Within The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien had a particular love for the paragraph in The Return of the King when the horns of the Rohirrim sound, announcing what may be the second most famous eucatastrophic moment in the story. My favorite line, however, has always been the paragraph that precedes it—cock crow:
“And in that very moment, away behind in some far corner of the city, a cock crowed. Shrill and clear he crowed reckoning nothing of wizardry or war, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn.”
As much as the arrival of Théoden’s army is a relief and a joy, signaling the first turn in a series of turns that will ultimately bring victory for our heroes on the Pelennor Fields, I find there is something far more primally reassuring in those moments just before.
Sauron could crush the whole of the world into subservience, but he cannot change the fundamental certainty of dawn. He might cover the sky in ash and shade, but the sun would still rise in his despite. And unless he were to find a way to wipe out every chicken in Arda, somewhere there would almost certainly be a rooster welcoming some glimmer of sunlight into the world, morning after morning after morning after morning after morning after morning…
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