The
Tale
‘Come
now!’ [said Legolas] ‘Time wears on, and the mists are blowing away, or would
if you strange folk did not wreathe yourselves in smoke. What of the tale?’
Pippin tells the story of the nine days since they parted at Parth Galen. At the end, Aragorn restores their knives, thrown away by the Orcs, and Pippin’s elven brooch. He praises the young hobbit’s action. ‘One who cannot cast away a treasure at need is in fetters.’ He is troubled by what he learns about the Orcs from Mordor. They seem to have known too much about the Fellowship and their purpose. But all agree that Saruman’s treachery has put him between a rock and a hard place between the West and Sauron.
Merry
takes up the story and recounts the Entmoot and the march on Isengard, and the
vast forest that moved with the Ents. This is made up of the Huorns (so-called,
apparently, because they can talk with the Ents), trees that have come awake
and can speak and move but are wild and strange and prone to fits of anger, if
they are not restrained by true Ents. Merry and Pippin are riding on Treebeard’s
shoulders. The whole march comes up to Isengard in the dark, then pauses and
waits.
Then with a blare of trumpets, Saruman’s army comes tramping out and heading off to Helm’s Deep. It includes Orcs, both marching and riding on wolves, Men (tall and grim-faced but not particularly evil-looking), and what look to be half-orcs, as tall as Men but with goblin faces. Altogether, it looked to be about 10,000, and Merry thought it did not look good for Rohan. But Treebeard let them pass. ‘My business is with Isengard tonight, with rock and stone.’ But it appears a huge force of Huorns is moving off south, following them.
When
the army is gone, Treebeard sets the hobbits down and goes up to the gates of
Isengard and begins pounding at the doors and calling for Saruman. He is
answered by stones and arrows from the walls. Luckily, Ent skin is even tougher
than tree bark and they are immune to poison, and while the arrows sting and
infuriate them, they produce no real damage: ‘An Ent can be stuck as full of
Orc arrows as a pin-cushion, and take no serious harm.’ Once Treebeard gets a few
arrows in him, however, he starts to get ‘positively hasty.’
Bits
and Bobs
It
has been suggested (I forget where) that Legolas’s attitude towards smoking
might be a generally Elvish opinion of the habit, and indeed we never hear of
an Elf smoking in the Legendarium. Whether this is because it is a relatively
new innovation in Middle-earth or because they have health objections is not
known. At least the Elves in Rivendell would have known of it through their
friendship with Gandalf. But the Elves (at any rate while in Middle-earth) are
not vegetarians, as is heavily implied in Jackson’s The Hobbit: An
Unexpected Journey, so they do not check that box in what used to be called
‘the wheat-germ and granola crowd.’
Aragorn
gives the hobbits back their daggers from the barrow, blades made for the old
war with the Witch-King, which will be significant for Merry’s future story. Merry
connects the goblin-men in Saruman’s army with the ‘squint-eyed Southerner’
back in Bree, which raises some concern about the wizard’s influence in the
Shire area. We are lore-dropped with quite a bit about the Huorns and the Ents (a
punch from an Ent-fist crumples iron like thin tin) which prepares us for the havoc
to come.
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