Latest / Mythmakers / The Dead Are Following - LOTR: An Author's Journey, Bk 5 Ch 2

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The Dead Are Following - LOTR: An Author's Journey, Bk 5 Ch 2 · Mythmakers

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Hello and welcome to Myth Makers.
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Myth Makers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creators brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy.
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My name is Julia Golding and today we are doing a sidecast episode where I continue to read my way through The Lord of the Rings.
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And we have reached in book five, so we're at the beginning of The Return of the King, chapter two, The Passing of the Grey Company.
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And what we are doing in these episodes is looking at this...
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this marvellous book from the point of view of what is going on, as far as we can reconstruct it, in the mind of Tolkien as his writing.
0:53
So I think the theme of this particular chapter, as I read around it, is second thoughts.
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What you do as a writer when you change your mind about how you're going to tell your story.
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And there are a couple of incidents here where you'll see that happen.
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So the big thing on this theme is that this chapter is in a number of sections.
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So we start with Merry, who's been left behind after Gandalf has ridden off with Pippin.
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So he's the last of the hobbits left with the remains of the company.
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And it's about what happens to him.
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And then there's a section about Aragorn daring to look into the Palantir that almost was the undoing of Pippin.
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And then there's a section about Erwin.
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There's a section in the sort of caverns of the Piles of the Dead.
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And then there's a wild hunt style ride through the lands of Gondor across the mountains where they go to the Stone of Erech.
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Now, the reason I want to sort of mention that structure is this wasn't how Tolkien originally thought he would tell this tale.
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He thought that he would put this material later on when they meet up again with the hobbits.
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The sort of latter half of this is told to Merry and Pippin much later on after the battle.
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And one of the reasons why Tolkien was thinking of that is he was probably thinking, well, we've got lots of separate stories running now.
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We've got Merry, we've got Pippin, we've got Frodo, we've got Sam.
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So perhaps I will save all that to a sort of report back phase.
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But he changed his mind.
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because he had, of course, done sections in the Two Towers where he followed just Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas.
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And so he decided to put half of that here, the episode with On the Path of the Undead.
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And I think what is interesting here is he also doesn't finish it.
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He chooses to leave it on a cliffhanger because he is building up to his biggest battle.
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Everything is mustering.
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That's the next chapter.
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And so he's holding back whether or not Aragorn is successful in summoning the dead to fight for him.
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Anyway, let's go back to the beginning of this chapter.
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It is in itself a bit of a rewind because it starts, the first part of the sentence is Gandalf was gone.
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So it immediately reminds us where we were in the narrative.
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So we've gone back to the moment where the previous chapter, they parted ways.
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Gandalf rode off on Shadowfax with, of course, Pippin in tow.
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And the section here really deals with poor old Mary's predicament.
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Everyone else is gone.
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And that's what he's thinking.
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Well, what use am I?
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And I think this is one of the beautiful things about Tolkien's writing and the most successful thing about The Lord of the Rings is
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Something that, for example, the Rings of Power is struggling with is that he remembers to have a relatable point of view at all times.
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And poor old Mary says, I don't want to be laid aside like baggage to be called for when it's all over.
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Yes, so that's a very relatable idea.
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Aragorn is full of gentle rejection, shall we put it like that, in this chapter.
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Though in Mary's case, it's very much on the lines of slightly prophetic rejection.
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really.
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Because of course, if he had taken Merry with him, Merry would have probably had a complete breakdown going on the paths of the dead, and he wouldn't have been there to help Erwin.
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So there's this sense of the fates are helping get the right people in the right places.
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So Aragorn is foreseeing this.
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Now, take a step back, that is the author planning.
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He has to give a reason why Merry isn't with them.
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And because he wants Mary for something else, or he feels he might.
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Tolkien may not have known exactly what he wanted Mary for, but he wanted Mary with the Rohan people, or else there's no one to tell that part of the story.
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So that's kind of a practical consideration in terms of craft.
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But in terms of story, Aragorn says to Mary that his road lies with him.
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That's Théoden.
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There is, of course, Mary becomes the last person that Therden sees and talks to.
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So again, this idea that Aragorn is foreseeing something here slightly, or his instinct is pointing him in the right direction.
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And then we get the arrival of these strangers.
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And...
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We're still with Merry, and so they don't know who's coming.
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Very important, don't tell us up front.
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So when the messenger says, riders are approaching at speed, don't say, oh, and they're your mates, because immediately you lose all tension.
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We don't know if they're going to be friend or foe until they arrive.
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And even the moment of revelation is held back a little bit longer because Aragorn doesn't immediately rush forward.
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There's a...
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Keep that tension there.
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But anyway, as they're approaching, Merry is sort of working out what happens if this turns into a fight.
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And he imagines himself left on his own in somewhere he doesn't know in the middle of nowhere amongst enemies.
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And he thinks, well, no good.
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He literally thinks no good.
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And so as a small person in this big world, he unsheathes his sword and decides to do his best.
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So that kind of gutsiness of the hobbits is one of their most adorable and relatable characteristics ever.
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So we get here the arrival of Aragorn's allies, the Dúnedain, have come.
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We get here a character who doesn't make it into the films, a character called Halbarad.
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So it's always lovely to dig these characters up.
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Plus we get Eladan and Elrahir, who are the sons of Elrond.
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We have heard about them briefly back in Rivendell, but again, they are characters who haven't made it into the film.
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Adaptations, it's lovely to rescue them from that obscurity.
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Remember that they're there.
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If you think, I don't always think about the films, but in the films, what they did is they gestured towards the presence of the elves by bringing Haldir together.
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and the Lorien contingent to Helm Steep.
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But they had to kill them all off because otherwise you're left with a sort of hangover of elves being in the wrong place because of the way the story is told.
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Anyway, Tolkien has a better solution to all this, which is to actually suggest that Aragorn does have some friends who are coming to his aid.
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And the people in the north, Elrond, Galadriel, Arwen, are thinking of him and sending help when needed.
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So we are remaining in Mary's point of view as these characters turn up.
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Just as a little note about Eladan and Elra here, we do actually see more about Halbarad than them.
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I think they remain in the shadows almost all the way through.
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They're very mysterious figures.
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We don't really get a handle on them.
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They didn't really get an awful lot to do.
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thinking about it.
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So I'm going to keep an eye out for them going on, but I don't remember them really becoming a character that you can sort of imagine, not like a Beragond or a Bergil, as in the last chapter.
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Anyway, let's keep an eye on the Sons of Elrond.
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So we remain in Merry's point of view and he stands down from his tension and sheaves his sword.
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That's rather sweet.
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What could he have done?
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Well, he was going to try his best.
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And almost the first thing that Halbarad says to Aragorn, or the messengers say, in fact, is Elrond says, remember the paths of the dead.
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So he's reminding Aragorn of something which we hear foot-learned later on.
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So that note of the paths of the dead.
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Of course, anybody who's done a bit of classical education or watched the Odyssey, you think about the paths of the dead as being somehow going into Hades or something like that.
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But the idea here is different.
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Tolkien has reinvented that idea, the paths of the dead.
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And there is a question raised at this point, which he delays the answer for.
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Again, one of these techniques as a writer is raise questions and save your answer for 20 how important the question is to your plot.
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It could be an enormous question, which you don't answer until the end.
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But something like this, where you have a question raised and you answer it later in the chapter is like a little mini plot hook.
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So it's quite good to put these in as well to satisfy your reader.
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And here the plot hook is who summoned the Grey Company to go to Aragorn's aid.
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And we also get a gift sent by the Lady of Rivendell, who we can probably piece together, is Arwen.
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And just as the Elrond and Eladan and Elrahir remain in the shadows, for a long time...
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the Aragorn-Arwen relationship remains shadowy and only glimpsed.
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And this is one of those moments.
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There's a hint of this relationship, and he hints again in the conversation with,
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Erwin.
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But because this isn't Aragorn's story, we don't get his inner thoughts on this.
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We just get a hint of the thing that is to become the wedding at the end of the story or towards the end of the story.
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Not the very end, as we all know.
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The company itself is retracing steps
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So if you're following in the maps, they go back to where the battle took place.
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And Gimli and Legolas, it's quite sweet.
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They show Mary around saying, this is where we did this.
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And also, if we're thinking about it as the beginning of the third book, it is a nod to recap, which is fun.
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But because Legolas and Gimli are talking to Mary, we get some sort of perspective on these newcomers.
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And Gimli says the writers of Rohan look almost as boys beside them, beside the Dúnedain.
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And the kind of language he uses for the Dúnedain is they're silent, they're like rocks, they're like Aragorn.
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And those words take us back to the Argonath, of course, which is often referenced.
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It's not referenced here, but that idea of silent and rocks.
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The Argonath is never far away from Tolkien's mind, I don't think.
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And Legolas, who of course is far older than even the Dunedin, but boys to the elves, of course, he doesn't say that, but he's probably thinking that.
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Anyway, he thinks that Galadriel is behind the message and behind the fact that the company has arrived.
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So while they're at Helm's Deep, they are given a sort of like it's a rest time when they're having something like the King's Court is gathering.
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And Therden remembers his promise to Mary, and his kindness to Mary is like rain after a drought.
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Mary sort of sees that Therden is a kind and loving lord, and his offer is very generous.
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He says to Mary, you shall be my esquire, if you will.
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That is a position of honor in a king's entourage.
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And there's a description here that Merry was filled suddenly with love for this old man.
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And this prompts him to offer his service.
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There is a deliberate pairing going on here, of course, which you must have noticed before, which is just in the previous chapter, we have Pippin offering his service to Denethor.
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And the...
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The tone around that was much more of a sort of defiance almost, proving his worth and a sense of gratitude to Boromir and the need to have a role in this war that's about to be fought.
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But Merry is much warmer, much more personal.
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Basically, Théoden is the nicer king.
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He wins on the nice king stakes.
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So, yeah.
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As a response to Theoden accepting his fealty, because this is a feudal ceremony we're seeing here.
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It's none of the vengeance for oath-breaking stuff that we got with Denethor.
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We've got actually a message of tempered love.
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Because Mary says, as a father you shall be to me.
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And Theoden says, for a little while.
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There's definitely in this whole chapter this sense of people seeing their ends.
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Everybody's a little bit prophetic in this chapter.
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So for those of you who like your horses, there's a little flurry of horse names.
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Rohirrin, Aragon's horse, has been brought down from the north.
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And Theoden is riding poor old snowmane.
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who is later to be his undoing.
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And Mary is given the pony who rejoices under the very well-chosen name by Tolkien.
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His names are excellent.
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Of Stibber.
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I don't know much about ponies, but I can imagine a Stibber, this little, solid mountain pony.
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So Aragorn has been absent for a while.
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And when he comes in, we see from Merry's point of view, so startling was the change that had overcome Aragorn.
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And he questioned Serden about how long it's going to take to muster Rohan, and this makes up his mind for him.
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How you make up decisions, how characters decide to do something, is always very important for driving the plot onwards.
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You've got to feel there's a ticking clock behind everything, and this is what's happening here.
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Tolkien is saying, you know, this plot needs to happen within a certain period or it's all going to be too late.
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That is the sort of sense in this chapter.
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And Aragorn says, we must ride our own road and no longer in secret.
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So he's actually moving very clearly in this chapter.
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It's probably the biggest step he takes to being Aragorn the king.
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With this resolve and the surety of purpose and his victory of wills over Sauron,
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is that he's moving into the legendary quality that attaches to him.
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Less of a strider, more of a Aragorn, more of a king, a lesser.
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And you find him, he's actually quite driven and grim during this whole chapter.
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So he's definitely moving up a gear, really.
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And so when everybody else is saying, oh, this is terrible that you're taking the paths of the dead, he actually is coming back with these affirmative statements that again have a hint of the prophetic about it.
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So he says to Emma, in battle we may yet meet again that all the hosts of Mordor shall stand between.
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It's a very heroic declaration and one that's referred to later in the battle of Pelennon.
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But with all this heroic stuff going on, what's so brilliant about the way Tolkien writes is he then brings it back.
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He brings it back to poor Merry, who said, at this point, he felt very small and he was puzzled and depressed by all these gloomy words.
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So perhaps for a reader who is not following every political nuance of this, particularly reading it the first time, there's an element of, yeah, we're puzzled too.
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So Mary is us.
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Mary is us thinking, what on earth is going on?
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What are these paths of the dead?
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What's happening?
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That's his role, which is delightful for us to be able to follow him.
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And he is dispatched off with Thurden and his riders, taking the hidden paths.
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At this point, in the first time of telling this, Tolkien would have carried on with Merry.
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Because this would be the point where he saved all the next material for later.
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But no, there's a little line break there and we go back to Aragorn.
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And it feels very filmic, this, like a filmic cut, because Merry rides away and then you've got Aragorn watching with Legolas and Gimli.
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And Aragorn says, there go three that I love.
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and the smallest, not the least.
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So unpacking that, he's saying he's got the greatest affection for Mary, which warms up this rejection.
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It's not saying rejection, but sending him off in another direction, that he's doing it with love and care.
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So we do get a little bit of reported
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battling with Sauron.
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In fact, Gimli is often our point of view for the rest of this chapter, though there are moments when it's Aragorn on his own, but particularly with Erwin.
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But a lot of it is, if there's going to be a sense of whose shoulder we're sitting on, it's often Gimli because he's like the other small person, the other more relatable person in the scene, particularly as Aragorn is ascending to this more legendary figure.
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Anyway, so Aragorn tells them that he has looked into the stone, the Palantir, and this has helped decide his next course of action.
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And Gimli is shocked because he, I mean, of course Gimli is shocked because he last saw Gandalf say how terrible these stones were and how they were trapped by Sauron.
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And Aragorn pulls rank, possibly for the first time.
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He says, you forget to whom you speak.
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Aragorn is rising, rising to kinghood.
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And apparently there were some complaints to Tolkien about how harshly Aragorn speaks here to Gimli.
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So he had a second thought and toned it down a little in later editions.
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So he mentions him smiling and sort of having a bit of self-deprecating humour in it as well.
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But he does say that he wrenched the stone to my own will
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If you think about Sauron is the equivalent of a Gandalf, he's a Maia.
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So this means that Aragorn is the equivalent of the strongest of men, the Elendils, the Isildurs of the past.
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He's of that stature and that kind of action proves where he is on the league table of men.
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And he goes on to say, to know that I lived and walked the earth was a blow to his heart, to Sauron's heart.
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for he knew it not till now.
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So Aragorn has purposely disturbed the ant's nest of Mordor, which of course we're going to see when we rejoin Frodo.
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He is provoking Sauron.
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He's trying to make Sauron scared.
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If you think about it as a game of chess, it's, this is my move.
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We're not just playing a defensive game.
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I'm going to do an attacking game as well.
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But it's hugely risky, of course.
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And we've got to feel that it's risky or else, again, the tension disappears from the story.
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And in that debate, particularly with Gimli, Aragon's defense is the hasty stroke goes oft astray.
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Sounds almost like a line from Burns.
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The wee slicket, timorous beastie.
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The best laid plans of mice and men, af gang aglay, which Tolkien would have known.
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There's a definite echo of that somewhere in that.
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But anyway, the hasty stroke often goes astray.
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But he's trying to provoke Sauron into making that hasty stroke.
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Gimli is very useful here.
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So let's think about the craft again.
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Gimli is super useful because he is challenging Aragorn, unlike anybody else.
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The Dunedain are obeying him because he's their leader.
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Legolas and the sons of Elrond are sort of to one side as the elves.
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Gimli as the dwarf who's thrown in with his lot in with Aragorn,
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provides that challenge that you need.
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Otherwise, this would be a very boring, this is what I'm going to do now, guys.
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Everybody come along with me.
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There'd be nothing in there to really hold our attention.
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But having Gimli pushing back and saying, hang on a minute, this is a risk, this is dangerous, allows Tolkien to seed in all of that jeopardy.
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It makes it more dynamic as a decision.
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And this is where we get the words of Malbeth the seer, which is one of those poems that Tolkien drops in from time to time.
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about the path of the dead.
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We see now that Tolkien is bringing in that Old Testament, New Testament pattern of, here are some words from the past which will guide the actions of the New Testament figure of Aragorn, in the sense that Aragorn is a little fragment of the idea of someone coming to return as a king.
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He's not saying he's a Christ, but there is an element of the returning king here, which is the kind of thing you get in the Isaiah prophecies, which then are referenced by Jesus in the Gospels.
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The kind of thing Tolkien went to church and heard regularly.
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So there's echoes of that in the idea of this seer in the past, this prophet in the past have said, in order to prove you are the king, you are to do this.
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So he's been given a challenge, but also a helpful prompt from the powers that be, sort of the heavenly powers of Middle-earth to take a certain path.
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And within this, it's notable that Aragorn is unlike the dark powers because he says, only of your free will would I have you come.
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They're not slaves.
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They're not to obey him just because he commands them, but because they want to follow him.
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And just practically speaking for the effect on the reader, part of us are thinking,
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gosh, this must be bad.
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If he's saying volunteers only for this mission, that's the equivalent, isn't it?
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And we get a little ghost story, just to make it sound even more ghastly, about where these dead come from, their failure to answer Isildur's call because they had worshipped Sauron in the dark years.
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And so we're primed, we're fully primed here.
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And just to give a sort of exclamation mark to this section, they have a heroic exit where they all gallop off.
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It would make a great sequence if ever somebody films this again.
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So they are going ahead of Merry and Théoden's party.
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So they arrive with Erwin first.
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So she's waiting for them at Edoras.
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And...
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We don't get much about Erwin, but this is one of the most important sections with her.
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I mean, we get her as Dernhelm coming forward, you know, in the next chapters with Merry, but she's hiding there.
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But here we get to see her heart.
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And what I love here is how impassioned she is.
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Tolkien is telling us just how fired up she is.
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Her eyes are resting most on Aragorn.
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She is a shield maiden, so she rejoices in their unlikely victory.
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She also has a queenly, princessly status in that she dares to question Aragorn's choice of the paths of the dead.
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And he is again gently refusing her all the way through by saying, I've been walking the lands before you were born, before you graced the land.
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He's sort of pulling seniority on her there.
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Because he is, in terms of how these royal families line up, he will be the senior royal in this relationship.
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So that's also thrumming underneath this.
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But Tolkien describes her as having her eyes were on fire.
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She is passionate.
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You don't really get to see or hear much about the physical presence of people when you think about it.
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And this is one of those times when we glimpse it.
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Actually, there was a little bit earlier on another physical mention in the Théoden Mary moment where it talks about the long hands of the king resting on Mary's brown, bent head.
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One of those rare moments when suddenly we see the physicality of these characters.
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Quite often they're fairly remote to us.
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But these fiery eyes are when she comes into focus.
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There is, in this public setting, there is a sort of intimate exchange between them is happening.
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Where the subtext, and this is where you don't put it on, the subtext becomes...
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the text in the private meeting, but this is the public section.
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So the subtext is what is being signalled here.
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And Aragorn is hinting that his heart dwells far in the north in Rivendell.
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So he is woken to the fact that she is in love with him, as he says later, in love with the idea of him.
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And they go on to have a sort of private conversation with,
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where she says, am I not of the House of Eel, a shield maiden and not a dry nurse?
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And she says, may I not now spend my life as I will, now that Therden, who she was nursing, has literally got back in the saddle.
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And Aragorn's answer is an interesting one here.
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It's not particularly a gendered answer in terms of rejecting her as a woman.
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He's putting her, if you are a shield maiden, he's saying you are under a command.
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Few may do that with honour, i.e.
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live their life as they will.
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And his comfort is a bit lacking because he says there may be need of valor, but without renown, very stoic philosophy, to fight the rearguard action when the men have failed.
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It is about male and female roles.
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Of course it is.
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But it's also here about how Rohan has failed to recognize her innate abilities and have put her in what they think is an honored position for her, but she finds as a cage.
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And she says she fears a cage.
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It's a powerful exchange.
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And it's a rare moment between men, menfolk, of language of personal desires and their heart desires.
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And one of the things which shows how intimate this gets is right at the end of this middle section, because this happens in three parts, Erwin dips from the U to the V register.
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So she drops into thee.
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They only go because they would not be parted from thee because they love thee.
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It's like you blurting out to your crush that you love them.
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It's that most mortifying, hot-exposed-to-be-wounded moment.
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So she leaves him at that point.
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And the next morning, I think she's a little broken here
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which is all preparing the ground for what she later chooses to do.
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She's desperate.
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She is going through the motions of the lady of the house, offering them the cup of farewell.
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But she is weeping, and Legolas and Gimli are quite distressed by that.
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And what is worse is she finally begs, I beg thee, take me with you.
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But of course Aragorn can't, because she is...
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Well, there's all sorts of reasons, but a simple one is she's under the command in that world of her king and her brother.
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So he has to ride off and leave her behind.
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And so that we don't
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feel too harshly about Aragorn, there is a little note here from Tolkien, the narrator.
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Only those who knew him well saw the pain that he bore.
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This isn't a light moment that Aragorn shrugs off.
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It's a moment that worries him because he's aware of how deeply wounded she is.
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And he can't help it, but he has been wounded.
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the person who wounds her by cutting off her chance of valor.
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So you've got this sense of this problem he's leaving behind, this fiery, passionate woman who might well do something desperate.
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And that, by the way, is a good thing to do as an author, because if you leave the sense of unease behind as well as the unease in front, you're creating yet more tension in your story.
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Now, there's a shift in tone after leaving Erwin, where we get to the ghost story element of this chapter.
33:43
Very spooky atmosphere.
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So it starts in the middle of page 59, if you're reading from the three-volume version.
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The light was still grey as they rode, for the sun had not yet climbed over the black ridges of the haunted mountain before them.
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A dread fell on them, even as they passed between the lines of ancient stones, and so came to the dim halt.
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There, under the gloom of black trees that not even Legolas could long endure, they found a hollow place opening at the mountain's root, and right in their paths stood a single, mighty stone like a finger of doom.
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Now, we've met these stones before, haven't we?
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Or similar stones.
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It reminds us of Barrow Rites.
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We know this is not a good sign, these single pillars.
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But also we've got... Just look at the sort of lexical set he's using.
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Hollow, black, ancient.
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Dim halt.
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Dim.
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Silly news.
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Halt meaning wooded place.
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And, yeah, so it's...
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And evoking this atmosphere that's going to follow us for the rest of this chapter.
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And here we've moved quite firmly over into Gimli's point of view.
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Things get worse as they approach the doorway.
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Do note here that unlike in the film version where the horses run away, this was partly done because they then filmed in a studio, I think.
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Here, they need their horses because they need to move quickly.
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But anyway, they're able to persuade the horses to go with them.
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Aragorn threw his strength of purpose.
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And there's a lovely touch here where Legolas speaks to them.
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The horse whispers, Arad, to follow him, calms his fears.
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Yes.
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But the doorway itself has this wonderful description.
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Fear flowed from it like a grey vapour.
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It's emanating this sense of dread.
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And of everybody, we don't see inside Illidan and Elrahir here, but they, of course, do have part human heritage in them.
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But Legolas is our pure elf.
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Legolas is the only one not to quail.
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Because for an elf, ghosts of men have no terror.
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I mentioned in this chapter how everyone seems to be plugged into their future.
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Poor old Halberad predicts his death as he goes through.
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And he is, I'm afraid to say, on the casualty list later on.
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But of everybody, Gimli is having it worst.
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His poor little knees are shaking.
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And how does he get himself to move?
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He goads himself.
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He says, an elf will go underground and a dwarf dare not.
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This section, by the way, is really well done in the BBC audio drama version of this, if you're looking for a very atmospheric soundscape.
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I've always enjoyed the way they did this section.
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And we get this dreamlike horrific journey through the paths of the dead.
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And what I noticed here when I was reading it, how it's far more terrifying to hint at and not see what is following you.
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So they've got dim flames.
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They can't see very far.
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Nothing has sailed the company nor withstood their passage.
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So what, you know...
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that nothing's stopping them, what are they scared of?
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And yet steadily fear grew on the dwarf as he went on, most of all because he knew now that there could be no turning back.
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All the paths behind were thronged by an unseen host that followed in the dark.
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Pearl Gimli keeps falling behind, so it's particularly scary for him because he's the one often at the back.
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we meet this mysterious skeleton.
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Tolkien's very good at giving us memorable moments.
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He doesn't explain, but they're like way markers that help us imagine.
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So we meet this...
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a skeleton dressed in Rohan armour who's scrabbling at a door, but she never got through.
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I was actually interested to see when I read the reader's companion here that Tolkien did speculate as to who this person was and why he was there.
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But in the book, it's saying no one will know the tale.
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But if you want to know your answer, and if you don't, put your fingers in your ears now, Tolkien thought this was the lost...
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heir to the Gondor, sorry, the lost heir to the Rohan throne, the one which meant there was a break in the mounds and they started a new lineage.
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And he may have been trying to get into one of the places of dark worship and that his legs had been broken and
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by the wicked people and he had been left there to die.
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So Tolkien had thought about the possibility of what that story might be but he talked about it as if maybe this was the truth.
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I love the way Tolkien kind of leaves it open.
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It's as though he's receiving the stories to him through the ether.
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He's not making them up though of course he is.
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And that's one of those ones where he thinks maybe that was the truth of that but it doesn't appear on the page here.
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What does appear on the page is the dreamlike horror of this sequence experienced by Gimli.
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In a way, we get closer and closer to Gimli and Aragorn gets further and further away from us because he is becoming the Aragorn of legend.
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And it's said about Gimli, the others passed on, but he was ever hindmost, pursued by a groping horror that seemed always just about to seize him.
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It's a horrible, horrible moment for Gimli.
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And he reflects that horror when he's telling it later to the fellow, to Merry and Pippin later after the battle.
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They eventually get out of the sort of hidden caverns on the other side of the mountain into a chasm where Tolkien has this idea that you can see stars from the bottom of a chasm.
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This is based on the idea that if you're in a deep enough well, you might be able to see the stars.
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Apparently that isn't a thing, but it's a nice image, isn't it?
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It's a thing in Middle Earth.
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We're fiction.
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We're allowed this.
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So he can see a few stars.
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And Legolas now looks back and...
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And he says the dead are following
40:40
I love this bit, a bit of poetry here.
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I see shapes of men and of horses, and pale banners like shreds of cloud, and spears like winter thickets on a misty night the dead are following.
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Wonderful stuff, really.
40:59
Very spooky.
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And then there's an increase in pace, because Aragorn says we have to get to this stone of Erech.
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by the deadline that they've got to call the dead to fight for them.
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And so they ride off.
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as fast as possible with the dead riding behind them.
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And there is definitely here because the way the locals shut their doors and bar their houses against this wild ride, there is a sort of folklore of the British Isles, the idea of the wild hunt, the uncanny hunt that rides through your village or your town.
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You must not open the doors to them.
41:42
There's an element of that here.
41:46
And they reach the stone of Erek, which is actually an unusual object.
41:50
I suppose it's like a very large palantir in some ways.
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But it's described as a black stone, a globe, the height of a man half buried.
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And of course, people have speculated in Middle Earth that it might have come from outer space because it does feel like something from a sci-fi story.
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But Tolkien explains it was brought over at the ruin of Numenor.
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So it's another of these amazing objects that was somehow transported there by these giants of people who were the Numenoreans.
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I also just want to point out here how different this plays to the film version of this.
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Because that is done in such a way that...
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Aragorn is sort of, he goes to where they are, hiding, challenges them, and is chased out, and he's not sure they're going to follow him.
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That's a kind of cliffhanger.
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And we later find out they do.
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But here, the dead have followed him from their halls to be summoned at the stone of Erech.
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And Aragorn moves into the formal language of Yi,
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Ye shall, you know, he is saying this is a word, it's his oath language.
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It's a declaration that you must stand by your oaths.
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And so his language becomes the equivalent of legal language, legally binding language in Middle-earth.
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And it's at that moment that we glimpse the unfurling of the standard that Arwen's made for him, though it's not fully revealed.
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We just see the dark, the black background because it's night time.
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And on they go, and it's still Aragorn the legend because only his will held them to go on.
43:44
He is keeping this army together by his will and having his followers stay with him.
43:53
We are not told at this point if they succeed.
43:58
Again, don't lose all your attention by saying, and then they arrived and defeated the Corsairs of Umbar and it was all fine and off they go to, are they going to get there in time in Minas Tirith?
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He doesn't do any of that.
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He says, the last thing I want you to think about are beloved characters, Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas at this point, is they are riding as fast as they can with an army of the dead following them.
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An army that has betrayed its oath in the past, so we've no reason to think they won't this time.
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And so the last sentence in the chapter leaves it all open.
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But the next day there came no dawn.
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That links us back to the moment we've already seen in Minas Tirith, where there's no sunrise.
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And the Grey Company passed on into the darkness of the storm of Mordor and were lost to mortal sight.
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But the dead followed them, picking up the echo of what Aragorn said.
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So a marvellous chapter, and it's quite refreshing to be in the company of our legends.
45:04
And it's also exciting to see Aragorn becoming this mythic character.
45:09
But it's also interesting to see how Tolkien rethought some of the things he did.
45:15
He's very much a writer who writes by discovery process.
45:19
But even after he's published something, he will re-edit it, as we know famously from The Hobbit, with the Hobbit of the Ring.
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He does fine tune when he agrees if he's got something slightly wrong.
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So there we are.
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Next chapter, we go back to Mary and the muster of Rohan.
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So exciting stuff as all roads at the moment are leading to Minas Tirith.
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Thank you very much for listening.
45:51
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45:55
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45:58
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