jack

Posted by Roseanna

https://readerofelse.wordpress.com/2026/03/16/a-close-reading-of-lotr-episode-11-speed-herons/

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Today we covered chapters VI – The King of the Golden Hall, VII – Helm’s Deep and VIII – The Road to Isengard. These were fun, pacy chapters, and ones that prompted particular levels of book/film comparison, given that there’s a whoooole lot of difference here in the order and nature of events in the story. But I’m going to save that bit for last, because I’m a tease (and/or it sort of relies on some points I want to make first).

Instead, I’m going to start of with something that absolutely slapped me in the face reading these three chapters: much in the same way as he’s wildly unsubtle with using stars in talking about the elves, and all the elven descriptions, Tolkien is going absolutely ham with gold and silver in all the sections about Rohan. It’s everywhere. Yes, Théoden’s hall has gold in it, and a gilded throne, and that makes sense for a king. But it’s also the light cutting through the darkness there. And the corn in the fields. And the hair of the men and the women, and particularly Éowyn. It’s the sun in the clouds. It’s the armour in the armory. And it is accompanied by silver, in the girdle and the sword and the horse and the river and the rain and the water and the sky and-… well, you get the picture. It’s the link up between the materiality of the Men of Rohan and the natural world that makes this interesting for me. Were it just their belongings, were it just the arms and armour, their displays of personal wealth, I would feel it was just about creating an image of this rich, kingly hall and the high men who inhabit it. But when it shifts out, to the hair of enough of the people that their enemies call them strawheads, and to the world in which they live, it feels like it becomes… more. Tolkien is trying to show us an essence of a place and a people all together, bound up as one.

Which is particularly interesting for this people. Where a lot of places the story has gone have been peopled by those who have lived there for millennia – elves and ents and so on – the history of Rohan is a little more prosaic. We are told they go back 500 years in this place, having been gifted the land by the King of Gondor, for services in war by their founder Eorl. Which pissed off the men of Dunland who I take it were there beforehand, and continues to piss them off. Border and land disputes are so… real… in contrast to the walking trees and a line of kings that extends through thousands of years. Sixteen kings is… it’s still a lot but it’s so comprehensible.

So it’s interesting that he’s tying them, descriptively, all up with their land. Normally when he does this it’s “time immemorial” things, not human scale.

Part of me thinks it might be because he loves Rohan best. Well, no, that’s a lie, I think he loves the elves best. But aside from his sad sad besties, the love I can feel in these chapters for the subject shines out in a way I haven’t really seen with any other location so far. There’s a deep fondness and familiarity in the natural world, especially in the Shire, but not so for the people. Whereas there’s a constant glow to everything and everyone of Rohan. Everything feels like it’s being captured in perfect moments, the light catching in the spears so they seem aflame because we see them at exactly the right time. Sunlight emerging from cloud to light up the silver of the rivers. Particularly The King of the Golden Hall is a golden hour photo in chapter form.

I mean, it makes sense, given his area of scholarship and all. Which leads to the weird contrast of the realism of Rohan – the mythic quality. Even as it makes a lot more temporal and logistical sense than a number of places in the story, Tolkien throws us off linguistically. The dialogue in this section is, predominantly, in a more formal, more archaic register than a lot of what we’ve seen, even compared to the elves. Like when Gandalf narrated the fight with the Balrog, there’s a lot of unusual syntax, some unexpected word choices. And while the formality makes sense in a royal court, in the moment of reading it’s a disjoint.

Rohan is a weird place, pulled out of legends like Beowulf, and simultaneously out of a history Tolkien knew intimately. The prosaic lies alongside the stuff of legends and moments of deeply dramatic poetry, their focus on death and battle, all to create this extremely distinctive place. And it’s great. It’s often very beautiful. But as someone who is less all aboard the Rohan train (they’re fine, but they’re not my best bois), it’s just a little odd to sit with, too.

And all that comes together in Éowyn, though we see her but briefly. She is described thus (bolding mine):

Grave and thoughtful was her glance, as she looked on the king with cool pity in her eyes. Very fair was her face, and her long hair was like a river of gold. Slender and tall she was in her white robe girt with silver; but strong she seemed and stern as steel, a daughter of kings.

And then after Théoden sets her to lead the people in his absence:

Alone Éowyn stood before the doors of the house at the stair’s head; the sword was set upright before her, and her hands were laid upon the hilt. She was clad now in mail and shone like silver in the sun.

And finally, as the riders leave Edoras:

Far over the plain Éowyn saw the glitter of their spears, as she stood still, alone before the doors of the silent house.

Beautiful, martial, stern and strong, gilded and silvered, and last seen standing sadly before a portent of doom. I mean, that’s Rohan in a nutshell, right?

Also, while I’m not about to accuse Tolkien of feminism (because I too have seen quite how long it’s been since there was a woman on page), I do think she is given a pretty decent hand here. She’s not written off or trivialised, and there’s no moment when the decision to have the people entrusted to her in the absence of Théoden and Éomer is anything other than natural. Since we’ve left the Shire (because the women in the Shire did not get a good showing), there have been exceedingly few women on page, but the ones we get are… I mean, I love them all. They’re distinct between them, some of them definitely outshine their husbands, and none of them are weak or any of the other stereotypes of misogyny. Tolkien just seems mostly to forget women are a thing you might see about the place at all… which checks out for an academic when he was there, I suppose. I don’t want to give him too much credit on this point, but there’s a little.

The story then moves away from Edoras and off to battle, which ultimately leads the forces to Helm’s Deep. Unlike me, Tolkien is very good at skipping over things and covering a lot of ground quickly when he wants to, and it’s amazing how little space the battle here takes up. It’s a very skimmy chapter, hopping from moment to moment, and especially so within the battle itself. The whole thing is viewed in short, disjointed sections, each tending to focus on two or three characters for one or two actions, before shifting away to the next pair. Does Tolkien just hate choreography? It doesn’t really appear here in any great amount – where I might expect it, the narrative tends to zoom out instead, or do a little dialogue – and thinking back to previous chapters (like the death of Boromir), it didn’t feel particularly prominent there either. The only point at which I remember him doing so is Gandalf narrating his fight with the Balrog… and that has a whole different quality through both the narration from Gandalf and the general mythic vibe overlaid over the whole thing. As someone who doesn’t enjoy reading fight scenes¹, I’m here for it, but it’s another point of difference with a lot of the fantasy that comes downstream of his work.

What we get instead, in absolute spades, is character work and dramatic tension.

There’s a lot of Gimli and Legolas in here, which I enjoyed (interesting that this is what stuck out to me, but for Ed the prominent thing was Aragorn and Éomer), but I actually find some of the more minor characters more appealing. Particularly, I enjoyed Háma, who has two really bad days. He messes up as a door keeper, he messes up as an errand boy, gets a bit of sass from his king, an awkward conversation with a guard, and then an untimely death in battle. And I love that we get this mini narrative of him, through our time in Rohan. Much more than I would love in depth blow-by-blow of a fight.

As for the dramatic tension, once the battle is over (saved by Erkenbrand with his blingy red shield and his black horn and his impeccable timing), Gandalf turns back up, along with a lot of extremely spooky feeling trees. Very familiar spooky trees… Tolkien does not tell us how events in Isengard have gone, but drops hints instead. Which works extra well when most of the characters are wondering about it same as we are. But before we get to any kind of resolution, there’s a lot of equally spooky landscape to get through, and bodies of fallen comrades to find, whose spirits (appropriately buried under a cairn by the river) will be apparently guarding the spot forever. Bit grim. Throughout, information is given out only piece by piece, slowly revealing the events that have been going on while Helm’s Deep was being fought over. Much of it is, I think, guessable or assumable for a first time reader, but there’s just that little tiny bit of doubt carrying things through, and I think it really works. We want to know that Merry and Pippin are alright, that the Ents survived their last march to Isengard, and Tolkien keeps making us wait.

Mainly, he forestalls this with a rousing resumption of everyone’s favourite drama queen riddle bitch act from Gandalf. When asked about the trees suddenly moving up to the fortress by Théoden, he says he had nothing to do with it, it’s not wizardry, but instead, it’s something else:

Ere iron was found or tree was hewn,
When young was mountain under moon;
Ere ring was made, or wrought was woe,
It walked the forests long ago.

Big help, Gandalf. But if Théoden wants answers, he has to come to Isengard it seems.

I’m sure there are people who find this frustrating. But personally I find Gandalf’s particular brand of obfuscatory bullshit hilarious and compelling. On the surface level, it is just incredibly fun, especially in contrast to later wizard figures in fiction and their preponderence of exposition bombs. But at a deeper level, it contrasts very well with the moments in which he does give answers, or advice, or anything straightforward or declarative. The riddle-bitchery serves as a great baseline from which variation into any sort of seriousness carries extra weight, so when Gandalf needs to push a particular piece of information or plot direction, it feels like it matters.

But it is also just very funny to me.

Similarly funny to me is the delightful scene we get of Legolas and Gimli being enthusiastic/horrified respectively about their mutual special interests. The newly-appeared forest is creepy and oppressive and Legolas is fascinated by it. He wants to go investigate, like, immediately. Gimli is not a fan of trees and extra not a fan when there are eyes. But he is a fan of the caves they’ve got under Helm’s Deep (and forgives Legolas his trepidation about them). Which, alongside this exchange just being quite funny, gives us something much more substantial. We see the world of Middle Earth told through many eyes throughout the story – hobbit, men, elves and wizards all have something to say about how the world looks to them. But Gimli is, predominantly, our only dwarf, and we have very rarely had his perspective on the world, and doubly so on what is good and beautiful. But here, Tolkien changes that. In my copy, there’s around a full page of dense description in which Gimli effectively sings a paean to the wonders of these particular caves. And it’s gorgeous. I like his nature writing generally – for me, it’s one of his great strengths – but he does tend to focus on the same, limited number of things as a part of that. It’s fine, he’s very good at it, but this joy in caverns is a bit of a departure, and stands out all the more for that, even as it’s at the same standard as the rest:

And plink! a silver drop falls, and the round wrinkles in the glass make all the towers bend and waver like weeds and corals in a grotto of the sea.

Gorgeous.

It is nice to be reminded that there is just as much equivalence as difference between the different cultures of middle earth, and Gimli and Legolas, wildly opposed as they are in many ways, can come together like this to be equally enthusiastic and engaging about the things they care about in the world.

Even outside of this particular back and forth, there are some banger lines of nature description in this section. I’ve said it before, in a number of previous chapters, but I’m going to keep saying it because, even though I’m used to it, a lot of them still really do hit and hit hard. It’s one of the things that is keeping me really engaged in the book, and I’m not going to let that drop just from familiarity. Particularly prominent in this section is how he likes to use water similes for the grass and grasslands (as well as for the Men of Rohan in battle, actually), and the repetition is really embedding this view of the rippling sea of green across the plains. Alongside the frequent uses of the gold/silver and calling things “glittering”, the chapters keep circling around an image of sunlight on water, adding even more to the warm cast I get over the whole thing. It’s just… lovely.

Right, I’ve held out long enough, time for some comparisons.

We’ll start with Théoden, specifically his character and character arc. In the book, we meet him under sway of Grima Wormtongue (and maybe Saruman?). It’s not enormously clear, because Tolkien rarely is about magic. But once that is dispelled, he stands up, listens to good counsel and makes good, kingly decisions for the safekeeping of his realm (even if he’s a bit keen on the “dying in battle” part of it all). Like most of the characters we meet on the side of good, he does what is needed of him to the best of his ability, he makes rational, decent decisions, and helps everything move in the direction it ought to go. Very few characters in these books are incompetent, or make poor decisions, and the outliers are marked out by the plot as notable. And while this means that Théoden is less frustrating than his filmic counterpart… I actually found myself missing that, in some ways.

His filmic counterpart is flattened into approximately one big character theme (as most of them are), which boils down to this insult he throws at himself in a chapter yet to come: “a lesser son of great sires”. Film-Théoden is extremely caught up in the idea that he is unworthy of the great men who came before him. And this drives him to pride, and to bad decisions, all of which bend towards a yearning for worth, even (and especially) if that comes in the form of death in battle. In his pride, he disagrees with counsel, leading them to Helm’s Deep and to needing rescue by Gandalf and Éomer. When we discussed this, Ed is dissatisfied with these changes, because they bend much of Théoden’s development in service to Aragorn’s character arc. But I like them, because they humanise him, in contrast to all the inhumanly competent people with whom the book is peopled. Of all the many people we meet through the course of the story, there ought to be one who is difficult. On the right side, yes, but not aiming quite where needed. Because… people. I believe it better for a Théoden driven by comprehensible, if self-destructive, motivations.

His changed arc obviously also goes hand in hand in the film with wildly changed events. I am aware of Bret Deveraux’s whole series about Tolkien and Helm’s Deep, which goes into more detail than I am willing or able to provide on the accuracy of troop movement and behaviour and whatnot. But even I am able to see that the book just… makes a lot more sense than the decisions in the film, even taking into account the different motivations of Théoden. Jackson is clearly aiming to keep the number of named characters we need to keep track of to a minimum (which makes sense! there’s loads in the book and the films need to tighten things up to fit their limited time), and he has his own read on the story he wants to prioritise (Aragorn’s journey to kingship)… and yeah he likes a big cool visual if he can get it. The changes in storyline do seem to serve this², for the most part. But they come at the cost of plausibility of some of the decisions from an in-world perspective, and of Éomer and Aragorn bro time, which is replaced predominantly with Théoden dooming and Aragorn counselling not-doom time. Which is a different vibe.

That all being said – and I cannot stress enough, I know how different the book and film are moment by moment in these events – I think, broadly, they both actually hit pretty similarly for me on an emotional level. I put the book down and felt the feelings I feel when I watch the film, and I don’t think just out of familiarity. There are parts of the story earlier where events are closer but feelings farther apart. So for all that Jackson has mucked around with things here… I don’t really hold it against him all that much. And it’s interesting that it can be so different and yet feel the same. I think precisely because of Théoden and his love of doom, and his dwelling on the imminent change of the world. It’s something Tolkien can weave in more subtly throughout the text, but sometimes Jackson needs a hammer to bring into the film. The hammer just happens to fall where, in the book, a lot of the seeded resonances come to the surface.

Some of the differences are also just functional ones of the medium. Tolkien can take aside for a second to say of, for instance, the orcs who ran into the newly present forest outside Helm’s Deep: “wailing they passed under the waiting shadow of the trees; and from that shadow none ever came again”. It is almost unremarkable in prose to shift temporal gears like this, dropping out of narration to give the reader the long view. In film though? Awkward as hell. In the same way, Tolkien’s easy flow through the battle scene where he skips between encounters and skims across the wider drama of the action would be much harder to effect in a medium that ties you more firmly into the now. I’m sure not impossible, but harder. And so Helm’s Deep must expand to fill a huge portion of the film, where in the book it’s a really quite short chapter. It’s a thing I like about books, that they can do this, the dilation and contraction of time and perspective at need, and without real difficulty. And I dislike when books feel the need to be filmic about their approach, and linger in the blow-by-blow of things that don’t need it.

So, I like both the film and book equally on this section. They both have things they’ve chosen to do, and do them in quite different ways. But both absolutely smash the button inside me marked “feelings”. And that’s what I want, most of the time. Tolkien continues to give it to me. He finds it in the natural world, in the sorrow of the people who know that time will pass, that change will come regardless of what they may do, and the determination of those who resist in evil times. All of those are very present in this section, and in this place and people for which Tolkien clearly has an immense fondness. It is hard not to be at least a little bit affected by that, as you read. I certainly was.

I was tempted to not explain the speed herons of this episode’s title, but I think it’s actually quite funny, so before I go have a window into my (not great) sense of humour.

Tolkien reintroduces the Ents in this section, showing them anew through the (wondering) eyes of the Men of Rohan. And in so doing, they get redescribed for us. On the whole, I think this is actually a clearer description than the first time around about the particulars of their appearance. But specifically, it also gives us a description of how they move:

walking like wading herons in their gait, but not in their speed; for their legs in their long paces beat quicker than the heron’s wings

Which is incredibly vivid! I know how herons walk, with their weird articulated stilts-for-legs, I can very easily visualise it for the lanky arboreal bois, and then… speed it up a bit. I noted this bit while reading to discuss because I thought it was great. And then we got there, with Ed flagging it as an absolute clanger. He’s allowed to be wrong sometimes. I am simultaneously charmed and deeply amused by the mental image of the Ents as speed herons, and so I leave you with that for your imaginations³, and for the title.

Next up, finishing out this half of The Two Towers with IX – Flotsam and Jetsam, X – The Voice of Saruman and XI – The Palantir.

1. I don’t enjoy fight scenes and sex scenes for pretty similar reasons, in fact. But both can be good when the writer does something with them, usually making them about emotions or themes more than they are about the moment by moment position and interaction of bodies. ︎
2. And gave untold teens their sexual awakening with the Aragorn door-opening scene. ︎
3. I tried to figure out how to speed up the gif so you didn’t even need to imagine, but my technology skills fell at the first hurdle on that one. ︎

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