Here Be Dragons

by Stefan Ekman

  Not only time but also distance determines the effect of Sauron’s evil force. As Sam and Frodo journey through Mordor toward the Dark Tower, they find the land to be completely dead. It is a dark, arid, lifeless place of sharp rocks, dry riverbeds, and broken plains, where what little water they find is as bitter as the air. In their chapter on “The Three Faces of Mordor,” Dickerson and Evans point out how Sauron’s evil kills even the memory of living nature in Frodo.74 Other parts of Mordor, farther away from the Dark Tower and the volcano, are comparatively fertile, however. The narrator tells the reader about “the great slave-worked fields away south in this wide realm […] by the dark sad waters of Lake Núrnen,” an area that Aragorn later bestows upon Sauron’s freed slaves and that apparently cannot be too dreadful (RK, VI, ii, 902; v, 947).75

  The force of Sauron’s evil does not necessarily kill vegetation; it may only stunt or corrupt it. In some cases, the plants themselves are portrayed as turning to evil, like the brambles of Mordor, with their long, piercing thorns and hooked, sharp barbs (RK, VI, ii, 896; 900). While annoying and painful, they are not dangerous, as contrasted with the flowers of the meadows in Morgul Vale. These pale, luminous flowers are “beautiful and yet horrible of shape,” with a sickening, corpselike odor (TT, IV, viii, 689). The juxtaposition of beautiful and horrible signals the perverting effect of evil, just as the juxtaposing of beautiful and terrible does (twice) when Galadriel warns Frodo of the consequences were she to take the Ring (FR, II, vii, 356). The wrongness of something both beautiful and horrible is made plain by the description of the flowers’ shapes as “like the demented forms in an uneasy dream” (TT, IV, viii, 689).

  The nightmarish quality of the evil landscape is emphasized even more strongly with the Dagorlad desolation. Frodo and Sam find themselves at the edge of the dead land “like men on the edge of a sleep where nightmare lurks,” and some of Aragorn’s troops suffer from the same sensation on their arrival; they walk “like men in a hideous dream made true” (TT, IV, ii, 617; RK, V, x, 868). The dream similes illustrate the third way in which a landscape becomes that of evil: through a language that warps the reader’s impression of the landscape. Returning to the Dagorlad quotation, we find a number of attributes that intensify the image of the dead landscape, for instance “gasping pools,” “sickly white,” “reluctant light.” Together with another pair of striking similes (“as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails” and “like an obscene graveyard”), they associate the landscape with sickness and death so forcefully that the reader easily accepts that the land is “diseased beyond all healing.”

  Imagery is used to tie the evil landscape to certain concepts. Nightmares and darkness, disease and death are all typical, but more active characteristics occur as well, which personify the landscape and turn the realm into an extension of its ruler: it is a tormented land of shadows and blind darkness where mountains and cliff faces loom and frown. When Sauron broods, so does the land (iii, 914). In the three chapters in which the hobbits travel through the Dark Land (RK, VI, i–iii), there are numerous examples of anything from dead metaphors to vivid similes: when Sam first gazes out over Mordor, he sees a hard, cruel, and bitter land (i, 879), and toward the end of their trek, the landscape is “rough and hostile,” even evil (iii, 917; 914). The Morgai mountain ridge is “grim,” with “crags like fangs,” air and water are “sad,” and roads and pinnacles are “cruel” (i, 879; ii, 900, 902; iii, 914, 921). Mount Doom vomits lava and belches fumes, the entrance in its side gazing toward the Dark Tower, and although it sleeps, it does so “uneasily” (i, 879; ii, 899; iii, 921–22; 918). Despite the personifying imagery, the land remains lifeless; it is a barren landscape, constantly stressing that the Dark Lord’s power is never one of life. To enter the wasteland of Dagorlad is to leave “the living lands” (RK, V, x, 868), and the wind that blows into Mordor from the West comes “out of the living world” (RK, VI, ii, 898). Although not a land of the dead, it is a land that has died.

  The Spoiled Plains and Ridjeck Thome76

  Lord Foul is a spiritual being and the enemy of the world’s Creator. His attempts to destroy the world in which he is imprisoned stem from his desire to escape it and confront his enemy. In The Power That Preserves, the third book in Donaldson’s first trilogy about Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, the final confrontation between Covenant and the Dark Lord takes place in Foul’s Creche. Before Covenant makes his way there, Foul’s realm is described to him and his Giant friend, Foamfollower: “There the Landrider [River] becomes the Ruinwash, and flows polluted toward the Sea. It is a murky and repelling water, unfit for use by any but its own unfit denizens” (390). The land is then described in more detail:

  [T]he Spoiled Plains form a wide deadland around the promontory of Ridjeck Thome, where Foul’s Creche juts into the Sea. Within that deadland lies Kurash Qwellinir, the Shattered Hills. Some say that these Hills were formed by the breaking of a mountain—others, that they were shaped from the slag and refuse of [Foul’s] war caverns, furnaces, breeding dens. However they were made, they are a maze to bewilder the approach of any foe. And within them lies Gorak Krembal—Hotash Slay. From Sea-cliff to Sea-cliff about the promontory, it defends [Foul’s] seat with lava, so that none may pass that way to gain the one gateless maw of the Creche. (390)

  Despite the dispassionate voice, which belongs to Covenant’s friend Bannor, and a description that is basically a list of features, we can see how Foul’s realm parallels that of Sauron: pollution, deadlands, hills of slag and refuse as a line of defense, even volcanic activity on the doorstep to the stronghold. The apparent similarity is so great that it is tempting to translate directly between the two evil realms: Kurash Qwellinir = Dagorlad, Gorak Krembal = Orodruin, Ridjeck Thome = Gorgoroth, and so on. Apart from highlighting the authors’ respective preferences in creating names, however, such one-to-one translations would only stress superficial features while drawing attention away from the radical differences.

  W. A. Senior argues that the “similarities between Frodo and Covenant can be traced easily to the paradigm of the fantasy hero […] their parallels are functions of form and plot, not of character and motive.” He proceeds to outline these parallels, including the dangerous quest to confront evil each protagonist embarks upon; both Mordor and Foul’s Creche are even situated in the southeast.77 Although Senior carries out a detailed and highly fascinating examination of parallels and differences between Donaldson and Tolkien, including the role of the ring at the center of each work, he says very little about the evil lands as such.78 The discussion that follows explores the relationship between character and motives of the respective Dark Lords and how they affect the characteristics of their lands.

  When the hobbits arrive in Mordor, the dead land horrifies them. The Middle-earth they have traveled through has not necessarily offered constant vistas of natural beauty, but the utter lifelessness they encounter here is beyond anything they could have imagined. Covenant and Foam-follower, on the other hand, have journeyed through a Land in which Foul has delayed spring by several months. They, and the reader, are also aware that Foul has already once contrived to kill every living thing in the Land. The dead landscape of the Spoiled Plains comes not as a shock but as an expectation fulfilled. This difference in how the evil land is perceived both originates in and is indicative of the distinctive character and motive of the Dark Lord who rules it. Understanding how Foul differs from Sauron helps us understand how his realm differs from Mordor, despite the obvious similarities.

  Senior subjects the two Dark Lords to a thorough comparison, observing a number of central distinctions: Sauron as a representation of evil is abstract, universal, and generic, evil as a symbolic force that wants to bind all in darkness. Lord Foul, for his part, is concrete, particular, and specific, wishing to twist and corrupt. He is the ills of leprosy inflicted on the Land.79 Whereas Sauron may wish to bind all in darkness, he only demands tribute and dominion (RK, V, x, 872). Lord Foul’s goals a
nd nature, on the other hand, are spelled out plainly from the very beginning: Foul explains how he was behind the Ritual of Desecration that reduced all life in the Land to dust a millennium ago, lists his various sobriquets (which capture aspects of his character), and warns Covenant that he will eradicate hope from the Earth. His final words are: “Think on that, and be dismayed!”80

  Dismay and hopelessness: invoking despair is one of Foul’s main motives, as may also be inferred from the Giants’ name for him, Soulcrusher. Much of Foul’s realm appears incomprehensible unless this aspect of him is taken into account. The journey of Covenant and Foam-follower through the Spoiled Plains is a series of exercises in despair, often through the dashing of hope or the marring of relief. (Christine Barkley refers to this as Foul’s “psychological torture” and describes its use against Covenant.81) Torrential rain and absence of food sources leave them hungry, wet, and cold. Any escape from a threat lands them in a comparatively more difficult situation. Such oscillations between relief and dismay are particularly intense in the eerie “orchard,” where every perceived advantage quickly proves to have an even greater disadvantage (400–404). The land thus causes the protagonists to swing between hope and despair, between relief and despondency, and each disappointment erodes their hope further.

  The erosion of hope is also the purpose of the last points of defense. The maze of the Shattered Hills (which, contrary to Bannor’s description, are not slag and refuse but forms carved from black, igneous rock) is constructed to take people in the opposite of their desired direction. Only by moving away from the fiery glow of the lava at Hotash Slay at each junction do the Giant and his friend reach the river of molten rock (424). Next, the lava river understandably ruins any hope Covenant has of crossing, since he has forgotten about the Giant’s ability to endure fire (425). Finally, even once Foamfollower has managed to get Covenant across, during the final stretch along the promontory to the entrance into Foul’s Creche, and down to the Dark Lord’s thronehall, the protagonists oscillate between hope and despair; and the closer they get to their ultimate goal, the more plain it is that these oscillations spring from Foul himself—that his realm’s purpose is his own: the eradication of hope.

  Foul’s second purpose, evident from his nickname “Corruption” as well as from the delight he takes in explaining his involvement in the Ritual of Desecration, is the destruction of life. Senior points out that “[o]ne obvious lesson of the Chronicles addresses the spoliation of our land in stark contrast to the maintenance of the Land by its peoples. There people worship the environment which, in our world, is often no more than a natural resource to be exploited.”82 To this should be added the point that the contrast is not simply between Covenant’s primary (and our actual) world and the Land but also between the people of the Land and their archenemy. Yet Lord Foul does not display Tolkien’s “anti-industrial animus”; Donaldson’s Dark Lord may be a polluter, but his evil power aims for wholesale corruption through any means available. According to Senior, Foul’s desire is “to twist and deprave,” but also to call attention to how twisted and depraved he has caused things to become;83 and although Senior does not mention it, the turning of the clean Landrider River into the polluted, murky, repellent Ruinwash certainly exemplifies this desire.

  The ruined landscapes of Tolkien and Donaldson thus appear similar, but they result from different attitudes to the natural environment. Sauron’s destruction is secondary to his other goals of defense and (military) production; the desolation of Dagorlad is the result of mines and forges—of industry—operated without regard for the environment, just as the darkness is necessary for his troops of nocturnal orcs and trolls to fight during the day. Orcs may enjoy the occasional, arbitrary felling of trees, but it is not their master’s main purpose. Conversely, Foul cares very much about nature: twisting and destroying it is a primary objective for him. The “scattering of tough trees and brush had eked out a bare existence until Lord Foul’s preternatural winter had blasted them,” so that now they stand gray, brittle, and dead (395). The “bare existence” no doubt left the trees just as twisted and bitter as the scrubby trees of the glens of the Morgai in Mordor and all the more pleasing for Foul.

  As environmental destruction per se is Foul’s motive, there is no need to elaborate on how the land is destroyed. The Landrider is suddenly polluted, likewise the soil. Bannor suggests that there are reasons behind the pollution (“the slag and refuse of [Foul’s] war caverns, furnaces, breeding dens”), but no evidence corroborates this claim. As in Sauron’s case, Foul’s evil is itself a poisonous force or energy—if anything, it is more tangible than Sauron’s. On Ridjeck Thome, the force of evil is so powerful that Covenant “felt muffled ill beating up through the rock” (432). It is there, near the very heart of Lord Foul’s realm, that the land suffers the worst damage, not (as in Mordor) on the doorstep, because the destruction springs first and foremost from Foul’s desire to destroy life. The dead landscape is easily recognizable from Tolkien, and from Browning before that—“a cracked, bare lowland of dead soil and rock, a place which had lain wrecked and riven for so long that it had forgotten even the possibility of life” (431). But here, nothing hints that poisonous waste or volcanic activity lies behind this destruction. Whether the force of Foul’s ill is as clearly delimited as Sauron’s evil, which stays within the land he controls, or whether, in Foul’s case, evil diminishes with distance from its source (like, for instance, electromagnetic radiation) is unclear. There is a fringe of “un-Spoiled flatlands” through which Covenant and Foamfollower pass (395), but whether the Spoiling is gradual is not mentioned. In any case, the landscape of Ridjeck Thome is the type of landscape that Lord Foul desires. Around his stronghold, he has created this landscape—not through his minions, but through the force of his evil alone.

  The connection between the Dark Lord and his realm is thus central to understanding Lord Foul’s land. By understanding the differences in character and motive between Foul and Sauron, we can see how there can be radical differences between two superficially similar landscapes that evil has turned into places of disease and death. The next example, however, from Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, entails a turn to an evil landscape that combines life and death, fecundity and disease.

  The Blight84

  The realms of evil discussed thus far are characterized by being dead or dying. Like the grim plain traversed by Childe Roland, they represent a sterile land where the exceedingly sparse vegetation is diseased, corrupted, moribund. The lands affected by the evil of the Dark Lord Shai’tan, or the Dark One, in Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World also produce diseased and corrupted vegetation. Rather than dying, however, these plants are deadly, subjected to Shai’tan’s carcinogenic evil. Even so, Shai’tan—the protagonists erroneously refer to him as Ba’alzamon during the first three novels in the series, before realizing their error—echoes both Sauron and Lord Foul: he is the opponent of the Creator, bound at the beginning of time; the embodiment of chaos; and the destroyer of reason.

  As in The Lord of the Rings and The Power That Preserves, the goal of the protagonists’ quest lies within the realm of the Dark Lord, and Rand al’Thor and his companions venture into the area under Shai’tan’s influence called the Blight. Unlike Sauron and Lord Foul, however, the Dark Lord in The Eye of the World is imprisoned and only has limited power over the physical world (see 726). The effect Shai’tan’s evil has on the landscape even far away from his prison is clearly noticeable, however:

  As the mountains drew closer, so did the true Blight. Where a leaf had been spotted black and mottled yellow before, now foliage fell wetly while [Rand] watched, breaking apart from the weight of its own corruption. The trees themselves were tortured, crippled things, twisted branches clawing at the sky as if begging mercy from some power that refused to hear. Ooze slid like pus from bark cracked and split. (734)

  This disease-ridden place is far from the sterility and death of Mordor and Foul’s Creche, as well
as from the dead landscape Childe Roland first encounters, but it recalls the second stanza quoted from Browning’s poem. The tortured trees also echo Dante’s Wood of Suicides, where tormented souls have been transformed into twisted trees and bushes.85 The Blight is a cancer in Rand’s world, a slowly growing zone of diseased vegetation. Unchecked growth, the mark of cancer, applies to more than the area of the Blight. The very plants grow impossibly. Along with the humidity and heat of the Blight, this fecundity suggests a tropical jungle, a place where vegetation hides dangers of all sizes. The traveler dares not touch anything without careful scrutiny, as deadly surprises may hide behind a branch or leaf. In the Blight, it is equally wise not to touch the leaves (as Rand is cautioned) for the very same reason.

  The further into the Blight the companions journey, the less attractive the idea of touching anything becomes. Like any cancer, the growth is not healthy. In the earlier quotation, the black spots and mottled yellow, along with the unnatural heat and humidity, suggest fungal attacks, decomposition that sets in even as the leaves are growing. The deeper Rand and his companions venture into the Blight, the more pronounced the decay becomes, until leafing and rotting occur simultaneously. The disease does not kill the vegetation, however. As in Milton’s Hell, this is a place where nature breeds perverse, monstrous things:

  [Rand] could not say what kind [of tree] it was, or had been, so gnarled and tormented was its shape. As he watched, the tree suddenly whipped back and forth again, then bent down, flailing at the ground. Something screamed, shrill and piercing. The tree sprang back straight; its limbs entwined around a dark mass that writhed and spat and screamed. (734–35)