The chapter alternates between these viewpoints. Legolas serves to bridge the two pairs, beginning the chapter fighting alongside Gimli and ending it alongside Aragorn. The second is Aragorn, frequently alongside Eomer, who shows us a picture of the battle as a whole, from the perspective of its captains. The first is Gimli, joined occasionally by Gamling, who serves as our window into the immediacy of the battle, the blood-and-guts of fighting axe-to-sword against Saruman’s forces. In narrating Helm’s Deep, Tolkien loosely divides his attention between two characters.
The defenders are on one side of the wall, the attackers on the other, and how well each is doing matches reasonably closely to their physical location.īy simplifying the large-scale concerns of narrating the overall battle, Tolkien saves himself space to focus on the small-scale concerns of individuals’ actions within the battle this is fitting, since Tolkien frequently inverts the small-scale concerns of individual hearts over the large-scale concerns of great historic deeds. Tolkien simplifies this task somewhat by casting this battle (and his other major battle scene, the Battle of the Pelennor Fields) as an attack on a fortress, rather than a pitched battle in the field. We need to know where the various forces are, how their attacks and defenses are progressing, and how their morale is holding up. Battles are complex scenes, requiring that the reader understand the topography of the battlefield, the capabilities of the opposing forces, and how all of these elements interact across time and space. Tolkien has a difficult task here, as all writers of battle scenes do. Indeed, it is the first significant victory for the forces of good that the narrative has seen so far. Saruman’s army is utterly destroyed, a major turn in the fortunes of the people opposed to Sauron. The orcs are ultimately routed at the coming of the dawn by a decisive cavalry charge led by King Theoden, which coincides with the arrival of reinforcements led by Gandalf and the appearance of a mysterious forest across the entrance to the valley. Saruman’s army of orcs and men spends an entire night attempting to dislodge the Riders of Rohan defending the fortress Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli prove instrumental to the defense. The story of the Battle of Helm’s Deep concerns the defense of a fortress, called the Hornburg, which defends the mouth of the eponymous valley.
0 kommentar(er)
