This chapter serves as something of a climax for book III. It's interesting to compare this with the climaxes of books I and II, each of which occurs in the final chapter of its respective book. This climax is greater, though, than either Frodo's escape from the Nazgul at the fords or the breaking of the Fellowship, and this may account for the extra space given to the denouement.
As Estelyn and Fordim have both noted, the battle itself is rather short - about 9 pages in my edition, with 16 total in the chapter. This is a beautiful illustration of the principle that, for maximal impact, it is the build-up to an important event that must be emphasized, not the event itself. We have been slowly building up to this climax more or less since we first encountered the Rohirrim in III-2, and more rapidly building up to it since the previous chapter. This is the same thing that was done in II-5, where the actual appearance of the Balrog takes up very little space, but the whole chapter builds toward it. Perhaps the prime example of this technique is still to come - in "The Siege of Gondor".
This is one of two major battle scenes in the novel (the other being the Battle of the Pelennor Fields), and, to my taste, this is the better written. I think that action scenes, and particularly battle scenes, in both books and movies, are harder to do than is generally thought. How can an author convey an event of such scope? And how can it be made interesting? For combat alone is not interesting; in fact, it can easily become very dull and tedious. I think that Tolkien found perfect answers to those questions in this chapter. The way to convey a battle is to give it a
plot. It is not really a single piece of action. It is rather a series of dramatic events linked together. The narrative of the battle must have an overall shape, just as any narrative must, with its high points and low points, its moments of suspense and moments of surprise, and, most of all, the same forward momentum that a large-scale plot has. That is what Tolkien does here. We have first the arrival at Helm's Deep and the preparation; then the rearguard is driven in from the Dike; then the host of the enemy approaches and sends arrows over the walls; then Aragorn, Eomer, and Gimli make their sortie; twice then the enemy creeps into the culvert, the second time using Saruman's blasting powder; etc. Where someone with less talent would simply write
a battle scene, Tolkien provides a series of events linked into a battle
story.
About the game between Legolas and Gimli. Fordim makes two points, the second of which I'll consider first:
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I've never fought in a medieval campaign, but I have fought with a sword (you know, tournaments, with safety equipment and everything) and there is just no way that one fighter can be so overwhelmingly good that he can wipe out that many opponents. And certainly not two: either the orcs are incompetent or Gimli and Legolas are getting a bit of 'help' from the author.
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I think there may be a kind of tension in LotR between two impulses, the realistic and the mythological. Middle-earth is so believable, so internally consistent and thoroughly described, that it feels "realistic". In a way then it seems quite fair to complain when characters perform feats that are blatantly unrealistic - like killing forty-two Orcs. But Middle-earth is mythological as well. As Neithan points out, Hurin is said (in the '77 Silmarillion) to have killed seventy trolls at the Nirnaeth. Now, it is not clear whether or not this actually derives from Tolkien (if it does, it must come from a
Narn text that CRT does not give in full). But the motif, if not the exact number and description, certainly come from Tolkien - in GA Hurin kills a hundred Orcs. This is quite in the heroic tradition - the
Iliad, for example, ascribes deeds of impossible valour to its heroes.
As for Fordim's first complaint:
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it seems a bit blood thirsty of them to be competing at all
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I would say yes, it does come across as grim and bloodthirsty (though also slightly humorous). I don't see that as a problem. War is grim and bloody, and those that fight in it must deal with that in some way. In real life, fighter pilots, for example, do count their kills. I wouldn't be at all surprised if there were some World War I antecedents for such grim joviality.