t convey more powerfully the nightmarish nature of their experiences. The Dead Marshes are not simply a place where the dead of long ago battles haunt any of the living foolish, or sufficiently driven by necessity, to enter. They are a place where death is ever present. Gollum’s ‘joke’ that if the hobbits are not careful they will themselves go down to join the dead & light little candles seems more dreadful in the ‘light’ of their seeing their own rotting faces in the water.

Yet this place is almost like a waking nightmare than a physical location, because the dead aren’t really there. The whole mood is one of unreality. One knows the horrors are not ‘real’ but they are inescapable. It is like suddenly realising one is having a nightmare but is unable to make oneself awaken, fearing that one may never awaken.

Yet the travellers do ‘awaken’ - to the arid blasted waste which lies before Mordor - & this awakening is worse than the nightmare. Yet, here Tokien seems to offer some ‘hope’, alomst of the kind that Sam feels on seeing the star later on:

They had come to the desolation that lay before Mordor: the lasting monument to the dark labour of its slaves that should endure when all their purposes were made void; a land defiled, diseased beyond all healing--unless the Great Sea should enter in and wash it with oblivion. "I feel sick," said Sam. Frodo did not speak.

When all their purposes were made void. What are we to make of that? Not if their purposes were made void, but when.

As Frodo says to Sam on seeing the fallen head of the statue at the crossroads ‘They cannot conquer forever.’

Yet they can do irreparable harm - ‘a land defiled, diseased beyond all healing’

The scars left by evil will remain, do what men (or Hobbits) will, but those who do the evil will pass away & no longer be able to inflict their malice on the world & its inhabitants. Even in the midst of the darkness there is hope. What I find interesting though is that Tolkien seems to hide this promise among descriptions of the horror & of the hobbits reactions to it.

‘The Light shines in the darkness, & the darkness has not overcome it.’

[Lalwendë]

They had come to the desolation that lay before Mordor: the lasting monument to the dark labour of its slaves that should endure when all their purposes were made void; a land defiled, diseased beyond all healing--unless the Great Sea should enter in and wash it with oblivion. "I feel sick," said Sam. Frodo did not speak.

Originally Posted by davem

When all their purposes were made void. What are we to make of that? Not if their purposes were made void, but when.

This, I think, has a double meaning. The 'when' can easily be interpreted as foreshadowing of the end of the book. But it can also hint at the longer term, that even across the great expanse of time to come, evil purposes cannot endure, that eventually they will be made 'void'. What is so startling is that even after this expanse of time, the waste would remain forever, a memory of evildoing.

But what about the word 'slaves'? Surely a slave cannot be blamed for carrying out such work when the word implies they have been forced to do it? Maybe the phrase means then, that when Sauron is defeated, his slaves will be freed, and that the purpose with which they have carried out such tasks will no longer remain, even though the evidence of their work will remain.

[Lathriel]

Of course people always grasp for what they know best when reading about a location such as the Dead Marshes. So immediatly the connection to WWI is made. I however also thought of Will o'the wisps and corpse candles. To me its always been a scary place however after re-reading LOTR I didn't find them as scary because I was reminded of Mordor and that to me is one of the scariest places ever created in literature.(that I've read)

the lasting monument to the dark labour of its slaves that should endure when all their purposes were made void;

I don't think these are just slaves. Aren't orcs slaves of Sauron as well? He controlls them completely so that they do exactly what he wants them to do.He has completely "brainwashed" them and deprived them of their free will.That is slavery another form. Of course orcs by themselves are stupid and evil but due to Sauron they do much more harm than they could have done by themselves. Besides, what about those who allied themselves with Sauron? Now they were truly brainwashed into joining him against the armies of the west. If Sauron hadn't made them obey by pouring honeyed words into their ears I'm sure they would never have joined him as easily, like mice walking into a mousetrap.
I think the slaves are Sauron's former armies and the monument is the dead marshes.

One part of this chapter that stays clearly in my mind is the nazgul flying across the marshes. It freaked me out because throughout the chapter there is a growing sense that if Frodo and Sam are discovered all will be lost.The need to hide from unfriendly eyes grows by every page thus it makes me feel extremely anxious. These feelings are very realistivplus they are a method that the author uses to keep the reader reading.