Tuesday, July 9, 2024

The Lord of the Rings: The Choices of Master Samwise (Part Three): Bits and Bobs

 


Bits and Bobs

          So Sam sees how the world looks when you have the Ring on, how the physical world becomes shadowy and ‘spiritual’ things gain definition. The Orcs become ‘a phantom company’ and their torches ‘pale flames,’ while the Ring, charged as it is with Sauron’s power, is an ‘orb of hot gold’ and Sauron’s probing will is acutely felt.

          Tolkien continues to give his Orcs unpleasantly suggestive names: Shagrat sounds like ‘a shaggy rat’ and Gorbag is a ‘bag of gore (blood)’. But they refer to themselves as Uruks, not Orcs or Goblins: Uruk is the singular, Uruk-hai the name for Orcs in the Black Speech.

          Shagrat hails Gorbag with ‘Hola!’ which is not of course the Spanish greeting. The use of hola and its variations was in origin just a word easy to shout to get someone’s attention. Hello was just such a word, until it was decided it would be the way to answer a telephone; then it became an all purpose greeting. Before that greetings were more like Good Day or God Bless You, but now we ‘will answer to Hi or to any loud cry.’ Variations of hola have been listed as “halloo, hallo, halloa, hello, hillo, holla, holler, hollo, hollow, and hullo." Give me a holler.

Other Orc exclamations are Hai! Hai yoi! Ya Hai! Ya Harri hoi! Ya Hoi! Since the Ring seems to give ‘understanding of tongues’ and Sam does not translate them, they may be just meaningless exclamations, similar to the goblin cries in The Hobbit: Ya hey! Ya-harri-hey! Ya hoy! As the Orcs ‘gabbled and yammered after the fashion of their own kind,’ they are said to be ‘a babel of baying voices.’ The word is, of course, from the biblical story of The Tower of Babel, where God confused the languages of the people trying to build a tower up to heaven. It seems an odd cultural intrusion into the Middle-earth mythos, like Tolkien’s use of dryad earlier.

Sauron tried to devise a single language for all his minions at one time, called the Black Speech, but with the passing of time and separation of tribes the Orcs were soon divided into their own tongues, and used a debased form of Westron (Common Speech) when they needed to communicate with each other.  With the Ring translating, there’s no telling what the Orc leaders are using here.

As The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion points out, ‘[Sam’s] weariness was growing but his will hardened all the more’ is an echo of the Northern ethic expressed in The Battle of Maldon, which Tolkien translated as ‘Will shall be the sterner, heart the bolder, spirit the greater, as our strength lessens.’

The power of the Nazgul lies in fear, not only bringing it to their enemies but using it to motivate their troops. Gorbag says they give him the creeps. His comment on what the Nazgul do for punishment reminds me of the Witch King’s threat to Eowyn later in the story: ‘He will bear thee away to the houses of lamentation, beyond all darkness, where thy flesh shall be devoured, and thy shrivelled mind be left naked to the Lidless Eye’, a fate he assures her would be worse than death.

The Orcs have to be careful about their treasonous talk of setting up on their own. They fear spies and squealers in their own ranks, and one gets the feeling that, if necessary, they would rat on one another if it came to be in their best interest. They have no faith in the propaganda of their higher ups, or in their competency to handle affairs. Tolkien notes elsewhere that Sauron was aware of such traitorous thoughts, but merely laughed at them. But the Orcs are right. ‘Something has slipped.’ And, in their busy plans, the higher-ups have not been paying enough attention yet.


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