The Lord of the Rings: The Passage of the Marshes (Part Four)

The Tale

Gollum crawls to the right looking for a way around the black mere. Sam and Frodo follow close behind, stooped and sometimes even using their hands as he does. ‘Three precious little Gollums in a row we shall be, if this goes on much longer,’ thought Sam.’ They come to the end of the mere and cross it, floundering from one tussock of weeds to another, sliming themselves up to the neck until they stink from waters like a cesspool.

          Late at night they at last find firmer ground, much to Gollum’s satisfaction. By some mysterious sense he seems to know where he is again and the way ahead. Late as it is he urges them forward, to ‘take master away from the wicked lights.’ He goes forward eagerly and the hobbits stumble after him. But in a little while Gollum stops and sniffs the air doubtfully. Sam asks him why: everything simply stinks. But Gollum has sensed a change coming. The air is moving. They move on, though Gollum shows signs of increasing uneasiness.

Suddenly they halt. They hear, far away, ‘a long wailing cry, high and thin and cruel.’ The stirring air grows cold and there is a noise like wind coming from the distance.  The misty marsh light waver and go out at its approach. Gollum freezes and stands shaking and gibbering. The rushing wind comes upon them, hissing and snarling, and the night grows less dark as the clouds and fog are torn before them. ‘[T]hen high in the south the moon glimmered out, riding in the flying wrack.’

For a moment Frodo and Sam are glad at the sight, though Gollum curses the White Face and its light. But then they see it come, ‘a small cloud flying from the accursed hills; a black shadow loosed from Mordor; a vast shape winged and ominous. It scudded across the moon, and with a deadly cry went away westward, outrunning the wind in its fell speed.’ They fall forward groveling on the cold ground. The shadow turns back and passes over them again, heading back to Mordor ‘with the speed of the wrath of Sauron.’ Behind it the wind roars along, rending the clouds and mist until the Dead Marshes lie bleak and bare under the ghastly moonlight.

Frodo and Sam get up, but Gollum will not move for terror. They rouse him a bit out of his panic at last. ‘Wraiths!’ he wailed. ‘Wraiths on wings! The Precious is their master.’ They see everything, and report back to Sauron. He knows everything! Gollum will not move until the revealing light of the moon has sunk off to the west.

‘From that time on Sam thought he sensed a change in Gollum again.’ Though more fawning than ever, he casts Frodo some mighty strange looks at times. He also goes back more to his old way of speaking.

But Sam has another growing anxiety. The closer they get to Mordor, the more the burden of the Ring is weighing upon Frodo, slowing him down and wearing him out. Frodo feels it as an Eye, a ‘horrible growing sense of a hostile will that strove with great power to pierce all shadows of cloud, and earth, and flesh, and to see you: to pin you under its deadly gaze, naked, immovable.’ Frodo can feel its location as surely as a man with his eyes closed knows where the sun is. He is walking into its power, and it beats upon his brow.

Gollum is probably feeling something of the same, torn between his promise and the fear of Sauron and his lust for the Ring, but Sam is distracted by his care for Frodo, so much so that he barely notices the shadow that has fallen on his own heart.

They struggle on until daylight, which reveals how much closer they are to the ominous mountains, no longer a cloudy menace but a bare black wall of towers. ‘The marshes were at an end, dying away into dead peats and wide flats of dry cracked mud. The land ahead rose in long shallow slopes, barren and pitiless, towards the desert that lay at Sauron’s gate.’ They spend the day cowering under a black stone, fearful of the possible return of the Nazgul overhead, spying them out.

The next two days are a stumbling nightmare of growing fear over ‘a weary, pathless land.’ The air grows harsh, with a bitter reek that parches their mouths. On the morning of the fifth day after they started following Gollum, they come to the desolation that lies before the gates of Mordor. Frodo looks around in horror.

‘Even to the Mere of Dead Faces some haggard phantom of green spring; but here neither spring nor summer would ever come again. Here nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rottenness. The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails upon the lands about. High mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of earth fire-blasted and poison-stained, stood like an obscene graveyard in endless rows, slowly reveled in the reluctant light. They had come to 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.’

They watch as all the horror grows clearer in the growing daylight. Even the sunlight seems defiled, walking among the clouds and flags of smoke, unfriendly, as if it would reveal them to enemy eyes. Too weary to go further they try to shelter under a mound of slag, but it leaks foul fumes that choke them. Gollum finally gets up cursing and leads them to a foul circular pit, cold and dead with a sump of oily water at the bottom. Here they cower hoping to escape the attention of the eye.

The day passes slowly. At first they cannot sleep and a great thirst troubles them. They were last able to fill their bottles back at the gully, which seems a paradise compared to where they are now. They try to take watches in turns, but on Frodo’s watch, overburdened with the Ring and looking up at the smoke streaked sky, he seems to see ‘strange phantoms, dark riding shapes, and faces out of the past.’  Bewildered and weary, he falls asleep.

Bits and Bobs

While the Dead Marshes carry Tolkien’s memory of the waste and ravages of war, he seems to evoke even more horrified judgement on the deadly industrial desolation that was destroying the land even at the time, and is now never far to seek, and decades more advanced. It is this insight into the barrenness and poison that is left and that will endure ‘even when all their purposes are made void’, when all the good has been sucked from the earth and the reason for making the desolation has long passed, that makes Tolkien a proto-ecologist, at least on a practical and aesthetic level.

Tolkien struggled with the chronology of events, trying to make the Nazgul passing over them here the one that was headed to Edoras, tying them together by coincidence, but he could not make it work. Gollum particularly fears this appearance. Under the pressure of thinking that Sauron might be about to get the Ring, thus putting it beyond his reach forever, he is again turned to increased desperation about his Precious and towards his old wicked ways.