Ephemera

Of course everyone can order a personal replica of Arwen’s pendant or Aragorn’s sword these days.  But some Lord of the Rings fans have generated quainter ephemera.

Paper dolls looking for lovely elf and hobbit dresses are now in luck.

Those who live in dollhouses might wish for something to read by the miniature fireplace.

Baked goods and other eatibles presumably taste better with Hobbit names.

Gondor never looked more appetizing.

And nothing would be better than a Tolkien quilt to curl up in while reading his works and eating the aforesaid goodies.

 

To Take a Bow

Bowing!  Here is a practice that has fallen out of the modern fashion.  I remember noticing it at the beginning of The Hobbit, when Bilbo bows to no fewer than 13 dwarves who enter his hobbit hole, exchanging the lines “At your service” and “And at yours.”  Frodo repeats this ritual somewhat more clumsily in the feasting hall of Elrond, when he meets one of those very dwarves again—Gloin, come from Dain’s kingdom under the Mountain.  Frodo discovers this venerable dwarf sitting next to him at table, and immediately proceeds to scatter the cushions on his seat by rising and bowing.

Bowing, I have recently discovered, is by no means so easy at it looks.  There is a stiffness about the modern vertebrae (or, at least, about mine) that hampers the motion and besets the attempt with a very odd if not awkward unease.  Several times now I have attempted to bow at the appropriate times in various liturgical services among the Anglicans and Eastern Orthodox.  There is certainly good reason for bowing at such moments—honoring the name of God, or of any Person of the Trinity, with a bow is hardly an objectionable act.  And yet it comes unnaturally.  I was not bred to such things.  And if it proves so unmanageable in the presence of a god, I suspect I would not attempt it in the presence of a dwarf, however venerable.

This, in conclusion, is part of my reason for loving The Lord of the Rings.  Tolkien is archaic and anachronistic even perhaps where he does not mean to be.  Whether or not bowing was still fashionable in the 50’s, it is one of those elements of foreign culture that appears so exotic and charming in the eyes of a barbarian raised in the late 90’s.  Archaism, anachronism, and all the charm of the foregoing are as much a function of the perceiver as they are of the perceived.  The Hobbits are lovable because they belong to an older culture than we.

 

Many Names

Suddenly Bilbo looked up. “Ah, there you are at last, Dúnadan!” he cried.
“Strider!” said Frodo. “You seem to have a lot of names.”
“Well, Strider is one that I haven’t heard before, anyway,” said Bilbo. “What do you call him that for?”

Why is it that things in Middle Earth have so many names? It’s as if Tolkien’s narrative landscape was tunneled through with linguistic rabbit holes, teeming with broods of playful and proliferating names. Black Riders, Ringwraiths, and Nazgul; Rivendell, the Last Homely House, Imladris; Strider, Aragorn, the Dúnadan—it seems as if being a person or place of importance in Middle Earth requires at least three different names, one of which must be in a foreign language if at all possible.

The meetings at Rivendell, and the tales told at the Council of Elrond in the chapter following, must have worked on Tolkien like so many excuses for enriching the treasure-trove of Middle-Earthling names. The character who was Tom Bombadil several chapters ago becomes Iarwain Ben-adar, Forn, and Orald during the Council of Elrond; and the sneaking culprit who bears so much of the blame for the Ring is revealed not only as Gollum but as Sméagol, who is to become Slinker and Stinker before his tale is done.

And this is not even counting the epithets. Frodo is dubbed both the Halfling and the Ring-Bearer, just as Elrond is the Half-Elven and Gandalf is the Grey. The Ring itself is variously the One Ring and Isildur’s Bane. Even Sauron, who does not seem to have another proper name—certainly not one as decorous and awe-inspiring as “Tom Riddle”—has an entourage of epithets that include “the Dark Lord,” “the Necromancer,” and “the Enemy.”

And so it seems that any being of any importance or lineage in Middle Earth bears many names, and indeed cannot avoid bearing them. Interestingly, the lone class of beings to largely escape these multiple namings is the Hobbits. They are named in our common modern way of First Name, Last Name, and that is very likely because they are neither important enough to have epithets (except in the case of a prodigy like the Old Took), nor adventurous enough to win other names. (Think of how many multiple namings arise from the same thing being named in multiple languages. That is a phenomenon that no respectable Hobbit would wander far enough to suffer.)

This fanciful proliferation of names, I believe, is ultimately not merely fanciful. If it does nothing else, it contributes its tuppence to the three-dimensional texture of Middle Earth as a world of intelligent beings. Things are named diversely because diverse languages name them, or because diverse qualities inhere in them. A name picks out what is most salient from someone’s particular angle of vision. Thus, Isildur’s Bane means nothing to Frodo until he hears the story of Isildur; but to the Heirs of Isildur, the epithet strikes closer to home than the mere noun “the Ring.” So it is with the Last Homely House and Imladris. The first conveys to us all the comfort of a chair by a fire; the last conveys all the magic and mystery of an unexplored fairy kingdom.

All this seems to be roughly what lies in the background of Bilbo and Frodo’s exchange on the names of Aragorn. It is tempting to think that Tolkien included the brief conversation just to make his linguistic point. For Aragorn explains to Bilbo that he is called Strider by a particular folk (the Bree-landers), much as he will explain to Boromir in the following chapter that travelers give the Rangers scornful names. The striding and wandering quality—“Longshanks” as Bill Ferny puts it—is what stands out about the Rangers to such a folk. But as Bilbo goes on to demonstrate in Elvish, the name of “the Dúnadan” when applied to Aragorn is fraught with import. It means “Man of the West, Numenorean,” and is not only what stands out to the Elves when they look at the weather-beaten Ranger, but is closer to the reality of who he is.

And so I say: let the names be fruitful and multiply, and replenish all of Middle Earth.

 

The Boring Lands

There is no denying that the moment on Weathertop is a sort of climax in Book I, to be outdone only by the confrontation at the Ford at the very end.  But between these two terrible clashes, we find an interminably long passage of barren lands and bleak hillsides, and a journey that lasts no less than 14 days.  Though Tolkien manages to give us an account of 2 weeks in less than one chapter, the length of time and the dullness of the journey wear off on the reading.  Why must this part of the tale be so lacklustre?

The simple answer might be merely geographical.  Weathertop is 14 days out from Rivendell, and Nazgul or no Nazgul, the ground simply has to be traversed.  Having previously drawn up his map, Tolkien could not miraculously move hills to make the Hobbits’ journey shorter for either them or the reader.  Nor, I suppose, was it unfitting that he should make the plodding as grueling on the reader as it was on the Hobbits.

But stepping outside the map of Middle Earth and into the art of the plot-maker, couldn’t Tolkien have done something to make these 14 days more… well, adventurous?

No and yes.  No, in that the point of the boring lands specifically seems to be not to provide us with new adventures, but to chronicle the effects of the old adventure on Frodo.  The chapter presents us with a series of days in which Frodo must bear the Morgul knife and gradually succumb to its powers.  Perhaps Tolkien thought we needed a relatively quiet time period in order to mark how Frodo’s dreams become darker as his arm grows colder.

Yes, however, in that Tolkien does provide us with some adventure through these boring lands, though not the terrifying and mystical adventure of a battle with Ringwraiths.  He takes the occasion, instead, to give us a reminder of a comic adventure that once transpired in the very same lands—an adventure involving Frodo’s own forebear, Bilbo, and a handful of Trolls.

There is no denying that the entire adventure is comic, both in its original form in The Hobbit, when the Trolls argue themselves to death over the manner of cooking and eating the Dwarves, and in its rediscovery by the four Hobbits.  Pippin is properly scared by the sight of a Troll in midday, forgetting that the sun turns Trolls to stone; Strider gets a chance to shine as he pokes gentle fun at the Hobbits for forgetting this fact and not seeing the bird’s nest behind the Troll’s ear.  Even Sam has his brief hour of genius when he spins a nonsense rhyme out of his head in honor of the occasion.  The whole adventure serves as comic relief.

Beyond comic relief, however, the adventure has a heuristic point.  In the midst of the boring lands, the Hobbits cannot help stirring up the dust of their own history.  They are journeying on a road that at least one Hobbit journeyed before them.  The lands of Middle Earth remember what has walked through them before; and, just as Tolkien refuses to move mountains on the map of Middle Earth, he refuses to forget the history that he himself already wrote to cover that map.

 

Middlemarch

There is something wonderfully apt about the word “middle” in both Middlemarch and Middle-Earth. In the case of Middle-Earth, of course, the Earth is midway between Heaven and Hell, caught in the opposing struggles of darkness and light. To be from Middle-Earth is to be one who is torn between death and immortality.

“Middlemarch” looks like it should be cognitively similar: the swath of land in the midst of a wider land, or maybe, the provincial place that is neither a backwater nor a great city. “Middle” also has resonances of the Middle Class, the bourgeoisie. And the Middle Class is exactly where we have found ourselves in Middle-Earth thus far. The Hobbits of the Shire and the Men of Bree are alike in this: they are not savages, not the laboring poor, not serfs or dependents; but neither are they kings and lords. They desire to be quiet and live in comfort. The life of high ideals and sacrifice is not for them.

Butterbur is loveable precisely because he is bourgeois, flourishing in his place and not recking either the glories or the dangers of a higher code or calling. When Strider begins to show him Frodo’s danger and the possibilities of a darker world intruding on Bree, his answer is classic.

“Me? Leave Bree! I wouldn’t do that for any money,” he says. And then, naively, “Why can’t you stay here quiet for a bit, Mr. Underhill?”

In all of this, the inhabitants of Bree and the Shire are very like the inhabitants of Middlemarch. They distrust living by extremes, and the littleness of their provincial lives is the same. In Middlemarch, in Bree, and in the Shire, “sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.”*

One could say that Tolkien and George Eliot look at the same coin from two sides. Eliot shows mundane provincial life being redeemed from the inside; Tolkien shows it redeemed from the outside, by those willing to venture out into the world of romance, and back again.

*George Eliot, Middlemarch, chapter 1.

 

A Knife in the Dark… but first, a Horn of Buckland!

Chapter 11 opens with a jolt.  The reader has just settled down in the Prancing Pony to see how Strider will handle the imminent threat of Black Riders in Bree.  And Black Riders do in fact arrive… but not at Bree!  Without warning, the plot has whisked us back to Crickhollow, where Fatty Bolger (in a surreal imitation of what could have happened at the Inn of Bree) flees from the Black Riders and abandons the little cottage to the invasion of supernatural forces.  Given that this is the only time the plot reverts to the Shire in the absence of the four Hobbits, the curious incident calls for a double glance.

First, though, we need to imagine what is actually happening in Bree that night, even though Tolkien does not give us an account.  Someone (quite probably Bill Ferny) breaks into the Hobbits’ sleeping room at the inn and demolishes it, slashing to pieces a decoy of Frodo that had been left in his bed.  Instead of describing this demolition, however, Tolkien gives us instead a picture of what is happening to another “decoy” of Frodo (Fatty Bolger himself, left to tend Crickhollow) dozens of miles away in the Shire.

Why this doubling?  Why make a decoy of the plot, the same way that Nob makes a decoy of Frodo?  Such narrative tricks are not in common trade in the age of the novel, and this particular trick is especially eye-catching because Fatty Bolger himself is so minor a character.  I have three hunches.

First is that the doubling is meant to underscore the danger to Frodo by showing what happens even to those who pretend to be Frodo.  Fatty Bolger, we recall, had been left behind in the Shire specifically “to keep up as long as possible the pretence that Mr. Baggins was still living at Crickhollow,” and that he had even “brought along some old clothes of Frodo’s to help him in playing the part” (chapter 5).  Meanwhile, Nob fashions a decoy of Frodo in the Prancing Pony by means of a good bolster and a brown woolen mat, to leave the impression that Frodo is sleeping soundly in his bed.  In the same night, both Crickhollow and the room in the Prancing Pony are attacked.  Fatty Bolger is nearly destroyed in the same way that the humble bolster is destroyed; but fortunately, the live decoy of Frodo escapes in time.

My second hunch is that this splitting of the narrative gives a prismatic effect to the danger.  We sense Frodo’s danger in Bree because we see its mirror image at Crickhollow.  And if the peril is so great at Crickhollow, where Frodo is not, how much greater must it be where he is?

Third, this kind of doubling of the plot and the person of Frodo multiplies our suspicions about the omnipresence of the Enemy.  The Black Riders are in many places at once.  They are on the scent, and converging.  The noose is tightening. The absence of Frodo from one place means his presence in another.

And, as an extra dollop of whipped cream on the special effects of this narrative trick, we get to hear the Horn of Buckland for the first time!  Gandalf said something once about Hobbits proving remarkably resistant in the face of evil.  The horn that can sound against the Ringwraiths in the Shire is the same that can sound against Saruman’s thugs—the Urban Planners, if you will—who arrive later.  A little foreshadowing of the stubbornness of Hobbits is not a bad preparation for what Frodo will find when he makes his return journey, and what will happen when his companions are forced to reckon with evil inside the Shire itself.

 

The Problem of Pleasure

As a first encounter with the world of Men, Bree is not too painful. To be sure, Tolkien weaves in plenty of uneasiness at the beginning of the chapter—the strange attitude of Harry the Gatekeeper, the unfamiliarity of the dark buildings, and the presence of Southern Men in the common room—but he manages to disarm each oddity fairly quickly with good food, good ale, and good cheer. The fact is that the hobbits have a constitutional weakness —a fondness for comfort and good cheer—and Tolkien simply exploits it.

Consider that, only the day before entering Bree, the Hobbits are lulled off their guard and lulled quite asleep by the cool shade of a harmless-looking stone. A few days before that, they are likewise lulled to sleep by a whispering stream. Several days before that, Pippin merrily bursts into loud song in the woods outside Hobbiton. (Perhaps this would not have been such a bad thing, if not for the convenient fact that it was dusk and a Black Rider was coming up behind. On a related note, it is, to all appearances, simply not a good idea to burst into song in the middle of a forest if one is a Hobbit. Frodo tries the same thing in the Old Forest, and the trees get upset and he is forced to stop.)

In the Inn at Bree, Tolkien develops the easy transition between a Hobbit’s sense of ease and of danger at least thrice, and with amusing detail. The greatest catalyst in this transformation is good food and good cheer (some may argue specifically it is good beer). Observe it happening no fewer than three times:

First, in the Hobbits’ decision to quit their room for the common room. This decision, as Tolkien tells us quite plainly, was prompted by the fact that they felt “so refreshed and encouraged” at the end of “three quarter’s of an hour’s steady going” at their supper. A chapter later in his conversation with Strider, and with the advantage of 20-20 hindsight, Frodo acknowledges this choice to have been rather foolish.

Second, in Pippin’s story-telling in the common room. He starts off with a comic account of the collapse of a roof in Michel Delving; and, when greeted by merry applause, is prompted to give an account of Bilbo’s birthday party. As Tolkien says (from Frodo’s perspective): “Pippin was evidently much enjoying the attention he was getting, and had become quite forgetful of their danger. Frodo had a sudden fear that in his present mood he might even mention the Ring.” Remember, it was Pippin who had serenaded the Black Rider earlier in the forests outside Hobbiton.

Third, in Frodo’s attempt to intervene. One would think that Frodo, at least, would be well on his guard, after having seen Pippin let down his. And, in fact, he starts off well by spouting off some nonsense to distract Pippin’s audience, and then responding quickly to a call for a song. The problem is that the course of the song itself, and the applause it arouses at the end, and (no doubt) another drink of ale, and the attempt to make the song merrier and better the second time—all of these distract Frodo from his danger, and lead to the evening’s colossal disaster. Apparently, singing in an Inn is as dangerous as singing in a Forest.

In short, Tolkien moves these particular bends in the plot along by having the Hobbits make mistakes very much in keeping with their amiable and convivial nature as Hobbits. It shows, perhaps, that he is not above exploiting the very characteristics that he makes lovable.