Sauron Defeated (8 page)

IV.

MOUNT DOOM.

The original draft of the chapter 'Mount Doom' was written continuously with the first completed manuscript B of 'The Land of Shadow', which at this stage was called 'Mount Doom' (see p. 31); but the division into two chapters was soon made.

The latter part of the original single chapter (which I will continue to call 'B') is remarkable in that the primary drafting constitutes a completed text, with scarcely anything in the way of preparatory sketching of individual passages, and while the text is rough and full of corrections made at the time of composition it is legible almost throughout; moreover many passages underwent only the most minor changes later. It is possible that some more primitive material has disappeared, but it seems to me far more probable that the long thought which my father had given to the ascent of Mount Doom and the destruction of the Ring enabled him, when at last he came to write it, to achieve it more quickly and surely than almost any earlier chapter in The Lord of the Rings. He had known from far back (see p. 3) that when Frodo (still called 'Bingo') came to the Crack of Doom he would be unable to cast away the Ring, and that Gollum would take it and fall into the chasm. But how did he fall? In subsequent outlines Sam's part was pondered. My father knew that Sam was attacked by Gollum on the way up the Mountain and delayed, so that Frodo made the final ascent alone; and he knew that Gollum got hold of the Ring by taking Frodo's finger with it. But for a long time he thought that it was Sam who, finally making his way to the Chamber of Fire, pushed Gollum with the Ring into the abyss. In none of the later outlines given in Chapter I did he achieve the final articulation of the story; but there seems good reason to think that these belong to the period of the writing of Book V, and if my chronological deductions are correct (see pp. 12 - 13), he had had plenty of time to 'find out what really happened' before he came actually to describe the final moments of the Quest.

As I have said, the final form of 'Mount Doom' was quite largely achieved in the first draft (B), and I give the following brief passage (interesting also for another reason) as exemplification (cf. RK

p. 223):

'Master!' he cried. Then Frodo stirred, and spoke with a clear voice, indeed a voice clearer and more powerful than Sam had ever heard him use, and it rose above the throb and turmoils of the chasm of Mount Doom, echoing in the roof and walls.

'I have come,' he said. 'But I cannot do what I have come to do. I will not do it. The Ring is mine.' And suddenly he vanished from Sam's sight. Sam gasped, but at that moment many things happened. Something struck Sam violently in the back, his legs were knocked from under him and he was flung aside striking his head against the stony floor. He lay still.

And far away as Frodo put on the Ring the Power in Baraddur was shaken and the Tower trembled from its foundations to its proud and bitter crown. The Dark Lord was suddenly aware of him, the Eye piercing all shadows looked across the plain to the door in Orodruin, and all the plot [> devices] was laid bare to it. Its wrath blazed like a sudden flame and its fear was like a great black smoke, for it knew its deadly peril, the thread upon which hung its doom. From all its policies and webs its mind shook free, and through all its realm a tremor ran, its slaves quailed, and its armies halted and its captains suddenly steerless bereft of will wavered and despaired. But its thought was now bent with all its overwhelming force upon the Mountain; and at its summons wheeling with a ...ing cry in a last desperate race there flew, faster than the wind, the Nazgul, the Ringwraiths, with a storm of wings they hurtled towards Mount Doom.

Frodo's words 'But I cannot do what I have come to do' were changed subsequently on the B-text to 'But I do not choose now to do what I have come to do.' I do not think that the difference is very significant, since it was already a central element in the outlines that Frodo would choose to keep the Ring himself; the change in his words does no more than emphasize that he fully willed his act. (In the second text of the chapter, the fair copy manuscript 'C',(1) Sam cried out just before this not merely 'Master!' as in the first text and in RK

but 'Master! Do it quick!' - these words being bracketed probably at the time of setting them down.)

This passage is notable in showing the degree to which my father had come to identify the Eye of Barad-dur with the mind and will of Sauron, so that he could speak of 'its wrath, its fear, its thought'. In the second text C he shifted from 'its' to 'his' as he wrote out this passage anew.

Some other differences in the original text are worth recording. On the morning after they escaped from the orc-band marching to the Isenmouthe, following Frodo's words 'I can manage it. I must' (RK

p. 211) text B at first continued:

In the end they decided to crawl in such cover as they could towards the north-range [and then turn south >) until they were further from the vigilance on the ramparts, and then turn south.

As they went from hollow to hollow or along cracks in the stony ground, keeping always if they could some screen between them and the north, they saw that the most easterly of the three roads went also in the same direction. It was in fact the road to the Dark Tower, as Frodo guessed.

He looked at it. 'I shall wear myself out in a day of this crawling and stooping,' he said. 'If we are to go on we must risk it. We must take the road.'

Here my father stopped, struck this out, and replaced it by a passage very close to that in RK, where it is Sam who sees that they can go no further in this fashion and must risk taking the road to the Dark Tower.

Another slight difference in the original text follows Frodo's words to Sam on the morning on which they left the road and turned south towards Mount Doom: 'I can't manage it, Sam. It is such a weight to carry, such a weight' (RK p. 214).

Sam knew what he meant, but seeking for some encouragement amid despair he answered: 'Well, Mr Frodo, why not lighten the load a bit. We're going that way as straight as we can make.' He pointed to the Mountain. 'No good taking anything we're not sure to need.'

Like a child, distracted from its trouble by some game of make-believe, Frodo considered his words seriously for a moment.

Then 'Of course,' he said. 'Leave everything behind we don't want. Travel light, that's the thing, Sam!' He picked up his orc-shield and flung it away, and threw his helmet after it; and undoing his heavy belt cast it and the sword and sheath with it clattering on the ground. Even his grey cloak he threw away.

Sam looked at him with pity.

This was struck out immediately and replaced by the text of RK, in which Sam suggests that he should bear the Ring for a while. But neither in the text B nor in the fair copy C is there mention of the phial of Galadriel or of the little box that she gave to Sam.(2) The height of Mount Doom was at first differently conceived: 'It was indeed some 3000 feet or so from foot to the.... broken crater at its crown. A third of that height now lay below him ...' Text C still differs from RK (p. 218): 'The confused and tumbled shoulders of its great sprawling base rose for maybe three (3) thousand feet above the plain, and above them was reared, almost as high again, its tall central cone, like a vast oast or chimney capped by a jagged crater. But already Sam stood half way up the base ...' (where RK has 'half as high again' and 'more than half way up'). My father's drawing, reproduced in Pictures by J. R. R. Tolkien no. 30, and in this book on p. 42, from a small page that carries also a scrap of drafting for this part of the chapter, seems to show the final conception, with the cone

'half as high again' in relation to the 'base'; but in this drawing the door of the Sammath Naur is at the foot of the cone, whereas in all versions of the text the climbing road came 'high in the upper cone, but still far from the reeking summit, to a dark entrance'.(4) When Gollum fell upon Sam as he carried Frodo up the road, both in the original text and in the fair copy C Sam not only tore the backs of his hands as he crashed forward (RK p. 220) but also cut his forehead on the ground. In B, against the words 'But Sam gave him no more heed. He suddenly remembered his master. He looked up the path and could not see him' (RK p. 222) my father wrote in the margin: 'his head was bleeding?' This was not taken up in C, but a little earlier, after the words 'Sam's hand wavered. His mind was hot with wrath and the memory of evil' (RK p. 221) C has: 'Blood trickled down his forehead.' Both these references to Sam's bleeding forehead were later struck from C. It is not clear to me what my father had in mind here. At first sight there might seem to be a connection with Sam s blindness in outline V (p. 11): Sam feels a blindness coming on and wonders if it is due to water of Mordor ... Sam half-blind is lagging behind', but that seems to have been introduced to explain how it was that when Gollum attacked Frodo went on unaware of what had happened; whereas here the blood in Sam's eyes was the result of Gollum's attack, and he himself urged Frodo to go on.

Possibly the cutting of his forehead was intended to explain why Sam could not see Frodo when he looked up the path, and was removed when my father came to the point when Sam was again felled by Gollum in the Sammath Naur: 'He was dazed, and blood streaming from his head dripped in his eyes' (RK p. 223).

When Sam urged Frodo to go on up alone while he dealt with Gollum Frodo replied, both in B and C: 'The Quest shall now be all fulfilled', where in RK he said: 'This is the end at last.'

At the end of the chapter, after the words 'Down like lashing whips fell a torrent of black rain' (RK p. 224), the first text moves at once to

' "Well, this is the end, Sam," said a voice by his side.' Here my father wrote in the margin soon after: 'Put in here (or in next chapter?) vision of the cloudwrack out of Baraddur [?growing] to shape of a vast black

[?man] that stretches out a menacing unavailing arm and is blown away.' The word 'man' is very unclear but I cannot see how else it could be read. Later at this point in the manuscript he wrote 'Fall of Ringwraiths' with a mark of insertion, and the passage 'And into the heart of the storm, with a cry that pierced all other sounds...' appears in C.

Lastly, Sam's feelings were thus described in B: 'If he felt anything in all that ruin of the world, it was perhaps most of all a great joy, to be servant once again, and know his master [added: and surrender to him the leadership].' This was repeated in C, but rejected and replaced by the reading of RK. In Frodo's final words he did not, in the original text, speak of forgiving Gollum.(5)

NOTES.

1. The fair copy- manuscript C is entitled 'Mount Doom' and numbered 'LIV' (see pp. 31, 37), the number changed subsequently to 'LII' (see p. 25).

2. Sam's vain use of the Phial when he entered the Sammath Naur (RK p. 222) appears in B. The addition concerning the Phial and the box was made later to text C.

The passage in which Sam remembered paddling in the Pool at Bywater with the children of Farmer Cotton (RK p. 216) is also absent from B. This is one of the few passages in this chapter for which a separate draft is found (before its introduction into text C), and here the names of the Cotton children are seen emerging.

3. three was changed in pencil to two on the manuscript (C), but three survived.

4. In both B and C, despite the earlier statement (as in RK p. 219) that the road came 'high in the upper cone ... to a dark entrance', it is said in the passage corresponding to that in RK p. 222 that the road 'with a last course passed across the base of the cone and came to the dark door', where in RK 'with a last eastward course

[it] passed in a cutting along the face of the cone and came to the dark door'.

In B there is a little sketch of Mount Doom which my father struck through, and here the entrance to the Sammath Naur is placed about a third of the way up the cone (which is here shorter in relation to the base than in the drawing reproduced on p. 42).

The road here disappears round the eastern side of the cone, below the door, and seems (the drawing is hard to make out) to reappear further up, coming from the left (east) and ending at the door.

5. A couple of points concerning names in this chapter may be mentioned. In the opening paragraph both B and C have 'He heard the scuffling and cries die down as the troops passed on into the Narch', where RK has 'passed on through the Isenmouthe'; see p. 33. The name Sammath Naur does not appear in B, but enters in C without any initial hesitation as to its form.

(Mount Doom.)

Note on the Chronology.

The chronology was still a day behind that of RK (see p. 36). At nightfall of the day on which they escaped from the orc-band at the Isenmouthe my father wrote in the margin of text B '18 ends'; this was March 19 in RK (in The Tale of Years 'Frodo and Samwise escape and begin their journey along the road to the Barad-dur'). The reference to the passing of the Cross Roads by the Captains of the West and the burning of the fields of Imlad Morghul (so spelt) is however present in B at the same point as in RK (p. 212): see VIII.432.