Crossing Caradhras: a Second Note on Tolkien and Scott
Yesterday on this very blog I was arguing Tolkien that remembered Quentin Durward’s ‘Black Riders’ from his childhood reading of Walter Scott, and repurposed them, adapting them into his Scott-esque Fantasy adventure yarn Lord of the Rings. Today: I’m arguing something similar, about a different episode.
So, in Anne of Geierstein, or The Maiden of the Mist (1829) Scott wrote a sort-of sequel to Quentin Durward (he was moved to ‘try in a continuation’ of the earlier novel, he said). Anne of Geierstein starts with a small party, two Englishmen and an Italian boy, together with their mule, trying to cross the Alps into Switzerland. One snowy peak they must pass, Mount Pilatus, is occupied by a malevolent spirit, supposedly the angry unquiet ghost of Pontius Pilate himself. The younger Englishman, Arthur, defies the mountain: ‘“How the accursed heathen scowls upon us!” [he] said … while the cloud darkened and seemed to settle on the brow of Mount Pilatus. “Vade retro! Be thou defied, sinner!”’ At his words a wind starts up. There are, as we might say, fell voices on the air.
A rising wind, rather heard than felt, seemed to groan forth, in the tone of a dying lion, the acceptance of the suffering spirit to the rash challenge of the young Englishman. The mountain was seen to send down its rugged sides thick wreaths of heaving mist, which, rolling through the rugged chasms that seamed the grisly hill, resembled torrents of rushing lava pouring down from a volcano. The ridgy precipices, which formed the sides of these huge ravines, showed their splintery and rugged edges over the vapour, as if dividing from each other the descending streams of mist which rolled around them. [Anne of Geierstein, ch 1]
The party’s attempt to cross the mountains becomes harder and harder, through blizzard and rockslide, as if they are specifically opposed by this evil spirit of the mountain.
But suddenly, as Antonio with the loaded mule had reached a projecting eminence, around the peak of which the path made a sharp turn, he stopped short, with his usual exclamation, addressed to his patron saint. It appeared to Arthur that the mule shared the terrors of the guide; for it started back, put forwards its fore feet separate from each other, and seemed, by the attitude which it assumed, to intimate a determination to resist every proposal to advance, at the same time expressing horror and fear at the prospect which lay before it.
Arthur pressed forward, not only from curiosity, but that he might if possible bear the brunt of any danger before his father came up to share it. In less time than we have taken to tell the story, the young man stood beside Antonio and the mule, upon a platform of rock on which the road seemed absolutely to terminate, and from the farther side of which a precipice sank sheer down, to what depth the mist did not permit him to discern, but certainly uninterrupted for more than three hundred feet.
Their way blocked, they hear ‘a loud howl of the wind, more wild than they had yet heard’; they are almost blown clear off the mountain to their deaths (‘it appeared to the travellers to shake the very rock on which they stood, and would have swept them from its surface like so many dry leaves, had it not been for the momentary precautions which they had taken for their safety’). Rocks rain down, ‘hurled downwards with the path’ — Scott says ‘the immediate cause of this phenomenon might probably have been an earthquake, not unfrequent in that country’, but the implication of the passage is that the mountain itself is trying to prevent the travellers crossing: ‘the evil spirit was peculiarly exasperated at the audacity of such strangers as ascended the mountain’, the narrator notes.
This landscape also contains a certain ‘dismal lake’, within the murky waters of which exists ‘a form’, an evil creature that on occasion emerges: in Scott’s novel this is the revenant of Pilate, ‘his body being drowned, his vexed spirit continued to haunt the place where he committed suicide … a form was often, he said, seen to emerge from the gloomy waters, and go through the action of one washing his hands’.
Does any of this remind any Tolkien readers of any particular passage in The Fellowship of the Ring, by any chance? Perhaps the chapter ‘The Ring Goes South’, in which Gandalf and Aragorn attempt to lead their party (and their mule, Bill) over the pass of Caradhras, known as ‘the Cruel’, and haunted by a malign spirit?
By midnight they had climbed to the knees of the great mountain. The narrow path now wound under a sheer wall of cliffs to the left, above which the grim flanks of Caradhras towered up invisible in the gloom; on the right was a gulf of darkness where the land fell suddenly into a deep ravine. Laboriously they climbed a sharp slope and halted for a moment at the top … The Company halted suddenly, as if they had come to an agreement without any words being spoken. They heard eerie noises in the darkness round them. It may have been only a trick of the wind in the cracks and gullies of the rocky wall, but the sounds were those of shrill cries, and wild howls of laughter. Stones began to fall from the mountain-side, whistling over their heads, or crashing on the path beside them. Every now and again they heard a dull rumble, as a great boulder rolled down from hidden heights above. [Lord of the Rings Bk 2, ch 3]
The party debate as to whether Saruman is in some magical manner afflicting them from afar (this is the version the movie goes with) or whether it is some other malign force: for, in Aragorn’s words, ‘there are many evil and unfriendly things in this world that have little love for those that go on two legs, and yet are not in league with Sauron, but have purposes of their own.’ Gimli agrees: ‘Caradhras was called the Cruel, and had an ill name, long years ago, when rumour of Sauron had not been heard in these lands.’
This is to say nothing of the later pool of ‘dark, unclean water’ by which the party rests and out of which emerges a monster: ‘a long sinuous tentacle .. pale green and luminous and wet’ that has ‘a fingered end’ that takes hold of Frodo’s foot. What are the odds, do we think, that Tolkien read this Scott novel in his youth and remembered, or half-remembered, this section when drafting his own adventure tale?
I might add: in saying this I am not accusing Tolkien of plagiary (there are, clearly, substantive differences between the two episodes). Rather, and as with the other famous elements from literature Tolkien reworks into his novel — such as the ‘walking trees’ inspired by his childhood disappointment with the twist at the end of Macbeth — I’d say what he is doing is adapting the elements that go to make up an adventure-romance to his particular Fantasy idiom. This is one of those.
