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frodo-with-glasses · 2 years

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This is a post about Ghân-buri-Ghân and the Woses, or the Wild Men.

Full disclosure: When I was a kid, I pretty much skipped this part. I was already getting very lost with the logistics of the Rohirrim’s movement, and I was very impatient for Merry and Pippin to be reunited already and Frodo and Sam to be done with the quest and back on home turf. I was having a hard enough time telling the difference between Gondor and Rohan (every other race in Middle Earth only gets one country that’s very important, but for the most boring race of them all I’m supposed to keep track of two?? preposterous), and having yet another group of humans pop up out of nowhere just to disappear after half a chapter left me baffled and annoyed.

After all, the Wild Men are pretty much disconnected from everything else in the story, aren’t they? They aren’t related to any of the characters we’ve met already. They’re not personal friends with any members of the Fellowship, or even friends with the friends of the members of the Fellowship. They have very little to do with Rohan and Gondor, and nothing at all to do with elves or dwarves or ents or hobbits or wizards or anything else that Little Me thought were the Important Parts of the story. If you took your cue from the movies, this opinion would only seem reinforced: the Riders of Rohan reach Minas Tirith with no complications greater than a Mumakil, and the Wild Men aren’t mentioned even once. If you didn’t know better, you might think the Wild Men are little more than an extraneous detour.

But it’s exactly because they seem extraneous that I think we need to pay them extra attention. Tolkien is not a careless storyteller; he’s long-winded, for sure, and has a knack for descriptions in excruciating detail, but he’s not careless. Every word, every sentence, every line of dialogue and narration and poetry exists in the story for a reason. If Tolkien didn’t have to put the Wild Men in the story—if they weren’t strictly necessary to the plot, save to solve one problem that (let’s be honest) kinda looks like it was invented just so they could fix it—that means he wanted to put them there. He wanted them there, because he wanted to tell us something.

I think it behooves us to listen.

So what is Tolkien trying to say? I have no idea. The man’s dead, and I can’t ask him. But the message I’m getting here has two parts:

1. The World Is Big

If nothing else, the Woses serve as a reminder that Middle Earth is much, much bigger than even Lord of the Rings makes it out to be. That’s saying something, because LotR isn’t a small story! This is a grand legend that stretches across nations, from one horizon to the other in an epic trek, and yet it still fails to capture Middle Earth in its every detail. Entire nations and kingdoms get lost in the wash, or are only mentioned in passing, and some names we only see in the maps at the back of the book.

Remember, Tolkien’s framing device for LotR is that it was an eyewitness account, a history written by the hobbits and supplemented with accounts from their friends. The POV characters we’ve had so far—if I’m remembering correctly—are Frodo, Sam, Merry, Pippin, Fatty Bolger, Bilbo, Aragorn, Gimli, and a sort of omniscient narrator that seems to represent “hearsay” or “local gossip”. If any of these characters didn’t witness something and come back to report it, then it didn’t make it into the story. If they didn’t go someplace, or meet some people, and come back to tell about it, then it didn’t make it into the story.

But just because the unnamed peoples of Middle Earth don’t get into the histories doesn’t make them any less important. Just because we don’t learn their names doesn’t mean they didn’t suffer under the fear of Sauron, or rejoice when he was defeated. Just because we don’t know them doesn’t make them any less…well, for lack of a better word, human, or any less important.

The War of the Ring mattered just as much to the Wild Men as it did to Gondor or Rohan or the Shire. Because the War of the Ring was about saving their world too.

2. A Treatise on Treatment of Native Peoples

Again, I’m only trying to reiterate what I can see of Tolkien’s opinion in this passage. I happen to agree with a lot of what he says, but we’re talking about him, not me.

The Woses are, as far as I can tell, the closest thing to an indigenous or native people group in the southern region of Middle Earth. Obviously they must have come from somewhere—anyone who’s read the Silmarillion could probably fill me in on that—but Ghan-buri-Ghan says himself that “Wild Men live here before the Stone-houses; before Tall Men come up out of Water”. The Wild Men preceded the settlement of Gondor, and inhabited the land even before the Numenorians; they were here First, and still they remain.

So, how does Tolkien portray this native people group? Well, the first thing he does is to say—hilariously and pointedly—that the Wild Men are anything but stupid. Ghan warns, in his broken speech, that Mordor’s forces outnumber the Rohirrim, and Eomer challenges this assertion—“how do you know that?”—to which Ghan says, if I may paraphrase, “boi I’m not a child I can count as well as you can”. The first point made is that, though the Wild Men may seem ugly and primitive and are clad only in grass skirts, they are as shrewd as the tacticians of Rohan, and maybe even more.

The next thing that happens is that Ghan strikes a deal: he and his people will lead the Rohirrim to Minas Tirith by long-forgotten roads, and in exchange, the men of Rohan must battle to drive off the Darkness so that the Wild Men may go back to their lives in peace. Of course, this arrangement benefits both parties; both are in danger, and both have a common enemy. To see the end of the Darkness would be infinitely valuable to them both.

This is fascinating to me, because you can’t really say that one party here was “using” the other, or that one benefited at the other’s expense. Yes, the Rohirrim gained the guidance of the Wild Men, which furthered their goal; but in the end, it only put them one step closer to possible death on the battlefield against a great Enemy. Yes, the Wild Men get to sit back and watch the Horse-Men risk their lives in open war, but if they should fail, what then? By helping Rohan, they are establishing themselves as an enemy of Sauron; whether Ghan realizes it or not—and personally, I think he does—this single act of defiance is putting a target on the backs of his people, should the Enemy emerge victorious. Sure, they can hide in the forests for a while—as long as there are forests. But not forever. I think that’s why Ghan takes his stand now; he knows there might not be another chance.

Ghan has established that he is shrewd, straightforward, and honorable. He even vows that he will lead the Rohirrim himself, and that they may kill him if he steers them wrong; he’s that willing to stake his life on his word. But when Theoden promises to handsomely reward Ghan for his help and his faithfulness, Ghan only asks for one thing in return: “if you live after the Darkness, then leave Wild Men alone in the woods and do not hunt them like beasts anymore”.

There’s something in me that kinda…twinges, when I read this. Like I’m half-remembering a bolt of anger from Baby Me before I checked out of this passage entirely. How dare this book imply that these kind, noble horse-people would be so cruel and barbaric as to hunt other human beings like animals? Wasn’t this the same people whose king accepted Merry like a son, and who provided Gandalf with the best horse in the world? These are the GOOD guys! They wouldn’t do something like that! The book doesn’t know what it’s talking about, clearly. I wish I could get back to the hobbits again.

But now that I’m older, I think it’s more telling that Rohan isn’t spotless and blameless in this transaction. They have wronged the Wild Men in the past; out of ignorance, maybe, and out of prejudice, perhaps, and out of fear, almost certainly. We all fear what is foreign to us and what we don’t understand. But Ghan is putting that aside for the moment. Ghan chooses to extend forgiveness. For once, his people and Rohan face a greater evil, and they unite against a common enemy. All of the sudden, Rohan has an opportunity to make amends for all their wrongs, by “driving away the bad air and darkness with bright iron”.

I’m sure I don’t have to tell you about the historical treatment of native people groups in our real world. The archetypal example, of course, is the European settlers and the native tribes of North America; but we see the same thing in Central and South America too, and that’s not even getting into the British Empire’s other affairs in Egypt and India and China and Oceania. I could talk about the Spanish conquistadors; I could talk about the Dutch in South Africa and apartheid. But it goes even further back than that. It’s what the Roman Empire did to the Germanic peoples of Gaul; what the Islamic Empire did to the entire Middle East and much of Northern Africa; what the Babylonians and Persians and the Mesopotamian superpower of the week did to their vassal states on a regular basis. Standard practice in Babylonia was to invade a place and immediately ship all the smart, strong, and wealthy people off to Babylon to be assimilated, leaving behind the weak, poor, unlearned, and destitute to till the land and keep their heads down. Can’t have a rebellion if everyone’s too dumb and starving to organize it.

(Incidentally, the Roman Empire is what gave us the word “barbarian”; the speech of the Germanic peoples they conquered was unintelligible to them and sounded like “bar-bar-bar”, so they named them after it. The fact that the word they coined now refers to a ruthless, stupid, uncouth person should tell you a lot about the Roman Empire’s opinion of these folks.)

Anyway, the point is that throughout history, there’s always been a pattern: up comes this people group who’s smarter and more advanced than anybody else, and they think that gives them free rein to go wherever they want, do whatever they want, and use, abuse, and extort the people they see as “beneath” them. The Romans had figured out indoor plumbing by the time of Christ, and they thought they were such hot stuff that they took over the Mediterranean and taxed the living daylights out of them. (Some estimates put the tax rate at about 90%. 90!! Imagine keeping only a tenth of your paycheck every month. I know it already feels like that, but still!)

We’d do well to address the question that Baby Me probably thought when I read this for the first time: “Why can’t the Wild Men just be Men of Rohan?” Why can’t they put on real clothes, and pick up spears and swords, and get on horses and ride into battle and make a real contribution? Why do they insist on going back to their primitive lives? Perhaps part of the reason the Men of Rohan felt justified in hunting the Wild Men is because they saw them as more crude and less advanced people; “they live in the forests, clad only in grass, hunting and sleeping under the stars like dangerous wild animals, and therefore must be treated as such”.

But let me ask you a question: Aren’t the people of Rohan primitive too? Aragorn describes them as “unlearned, not writing any books but singing many songs”; how is that any different from the songs that may be passed down by Ghan-buri-Ghan’s people? Isn’t Rohan crude and simple in its own way, at least in comparison to some others? Just because they build houses of wood and speak with fair, beautiful speech doesn’t mean they are better than those who don’t. If Rohan had the right to treat the Wild Men as they wished—because, as “civilized people”, they were so much smarter and more advanced—then Saruman had the right to treat Rohan as he wished—because, as a Wizard, he was so much smarter and more advanced.

I want you to get this. If Rohan does not check itself here and humbly accept the Woses as equals, then Rohan is no better than Saruman.

Thankfully, Rohan does pass the test. One of Theoden’s greatest traits is his humility, and it serves him well here. A deal is struck, a path is cut, and the Wild Men make their contribution and disappear into the forests, with only a lingering portent that the wind is changing, and maybe the times with it. The book says that they were “never to be seen by any Rider of Rohan again”; by which I take it that Rohan’s side of the promise was upheld, and the Wild Men lived on, in their own ways, unmolested, in the Druadan Forest until the end of time.

I don’t have a way to end this, but maybe that’s appropriate to the subject matter; like the Wild Men themselves, this post will appear out of nowhere and disappear just as quickly as it came. I just think the Woses are fascinating—both for in-universe and meta reasons—in spite of, and perhaps because of my initial annoyance all those years ago.

We will return to your daily crack post tomorrow LOL

#ghan-buri-ghan #the wild men #lord of the rings #lotr #lotr meta #my writing #there are no tags on tumblr for ghan-buri-ghan or the wild men or anything like that #literally no one is talking about these guys #they are the cryptids that they were always meant to be #in which i wax eloquent about the roman empire and history nerd stuff for WAY too long

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