'The hasty stroke goes often astray,' said Aragorn. 'And his counsels will be disturbed. See, my friends, when I had mastered the Stone I learned many things. A grave peril I saw coming unlooked-for upon Gondor from the South that will draw off great strength from the defence of Minas Tirith. And there are other movements in the North. But now he will hesitate, doubting whether the heir of Isildur hath that which Isildur took from him, and thinking that he must win or lose all before the gates of the City. If so, that is well, as well as an evil case may be.
'Another thing I learned. There are other Stones yet preserved in this ancient land. One is at Erech. Thither I will go. To the Stone of Erech, if we can find the Paths of the Dead.'
The Paths of the Dead! said Gimli. That is a fell name, and little to the liking of the men of Rohan, as I saw. Where do they lie, and why must we seek them?'
'I do not yet know where they lie,' said Aragorn. 'But in Dunharrow it seems that we may learn the answer. To Dunharrow at the swiftest, then, I will go.'
'And you would have us ride with you?' said Legolas.
'Of your free will I would,' said Aragorn. 'For not by chance, I deem, are we three now left together of the Company. We have some part to play together. Listen! Here is an old rhyme of my kindred, almost forgotten, never understood.
The days are numbered; the kings are sleeping.
It is darkling time, the shadows grow.
Out of the Mountain they come, their tryst keeping;
at the Stone of Erech horns they blow.
Three lords I see from the three kindreds:
halls forgotten in the hills they tread,
Elpord, Dwarflord, Man forwandred,
from the North they come by the Paths of the Dead!(15)
Why does this point to us, you may ask. I deem it fits the hour too well for chance. Yet if more is needed: the sons of Elrond bring this word from their father in Rivendell: "Bid Aragorn remember the Paths of the Dead."
'Come then!' Aragorn rose and drew his sword and it flashed in the twilight of the dim hall of the Burg. 'To the Stone of Erech! I seek the Paths of the Dead! Come with me who will!'
Legolas and Gimli answered nothing, but they rose also and followed Aragorn from the hall. There on the green waited silently the hooded Rangers. Legolas and Gimli mounted. Aragorn sprang on Hasufel. Then Halbarad lifted a great horn and the blast of it echoed in Helm's Deep; and they leapt away, tiding down the Combe like thunder, while all the men that were left on Dike or Burg stared in amaze.
The last page of the manuscript carries the words pencilled at the end of version B (p. 300): 'So now all roads were running together to East ≥ ..', the paragraph that opens 'The Muster of Rohan' in The Return of the King.
At this point my father typed a fair copy, which I will call 'M',(16) very closely based on the manuscript C as revised. This text, numbered 'XLV', bore the title 'Many Roads Lead Eastward'. Only a few passages need be noted. I have mentioned (p. 304) that after the departure of Théoden from the Hornburg 'Aragorn's words with Halbarad about Merry and the Shire-folk are absent' in C revised; but the forerunner of the passage in RK (p. 53) now appears:
Aragorn rode to the Dike and watched till the king's men were far down the Combe. Then he turned to Halbarad. 'There go three that I love,' he said, 'and not least the hobbit, Merry, most dearly. For all our love and dooms, Halbarad, and our deeds of arms, still they have a great worth, that greatheart little people; and it is for them that we do battle, as much as for any glory of Gondor. And yet fate divides. Well, so it is. 1 must eat a little, and then we too must haste away ...'(17)
Secondly, after Aragorn's words, 'If so that is well, as well as an evil case can be' (p. 304) he now continues:
'... These deadly strokes upon our flanks will be weakened.
And we have a little room in which to play.
'Another thing I learned. There is another Stone preserved in the land of Gondor that he has not looked:n. It is at Erech.
Thither I will go....'
And lastly, Aragorn now introduces the 'old rhyme' in these words: 'Listen! Here is an old rhyme-of-lore among my kindred, almost forgotten, never understood: it is but a shard of the rhymes of Malbeth, the last Seer of our folk in the north' (see note 15). The verse differs from the form in C revised (p. 305) in lines 2-4, which here read:
It is darkling time, the shadow grows.
Out of the Mountain he comes, his tryst keeping;
At the Stone of Erech his horn be blows.
From the point where 'Aragorn sprang on Hasufel' the typescript M continues thus:
... Then Halbarad lifted a great horn, and the blast of it echoed in Helm's Deep, and with that they leapt away, riding down the Combe like thunder, while all the men that were left on Dike or Burg stared in amaze.
So now all roads were running together to the East to meet the coming of war and the onset of the Shadow. And even as Pippin stood at the Gate of the City and saw the Prince of Dol Amroth ride in with his banners, the King of Rohan came down out of the hills.
Day was waning. In the last rays of the sun the Riders cast long pointed shadows that went on before them....
The paragraph 'So now all roads were running together to the East ...' had been written at the ends of texts B and C (pp. 300, 305), from which it was already clear that my father had in mind a chapter that should fall into two parts: first, the story of the return of Théoden and Aragorn to the Hornburg and Aragorn's looking into the Palantír of Orthanc, followed by the separate departures of Théoden and the Riders and of Aragorn and the Rangers; and second, the story of Théoden's coming to Dunharrow. The paragraph 'So now all roads were running together to the East' was devised as the link between them (and provided the title of the chapter in the typescript, which I have adopted here). In terms of RK, this 45th chapter of The Lord of the Rings consisted of 'The Passing of the Grey Company' (pp. 46 - 56) and 'The Muster of Rohan' (pp. 64 ff.); but all account of Aragorn and the Rangers after they had left the Hornburg was to be postponed.
By the time typescript M was made, much further work had been done on what it is convenient to call by the later title 'The Muster of Rohan', extending it from the point reached in October 1944, as detailed in Chapter II ('Book Five Begun and Abandoned'). I shall therefore postpone the second part of 'Many Roads Lead Eastward' to my next chapter; but the subsequent history of the first or 'Hornburg' part may be briefly noticed here. The typescript M, retitled 'Dunharrow', became the vehicle of much of the later development (doubtless at different times) as far as the departure of Aragorn and the Rangers from the Hornburg, with such changes as Parth Galen for Calembel (and a proposed name Calembrith), Elladan for Elboron, the introduction of the passage (RK p. 48) in which Elrohir and Halbarad deliver the messages from Elrond and Arwen ('the Lady of Rivendell'), and of Aragorn's account (RK p. 55) of the oathbreaking of the Men of the Mountains and the words of Isildur to their king. Nonetheless, the verse of Malbeth did not at this stage reach the alliterative form in RK:
'... Listen! This is the word that the sons of Elrond bring to me from their father in Rivendell, wisest in lore:
'"Bid Aragorn remember the Paths of the Dead. For thus spoke Malbeth the Seer:
When the land is dark where the kings sleep
And long the Shadow in the East is grown,
The oathbreakers their tryst shall keep,
At the Stone of Erech shall a horn be blown:
The forgotten people shall their oath fulfill.
Who shall summon them, whose be the horn?
For none may come there against their will.
The heir of him to whom the oath was sworn;
Out of the North shall he come, dark ways shall he tread;
He shall come to Erech by the Paths of the Dead." '
At the stage represented by the further development of this typescript with its manuscript additions my father added (as the pagination shows), in a roughly written continuation that is however close to the form in RK, the story
of the coming of the Grey Company (not yet so called) to Dunharrow, and the meeting that night, and again next day at dawn, of Aragorn and Éowyn (RK pp. 56 - 9).(18) It is clear from the pagination that at this stage the muster in Harrowdale was still to be included in this chapter ('Dunharrow'); and that the passage of the Paths of the Dead was not yet told in this part of the narrative.
NOTES.
1. A note in the margin of this text says 'Night of 3, day of 4th', i.e. they came to the Hornburg at dawn of the 4th of February. The chronology envisaged here was presumably that Théoden would leave the Hornburg early on the 5th. See note 9.
2. On the First Map 'Dunharrow' was the name of the mountain afterwards called Starkhorn (VII.319 and p. 240 in this book); the distance from that 'Dunharrow' to the spot added later to mark the position of the Stone of Erech (p. 268, footnote) is 18.5 mm or 92.5 miles. Precisely the same, though I think that this is by chance rather than design, is found on the anomalous map redrawn on p. 269 for the distance from Erech to a little mark in Harrowdale that probably represents Dunharrow. The Second Map (p. 434) gives (probably) 45 miles; and this is also the distance on my father's large-scale map of Rohan, Gondor and Mordor (and on my reproduction of it published in The Return of the King).
3. A wooden ruler that may have been the one used by my father at this time gives 50 mm. = 62.5 miles.
4. Taum Santoski has been able however to read a good deal of it, especially in the latter part of the text where the arrival of the Rangers is described: here there is no difference of any significance between the original draft and the overwriting in ink. Of the opening passage of the chapter less can be made out; but it can be seen that Aragorn, in answer to Legolas' question 'Where?' ('And then whither?' in RK) replied: 'I cannot say yet. We shall go to the Hold of Dunharrow, to Edoras I guess for the muster that the King ordered in [three > ?four] nights' time from now. But that may prove too tardy.' He seems not to have said anything equivalent to 'An hour long prepared approaches'; and in answer to his question 'Who will go with me?' it is Merry alone who replies: 'I will. Though I promised to sit by the King when he gets back in his house and tell him about the Shire.' To this Aragorn replies: 'That must wait, I fear - [?indeed] I fear it shall prove one of the fair things that will not come to flower in this bitter spring.'
5. For earlier applications of the name Halbarad see p. 236 and note 10.
6. A few other details in which the text differs from RK may be mentioned. Aragorn's reply to Merry's remark about his promise to Théoden remains as it was (note 4). In the encounter with the Rangers Merry's thoughts are not reported; Halbarad does not name himself Dúnadan; and neither Aragorn nor Halbarad dismount at first - not until the 'recognition' do they leap down from their horses.
7. The brackets are in the original.
8. In The Tale of Years (LR Appendix B) the entry for the year 1436 in the Shire Reckoning states that the King Elessar, coming to the Brandywine Bridge, gave the Star of the Dúnedain to Master Samwise. In my note 33 to The Disaster of the Gladden Fields in Unfinished Tales (pp. 284 - 5) I said that I was unable to say what this was. This is a convenient place to mention that after the publication of Unfinished Tales two correspondents, Major Stephen M. Lott and Mrs. Joy Mercer, independently suggested to me that the Star of the Dúnedain was very probably the same as the silver brooch shaped like a rayed star that was worn by the Rangers in the present passage (RK p. 51); Mrs. Mercer also referred to the star worn by Aragorn when he served in Gondor, as described in Appendix A (I.iv, The Stewards): 'Thorongil men called him in Gondor, the Eagle of the Star, for he was swift and keen-eyed, and wore a silver star upon his cloak.' These suggestions are clearly correct.
9. The chronology is now thus:
February 4 Théoden and Aragorn reach the Hornburg at dawn. In the afternoon Théoden and the Riders leave for Dunharrow, and soon after Aragorn and the Rangers leave for Edoras.
At the Hornburg Eomer says: 'On the evening of the second day from now we should come there [to Dunharrow]. That night the moon will rise full.'
February 6 Full moon. Théoden arrives at Dunharrow at dusk.
10. In a later text (see p. 397) the black Stone of Erech, brought from Númenor, was not a Palantír, but a Palantír was preserved in the Tower of Erech. In the present text (and in the subsequent revisions, pp. 302, 304-5}, on the other hand, the most natural interpretation of the words seems to be that the Stone of Erech was itself the Palantír. On the sites of the Palantíri as originally conceived see pp. 76-7. - Against Aragorn's speech is pencilled in the margin: 'He has not forgotten the sword of Isildur. Doubtless he will think that I have got the treasure.' Cf. the subsequent text (p. 304): 'But now he will hesitate, doubting whether the heir of Isildur hath that which Isildur took from him.'
11. I have punctuated this verse according to the subsequent version of it, which is almost identical. In the fourth line my father wrote over earth, changing earth to the world, and I have substituted on for over, as in the following version. - forwandred: worn and weary from wandering.
12. The original texts of the abandoned opening of 'The Muster of Rohan' began 'Day was (fading) waning'; the paragraph cited ('So now all roads were running together to the East ...') precedes 'Day was waning' in RK.
13. In the message that came to Rivendell the wording in this text is: The Lord Aragorn has need of his kindred. Let the last of the Kings of Men in the North ride to him in Rohan, where RK has Let the Dúnedain ... In a rejected form of this passage preceding it in the manuscript the wording is: Let all that remain of the [struck out: Tarkil] Kings of Men ride to him in Rohan.
Legolas' support for his opinion that it was Galadriel who sent the message, 'Did she not speak through Gandalf of the ride of the Grey Company from the North?', is absent here. The reference is to 'The White Rider' (TT p. 106) and Galadriel's verse addressed to Aragorn spoken to him by Gandalf in Fangorn:
Near is the hour when the Lost should come forth,
And the Grey Company ride from the North.
But dark is the path appointed for thee:
The Dead watch the road that leads to the Sea.
It was at this stage in the evolution of the story that Galadriel's message in verse to Aragorn was changed from its earlier and altogether different form: see VII.431, 448.
When the three companions went down from the broken gates they 'passed the new mounds of the fallen raised on the Gore' ('on the greensward', RK p. 50); and 'the Riders were assembling upon the Gore' ('on the green', RK p. 51). Cf. the description of the Hornburg in the chapter 'Helm's Deep' (TT p. 134): 'About the feet of the Hornrock it [the Deeping Stream] wound, and flowed then in a gully through the midst of a wide green gore'; also the drawing of Helm's Deep and the Hornburg in Pictures by j. R. R. Tolkien, no. 26.
14. An odd detail may be mentioned here. In his conversation with Legolas and Merry Gimli says in the C version, as first written: 'I played a game which I won by no more than one orc' (cf. RK p. 49). This was now altered to: 'and here Legolas and I played a game which I lost only by a single orc', and this survived into the first typescript. But in the second completed manuscript of 'The Road to Isengard', written long before this time, the text is precisely as in TT, p. 148: You have passed my score by one,> answered Legolas.'
15. A rejected version of this form of the verse is also found in the manuscript: in this the first two lines read:
The Shadow falls; the kings are sleeping.
It is darkling time, all lights are lou .
The remainder of the verse is the same as that given in the text. Although Aragorn describes it only as 'an old rhyme of my kindred', the words 'Three lords I see' perhaps suggest the utterance of a seer; and Aragorn attributes it in the following text (p. 306) to 'Malbeth, the last Seer of our folk in the North' (cf. RK p. 54, where he declares that the wholly different verse that he recites in this place was spoken by 'Malbeth the Seer, in the days of Arvedui, last king at Fornost'). - In none of these texts is th
ere any indication of what the 'tryst' might be. In the outline given on pp. 274-5 there is mention of the defeat of the Haradwaith by 'the-Shadow Host'.
16. The reason for calling the typescript 'M' is that as will be seen shortly it covers, in a single chapter (XLV), both the story of Aragorn at the Hornburg (preceded by texts A to C) and the story of the Muster of Rohan (preceded by texts A to L).
17. This was changed on the typescript to read: '"There go three that I love," he said, "and the halfling, Merry, most dearly.... and for them also we do battle, not only for the glory of Gondor. And yet fate divides us...." '
18. It is said in this continuation that Aragorn came to Edoras 'at dusk on the next day' (February 5), and that they did not halt there but passed up Harrowdale and came to Dunharrow 'late at night'; and Aragorn says to Éowyn on the following morning (February 6) that Théoden and Eomer will not return 'until the day is old'. See note 9.
V. MANY ROADS LEAD EASTWARD (2).
When my father made the typescript (M) of the long chapter 'Many Roads Lead Eastward' he had not only written a good deal of what afterwards became 'The Passing of the Grey Company': he had also greatly extended the story that would later become 'The Muster of Rohan' from the opening abandoned in October 1944. A new text of the latter (following the last of the earlier ones, that in 'midget type' which I have called H, p. 250) takes up at the point where Eomer says 'Harrowdale at last!' (RK p. 65); this I will call 'J'. Tolerably clearly written in ink, it extends only as far as Merry's wonderment at the line of standing stones across the Firienfeld (RK p. 68), the last lines being roughly pencilled, and then peters out into a brief outline; but so far as it goes the first part of 'The Muster of Rohan' in RK was now achieved almost word for word, except just at the point where it breaks off.(1) The text ends thus:
The History of Middle Earth: Volume 8 - The War of the Ring Page 39