![]() ![]() I’ve talked about this before of course, and I’m sure I will bring it up again. He and Merry have essentially been little more than extra mouths to feed. “What good have I been? Just a nuisance: a passenger, a piece of luggage.” He’s going to find himself a hell of a lot more useful starting from this point, but it is important to wonder what the hell the point of bringing him along up to now has been. Right now, Pippin hates himself and with good reason, his internal thinking focusing on his (absolute) uselessness to the quest so far: “ I wish Gandalf had never persuaded Elrond to let us come,’ he thought. This section also allows us a pretty heart-rending description of Boromir’s last stand: “ His last memory was of Boromir leaning against a tree, plucking out an arrow then darkness fell suddenly.“ ![]() Pippin’s heroism will be a little less macho, but no less important. Merry is going to start being slightly more capable in a traditional sense from this point on, in a more physical manner I mean, something that will continue all the way up to his crucial moment on the Pelennor Fields. That said, the recollection of the brilliantly described “ good ol’dMerry” fighting, and hacking off a few limbs, comes as a surprise. The haze of unconsciousness provides us with a murky retelling of the Amon Hen craziness and fighting: “… it seemed that he could hear his own small voice echoing in black tunnels, calling Frodo, Frodo! But instead of Frodo hundreds of hideous orc-faces grinned at him out of the shadows, hundreds of hideous arms grasped at him from every side.” In this, Pippin provides a very unlikely moment of humour in an otherwise dire situation, as he remembers suddenly stumbling on a large group of bad guys, Han Solo in the Death Star style, a moment of stunned silence, then capture. We open with a crash cut to Pippin, and we know that he and Merry must be in a spot of bother. The Two Towers was already getting better with “ The Riders Of Rohan“, but here things really get kicked up a notch. There are many reasons for this, but the essence is that it gives us a wonderful first hand view of the culture of the orc race, as well as having a nicely contained mini-narrative, that offers lots of memorable moments of excitement and adventure. ![]()
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