I am happy to post this interview what is binary option with author Benita J. Prins, fellow lover of all things Tolkien and a great writer in her own right too! I read her fantasy, Sea of Crystal, Sea of Glass recently and recommend … Continue reading
The single most chilling speech delivered by an agent of the Dark Lord in "The Return of the King" does not come from Sauron himself. It comes from the silent figure who steps out from the Morannon and holds up the fallen weapons of his master's enemies. The Mouth of Sauron speaks for a master who will not lower himself to parley, and every sentence he utters is built from stones of language that crack under pressure. Readers who pause over the text find barbed jokes, legal sophistry, and ancient insults laid in wait beneath a diplomatic surface that only pretends to be polite.
Tolkien was a philologist before he was a novelist, and the parley at the Black Gate shows his appetite for double meaning at its most cynical. Australian readers of the saga, who often turn to detailed guides and local literary societies in cities from Melbourne to Perth, have long noted that the chapter rewards slow reading. The dialogue reads as smooth menace in a first pass, but a careful listener can hear the villain snickering behind every clause.
Sauron's Mouth, whose only name is the function the narrative assigns him, was the Lieutenant of the Tower of Barad-dûr. Tolkien makes this explicit in drafts and later commentary, and the Black Gate parley is his single moment on stage. He is, as Tolkien once noted in correspondence, a living document of the Black Speech — a kind of walking treaty between Sauron and his slaves. Every word he speaks carries the muscle of the will that animates him.
What makes the character suited to the punwork in the parley is precisely his anonymity. A named hero cannot play the verbal trickster with the same credibility. Sauron needs a face that can be denied, a figure whose exact identity can be argued later if the Dark Lord wishes it. The Mouth is therefore constructed to be plausible, formal, and terrifying all at once, and his speech is built on a scaffolding of borrowed tongues that crack on close reading.
The dialogue is also tuned to a particular kind of audience: envoys who consider themselves the heirs of older tradition. Aragorn answers in the high language of kings. The Mouth answers in a crafty legal register. The clash is part classic oratory and part back-alley haggling, and the puns belong to both registers at once.
The single word that anchors the parley's wordplay is "terms". When the Mouth offers the Captains of the West their lives in return for walking away, he announces that he has come on terms. On the surface, this is the language of negotiator and diplomat. Each side lays out terms, the neutral ground is occupied, and the formal exchange begins.
The deeper joke lies in the legal and mercantile register that "terms" carries. In Middle-earth's older usage, and certainly in Tolkien's love of archaic English, "terms" also refers to boundaries and limits, as in the terms of an estate or the terms of a lease. A parley that meets on terms is one that has already been bound by them. Sauron is offering conditions whose conditions he has already fixed.
When a hobbit who has grown up on a Shire-farmer's understanding of fences hears "terms", the polite register collides with something more territorial. The Captains are being invited onto a patch of ground whose legal fiction Sauron controls. The Dark Lord wants nothing so much as the chance to make free peoples accept the geometry he has drawn around them.
Mordor, the Mouth says, his workers are the slaves of his desire. The Lieutenant, by his nature as herald of Sauron, makes an offhand reference to a regime entirely built on bondage. Tolkien knows exactly what he is doing, and the irony sharpens for any reader who pauses on the word. The Mouth speaks of slaves as if slavery were a domestic arrangement, even a stable form of employment. He does so because the reality of Mordor is that there is no other kind of employment on offer.
The reference also carries the hint that Sauron's bidding is itself a form of bondage. The Lieutenant exists only to mouth what his master has gagged him with. When he calls others slaves, he names himself what he cannot admit to being. Sauron cannot present his great captain as an unfree voice, and so the dark joke of the regime lies buried in a single word, used condescendingly of those whom Sauron intends to enslave.
A reader in a country with a long historical reckoning with forced labour will hear this pun more sharply than others might. In Australia, the language of bondage remains a charged term in academic halls, in museum exhibitions, and in bookshops where descendants of the South Sea Island labourers keep their histories alive. The Mordor in Tolkien's playful register slides uncomfortably close to references Australians still ponder at home.
When the Mouth mocks "the bick of Morgoth, the slave-Morgoth", the unfamiliar word does what Tolkien often does with his dialogue. It borrows from an older stock of English. In Middle English and early modern English, "bick" could mean a taunt, a saucy retort, or a sharp accusation. It is the root that gives the verb "bicker", and it sits close to words like "provoke" and "repel".
The punning move is to project the insult onto the Vala, not onto the speaker. By calling Morgoth a bick — a picker of quarrels, a petty responder — the Mouth does two things at once. He flatters Sauron, who has read the older chronicles and may be counted on to enjoy the joke. He also mocks Aragorn, Gandalf, and the heirs of Númenor in front of them, because they too know the old language. The pity of Morgoth is also the pity the West now extends to its tyrant in the very act of recognising his old crimes.
This is a jest that only the company at the Black Gate can fully parse. Tolkien loved such in-jokes, and he rarely used them to flatter those in the wrong. The Mouth's sarcasm is also the sarcasm of the Black Speech breaking into Westron grammar — the language being corralled into a service it does not wish to perform.
The most visibly cruel pun is the casual roll-call at the end of the Mouth's speech. He holds out the mithril shirt, calls it a pretty toy, and announces that he has found its owner. He names Peregrin, son of Paladin, of the Shire. The intrusion of the home-names of a hobbit into the verbal theatre of Mordor is meant to break something in the hearts of the listeners.
Tolkien uses the proper name with the same instinct he uses when he gives the Witch-king a surname of prophecy. A name on the lips of a tyrant is a name being claimed. By saying Peregrin where Pippin would have been enough, the Mouth performs a small ritual that says: we have read your genealogies, we know your father's name, and we know the country where births are registered. The home has been stripped down to the stones of its records, and the tyrant reads the ledger aloud.
It is also a literary pun, because Tolkien's training in Old English and Welsh made him attentive to how names can be turned into incantation. The Mouth, who has no proper name of his own, takes possession of the most proper of hobbit names. The unnameable has handled the named. That inversion of power is the grim joke underneath all the others, and Tolkien knows it will sting the reader as well as the hobbit standing at the back of the host.
The Australian reading public took to Tolkien as soon as the books reached the shelves in the late 1960s, partly because the geography of the Shire and the deserts west of it speaks to travellers used to wide horizons. Local book clubs, from Adelaide to Brisbane, soon set up reading circles where philological questions got a fair airing. The parley at the Black Gate was one of those chapters that travellers and scholars alike liked to revisit, because each hearing brought out a new knot of language that had been hidden in plain sight.
Readers down here also learned to compare Tolkien's puns to those of the Australian poets. Lawson and Paterson liked the joke inside the bush yarn, and the tradition of dry double meaning runs through the colonial rhymes. Tolkien's herald does much the same work. He hides a knot of cruelty inside a polite legal language so that the listener has to lean in to hear the wrong. Such writing rewards the slow reader no matter where that reader is sitting, by a beach or at a kitchen table.
The chapter rewards returning, and more than one local reader has built a lecture around it. https://annemariegazzolo.com/ holds an extended meditation on the literary ethics of Tolkien's use of cruelty as language. Other reflections on the author and his craft can be found across the shelves of independent bookshops in Brunswick and Fitzroy, where the puns of the Mouth still get a careful hearing.
An essay I wrote about the desire of Tolkien and the TCBS to be a light to their darkening world. A century later, he still provides light. Thank you, Professor and God trade binary option bless! Art by Justin Gerard … Continue reading