A Close Reading of LotR – Episode 13 – Are All Bogs Purgatory?
Apr. 25th, 2026 09:03 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
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In this section we started book 4 and read just two chapters, I – The Taming of Sméagol and II – The Passage of the Marshes, covering just 33 pages in my edition1.
This section starts us off into the “Frodo, Sam and Gollum walk a lot” bit of the story, which unsurprisingly means we’re back to Tolkien’s stalwart favourite: descriptions of the landscape. I say this without judgment because I love the walking-through-the-landscape bits. Genuinely may be my favourite part of Tolkien’s toolkit, 10/10 no notes. This particular instance of it also feels like a conscious echo of the start of Fellowship, just hobbits grappling with the natural world. The only differences being that this natural world is increasingly more malevolent (even than Old Man Willow), with the threat of Morder visible on the horizon and tangible to those with senses and awareness to comprehend it, and that the characters are far more conscious of the stakes now. Frodo has accepted his role as bearer of the Ring and, as he makes clear in these two chapters, is fully aware of the implications that acceptance has. He does not, at this juncture, expect to come out of this journey alive. Sam is only just realising this. The weariness, the horror of the scope of their task, makes the journey all the harder, just as the landscape does. Frodo, particularly, feels the burden of it – he wants to get to Mordor and “make an end of it”. It’s bleak, and Tolkien compounds that bleakness with his portrayal of the barren land they walk through.
Although there are a handful of moments in this section which have enormous import on the story as a whole, in terms of actual action and occurrence, they are otherwise relatively empty. They work, for the most part, because of Tolkien’s immense skill with his use of prose. The whole book is littered with banger lines, but the density of them her is noticeable. For examples:
Presently it grew altogether dark: the air itself seemed black and heavy to breathe. When lights appeared Sam rubbed his eyes: he thought his head was going queer. He first saw one with the corner of his left eye, a wisp of pale sheen that faded away; but others appeared soon after: some like dimly shining smoke, some like misty flames flickering slowly above unseen candles; here and there they twisted like ghostly sheets unfurled by hidden hands.
It’s gorgeous! It’s eerie! Much of his description in this section, and especially while they are in the marshes, is slightly horror inflected, and he deploys it wonderfully. He takes this thing he’s already great at and just twists it slightly, turned the skill away from wonder and into creepiness. It’s something I’ve picked up on before, in other sections, but it bears repeating: he’s surprisingly good at shifting into a different mode of storytelling, preserving the continuity of the story as a whole while giving a specific section its own vibe, an atmosphere that lends itself to a different genre altogether. And, when the characters are once again doing not a whole lot beyond tramping through the landscape, giving it this point of difference really does help the story along.
My enjoyment of it is also somewhat enhanced by a panel I went to at Eastercon – yes it’s the Hauntology one I mentioned in the last post. Turns out it’s actually a great tool for thinking about Tolkien, and it comes right to the fore in the marshes. Frodo (and Gollum) can see, as they walk, bodies of the dead, of Men, Elves and Orcs, in the waters around them. Rotten but whole, they are the dead of battles from an Age before. Sam only notices them when he stumbles, and boggles that they should still be here, so long later. Except, they aren’t really. Gollum tells them he has tried to reach out and touch the dead, but you cannot. You can see them, but never reach them. Tolkien has frequently loved to have the spectres of history long lost loom large over the fallen world in which the story takes place, and this is, if anything, his least subtle iteration of it. But no less powerful for that. It is a deeply eerie visual, made more so by the lack of explanation for it. We never know how or why they linger, here but not here, and that is just as haunting as their presence in this strange, menacing landscape.
In many ways, I think in this section my favourite character is the landscape. It has a presence within the story more compelling (sorry everyone) than Sam or Gollum, and Frodo’s interest for me here is more about the wider narrative.
Because this is the section which contains two crucial scenes which set some tone and expectations for the rest of the narrative. The first is right at the start, when the two hobbits capture Gollum. He is descending a cliff, following them (possibly by scent) and, when he alights at the bottom, Sam jumps on him. A scuffle ensues, but is ultimately resolved when Frodo holds Sting to Gollum’s neck, forcing him to stillness. Now, on his descent, Gollum has been muttering about how he hates the hobbits, calling them thieves, and when set upon, he does bite Sam. But until prompted by his assailant, he neither actively threatens nor attempts harm. This may seem like hair splitting, but it is critical to Frodo. Sam urges that they tie Gollum up and leave him, but Frodo refuses – either we kill him outright or not at all – and ultimately turns to mercy.
‘Poor wretch! He has done us no harm.’
‘Oh hasn’t he!’ said Sam rubbing his shoulder. ‘Anyway he meant to, and he means to, I’ll warrant. Throttle us in our sleep, that’s his plan.’
‘I daresay,’ said Frodo. ‘But what he means to do is another matter.’
And a memory comes to him then, of his conversation with Gandalf back in Fellowship, on the pity that stayed Bilbo’s hand in dealing with Gollum. Gandalf warns him not to be “too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety”. And here, as promised, that moment arrives. Frodo realises that he does, indeed, pity Gollum and stays his hand (and Sam’s). And of course, if you know how this story goes, this moment is crucial.
Especially when taken hand in hand with a scene a few pages later. Gollum has tried to flee – note, flee, not attack them, we’re coming back to this in a second – and they have captured him again. Because he cannot be tied up with elven rope which burns him (more on this later too), they decide to restrain him via an oath instead. And the only thing available by which he can swear where they will trust his words is the Ring. So swear he does. But Frodo says:
Would you commit your promise to that, Sméagol? It will hold you. But it is more treacherous than you are. It may twist your words. Beware!
And so, Gollum declares:
Sméagol will swear never, never to let Him have it. Never!
Both of these will turn out to be entirely true and binding.
In a section where Tolkien is balancing his earlier moments of hope – when the narrative voice steps away to tell us that there will be an after – with despair, as Frodo tells Sam that the journey ends when they destroy the Ring, it is interesting that he also drops these key pieces of information, right alongside the addition to the party of an incredibly critical character, and just after the midpoint of the story. This, at the heart of the text, is a declaration of what the book is and will be, even if the reader might not yet know it. It’s awfully tidy of him, if nothing else.
To come back now to Gollum, however. In the film, Jackson takes this ambiguous scene and pushes it to one side of the equation – his Gollum absolutely is intending to attack the hobbits, and so their violence is immediately justified as self-defence. Tolkien needs no such certainties to hide behind. Gollum may hate the hobbits here, but we have no clear assertion that he intends them harm apart from Sam’s. And this ambiguity makes Frodo’s decision all the more plausible; as he says, what he intended is besides the point, they don’t know it. What he’s done, here and now, to them, is nothing but self-defence. Pity is a very reasonable reaction. That pity – that willingness to extend grace to Gollum – sets the two hobbits apart from one another. As Ed pointed out, nothing that Gollum ever says or does changes Sam’s mind; he’s already set on his opinion at the start and will, to an extent, later be proven right. But the two hobbits have the same evidence before them, and Sam has no special insight that Gollum is about to betray them. His accuracy is coincidental. Tolkien gives us then an ambiguous scene, and has these two sympathetic characters respond differently to it. It’s an insight into their characters, that the one of them has changed in response to events, and the other hasn’t. Given what I know about how the story ends… it feels important to have both the ambiguous situation to which they are responding, and such a heavy highlight on Frodo’s choice of pity.
It also fits perfectly well into the Big Catholic Vibes Tolkien does, so you know, lot to recommend it.
Speaking of Catholic vibes, this journey sure has some.
The hobbits start in Emyn Muil. It’s not a particularly lovely bit of landscape, but it’s also not particularly awful either. It’s just a place they need to get through. They then travel into the marshes, a dead, eerie place full of visual uncertainty, a place with some life still in it, but sparse of things they would expect to see in the normal world, and populated by spectres of the dead, stuck in place for an Age of the earth after their deaths. It’s hazy, mist-wreathed, and the sun is distant and hard to find – indeed at one point Tolkien describes her as if she is in another world entirely. Dare I say it, is this place maybe just a little bit liminal? And then, they emerge from the marshes into “barren and pitiless” flats, the “desert that lay at Sauron’s gate”. This is a place Tolkien really turns up the description for:
They had come to the desolation that lay before Mordor: 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.
So not a nice place then, yeah?
Could we perhaps even suggest that Sam and Frodo have moved from the known world, through purgatory and into hell itself? I find it a very compelling way to conceptualise these chapters, both for how they fit the landscape they move through so well, and for how they fit the changing mood of the characters. Particularly that last section, a landscape so utterly tainted by evil that nothing can cleanse it but being flooded by the sea itself. Biblical much?
On a personal note, I am particularly inclined to concur that bogs and marshes are inherently purgatorial given my experiences with them. I have particularly vivid memories of my Bronze Duke of Edinburgh Award expedition2, where our boots became so clogged with sticking mud from the boggy fields we walked through that it took us hours longer than it ought to have to reach our camping spot, and walking on the pavement when we finally reached it on the way there hurt after hours of soggy ground and dragging legs. When I think back to the walking, I remember only an impossibly yawning void of hours3 squelching through nondescript fields with ominous farmhouses looming in the distance. I’m with Tolkien on this one.
Anyway. Marshes aside, there’s another bit of Big Catholic Vibes in this section – redemption and lembas bread.
When captured, Gollum reacts violently to being bound by elven rope. It – which Tolkien has already spent time describing for us as glowing with faint silver light and being of greater help than expected to the hobbits – is clearly imbued with something, their essence or magic or whatever it might be. Its elven-ness is manifest. That elven-ness is anathema to Gollum as he is now. Whatever is in him, especially of the Ring, cannot abide the touch of elven things. So too when the hobbits offer Gollum a little lembas bread. Now if that doesn’t smack of communion wafer I don’t know what does. When he likewise rejects it, Frodo muses that “this food would do you good, if you would try. But perhaps you can’t even try, not yet anyway”. In contrast to the hellscape of the plains before Mordor, Tolkien here gives an implication that Gollum may not only be cured by the oblivion of the sea. It is in Frodo’s speech, not Gandalf’s, so we can’t trust to perfect knowledge from him. But it is the possibility that’s interesting – Gollum could be redeemed. What has been done by the Ring, perhaps, can be undone.
I haven’t really a conclusion on it, only that it is very catholic, and also interesting.
In a similar vein, but this time “war” rather than “catholicism”, this passage struck me particularly vividly:
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 revealed in the reluctant light.
I don’t know what Tolkien did or saw during his time at war, but this… the desecration of the world, the violence inherent in his descriptions of it – “fire-blasted and poison-stained” – definitely is suggesting to me there might be some influence here. Again, no conclusion, only remarking that it hit me quite intensely while reading, and that it struck something of a chord with the necessity of mercy from Frodo earlier in the section.
But that mercy isn’t the only thing that stands out for Frodo here. At two points Tolkien describes him in ways that struck me as intensely reminiscent of another character in the story – Aragorn. Firstly, when he despairs, he declares that all his decisions have come to ill, paralleling the Aragorn of the end of the first book and beginning of Two Towers, distressed that his leadership after the loss of Gandalf has gone so poorly. The second is this, when Gollum is being told to swear on the Ring:
For a moment it appeared to Sam that his master had grown and Gollum had shrunk: a tall stern shadow, a mighty lord who hid his brightness in a grey cloud, and at his feet a little whining dog.
For me, this calls to mind those moments when Aragorn steps into his kingship and imposes it on the world around him, to the wonder or terror of those who behold it. Which makes sense for a man who will indeed be a great king, and says something, I think, for a hobbit who is being touched by a great power in the world.
Two last, mostly unconnected points;
I’ve talked previously about Tolkien’s consistent (and often repeated) imagery of good and evil, how good is light and cold, the moon and stars, silver and so on, where evil is red and hot and dark. Part of why that consistency of imagery is so good is that it gives payoff later when it is used with less overt marking, but the reader has hopefully been primed to intuit it into the description. And so, I particularly enjoyed this description of Frodo’s growing awareness of Mordor and Sauron:
So thin, so frail and thin, the veils were become that still warded it off. Frodo knew just where the present habitation and heart of that will now was: as certainly as a man can tell the direction of the sun with his eyes shut. He was facing it, and its potency beat upon his brow.
With all the reinforcement Tolkien has been doing of the heat and force of evil in the world, this vision of it as the hot sunlight on one’s face is extra potent, and a very vivid image to conjure up to boot. It’s cool to see something I’ve been noticing throughout get used to such good effect.
And, lastly, a lighter (albeit still thoughtful) note: in the conversation he has with himself when planning to betray the hobbits, Gollum spells out what he wants to do if he has the Ring:
See, my precious: if we has it, then we can escape, even from Him, eh? Perhaps we grows very strong, stronger than Wraiths. Lord Sméagol? Gollum the Great? The Gollum! Eat fish every day, three times a day, fresh from the sea.
Where everyone else who has considered the possibility of taking the Ring has thought in terms of the wider world – becoming a dark queen perhaps, or fighting the forces of Sauron to defend one’s homeland – Gollum’s desires are much smaller. Personal safety and access to regular meals of fish. That’s all. He doesn’t want to fight back, he wants to escape. In the wider thesis of Gollum – someone who has been touched by evil, done terrible things, but also someone who is critical to the journey now, and who is, perhaps, not beyond redemption – this is another argument, and one that aligns him more closely with the hobbits, and their habitually smaller concerns. He is not, perhaps, all that much removed from Frodo in some respects.
And so, here endeth another section. Not my favourite, and I am not yet convinced into a love of Sam that has eluded me thus far, but one that does a stellar job even by Tolkien standards of a sense of place, and fitting that place into his wider arguments of the world and the story. He remains a great describer, one who doesn’t need to thesaurus it up to give us some intensely memorable lines, and who is clearly obsessed with the lingering effects of the past on the landscape of his world’s present. This section presents a bit more moral – and a lot more catholic – than most others have, and seems to signal some of the critical foundations for the overarching narrative to come, and what is going to matter in the crescendo of it. I struggle a little without access to characters I find more immediately compelling, but the landscape does still tide me through, and the payoff of some of the earlier themes helps it along somewhat too.
Next up, another small section of just two chapters, covering The Black Gate is Closed and Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit, bringing the story inexorably closer to MA BOI Faramir. We’re hoping to finish up The Two Towers by the end of May, so we can have a little break (for me to mainline some awards shortlists, among other things) before diving into The Return of the King.
- You might think that would lend itself to brevity on my part in discussing it. You would be wrong. (Also yes I probably am going to sass myself in every post for being a wordy bitch, I deserve it).
︎ - For people not from the UK, this is something you do at school as a teenager, where you go on a long hike across the countryside with some friends and camp somewhere distressingly rainy. If you do this alongside some kind of a project and some kind of volunteering, you get an award. And then if you do it all again but more you get a better one. I only did Bronze, because the camping part was fun but the rest of it was… administratively burdensome, let’s say. ︎
- I suspect it really wasn’t all that long, but I was fifteen. Mud, putting a tent up in the rain and someone having a wasp fly up her trousers (true story) was the worst I was really going to be dealing with on the regular. ︎