The Lord of the Rings: The Taming of Smeagol (Part One)

The Tale

‘Well, master, we’re in a fix and no mistake,’ said Sam Gamgee. He stood despondently with hunched shoulders beside Frodo, and peered out with puckered eyes into the gloom.’

It is the third evening since Frodo and Sam have left the Company. They have picked their way through the twisted knot of hills that is the Emyn Muil, often lost and sometimes going in circles, but on the whole moving steadily east. But they are finding the eastward faces of the hills too sheer to climb down into the marshes below. They are paused on the brink of a tall cliff, looking towards the dark mountains of Mordor.

Sam remarks on the irony that of all the places in the world they’ve never wanted to go to Mordor and now they have to try to get there but can’t ‘nohow’. Frodo shudders. If they can’t get down, they can’t stay there, but must find a sheltered place to stay the night and try again tomorrow.

Frodo ponders his doom. He thinks he’s fated to go into ‘that Shadow yonder’, but will good or evil show him the way? Delay helps the Enemy. ‘Is it the will of the Dark Tower that steers us?’ He should have left the Fellowship long before and come over the Battle Plain to the passes of Mordor. But now they can’t find the way back and Orcs prowl the east bank of the River. Frodo’s too tired to think. They’ll just have to camp and try again tomorrow. What food have they got?

Sam answers that they’re down to the lembas, the Elvish waybread from Lorien, but there’s quite a bit of it. It’s good but getting monotonous; he wishes for a bit of plain bread and a mug of beer. He’s lugged his cooking gear for miles, but there’s no fuel for a fire and no food, ‘not even grass’, to cook.

They go down and find a stony hollow to make a camp in. It is at least a shelter from the cold easterly wind. They sleep, one watching as the other rests, until morning. In the cold grey dawn, as they munch their lembas for breakfast, Sam asks Frodo if he’s seen anything through his watch.

For it seems Gollum is still following them; they’ve seen his eyes shining in the dark. It’s given Sam a turn, and he threatens (not for the last time) ‘the miserable slinker’ if he should ever catch him. But they haven’t had any sign of him for two nights, and Frodo hopes they’ve lost him. At any rate, he’s not Frodo’s main concern at the moment. It’s getting down out of these hated hills.

‘I feel all naked on the east side, stuck up here with nothing but the dead flats between me and that Shadow yonder. There’s an Eye in it.’ They’ve got to find a way down today.

Bits and Bobs

And so, in Book Four we take up again the thread of Frodo and Sam’s story, which, despite all the wonders and battles of Book Three, is where the crux of the quest and the main narrative lies. We go back in time a bit; while Frodo and Sam wander the cliffs (Emyn Muil = Sindarin ‘drear hills’) seeking a way out, the Orcs are carrying off Merry and Pippin, and Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli are pursuing them.

I noticed the odd phrase ‘puckered eyes’ to describe Sam looking into the gloom. I can’t be altogether sure, but I have the impression that Tolkien might be using this to avoid the terms ‘squint’ or ‘squinting’, almost always a word in his vocabulary that implies disapproval, of a failure of true sight. ‘To crooked eyes truth may wear a wry face.’

Frodo’s words about his bad decisions echo Aragorn’s earlier ‘All that I do goes amiss.’ He even goes so far as to wonder if Sauron is somehow guiding his actions. The irony in this case (as it is in Aragorn’s) is that his decisions prove to be good in the end, even providential. If he had taken a more direct approach earlier, he (and possibly Sam, if he had followed him) would probably been captured; as it is, the less obvious move nets him a sneaky guide and later Gollum’s being present to save him from ultimate failure. ‘Something happened that the Dark Lord did not purpose.’

I love Sam. Sam is just … Sam. Whether wishing for some plain food and a mug of beer over lembas, or threatening to thrash and maybe even kill Gollum if he ever gets his hands on him, Sam has the normal reactions; he is the simple hobbit, the ‘ordinary man’, driven by the ‘stock responses’ as C. S. Lewis calls them. ‘Stock responses are those responses which certain things merit. They are the natural and proper response to seeing a waterfall or a sunrise or a dying child.’ Although Sam can rise to some higher vision or insight, it is his ‘plain hobbit sense’ of who he is and of his place in the world that helps him to resist the call of the Ring.