Army of the Dead in Tolkien's book: did they reach Minas Tirith?

In Tolkien's The Return of the King, the Army of the Dead never makes it to Minas Tirith. I saw the films before I ever read the books, and as a kid I thought that scene was incredible. Then I read Tolkien's version, and it completely changed how I saw that whole battle. I think his version is the better one.

To get there, I'm going into the darker, ghostlier side of Middle-earth: the Witch-king and the two people nobody expected to bring him down, the haunted tombs the films left out, the cursed army of oathbreakers, and the Dead Marshes, a landscape Tolkien himself connected to something he lived through in the First World War.

The Witch-king of Angmar and the Morgul knife on Weathertop

The most famous witch in Middle-earth is the Witch-king of Angmar, although technically he isn't really a witch. He's the leader of the Nine and one of Sauron's most terrifying servants. The thing I find particularly horrible about him is what happens to Frodo on Weathertop in The Fellowship of the Ring.

As the black figures advance, Merry and Pippin throw themselves flat and Sam shrinks to Frodo's side. Frodo is overcome by a temptation to put on the Ring, not out of hope of escape but because he simply feels he must. When he does, the shapes become terribly clear: five tall figures with white faces and merciless eyes. The tallest wears a crown and holds a sword in one hand and a glowing knife in the other. Frodo cries out to Elbereth, strikes at his enemy's feet, and feels a pain like poisoned ice pierce his left shoulder as Strider leaps out of the dark.

When the Witch-king stabs Frodo with that Morgul knife, he isn't just trying to kill him. The tip breaks off inside Frodo and starts working its way towards his heart. In the chapter Many Meetings, Gandalf explains that "hobbits fade very reluctantly" and that strong warriors of the big people would quickly have been overcome by the splinter Frodo carried for 17 days. Had the riders succeeded, Frodo would have become a wraith under the dominion of the Dark Lord. So you're not just being murdered, you're being turned into one of the very things that's hunting you. Luckily, Elrond saves him, but it shows how dangerous the Witch-king is.

Éowyn and Merry bring down the Witch-king on the Pelennor Fields

In The Return of the King, this ancient creature meets two people he wasn't expecting any trouble from: a woman and a hobbit. At the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, he's standing over the fallen King Théoden when Éowyn steps forward to defend her uncle.

Years earlier, the elf Glorfindel had prophesied that the Witch-king would not fall by the hand of man. In the appendices, after the Witch-king flees into the shadows, Glorfindel says: "Far off yet is his doom, and not by the hand of man will he fall." The Witch-king has taken that to mean he's invincible, which is a fairly dangerous assumption to make about a prophecy. So he tells Éowyn, "No living man may hinder me." She reveals herself: "But no living man am I. You look upon a woman."

Everyone remembers Éowyn. What often gets overlooked, in my opinion anyway, is Merry. While the Witch-king is intent on Éowyn, he heeds Merry "no more than a worm in the mud." Éowyn kills the winged beast, then the Witch-king shatters her shield and breaks her arm. As he raises his mace, Merry stabs him from behind with an ancient blade forged centuries before for the wars against Angmar. It breaks the spell holding the Witch-king together, and Éowyn drives her sword between crown and mantle for the final blow. The mantle falls empty.

I genuinely think this is one of the best moments in The Lord of the Rings, and not just because Éowyn gets that brilliant line. Neither of them was supposed to be there. Éowyn had been told to stay behind, and Merry had been told he was too small to be any use in battle. I like that it takes both of them. Éowyn lands the final blow, but without Merry and that rather conveniently ancient sword, it might have gone very differently. That's much more interesting than the biggest, strongest warrior beating the villain. The Witch-king spent centuries terrorizing kingdoms and is brought down by two people nobody thought should be fighting at all.

Tolkien, Macbeth and the Ents marching to war

This prophecy business might sound familiar if you've read Shakespeare. In Macbeth, the witches tell Macbeth that none of woman born will harm him, so he thinks he's safe until he meets Macduff, who was delivered by Caesarean section. Shakespeare uses a technicality to get around the prophecy. The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey pointed out how similar that is to Éowyn and the Witch-king, and the connections he makes are fascinating.

Tolkien never said he based this scene specifically on Macbeth, but we do know there was something in Macbeth he didn't like at all. Birnam Wood turns out to be soldiers carrying branches, and Tolkien thought that was a big disappointment. In his letters, he writes that he didn't consciously invent the Ents at all, and that the Treebeard chapter came out almost like reading someone else's work.

Looking back analytically, he says the Ents are composed of philology, literature and life, and that their part in the story is due, he thinks, to his "bitter disappointment and disgust from school days" with Shakespeare's use of the coming of Birnam Wood. He longed to devise a setting in which the trees might really march to war. That's partly where the Ents came from, which I love. Tolkien read Macbeth, thought the walking forest was rubbish, and decided to do it properly himself.

Sauron first appears in The Hobbit as the Necromancer of Dol Guldur

If you've read The Hobbit, you might remember a mysterious figure living in Dol Guldur, deep in Mirkwood, known only as the Necromancer. That is, of course, Sauron. In chapter one, An Unexpected Party, Gandalf explains the map and tells Thorin that he found Thorin's father, Thráin, a prisoner in the dungeons of the Necromancer.

Near the end, in chapter 19, Bilbo overhears Gandalf telling Elrond that a great council of the white wizards had at last driven the Necromancer from his dark hold in the south of Mirkwood. Appendix B of The Return of the King fills in more: Gandalf enters Dol Guldur, discovers its master is indeed Sauron, who is gathering the rings and seeking news of the One, finds Thráin and receives the key of Erebor. Thráin dies there.

So Gandalf had found out who Sauron was years before Bilbo's adventure, and during The Hobbit the White Council drives him out. Sauron was already planning to go back to Mordor, though, so it wasn't exactly a permanent solution. I love that Tolkien introduced the Dark Lord to readers of The Hobbit as a mysterious necromancer in a haunted fortress. It's a very different introduction from the enormous armored figure we know from the films.

The Barrow-downs, the ghost story the films left out

When I finally read The Fellowship of the Ring, there were whole sections Peter Jackson hadn't included. One was the Barrow-downs, and considering how creepy that chapter is, I'm still a little surprised it didn't make the films. Before the hobbits even reach Bree, they're lost in fog in an ancient burial ground. Centuries earlier, evil spirits had been sent into these mounds from Angmar, the realm of the Witch-king.

In chapter eight, Frodo does what Frodo does and wanders off on his own. He loses the others, hears cries for help in the mist, climbs a hill, and is taken. He wakes trapped in a barrow, probably already under the spells of the Barrow-wights. In a pale greenish light he sees Sam, Pippin and Merry on their backs, deathly pale and clad in white, with gold circlets, chains and rings, and one naked sword laid across their three necks. Then a hand starts creeping towards them.

It's a proper old-fashioned ghost story. Frodo cuts the hand off and calls for Tom Bombadil, who turns up and saves everyone, which is probably the most Tom Bombadil solution imaginable. And this is where it links up: the sword Merry used on the Witch-king came from this very tomb. A weapon buried in a haunted grave for hundreds of years ends up helping destroy the creature who sent those spirits there. I love how Tolkien connects these things.

The Army of the Dead never reached Minas Tirith in the book

The Barrow-wights aren't the only ghosts in Middle-earth. The Dead Men of Dunharrow swore an oath to Isildur to fight against Sauron, and when the time came, they refused. Isildur cursed them to find no rest until they kept their promise. Thousands of years later, Aragorn, as Isildur's heir, calls on them to honor that oath.

In The Return of the King, Aragorn blows a silver horn at the stone, and a great unseen host gathers about the hill. He cries, "Oath breakers! Why have ye come?" and a voice answers that they come to fulfill their oath and have peace. Aragorn tells them that when the land is clean of Sauron's servants, he will hold the oath fulfilled. The shadow host follows the Grey Company south, and the people of the fords flee at the rumor of the coming of the King of the Dead.

Watching Peter Jackson's The Return of the King (2003) as a kid, I thought the Army of the Dead turning up at Minas Tirith was brilliant, and to be fair, I still do. I think Jackson made the right call for the film. Aragorn arrives on the ships, everyone thinks it's the enemy, and then a huge ghost army pours out and destroys everything. It's brilliant cinema. But having read Tolkien's version, I do somewhat prefer what he does, because the dead never get to Minas Tirith. They help Aragorn defeat the Corsairs down at Pelargir, and once they've kept their oath, he lets them go.

At the start of chapter nine, Legolas and Gimli tell Merry and Pippin what happened. Gimli says he was put to shame on that road and held to it only by the will of Aragorn. "And by the love of him also," Legolas adds. Legolas describes the shadow host seeming to grow stronger in the gloom, and the book goes on to make clear the curse isn't broken by slaughtering another army. It's broken because they finally keep their word. When the ships reach Minas Tirith, they carry living soldiers from southern Gondor. I think that's much better, because the battle isn't won by an unstoppable ghost army. It's won by ordinary people who turned up to fight. I love the film version, but Tolkien's version makes the victory far more earned, and that's something I've come to appreciate more as I've got older.

The Dead Marshes and Tolkien's experience at the Somme

For me, the most disturbing place of all is the Dead Marshes. On the way to Mordor, Frodo, Sam and Gollum cross an enormous, miserable swamp where, long ago, a great battle was fought between Sauron's armies and the Last Alliance of Elves and Men. Over the centuries, the marshes crept across the battlefield and swallowed the graves. Strange little lights float above the water, and Gollum warns them not to follow them or even look at them.

In The Passage of the Marshes in The Two Towers, Sam stumbles, his face close to the water, and sees dead faces beneath it. Gollum cackles, "You should not look in when the candles are lit." Frodo has seen them too: men, elves and orcs, proud and fair, all rotting, all dead. Gollum admits he tried to reach them once, but you can't touch them. What's great is that nobody seems to know what they are. There's no monster, just a horrible reminder of everybody who died there.

In 1916, during the First World War, Tolkien served as a signals officer with the Lancashire Fusiliers and took part in the Battle of the Somme. The book Tolkien and the Great War opens with a chronology of his time in France, from arriving to reaching the front line, along with some lovely photographs, and I'd highly recommend it. The landscape there had been torn apart by artillery, trees destroyed, ground churned into mud, shell holes filling with water. Looking at photographs of those battlefields, it's difficult not to think of the faces beneath the marshes. Tolkien became seriously ill with trench fever and was sent home. Robert Gilson, one of his closest friends, was killed on the first day of the Somme, 1 July 1916, and Geoffrey Smith, another close school friend, died of his wounds that December. They'd been part of a group who loved literature and poetry and hoped they might one day create something meaningful.

I want to be careful here. Tolkien was clear that The Lord of the Rings isn't an allegory for the First World War. But in 1960, in Letter 226 to Professor L. W. Forster, he wrote that perhaps in landscape the Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to northern France after the Battle of the Somme, while saying they owe more to William Morris. So we shouldn't pretend the Dead Marshes are literally the Somme. He said they owed something to it, and I think we should take him at his word.

What really gets me isn't the ghosts or the lights. It's the faces. These people have been dead for thousands of years, the battlefield has disappeared under the marshes, but their faces are still there. Knowing Tolkien served at the Somme and lost two of his closest friends, I find that much more unsettling than any giant spider or monster, because beneath all the mythology there's a man who'd seen what war could leave behind. It's the thought of all those people, and everything that was lost with them, that makes that chapter so difficult to forget.