The Lord of the Rings: Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit (Part One)

The Tale

Frodo, Sam, and Gollum rest for the last few hours of daylight. When darkness comes, they set off again after eating a little and drinking only a bit. Gollum accepts some water but is dreadfully hungry. He still cannot take lembas.

A single light burns high in the Towers of the Teeth and seems to follow them like a red eye for hours as they flee.  They dare not take the road, but they follow it on their left, as a guide. Finally, when the night is getting old and they are out of sight of the evil red light, they rest a bit, but are soon hurried on by Gollum through the last hours before dawn.

Morning light reveals they are already in a land less barren, more heathland than bare waste, with ‘ling and broom and cornel.’ There are pine trees on the heights. This ‘land had only been for a few years under the dominion of the Dark Lord and was not yet fallen wholly into decay.’ But the Black Gate is still too near. They find a place to hide as the revealing daylight grows.

The day is dim and shadowy; they are under the shadows of the mountains and the sun is veiled. Frodo sleeps well, but Sam can only doze, even when he is sure Gollum is asleep, ‘whiffling’ and twitching. Sam is getting hungry himself, wanting something less ethereal than the elvish waybread on his belly.

When the day fades away they descend and finally take to the road itself, keeping their ears open for any rider or messenger on the paved way. This helps them go faster though the danger is greater. The road is straight and level and recently repaired, originally made by the Men of old, but as they go southward it grows more ruinous and overgrown. Eventually it devolves into a mere cart track, though still straight and true. So they pass into the northern marches of the land called Ithilien, ‘a fair country of climbing woods and swift-falling streams.’

The fading night is fine under a clearing sky and a round moon, and the Hobbits can smell the fragrance of the land growing as they go forward, though it makes Gollum blow and mutter. They have come much farther south than the climes of the Shire and Rivendell, but it is only as they’ve come into less wasted lands that they notice the warmer atmosphere and incipient spring. Resinous trees, fir and cedar and cypress, are about them, and sweet-smelling herbs and shrubs are budding. ‘Ithilien, the garden of Gondor now desolate, kept still a dishevelled dryad loveliness.’ They climb the steep side where the road cleaves through a stony hill and observe the layout of the land.

‘Many great trees grew there, planted long ago, falling into untended age amid a riot of careless descendants; and groves and thickets there were of tamarisk and pungent terebinth, of olive and of bay; and there were junipers and myrtles; and thymes that grew in bushes, or with their woody creeping stems mantled in deep tapestries the hidden stone; sages of many kinds putting forth blue flowers, or red, or pale green; and marjorams or new-sprouting parsleys, and many herbs of forms and scents beyond the garden-lore of Sam. The grots and rocky walls were already starred with saxifrages and stonecrops. Primeroles and anemones were awake in the filbert-brakes; and asphodel and many lily-flowers nodded their half-open heads in the grass: deep green grass beside the pools, where falling streams halted in cool hollows on their journey down to Anduin.’

The travelers leave the road and move downhill. The sweet scents of the land rise about them as they proceed. Gollum retches at the spiciness of the air, but it makes Sam laugh in pure joy and heart’s ease. They find a clear stream falling into an ancient stonework basin, and here they bath and drink from the sweet falling water. But then they must find a place to rest and hide for the day.

For, pleasant as it is, they are still in enemy territory. Not only is it scarred by ancient wars, but there are also new wounds on the land, inflicted by Sauron’s servants: ‘a pit of uncovered filth and refuse; trees hewn down wantonly and left to die, with evil runes or the fell sign of the Eye cut in rude strokes on their bark.’

Sam, heedless for a moment and exploring the feel and touch of new plants, stumbles across a scorched ring full of bones and skulls, a ‘place of dreadful feast and slaughter.’ Though the plants are already trying to cover it, it is apparently recent. Sam decides to keep quiet about it, lest Gollum show a culinary interest.

‘Let’s find a place to lie up in,’ he said. ‘Not lower down. Higher up for me.’

 

Notes

Northern Ithilien is 600 miles south of the Shire; it’s climate and vegetation are like that of Mediterranean Italy to England. It is now early March, or a little over two months since the Fellowship started out from Rivendell on December 25^th. This far south, spring is already in the air.

Oh my, the list of plants and trees in just this one paragraph alone. The mere tumble and sound of the catalog of names is enough to evoke the riot of growth and variety, all the more notable after the barrenness of the Dead Marshes. Here are a few of the more unfamiliar ones.

Ling (a common heather)

Broom (a shrub with yellow flowers, thin green stems, and few leaves)

Cornel (a type of dogwood, a shrub with dark red branches and greenish-white flowers)

Larch (a coniferous pine tree with bright green needles. The … Larch)

Tamarisk (an evergreen shrub or small tree with feathery branches)

Terebinth (a small tree of the cashew family)

Saxifrage (a low-growing plant with small flowers, found among rocks)

Stonecrop (a small fleshy-leaved plant with star-shaped flowers, found on rocks or walls)

Primerole (any early spring flower, like cowslips or field daisies)

Asphodel (a plant of the lily family, often associated with death)

It is almost certainly no mistake that as we move into areas once under ‘Numenorean’ influence that we find the narrative using more Latinate terms. Romans are the real-world correlatives of the Men of the West. Besides many classical names of the plants, Tolkien uses ‘grot’ (a shortening of ‘grotto’ or small cave) and ‘dryad’ (the Classical Greek or Roman name for a tree spirit, an unusual reference to another mythology; perhaps it also recalls a folk association with the word ‘druid’).