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01-20-2005, 06:40 PM | #1 |
Princess of Skwerlz
Join Date: Jan 2002
Location: where the Sea is eastwards (WtR: 6060 miles)
Posts: 7,500
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LotR -- Book 3 - Chapter 08 - The Road to Isengard
Light and victory begin this chapter, and it wraps up the happenings with the awakened forest. We see the victors handling their enemies differently - the orcs are destroyed, the men of Dunland spared and set to work.
Gimli's description of the Glittering Caves gives yet another glimpse of his eye for beauty and the Dwarven ideals. His friendship with Legolas is shown in their promise to accompany each other to the sights that each one of them feels most important. The horrible change to the valley of Isengard is described - first through Saruman's corruption of it, then through the destruction by the Ents. And last, but most certainly not least, the travellers meet Merry and Pippin (again)! The conversations and their actions are so typically hobbitish, giving a welcome touch of comic relief to the serious situation. I enjoy them tremendously at every rereading. Which part of this chapter is your favorite? Which descriptions of landscapes affect you? Which characters do you enjoy most? (Thread will open on Sunday/Monday, January 30 - 31)
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'Mercy!' cried Gandalf. 'If the giving of information is to be the cure of your inquisitiveness, I shall spend all the rest of my days in answering you. What more do you want to know?' 'The whole history of Middle-earth...' |
01-30-2005, 09:02 PM | #2 |
Dread Horseman
Join Date: Sep 2000
Location: Behind you!
Posts: 2,743
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The Road to Isengard is now open.
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01-30-2005, 11:10 PM | #3 |
Ghost Prince of Cardolan
Join Date: Jan 2003
Location: Wandering through Middle-Earth (Sadly in Alberta and not ME)
Posts: 612
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One of my favourite parts in this chapter is Gimli's description of the glittering caves. I can picture them so well and the description is so accurate it becomes real.
In this chapter you also get the feeling that the friendship between Legolas and Gimli is rapidly growing. Especially when they promise to eachother that Legolas will see the glittering caves and Gimli will see Fangorn forest. Both of them are more willing not only to face eachothers differences but to accept them. They no longer hold onto their prejudices as before but are willing to see Fangorn forest or the glittering caves and to form their own opinion. Also the reunion between the hobbits and Legolas and Gimli makes me feel very happy. Most of the book has been pretty dark so far and it is nice to read about a victory and friends seeing eachother again. I always thought the Huorns were neat. Despite the fact that they helped to clean up the orcs I thought they were creepy when I first read the book. (and still do)Also because you don't know what they are untill Legolas,Gimli, and Aragorn hear merry and Pippin's story. This little technique that Tolkien uses of keeping a reader in the dark for as long as possible keeps me reading and re-reading LOTR.It keeps me from getting bored with the book. (Plus of course the wealth of detail) Overall this chapter has a feeling of transition for me. You can simply feel that fortune might be turning to the heros' favour despite all odds. This chapter always gave me a feeling of hope. The battle Helm's Deep is won and as I've said before friends reunite. I think Merry and Pippin's speech is so typically hobbitish that I have to smile every time as I read it. Whatever happens Hobbits are still able to stay so optimistic it makes me wish I had that same talent.
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01-31-2005, 11:04 AM | #4 |
Late Istar
Join Date: Mar 2001
Posts: 2,224
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For me the most striking part of this chapter is the long description of Isengard - the section beginning "Beneath the mountain's arm within the Wizard's Vale . . ." As unremarkable as these paragraphs may seem when compared with such scenes as the battle of Helm's Deep, I think that this description exemplifies certain aspects of Tolkien's writing style and ability.
First, there is the mere fact that this account is placed here. Up to this point the narrative in this chapter has followed our heros as they deal with loose ends from the battle and start on the journey toward Orthanc. If I had been writing this chapter, I probably would stayed with these viewpoint characters exclusively, describing Isengard as they come to it, from their perspective. Now of course that's because I don't have anything remotely like Tolkien's grasp of the technique of story-telling - but after all, it does seem like the more natural thing to do, and I'd guess that few writers, even good ones, would think to break away from that viewpoint and move to, as it were, a higher perspective, to give a more distant and objective description of Isengard before proceeding. Yet this is something Tolkien does quite often. It happens constantly in the Silmarillion - many transitions are effected by "Now it must be told . . ." or "Now the tale turns to . . ." and very often we are pulled out of our perspective in time and space with references to events that occur later on and far away. This happens less in LotR, but it still happens. Most often we are only briefly taken out of viewpoint, but the passage in this chapter is not unique. Another notable one that occurs to me at the moment is an account of Shelob toward the end of book IV. These passages make the narrative voice of LotR the so-called "omniscient narrator". I think that this is an important point to note when one considers Tolkien in relation to other modern authors. I would say that most current fantasy writers (and indeed most current commercial authors) tend to use the "third person limited" voice, in which, though the prose is still in third person, each scene is told the perspective of one of the characters in that scene. I would go so far as to say that this is one of the ways in which modern fantasy fails when compared with Tolkien. For - and I admit that this is speculative - I think that there is something about the fairy-story as a genre that lends itself to the omniscient narrator. I'm not entirely sure why this is. In part, it may be that the omniscient narrator, in a manner of speaking, is capable of lifting the story up out of the mundane and making it bigger than the individual perspectives within it. That is certainly something that happens in this instance; in a way the shift in perspective is very cinematic. It's as though we follow the characters with close shots and shots from their perspective as they move toward Isengard; then when they finally approach it, the camera jumps to a high wide shot of the whole area. In a movie this would have the effect of opening up the story, making it feel big or expansive - and I think it is the same effect that Tolkien achieves here. Perhaps a more mundane reason that this omniscient viewpoint is effective is simply that it allows the narrator to more effectively communicate information to the audience. In a limited perspective (and most of all in first person) the author must contrive it that all the information the reader needs to know must be accessible to the narrator. If this chapter were told strictly from the perspective of the main characters, it would take quite a while for the reader to grasp the layout of Isengard, as the characters slowly approached it and entered it. The omniscient voice allows Tolkien to simply tell us what we need to know. That's a somewhat long analysis of a fairly short passage, but I think that Tolkien's narrative voice is an interesting and under-discussed subject. |
01-31-2005, 02:00 PM | #5 | |||||
A Mere Boggart
Join Date: Mar 2004
Location: under the bed
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There was another interesting narrative point which I noticed as I read of the discussion between Theoden and Gandalf. It almost seemed as if in this conversation Tolkien was 'stepping out of the text' to tell us something about the nature of the story, where we have been, and what we are about to face, yet he does this via two of the characters. He also seems to be telling us something of the nature and history of myth and folklore. Taking the conversation bit by bit, several thoughts struck me as interesting:
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01-31-2005, 02:53 PM | #6 | ||
Illustrious Ulair
Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: In the home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names,and impossible loyalties
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There has been a battle of men against monsters, against the 'darkness' personified, but there has been another battle, a mythical battle of the trees & the forces which seek to wipe them from the earth. Its as if these two battles eched each other, or perhaps its the same battle taking place on two planes - the mundane & the supernatural - simultaneously. What is strange though is that these two battles are fought against the same enemy - as if Saruman himself is fighting both a natural & a supernatural battle - as if he seeks a victory on the supernatural as well as the natural plane. We seem have another example of the 'two worlds' which Tolkien says the Elves inhabit. No victory achieved in only one of those worlds will suffice. Its almost as if Saruman has had to fight on two fronts & suffered a defeat in both. WE learn a lot about Saruman in this chapter. We learn his true desire, & all his clever philosophising in his talk with Gandalf is exposed. He wants to be Sauron: Quote:
Well, it doesn't profit Saruman at all. He loses everything in the end, because he fails in his attempt to gain the world, or rather the worlds, as well as sacrificing himself to his own desires. He ends not with the Ring, but with 'blood' on his hands, & that 'blood' is not just that of the people of Rohan, it is also his own. He has sacrificed himself in an act of spiritual suicide. He has taken his own life, 'killed' himself, in his desire to be someone else - Sauron. |
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