Shelob: A frightening, ancient evil

He may not be Steven King or Edgar Allen Poe, but J.R.R. Tolkien manages to pack a couple scares into The Lord of the Rings. Two chapters in particular send a chill down my spine: One is the "Passage of the Marshes," which I discussed in a recent post, and the other is "Shelob's Lair."

Re-reading this latter chapter made me remember how loathsome a monster is Shelob. She is truly horrifying, a monster that makes Pennywise's true form in King's It seem like a daddy longlegs in comparison. She is old, old enough to darken Middle-Earth before Sauron arrived on the scene, and bloated from drinking the blood of Elves and Men. Tolkien says she cares not for wealth or power, but spends all her time brooding on her next feast. "For all living things were her food, and her vomit darkness," he writes. That's about as nasty and explicit as Tolkien gets.

More dreadful is the knowledge that Sauron knows of Shelob and feeds it with orcs and prisoners:

And sometimes as a man may cast a dainty to his cat (his cat he calls her, but she owns him not) Sauron would send her prisoners that he had no better uses for: he would have them driven to her hole, and report brought back to him of the play she made.

"Play she made?" Jesus, I don't know what's worse--being paralyzed with poison and eaten alive by a monstrous, reeking, millenna old spider, or the thought of Sauron listening to such tales with glee.

Tolkien does a masterful job building up the horror in "Shelob's Lair," primarily by engaging other senses than sight in the reader, particularly smell. As Sam and Frodo approach Torech Ungol (Shelob's Lair), they catch scent of its foul reek, "as if filth unnameable were piled in the dark within." This is a rancid, foetid stench that can only belong to some great, millennia-old carnivore.

Inside Shelob's lair the air is still, stagnant, heavy, and any sounds Frodo and Sam make fall dead. It is pitch black, so dark you cannot see your hand though you hold it inches from your face. The evil and foulness are palpable, and Tolkien describes how a great fear and dread is upon the hobbits, though they do not know its origin. The oppression is so great that Sam and Frodo clasp hands in the darkness.

Our first encounter with Shelob not visual, but conveyed through her awful sounds, described by Tolkien as, "Startling and horrible in the heavy padded silence: a gurgling, bubbling noise, and a long venomous hiss." Then come the eyes, two great clusters of many windows. "Monstrous and abominable eyes they were, bestial and yet filled with purpose and with hideous delight, gloating over their prey trapped beyond all hope of escape."

When Tolkien finally draws aside the curtain for the big reveal, Shelob is every bit as noisome as my mind had prepared her to be. I think there's something particularly hideous about spiders as a species, and Shelob is truly the worst:

Hardly had Sam hidden the light of the star-glass when she came. A little way ahead and to his left he saw suddenly, issuing from a black hole of shadow under the cliff, the mostly loathly shape that he had ever beheld, horrible beyond the horror of an evil dream. Most like a spider she was, but huger than the great hunting beasts, and more terrible than they because of the evil purpose in her remorseless eyes. Those same eyes that he had thought daunted and defeated, there they were lit with a fell light again, clustering in her out-thrust head. Great horns she had, and behind her short stalk-like neck was her huge swollen body, a vast bloated bag, swaying and sagging between her legs; its great bulk was black, blotched with livid marks, but the belly underneath was pale and luminous and gave forth a stench. Her legs were bent, with great knobbed joints high above her back, and hairs that stuck out like steel spines, and at each leg's end there was a claw.

Sam's confrontation with Shelob is also one of my favorite scenes, and it is here and in his actions subsequent to Frodo's poisoning and capture that he emerges as a great hero in the rolls of fantasy literature.

War and death come to Middle Earth

War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.

--Faramir, "The Two Towers"

Although regarded as high fantasy (and thus conflated with "escapism," often by those who should know better), J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is also a treatise on war. Books 3 and 4 of Tolkien's tale (The Two Towers) shift the focus of the story from that of the adventures of the Fellowship to a broader conflict brewing in Middle Earth. The company emerges from the dark pit of Moria and the bright woods of Lorien only to be swept up in the machinations of Saruman and the great battle at Helm's Deep.

In my re-reading of The Lord of the Rings I recently passed through the vast bogs and fens which lie between the Emyn Muil and Mordor. This wide stretch of trackless, treacherous land is home to the Dead Marshes, named for the spectral corpses of fallen men, elves, and orcs that lie beneath its muck and dark waters. At one time their bodies lay on the dry Dagorlad, the site of a great months-long battle of the second age of Middle Earth. In this battle the Last Alliance of elves, men, and dwarves fought Sauron's forces at the gates of Mordor. The forces of good prevailed as Isildur cut the One Ring from Sauron's hand, but only after tremendous loss of life on both sides. Gradually the swamp spread, covering the land and the bodies of the slain.

Tolkien wrote in a letter that he drew his inspiration for the landscape of the Dead Marshes from experiences in the Somme, but it's no great stretch to speculate that this terrible battle made an impact in other, more profound ways on The Lord of the Rings. In the first day of the Somme the British suffered their worst loss of men in a single day in British history; 57,000 casualites, including 19,000 young men whose lives were snuffed out like candles in a hail of German machine-gun fire and shrapnel. Among those to die in the Somme were Tolkien's good friends Rob Gilson and G.B. Smith (for a compelling and complete recounting of Tolkien's wartime years and its influence upon his writings, I heartily recommend Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle Earth, by John Garth).

In the Dead Marshes Frodo, Sam, and Gollum come face-to-face with death as the great fear--that it is simply the end, and that there is no immortal soul. Our lives are simply snuffed out when our bodies fail or are destroyed. All men, good and evil alike, are mingled together in the common lot of corruption, the grave, where good deeds in life are not rewarded by the eternal hereafter--because there isn't one. The images of the dead in the pools reflect this horror, notes Frodo:

They lie in all the pools, pale faces, deep deep under the dark water. I saw them: grim faces and evil, and noble faces and sad. Many faces proud and fair, and weeds in their silver hair. But all foul, all rotting, all dead. A fell light is in them.

In another passage from The Two Towers that I had forgotten, Sam, Frodo, and Gollum manage to find a brief respite in the land of Ithilien, still fair and flowering even though it has fallen beneath the shadow. But this peace is only an illusion, a respite: When Sam leaves the path to examine the trees, he stumbles on a ring still scorched by fire, and in the midst of it finds a pile of charred and broken bones and skulls.

Tolkien witnessed too much of this senseless loss of young life in his experience during the Somme, which explains why death weighs heavily on his mind in The Lord of the Rings. Elves alone have the gift of immortality, but men are mortal and "doomed to die." As men dwindle from the greatness of their elder days so too are their lifespans reduced.

Yet The Lord of the Rings is also infused with heroic men and martial victories. Garth posits that Tolkien did not believe that the sacrifice of young men's lives was a waste, if given for the right reasons. Writes Garth: "It [The Lord of the Rings] examines how the individual's experience of war relates to those grand old abstractions; for example, it puts glory, honour, majesty, as well as courage, under such stress that they often fracture, but are not utterly destroyed."

Tolkien personified his feelings about concepts like glory, honour, and courage in the peoples of Rohan. Rohan is at constant war with the orcs and wild men, and like the Dunedain must remain ever alert, guarding against encroaching evil. They believe that death on the battlefield, while sorrowful, is never in vain as long as their acts are remembered. Thus the wistful (and my personal favorite) bit of Tolkien poetry, the Lament for Eorl the Young:

Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?
Where is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest and the corn growing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow; The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.
Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning,
Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?

This piece captures Tolkien's ambivalent feelings about war. The poem on the one hand portrays the magnificence of Eorl, resplendent in his war gear and the full flower of his years, using the symbolic language of spring and harvests and growing corn. But the song also mourns his death, asking again and again "Where has he gone?" in a question that cannot be answered. Eorl's passing leaves no trace, like a whisp of smoke. For the living only his memories remain.

The Riders of Rohan remember their dead with songs like these and through the simbelmyne, a small white flower which grows on their graves and tombs. According to the Encyclopedia of Arda, "simbelmynë is translated as 'Evermind': a reference to the memories of the dead on whose tombs the flower grew."

Tolkien does not take war lightly and the men of Rohan, though portrayed in a sympathetic light, are not his ideal. That place is held by Faramir, Tolkien's portrayal of man at his best. Faramir sees war with a keen eye, and tells Sam and Frodo that the high men of Numenor, of which he is a descendant, have "fallen" and are becoming like the Rohirrim, loving valor for valor's sake: "Yet now, if the Rohirrim are grown in some ways more like to us, enhanced in arts and gentleness, we too have become more like to them, and can scarce claim any longer the title High...For as the Rohirrim do, we now love war and valor as things good in themselves, both a sport and an end."

Tolkien's clearest view on war is revealed in a famous passage in which Sam views the body of a dead soldier from the south, slain at his feet by arrows from Faramir's men in the woods of Ithilien:

He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man's name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies and threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace.

In other words, war is terrible and of last resort, and slain foes are, in the end, just men--and therefore to be pitied. War is necessary when "destroyers" like Sauron or Hitler would impose their will on the free peoples of the world, but it is a duty to be carried out, not glorified. It brings with it too much death and sorrow. In his famous foreward to The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien wrote:

One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.

Tolkien never forgot the loss of Gilson and Smith, nor the Somme. At some level it fed into his passion for language and myth, providing fertile ground for a great tale. We have The Lord of the Rings to thank.

Run to the Hills: Bayley back in the news (for his hair)

Somewhere I can hear the singing, "I'm running out of my hair, I'm running out of it..."

I can't rank on Blaze Bayley too much, considering that the photo of his bald spot pre-treatment looks a lot like mine, only smaller. But this ad from Mojo Magazine was too good to pass up. Love the posed hands, as if he were about to invoke some sorcerous power.

Oh, and the sideburns too.

The Road: Exploring Tolkien's grand metaphor

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

As a kid one of the many things I loved about The Hobbit was its maps. The map of the Wilderland just inside the front cover of the book (see picture above) had a dotted line that crossed the Misty Mountains, followed the Old Forest Road, and, if you turned North when you reached the River Running, took you past the Long Lake and to the foot of the Lonely Mountain. I recall tracing the journey with my finger and at times letting it wander (not too far) into Mirkwood on either side.

I was fascinated with the idea that, when Bilbo left his small home in Bag End and set off with the dwarves, he was literally stepping onto the very same road that runs all the way to the Desolation of Smaug--and beyond. In The Lord of the Rings Frodo recalls Bilbo telling him that:

'He used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river; its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary. "It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door," he used to say. "You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to. Do you realize that this is the very path that goes through Mirkwood, and that if you let it, it might take you to the Lonely Mountain or even further and to worse places?"'

I still love the thought of the Road as an actual track that you can follow from one end of Middle-Earth to the other. But now that I'm a little older I can also appreciate its metaphors as well.

The Road as life
Tolkien says that the Road can sweep you off your feet, implying that it has an element of wildness and chance about it. It can take you to places you never expected. You may face hardships and perils or death in a foreign land. You may find great wealth, or the last refuges of magic, in realms where time seems to stand still.

But the Road always starts with a simple choice, and that is the decision to set your foot upon it. It starts with humble beginnings, from a single door in Bilbo's case, but if you follow it long enough it will take you to an intersection of many paths and errands. This very much parallels the course of a life, in which a child has but a few options but eventually encounters the many freedoms (and perils) that come with adulthood.

In his walking song Bilbo cannot say where the Road eventually leads, because eventually choice intersects with chance. We can choose our own direction on the Road, for good or ill.

In my "normal" suburban life even I feel a tinge of fear and thrill of the unknown when I step onto the Road and leave my driveway on some long business trip, of which I typically take at least two a year. And I'm always amazed and relieved to find when, after boarding a jet plane and traveling 3,000 miles across the entire country and back again, I find myself once again at home with my family.

It may not be the Misty Mountains or Mordor but it's about all the excitement I can handle.

The Road as death
Of course, eventually we all must reach the end of the Road. Tolkien offers four versions of Bilbo's walking song in The Lord of the Rings; each time the teller (alternating between Bilbo and Frodo) is further along in the Road of his life.

The first time we hear Bilbo's song it's the quote I started with above, and it's full of energy and anticipation of the journey. The second time, Frodo sings the song and he has begun the long trek to Mordor. In place of "eager feet" we get "weary feet." He is feeling the weight of his great task, just as we feel the adult weight of jobs, responsibilities, and age.

In "Many Partings," we hear the song for a third time. Bilbo knows his traveling days are winding down when he sings:

The Road goes ever on and on

Out from the door where it began.

Now far ahead the Road has gone,

Let others follow it who can!

Let them a journey new begin,

But I at last with weary feet

Will turn towards the lighted inn,

My evening-rest and sleep to meet.

In The Road to Middle Earth, author Tom Shippey states that Bilbo here is equating the lighted inn with Rivendell, which is his literal next stop, but that he is also referring to his own death.

In "The Grey Havens," the final chapter of The Lord of the Rings, Frodo sings Bilbo's old walking-song one last time, though the words have changed much:

Still round the corner there may wait

A new road or a secret gate;

And though I oft have passed them by,

A day will come at last when I

Shall take the hidden paths that run

West of the Moon, East of the Sun.

In other words, there is a new Road to take at the end of our lives. It is a road hidden to mortal men, perhaps always under our noses ("oft have passed them by") but invisible to our senses. No living man (nor hobbit) has ever started down this road.

According to Tolkien's cosmology, Middle-Earth was once flat, and you could reach the Undying Lands if you sailed far enough out to sea. But the Numenoreans abused this opportunity, and as punishment the Creator gave Middle Earth its present round shape. The straight Road was lost, and now only the elves can find the Grey Havens.

Man has a different final Road to take than that of the elves, one that Tolkien hints in his cosmology may lead his soul, freed from his body, back to the Creator.

My own Road
I'm glad to say that, right now, my Road runs straight through Middle Earth (right now I'm listening to The Lord of the Rings as I drive Route 95/114 to work; hardly Bilbo's garden path or the East-West road running out of the Shire, but it will have to do). Middle-Earth is becoming a well-trodden and familar path but I never tire of taking the trip.

If there is an afterlife, I hope with all that's in me that I will awake at the end of my Road to find myself in Meduseld, the golden hall of Theoden, my current stop in my latest re-read of The Lord of the Rings. Even better, perhaps I may one day find myself enjoying a fine beer at The Prancing Pony, listening to the locals tell a queer tale about a hobbit from the Shire and his companions who fell in with a mysterious ranger from the North. Time will tell.

Pictures on the Web of forthcoming film version of The Road

I recently came across some pictures of the forthcoming film version of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. This is an excellent (albeit bleak and quite depressing) post-apocalyptic novel that I reviewed several months ago.

The pictures here look quite good and very much nailed the look I had pictured in my mind's eye while reading McCarthy's novel. Also, I like the choice of Viggo Mortensen for the role of the father. Check them out at Firstshowing.net:

• http://www.firstshowing.net/2008/08/07/six-new-photos-from-cormac-mccarthys-the-road/
• http://www.firstshowing.net/2008/05/27/first-look-viggo-mortensen-in-cormac-mccarthys-the-road/

Journey to the Center of the Earth: A review

In listening to Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, I was struck by how much modern films like Raiders of the Lost Ark and National Treasure owe to this book. Although it was written way back in 1864, while the War Between the States was in full swing and the earth was a very different place, in many ways its thoroughly modern, at home alongside recent sci-fi novels like John Crichton's Jurassic Park.

In summary, Journey to the Center of the Earth is a fast-paced and lively pseudo science/exploration story that manages to be mostly interesting and entertaining. Unfortunately, it also crosses over into unbelievable territory about three-quarters of the way through and ends with a classic deux-ex-machina, but I found I can live with it.

Journey to the Center of the Earth takes aim at the theory that the earth grows hotter the nearer that you travel to its center. Verne posits the idea that the earth's core is inhabitable and houses massive cavities, caverns so huge that you cannot see their roof. At its center is a sea large enough that you can travel across it and lose sight of land all around. Science has of course since proven this idea impossible, but it makes for a fun story if you divorce it from reality.

Journey to the Center of Earth has a compelling opening that reminded me of The DaVinci Code--Professor Liedenbrock and his nephew Axel, the heroes of the story, find a coded note written in runes within the pages of an Icelandic saga. They puzzle through it and discover that it is a note written by Arne Saknussemm describing a passage he has found to the center of the earth. The opening is located in the interior of a dormant volcano in Iceland. Liedenbrock and Axel recruit an Icelandic guide and the three men embark on their journey.

I found Verne's descriptions of overland and sea travel to Iceland interesting, and the first scenes of the descent fascinating. Verne vividly portrays the vast depths and terrifying downward drops of the volcano shaft, and creates excitement and dread in two sequences in which Axel gets lost in the inky blackness and the three men nearly die of thirst.

Unfortunately I thought that the tale started to unravel once the men near the earth's center, which contains ice age creatures, dinosaurs, and even early men. If the story didn't literally jump a shark it certainly started to lose me once Liedenbrock and Axel's small boat passes very nearly over an Ichthyosaurus. I was also puzzled with the abrupt ending--Liedenbrock and Axel gain great fame from their expedition, while others treat their claims with skeptcism. But, inexplicably, no one ever bothers to re-trace their footsteps and verify their claims.

Still, you could do worse than pass the time by giving it the book a listen. It's also skillfully read by English-accented, professorial-sounding narrator Simon Prebble.

Note: This review is also posted on SFFaudio.com.

Pan's Labyrinth: Fantasy illuminates a dark period of real history

Warning: Spoilers abound in this review.

A long time ago, in the underground realm, where there are no lies or pain, there lived a princess who dreamt of the human world.

Two years after its release, I finally got around to watching Pan's Labyrinth. I wish I hadn't waited that long. Although I don't watch a lot of movies these days it's one of the best films I've seen in years.

At the beginning of the film a mother and a daughter are riding in the back of a car. The girl is reading a fairy tale and her mother looks on with disapproval. "Fairy tales--you're a bit too old to be filling your head with such nonsense," she says.

Director/writer Guillermo Del Toro then spends the next two hours proving her wrong, as well as the critics who hold fantasy in a similar regard.

We've all heard it before: Fantasy is for children. It's a tired and wrong-headed belief, yet too many of the literary establishment either ignores or treats works like The Lord of the Rings or The Chronciles of Narnia with outright contempt.

Should we see a few more films like Pan's Labyrinth, however, these arguments might dissipate forever. Pan's Labyrinth is not Narnia or Wonderland. It's concerned with the hard stuff of history, grim and painful and violent and adult, but there is magic and wonder at its heart, too. It's fantasy at its best: Impossible places and beings that, while otherworldly, allow us to see the real world in a sharper focus.

For those who haven't seen it, Pan's Labyrinth takes place in 1944 Spain after the Spanish Civil War. World War II is reaching a fever pitch and it's a time of incredible turmoil and violence in Europe. In Spain, fascists of the Francisco Franco regime are attempting to take control of the country.

In the midst of these violent times, Ofelia, a young girl with an active imagination and a love for fairy tales, and her pregnant mother Carmen travel to an outpost in the mountains where a ruthless fascist force led by Captain Vidal is trying to wipe out a pocket of guerilla resistance (Ofelia's father, a tailor, was killed in the war, and Carmen and Vidal have recently married).

The outpost is located near an ancient stone labyrinth, where Ofelia encounters a faun and some fairies. The faun tells Ofelia that she is a princess of a fantastic underground realm, accessible by a winding stair in the labyrinth's center. But before Ofelia can return she must complete three difficult tasks.

For the rest of the film Ofelia tries to complete her tasks as the bloody and terrible events of the real world unfold around her. A few members of the household covertly provide food and supplies to the rebels and Vidal mercilessly tortures and murders all those he suspects of aiding them. Carmen develops complications from her pregnancy and Vidal tells the doctor to save his son, not his wife, for whom he cares little. Vidal holds Ofelia in even less regard.

My only criticism was that the horrifying real world events at times threaten to overwhelm Ofelia's storyline and the fantasy elements. But Del Toro's master hand provides balance, using Ofelia's fantasy experienes to draw parallels with the fascist movement.

Del Toro never reveals whether Ofelia's "experiences" are the workings of her overactive imagination or real events. But he does hint that her fantasies are real, or at least have real world consquences. For example, Ofelia as one of her tasks has to recover a magic dagger from the hall of the Pale Man, a gruesome child-eating monster who sits motionless at the end of a long table overflowing with food, stirring only when someone eats his food. Ofelia fails to heed the faun's warning and eats two grapes. The Pale Man lurches after her, killing two of her fairy companions. In the real world, Ofelia's mother dies in childbirth and a freedom fighter is captured and killed.

Although the Pale Man is terrifying (it's worth watching Pan's Labyrinth for this scene alone), the real monster of the film is Vidal. Ofelia's struggles with the monsters of fantasy are all reflections of the evil inherent in her stepfather and fascism as a whole. In the end, Ofelia is required to murder an innocent infant to reach the underground fantasy realm. She refuses to follow orders, which is precisely what so many of the rank and file in Nazi Germany failed to do. The horrors of the Final Solution were the result.

Del Toro also includes some homages to his fantasy influences. These include Alice in Wonderland (Ofelia descends downwards into a hole) and the Wizard of Oz (a brief glimpse of red shoes when Ofelia crosses over into the land of fantasy). There's even a nod to Jackson's Lord of the Rings--In one scene nine fascist riders surround a woman working covertly for the freedom fighters, clutching a blade to her own throat as she prepares for suicide over capture. There's others that I probably missed. One viewing is not enough to take in all of the references and allusions in this film.

The end of the movie is heartbreaking, but also uplifting, as Ofelia returns to an underground realm "where there are neither lies nor pain." Is she in paradise, or is this "underground realm" merely the cold comfort of the grave? Del Toro does not provide the answer, but offers plenty of evidence to support either conclusion.

Suffice to say that I am now very much at ease with Del Toro directing The Hobbit. After watching Pan's Labyrinth, I have no doubts he can meet my and the rest of the Tolkien fanbase's lofty expectations for this film.