Big Books I Have Read: LOTR, Part V

We're continuing to enjoy LOTR aloud.  We've finished fighting at Helm's Deep and we're moving into book 4 (that is, The Two Towers part 2), which seems an excellent occasion to consider some differences between the Tolkien text and the excellent-but-of-course-very-peculiar-because-hey-cinema Peter Jackson movies.

No red-blooded old-school D&D'er who found his way to Fantasy via Tolkien doesn't love seeing orcs hacking and getting hacked.  I suspect that this describes Peter Jackson as much as it does Yours Truly.  The battle sequences in the films are almost all top-notch, even when they go over the top.  No, I don't even mind seeing Legolas shield-surfing into a crowd of Uruk Hai.  That's allowed, given how grimly everything is otherwise going, and anyway those Uruks had it coming.  I fully admit that I choke up a little at the fear in the eyes of Rohan's pre-teen soldiers, and later at the just-in-timely arrival of Haldir's stoic Galadhrim.

Rereading the same scenes in the books again, though, I'm struck at just how little Tolkien seems to be interested in not only action-beat pacing but fighting in general.  Tolkien had been a soldier, let's remember, and in WW1 he experienced the kind of world-ruining awfulness that makes movie-style sword-swinging look not only tame but ridiculous.  ("By 1918," he tells us, "all but one of my close friends were dead.")  What's more, as everyone knows, JRRT was fascinated with the ancient cultures of northern Europe, most of which were concerned with martial virtue above all else.

In the books, however, nearly all of the exciting/dramatic/gory details that make the movie battle so visually compelling are either totally absent or barely implied.  There is a sequence where Gimli keeps count of hewn orcs, but it is brief, and there is no relish in the bloodiness of the fight.  Sometimes JRRT might almost be describing the movement of pieces across a map rather than dwelling on sweat and pain, and he never forces us to look at horror.

Indeed, the most terrifying and disturbing moment in the book's battle of HD is one completely free of blood and gore.  It doesn't even appear in the movie, and it is composed solely of dialogue.  Aragorn has lept atop the wall of the fortress, and he is calling on the endless army of Saruman's orcs to surrender:

               The Orcs yelled and jeered. 'Come down! Come down!' they cried. 'If you wish to speak to us, come down! Bring out your king! We are the fighting Uruk-hai. We will fetch him from his hole, if he does not come. Bring out your skulking king!'

               'The king stays or comes at his own will,' said Aragorn.

               'Then what are you doing here?' they answered. 'Why do you look out? Do you wish to see the greatness of our army? We are the fighting Uruk-hai.'

               'I looked out to see the dawn,' said Aragorn.

               'What of the dawn?' they jeered. 'We are the Uruk-hai: we do not stop the fight for night or day, for fair weather or for storm. We come to kill, by sun or moon. What of the dawn?'

There's a creepiness here that no amount of makeup can produce.  It isn't direct and it isn't allegory, but it echoes the hateful mob that stands in the darkest moment in Western narrative.  "Bring out your king!  We come to kill!"  We are near Golgotha.