The Lord of the Rings: The Great River

The Tale

Frodo is roused by Sam the next morning; apparently they landed sometime in the night and camped, removing Frodo while he was still asleep and wrapping him up well. Gimli is busy nearby building a small fire.

They start out again before it is broad daylight. They let the boats drift forward on the middle of the current, not paddling forward, reserving their strength in place of speed. But Aragorn insists that they start early each morning and travel far into the evening. ‘[H]e feared that the Dark Lord had not been idle while they lingered in Lorien.’

But they see no sign of enemies for the next two days. On the eastern bank to their left they see the Brown Lands, a low hilly area devastated by the Dark Lord ‘without even a broken tree or bold stone to relieve the emptiness.’ On the left the land is flat and treeless but green and lined with forests of tall reeds, hissing in the wind. From that side they hear many small fowl calling in the reeds, and once or twice the travelers hear the rush of mighty wings and look up to see great phalanxes of swans passing overhead. They are black swans.

Frodo wonders why it’s still so cold for as far as they’ve gone south. Aragorn explains they haven’t gone down very far; their slanting journey has only taken them about sixty leagues farther down than the Southfarthing in the Shire. Orcs have been reported making forays in the area lately, however, and broad as the River is they can still shoot arrows across the stream. Sam looks uneasily around. As likely as before the trees on either bank might have held hidden enemies, this open area leaves them too exposed.

This feeling of uneasiness grows on the Company for the next two days. They spend a whole day paddling forward, hastening the journey. The river grows shallower with stony beaches on either side; they must be careful they don’t scrape bottom on the gravel-shoals. A cold wind blows from the east from the Brown Lands. ‘There was little talk and no laughter in any of the boats.’

While Legolas’ heart is running through starry beech-woods and Gimli is wondering if he has gold fine enough to use in making the housing for the Lady’s gift, Merry and Pippin are uneasy in the boat with Boromir. He’s biting his nails and muttering to himself, peering at Frodo and sometimes guiding their boat close to his. Sam is miserable. He has nothing to do but stare at the dreary lands passing them. Although he has grown a little more used to the boat, he is so awkward and stiff no-one trusts him with a paddle.

But he can still be on watch. On the dusk of the fourth day, while he is feeling drowsy and the light is uncertain, he sees something behind them that makes him sit up and rub his eyes. That night as they set up camp on a small eyot [a little island in a river or lake] he tells Frodo he’s seen something funny, Frodo says he could use a laugh, but Sam says it was funny queer, not funny ha-ha. In the dim he saw what looked like a log with a couple of shining eyes behind Gimli’s boat, and it was moving faster than the flow and catching up. The eyes disappear when he sits up and takes notice. At first he thought he was dreaming, but now he’s not so sure.

Frodo says that both he and Haldir and the Elves saw such a thing on that first night on the flet before they entered Lorien. Sam says that putting two and two together and adding old Mr. Bilbo’s stories, he fancies he can put a name to this phenomenon. ‘A nasty name. Gollum, maybe?’

Frodo fears it’s true. He supposes the creature got on their trail in Moria and has been following ever since. He’d hoped their stay in Lorien would put him off their track, but no. They decide to say nothing to the others for the night, but to keep extra watch. Frodo particularly instructs Sam to wake him up for his turn. Sam will need to be fully awake tomorrow to keep watch on the river behind them from his place in the prow.

‘In the dead hours’ Frodo comes awake being shaken by Sam; it is his turn to watch. Sam reports some soft splashing and perhaps a sniffing noise, but there are many odd noises on the river at night. He can’t be sure. He goes to sleep, and Frodo takes his place. Time passes slowly, and Frodo is feeling tempted to lie down, when he sees a dark shape float near to one of the boats. A long whitish hand comes out and grabs the gunwale [upper edge of the boat] and two pale lamp-like eyes gaze inside, then turn to look at Frodo. There is a hiss of breath. Frodo leaps up and draws Sting. The lights go out, there is a hiss and a splash, and the dark shape shoots away downriver.

Aragorn springs awake and see that Frodo has drawn his sword. The hobbit says that Gollum was here, or so he supposes. Aragorn reveals he has been aware of him since Moria and hoped the trip down the river would help lose him, but now the creature has been following them lying on a log. He’s tried to catch Gollum once or twice, ‘but he is slier than a fox, and slippery as a fish.’ He wishes he could catch Gollum; perhaps he would be useful as they try to find a way into Mordor. A loose Gollum might murder someone in their sleep or set other enemies on them. Aragorn takes over Frodo’s watch; tomorrow they will have to try going faster.  

Gollum is not seen again that night. The rest of the company is alerted to his presence, but he is not seen for the remainder of the voyage. They paddle faster, traveling mostly by night and twilight and lying low by day. The seventh day is grey and overcast but clears enough by evening to show patches of pale yellow light from the white rind of the new Moon.  The next day the country on either side of the river  grows stony. ‘They were drawing near to the grey hill-country of the Emyn Muil, the southern march of Wilderland.’

As they lay in their camp that day Aragorn sees many flocks of birds wheeling high overhead; he wonders if Gollum has been spreading news of their journey. Towards evening he and Legolas spot a distant eagle circling high as if searching and heading southward. It is far from the mountains. They wonder what it might forbode. They wait until full dark before moving on.  

The eighth night of their journey comes, clear and bright with stars. Aragorn decides they will try one more night with the boats; after that the river will become too dangerous and must be navigated by day. Sam is put forward in the prow to be on watch. About midnight he yells; there are dark shapes of rocks ahead. The swift waters have carried them further than Aragorn had calculated. They are hardly able to turn, and the current is carrying them to the eastern shore, the hulls of the boats already grinding now and then over the shoals.

Suddenly there is the twang of bowstrings and arrows start falling around them. One hits Frodo in the back but rebounds off his mithril mail, another passes through Aragorn’s hood. Dark figures are running back and forth over the shingle banks there on the eastern shore. Orcs. ‘Gollum’s doing, I’ll be bound,’ said Sam to Frodo.’

They paddle hard into the middle stream. Arrows still follow them but seem to be foiled by the elven cloaks in the dark.  They turn towards the western shore. ‘Under the shadow of bushes leaning out over the water they halted and drew breath.’ Legolas leaps out of the boat a few paces up the bank, bow drawn, looking for a target amid the shrill cries coming from the other shore, but it is too dark.

‘A sudden dread fell on the company.’ Legolas looks up, and the company see a dark shape approaching in the sky overhead, ‘blotting out all light as it approached.’ It is greeted by fierce cries from the Orcs, and Frodo feels a chill clutching his heart and a deadly cold in his shoulder, 'like the memory of an old wound.’ Legolas lets fly an arrow. There is a harsh croaking scream, and the winged shape plunges to the eastern shore where its fall is greeted with wails and curses, then silence. ‘Neither shaft nor cry came again from the east that night.’

They take the boats upstream a bit and draw into a small shallow bay. There they lay low and await the dawn. They praise Legolas’ shot and wonder what it was he hit. The shadow of its dread reminds Gimli of the Balrog, but Frodo says it was something colder, but dares not say what he thinks it might have been. But its fall seems to have dismayed the Orcs. But the Orcs are still there, says Aragorn, and the Company should all stay awake with their weapons at hand.

While they wait, Sam tries to bring his reckoning of days up to date; he seems to have lost count in Lorien. They discuss the nature of the Elvish perception of time. ‘For the Elves the world moves, and it moves both very swift and very slow,’ says Legolas. Swift because they themselves change little and the world speeds by, and slow because they don’t count the years for themselves, and the seasons pass like ripples on the stream. Frodo says the time passes quickly in the land ‘where Galadriel wields the Elven-ring.’ Aragorn warns him not to speak of that outside of Lorien.

The night passes slowly and the day dawns with fog, cover, perhaps, but hard to find a way through. Boromir wants to continue along the west shore and head to Gondor, but Aragorn means to portage their boats by the ancient way to Rauros-foot and take to the river again past the rapids. When it becomes clear that Frodo will follow where Aragorn leads, Boromir declares he will go as far with them as to the Tindrock, and then he must take his road home.

Aragorn and Legolas leave to scout out the way and return after only two or three hours. They have found the track, but must carry the boats for a ways. They are light, and even Merry and Pippin can carry one across the flat. But it takes the two Men to carry the boats one by one over the tumbled land to the portage way. There the going is easier, and by dusk they have reached the river again. They decide to stay there and rest and go forward in the boats come morning.

The day dawns and they set off. The dim shapes of the cliffs on either side grow higher and higher, and rain sets in for a bit. When it clears, they find the river so swift and the walls so high that they couldn’t land if they wanted. ‘Frodo peering forward saw in the distance two great rocks approaching: like great pinnacles or pillars of stone they stood.’ These are the Argonath, the Pillars of the Kings, that mark the old boundary of the kingdom of Gondor. As they approach Frodo sees that they are two ancient colossal statues.

‘Upon great pedestals founded in the deep waters stood two great kings of stone; still with blurred eyes and crannied brows they frowned upon the North. The left hand of each was raised palm outwards in gesture of warning; in each right hand there was an axe; upon each head there was a crumbling helm and crown.’ The company is bowed beneath the majesty and awe of the figures, except Aragorn, who sits erect and with glowing eyes greets the statues as ‘Isildur and Anarion, my sires of old. Under their shadow Elessar, the Elfstone son of Arathorn of the House of Valandil Isildur’s son, heir of Elendil, has naught to dread!’ Then he wishes that Gandalf was here, as he wants to go to Minas Anor but cannot now leave Frodo.

They pass through the long dark chasm past the statues, filled with howling winds and rushing water, and come out into the calmer lake of Nan Hithoel. Ahead lies the falls of Rauros, with Tol Brandir [the Tindrock] in the middle, and the hills of Amon Lhaw and Amon Hen on either side. They rest and drift a while, taking some food, then paddle to the westward shore and by nightfall set up a camp.

‘The tenth day of their journey was over. Wilderland was behind them. They could go no further without choice between the east-way and the west. The last stage of the Quest was before them.’

Bits and Bobs

Well, our suspicions are finally confirmed; Gollum is on the company’s trail, and has been since Moria. Aragorn has known it all along, but apparently hasn’t told anyone in hopes to shake him and not worry anybody. He calls Gollum a ‘footpad’, an old word for a thief that robs on foot rather than on a horse, but also suggests his padding along on foot or paddling his craft with his feet.

I am glad to find that it is Gimli who is building the fire. It seems to me to be a callback to The Hobbit, where it states that ’Dwarves can make a fire almost anywhere out of almost anything’ and that of Thorin’s Company the best fire-makers are Oin and Gloin (Gimli’s father).

The black swans they see seem ominous, though they are never specially pinned down as enemy spies; from the black horses the Nazgul ride to the black squirrels of Mirkwood, the coloration suggests connections with the Dark Power. But the eagle they see will turn out to be searching for the company for a more beneficial agent.

Sam’s instinct to blame Gollum for the Orc attack is spot on, as it turns out. According to Tolkien’s scheme in unpublished papers in the Marquette library (reported in A Reader’s Companion to be the only complete timeline of all actions in LOTR) it is noted that on January 24 Ugluk, a captain of the Orcs, captures Gollum and extorts enough knowledge of the company to assure him of the presence of the Ring. Gollum escapes again, follows the Fellowship until he is found out, then in terror of the Orcs flees into the Emyn Muil, where he later finds Frodo and Sam.

Emyn Muil is a Sindarin name, apparently meaning ‘drear hills’. They lie south of the Brown Lands, which we learn later were once the gardens of the Entwives, before war passed over them. Though in my synopsis above I constantly refer to simply ‘the river’, it is Anduin the Great (Sindarin ‘long river’), the longest river that rives Middle-earth in the Third Age.

‘The dead hours’ are the early hours after midnight. When Sam sees Gollum, it is February 19^th. As they go along, Boromir seems to be growing more and more antsy, and never misses an opportunity to suggest turning towards Minas Tirith. ‘Portage’ refers both to a path or road to carry a boat from one body of water to another, and the act of doing so.

Cor Blok interprets Legolas shooting of the ‘Winged Steed’ in the sense of a steed as a horse, a misconception that has persisted from the Ace paperbacks to the Rankin/Bass Return of the King.

When they reach the Argonath, the Pillars of the Kings, they have traveled over 300 miles by water. These colossal statues are another favorite of illustrators throughout the years. They suggest the might and skill of the world gone by, remnants of the Egyptian-like culture of Numenor. In the Jackson films, when the boats pass by the feet of the Argonath, it is one of the least convincing special effects, though still passable. It reminds me (mildly) of Marshall, Will, and Holly and their routine expedition.

We are only one chapter away from the end of The Fellowship of the Ring.