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In the moon if you looked in some pools you saw your own face fouled & corrupt & dead. Describe the pools as they get nearer to Mordor as like green pools & rivers fouled by modern chemical works. (HoME p. 105)
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These are interesting ideas, & I wonder why Tolkien chose not to pursue them. I suppose it could be argued that he did in the case of the desription of the pools & rivers, in so far as he could without anachonism - ie actually stating the comparison clearly. But in the case of the travellers seeing their own distorted & rotting reflections he seems to have changed his mind.
Perhaps he thought it might cause confusion, or lessen the impact of the images they did see.
The reason these early ideas struck me is that there is an automatic presumption nowadays that Tolkien is writing about the experience he must have had on the battlefields of WWI, seeing the rotting corpses of the fallen in the stagnant pools of nomansland. Perhaps there was something more ‘supernatural’ intended.
Yet it would have lead to confusion between the Hobbits seeing their own corpselike reflections as well as the images of the fallen from the Last Alliance in the same pools & he did try to get round this by the idea that they would see their own reflections by the light of the moon & the reflections of the fallen by the ‘corpse candles’.
All of which being said, I wonder if the original idea didn’t convey more powerfully the nightmarish nature of their experiences. The Dead Marshes are not simply a place where the dead of long ago battles haunt any of the living foolish, or sufficiently driven by necessity, to enter. They are a place where death is ever present. Gollum’s ‘joke’ that if the hobbits are not careful they will themselves go down to join the dead & light little candles seems more dreadful in the ‘light’ of their seeing their own rotting faces in the water.
Yet this place is almost like a waking nightmare than a physical location, because the dead aren’t really there. The whole mood is one of unreality. One knows the horrors are not ‘real’ but they are inescapable. It is like suddenly realising one is having a nightmare but is unable to make oneself awaken, fearing that one may
never awaken.
Yet the travellers
do ‘awaken’ - to the arid blasted waste which lies before Mordor - & this awakening is worse than the nightmare. Yet, here Tokien seems to offer some ‘hope’, alomst of the kind that Sam feels on seeing the star later on:
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They had come to the desolation that lay before Mordor: the lasting monument to the dark labour of its slaves that should endure when all their purposes were made void; a land defiled, diseased beyond all healing--unless the Great Sea should enter in and wash it with oblivion. "I feel sick," said Sam. Frodo did not speak.
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When all their purposes were made void. What are we to make of that? Not
if their purposes were made void, but
when.
As Frodo says to Sam on seeing the fallen head of the statue at the crossroads ‘They cannot conquer forever.’
Yet they can do irreparable harm - ‘a land defiled, diseased
beyond all healing’
The scars left by evil will remain, do what men (or Hobbits) will, but those who do the evil will pass away & no longer be able to inflict their malice on the world & its inhabitants. Even in the midst of the darkness there is hope. What I find interesting though is that Tolkien seems to hide this promise among descriptions of the horror & of the hobbits reactions to it.
‘The Light shines in the darkness, & the darkness has not overcome it.’