The Red Book of Westmarch

So, what of Gandalf and Frodo’s long fireside chat in the second chapter of the Lord of the Rings?

The main point of the conversation is to build up to the magnificent question of what to do with the One Ring, now that it has been found.  But building up to there takes some time.  No wonder.  To know what to do with the Ring, one has to know where it came from, and who made it, and how he made it, and why.  Right action in this chapter cannot depend merely on having a good will: it depends on knowing something about the past.  More than something, it depends on knowing the stories of the past.

Gandalf’s “history lesson” to Frodo is a series of stories:  Sauron’s, Isildur’s, Gollum’s, and Bilbo’s.  Isildur, Gollum, and Bilbo are unlikely foils to each other, and the first two are unlikely foils to Frodo, but they were all Ring-bearers, and through the unlikely similarity of their stories Tolkien punches home the deeply corruptive nature of the Ring.

Through the unfolding of the stories, however, Tolkien has a genuinely practical problem before him:  how to keep the attention of a reader through a conversation which, at every moment, is in danger of degenerating to a mere history lesson.  For this reason I think he has Frodo periodically interrupt Gandalf with questions.  The questions move the stories along.  The problem is that… well, Frodo’s questions appear only to do that.

Whenever I encounter a prose conversation in a prose work written after, say, 1800, I instinctively try to read it as a “novel” conversation:  that is, one in which the conversation has its principle of motion in itself, in which each speaker’s reactions to each spoken sentence arise directly from his unique character in the story.  From the fine art of crafting such interchanges, for example, arises the lasting fame of that mistress craftswoman of conversation, Jane Austen.  It is simply impossible that anything Elizabeth Bennett says could be mistaken for anything her sister Jane says, it being in fact impossible that anything Lizzy says should not be distinctively and intrinsically Lizzyan.

Not so with Tolkien, I fear.  Nothing Frodo says has any distinctive “Frodo-ness” about it.  Tolkien has him speak, not to reveal his character, but to move the story along.  Even Gandalf’s role in the conversation is not the role of a conversationalist but a story-teller.  For Tolkien, the Story is all-absorptive.

What to make of this?  If I thought Tolkien were writing a novel, I would call it deficient on this point.  But perhaps that is the key.  The novel form and the prose style have been associated for so long that perhaps a non-novel in prose would seem like a contradiction.  But if Tolkien were really attempting to write in a different genre in prose, would that other genre really derive its life-blood from good conversations the way that a novel would?

Thomas Malory, as I recall, was not great on the point of conversation either.

After resisting another long post on the Long Expected Party, I’m moving on to “The Shadow of the Past.”  For reasons both practical and meta-historical, I think this chapter is the most important chapter in the LotR trilogy.  On the practical side, Tolkien has the formidable task of transitioning from the child-fairy-tale tone of the Hobbit to romance-quest tone, and from the ring to the Ring.  On the meta-historical side, I see him offering several oblique commentaries on (hi)story-telling itself.

For this post (since, of course, I mean to squander at least as many on “The Shadow of the Past” as I did on the Party), I only want to try to schematize the structure of the chapter, bringing to the fore (I hope) some of the intricacy of how Tolkien progresses with the transition, as well as the framework that he puts around the central conversation between Gandalf and Frodo.

A.  The chapter opens with an illustration of how legends develop (“Mad Baggins”).

B.  Sam Gamgee holds forth in the Inn about Walking Trees and Elves.

C.  Gandalf & Frodo’s conversation unfolds in stages punctuated by Frodo’s questions.

            1.  Gandalf reveals the identity and the history of the ring:

                  a. It is a Great Ring…

                  b. …with an unwholesome power…

                                    Gandalf refers to the Bilbo-story (story within a story)

                  c. …and with identifying marks that prove it to be…

                  d. …the One Ring.                      

                        (1).  Gandalf describes the present danger.

                                    Gandalf tells two stories within the story (the narrator

                                    and Frodo transition from the ring to the Ring):

                                                1. Isildur-story

                                                2. Gollum-story

                        (1’).     Gandalf again describes the present danger.

            2.  Gandalf poses the question of what to do, & Frodo suggests flight.

B’.  Sam Gamgee is caught eavesdropping and is doomed to go with Frodo.

Without quite being aware of it, I’ve allowed the past 3 weeks to slip by with much studying for midterms and no postings of the blog.  Now that midterms are over, the time has come for important things again, like Lord of the Rings.

I know I am spending a long time thinking about the long expected party.  But the chapter merits a long time, for it is long, and it is the setting of the stage for everything that follows.

I’ve been thinking about Frodo’s entrance into the course of events.  It is so unimposing.  The way the chapter starts out, you would think that the whole romance was to be about Bilbo.  He is, after all, the main character who is already known from The Hobbit, and Frodo only appears incidentally as his birthday-sharer and heir.  The first time we actually get a glimpse of Frodo (directly following Bilbo’s disappearance, interestingly), he is sitting and saying nothing.  Then, perhaps in an attempt to get us inside this important hobbit’s head after the momentous disappearance of his uncle, Tolkien slips in the odd remark that Frodo “realized suddenly that he loved the old hobbit dearly.”

I don’t know why I find this sentence annoying.  I think it’s because I don’t really believe in real people “suddenly realizing” such things at such moments… it smacks faintly of artificiality, and of the chiefly unimaginative authorial device of getting us inside someone’s head by having them “suddenly realize” something (usually something about himself which a real person would have known for some time).  So, then, Frodo shows up as a quiet character who really doesn’t know much about himself.

I should admit, however, that in several more paragraphs, Frodo appears to better advantage when he returns to Bag End after Bilbo’s departure.  Frodo is a very gracious sort of host, though from the beginning he is tired and weary (he “looked indisposed…. but he spoke quite politely” [47]).  He does begin to take on his own voice and character—a soft voice, and a quiet, sometimes harried, but always “honest” and frank character—in opposition to Gandalf’s terseness and abruptness and mysteriousness.  By the end of the chapter, after his last conversation with Gandalf about not using the Ring, he is off to his own good, quiet, still rather self-ignorant start.