[Lalwendë]

I'm sure some people will draw connections between the Dead Marshes and the despoiled landscapes of the trenches of France and Belgium in WWI. But what this chapter always brings to mind is the wide and treacherous landscapes of our own marshlands in the UK. I'm thinking of tidal land close to estuaries, bogland, and the old marshes which have now largely been drained for farmland.

The hobbits soon found that what had looked like one vast fen was really an endless network of pools, and soft mires, and winding half-strangled water-courses. Among these a cunning eye and foot could thread a wandering path. Gollum certainly had that cunning, and needed all of it. His head on its long neck was ever turning this way and that, while he sniffed and muttered all the time to himself. Sometimes he would hold up his hand and halt them, while he went forward a little, crouching, testing the ground with fingers or toes, or merely listening with one ear pressed to the earth.

Those old marshes may have been drained but the land is still criss crossed with a network of deep and forbidding ditches, pools and winding paths. I remember my first reading would make me think of childhood adventures where you would find yourself being sucked into the very earth when playing around these watercourses. And they were full of writhing eels, much as the Dead Marshes seem to be:

There are snakeses, wormses, things in the pools.

Marsh lands also produce sulphorous natural gas (that smell will have been like rotten eggs), which is formed due to the rotting process of vegetation in marsh land which does not drain easily. This is one of the common 'explanations' for such phenomena as Will O The Wisp, and Sam himself encounters the naturally occuring substance:

He fell and came heavily on his hands, which sank deep into sticky ooze, so that his face was brought close to the surface of the dark mere. There was a faint hiss, a noisome smell went up, the lights flickered and danced and swirled.

But though the marshlands my have been drained, the old stories and folklore remain, and Tolkien makes use of tales of both Will O The Wisp and Jinny Greenteeth:

He first saw one with the corner of his left eye, a wisp of pale sheen that faded away; but others appeared soon after: some like dimly shining smoke, some like misty flames flickering slowly above unseen candles; here and there they twisted like ghostly sheets unfurled by hidden hands.

Cold clammy winter still held sway in this forsaken country. The only green was the scum of livid weed on the dark greasy surfaces of the sullen waters. Dead grasses and rotting reeds loomed up in the mists like ragged shadows of long-forgotten summers.

In HoME it states that Tolkien was actually trying to make use of stories of Corpse Candles; in the chapter, they are referred to by Gollum as 'candles of corpses'. From HoME:

Corpse Candle is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as "a lambent flame seen in a churchyard or over a grave, and supertitiously believed to appear as an omen of death, or to indicate the route of a coming funeral".

I wonder whether this was just an intriguing image or story which Tolkien wanted to include to add atmosphere to this part of the journey. Or did he want to use this to signify something else? After all, all our rational thought ought to tell us that this little group simply are not going to make it, that the odds are against them at this point, or if they do, they are not going to come back and are certainly on some kind of 'funeral march'.

Finally, two lines I particularly like. The following line is wonderfully descriptive and gothic:

Looking up they saw the clouds breaking and shredding; and then high in the south the moon glimmered out, riding in the flying wrack.

And this line makes me feel immense sadness for Gollum. It instantly makes you realise just how old he is, and that at one time, Gollum was just like an ordinary Hobbit, listening to fireside tales.

There was a great battle long ago, yes, so they told him when Smeagol was young, when I was young before the Precious came