A Reader of Else

And now, it ends. We finish our close reading of The Fellowship of the Ring with chapters VIII – Farewell to Lórien, IX – The Great River and X – The Breaking of the Fellowship, moving from a last little bit of elven sorrow into the next part of the quest.

For this part, as a little celebration, we had our own hobbity snack feast while discussing the chapters, enjoying potato and rosemary sourdough with a variety of cheeses, chutneys, meats and cake, and a large pot of tea. It felt appropriate, and more importantly an entirely delightful way to spend an afternoon. I would highly recommend.

The content of these chapters was somewhat less cheery than our snacking, though.

I don’t want to linger too much on elven sadness here, because I covered that plentifully previously, but there is a reprise of it, and there are some proper banger lines that come with it. I noted before about the uncomfortable conclusions I draw from all the elven sadness and Tolkien’s conservatism. Even knowing that, even having those thoughts so recently in my mind, I could not escape in the moment of reading nonetheless being pulled into feeling the sorrow of the passing of the elves from the world by the power of Tolkien’s prose. When it comes to the things he cares deeply about – and I think at this point it’s obvious that the elves being lost to the world is very much one of them – he’s good at mashing the emotions button with how he chooses to put it down on the page. We get a number of examples here, but I think the one that worked best on me was this, on Galadriel herself:

She seemed no longer perilous or terrible, nor filled with hidden power. Already she seemed to him, as by men of later days Elves still at times are seen: present and yet remote, a living vision of that which has already been left far behind by the flowing streams of Time.

What also hit me about this, and the other pieces in this chapter on the passing out of the world of beautiful things, was a connection I had never explicitly drawn before in my mind – how clear this line is between Tolkien and Guy Gavriel Kay’s return in his work to the passage of time and the loss of beauty. I was struck, reading that quote above, with a thought of the mosaic in a chapel we see in two of his books. The first when new, and the second, many years later, of that same mosaic left untended to crumble into ruin, but still with its faded beauty there for someone to see, and to wonder at what once was. This is hardly a stunning or new revelation, by any means, but I am interested that I never quite connected these two particular dots before, especially given that that theme of Kay’s is one of the things I find most effective and evocative in his work. Sometimes things need to be held up to the light in just the right way to catch the brain, I suppose, and this was that particular illumination for me.

The other key thing this chapter highlighted – as Galadriel gives her gifts to the fellowship – is something that has been cropping up in places throughout the book so far, but which is emphasised particularly here and in the next two chapters: the extent to which Aragorn has been picking up kingship by slow degrees through the story.

Galadriel gives him first the gift of a scabbard, but asks if he wants anything more, knowing that they will not meet again in the living world. Though she cannot give him his earnest desire – unnamed, but unsubtly Arwen – what she does do is pass him a a set gem which was left here for Aragorn should he ever pass. Along with it, and more crucially, she says:

‘This stone I gave to Celebrian my daughter, and she to hers; and now it comes to you as a token of hope. In this hour take the name that was foretold for you, Elessar, the Elfstone of the House of Elendil!’

Following which:

Then Aragorn took the stone and pinned the brooch upon his breast, and those who saw him wondered; for they had not marked before how tall and kingly he stood, and it seemed to them that many years of toil had fallen from his shoulders.

With brooch and name, he has shown himself a little more the thing he is fated to be. Just as when he took Andúril, the acquisition of a signifier of his future role makes plain to those around him that he is becoming something else than he has been accustomed to be, and to be seen as. This is kingship as performance – he takes on the mantle and stands, decides, speaks as one who has come into his power – but also as a status that requires physical manifestations, tokens that show his power in the world, but also demonstrate that he has taken the steps and been legitimised in that role by the right powers. In a section rich in nods to Anglo-Saxon historical practices (there’s mead, weaving, cups being shared and the act of gift giving here), it does not seem particularly out of kilter to think that Aragorn’s progression into the role of king also echoes history somewhat.

Which is particularly interesting in a book so clearly fixated on blood and identity¹. Aragorn is king by right because of his unbroken lineage to Elendil. He is of the men of Númenor. These are both incredibly important, and often mark him out as special, even aside from his claim to the throne of Gondor. But, these moments of ritual seem to say, that bloodright alone is insufficient. That bloodright has sat with every ancestor before him back through the line. Aragorn, however, is the one who is doing all these steps and actively taking up the mantle of the kingship – because king is a thing you do, not just a thing you are. So Galadriel’s gift to him – this bestowing of a name that marks him as having reached a step in his fated journey – is part of that performance, a part of collecting about himself the signifiers that mark him, outwardly, as the king he both is and will be.

A little later, having made their way down the river, the Fellowship find themselves at the Argonath, and this comes to the fore as Aragorn marks the connection, and that this is the first time he goes into the land of his birthright under his own, true name:

Frodo turned and saw Strider, and yet not Strider; for the weatherworn Ranger was no longer there. In the stern sat Aragorn son of Arathorn, proud and erect, guiding the boat with skilful strokes; his hood was cast back, and his dark hair was blowing in the wind, a light was in his eyes: a king returning from exile to his own land.

‘Fear not!’ he said. ‘Long have I desired to look upon the likenesses of Isildur and Anárion, my sires of old. Under their shadow Elessar, the Elfstone son of Arathorn of the House of Valandil Isildur’s son, heir of Elendil, has naught to dread!’

And so he has taken up not just the physical tokens of kingship and his name, but his lineage too. Here, in his land, he names his connection and his role, and takes up the pieces of his identity that are past, as well as future.

I had the perhaps fanciful notion – with which Ed was not entirely on board, I will admit – that this progression through the book of his collection of unique, valuable and symbolic items, and now the bestowal of a name and declaration of heritage as he comes into his kingdom, perhaps represents a slow coronation ritual that he undergoes all the way from Rivendell to Minas Tirith. Are the sword and the stone truly so different from the sceptre and the orb? I like this reading, so I shall keep it, even if it might be a little silly.

Regardless of what quite it signifies, it threads through this last piece of the book that the character we met as Strider is Strider no more. Or not only. Frodo is not the only one who has undergone change through this journey.

The other character who stands out in the gift-giving, for rather different reasons, is Gimli. While the others have gifts prepared for them, Galadriel is unsure what a dwarf could possibly want of her. What proceeds comes straight out of Arthurian romance – the request for a strand of her hair to treasure, and to pass down as an heirloom, and a “pledge of good will between the Mountain and the Wood until the end of days”. This hair he describes as surpassing “the gold of the earth as the stars surpass the gems of the mine” – twice over highlighting the signifiers of both dwarves and elves. This whole section – several paragraphs of dialogue – is particularly formal in tone, rich in symbol, and seemingly out of keeping with much of the text. And that is its strength. Tolkien is consciously harking back to a certain type of story, a certain type of request, and his language slips a little into the mode of the thing to better evoke it.

While it does not escape the unpleasant characterisation of the dwarves entirely – Galadriel’s hope for Gimli’s future is “your hands shall flow with gold, and yet over you gold shall have no dominion” – it is an interesting contrast to their portrayal in The Hobbit, where the gold sickness is far more prominent a characteristic. Gimli acting as the romantic hero, the knight errant with his formal courtesy and careful flattery of the high lady, offers another angle on his character, and on the people he represents. Does this assuage the previous racism? Of course not. But it suggests perhaps that Tolkien’s approach in the intervening years may have gained a modicum of nuance.

This connects, unfortunately, to Celeborn’s speech here. As they ready to leave, he offers them boats to take, and indicates that there are those among them who can handle them. He does this by linking them to their people – Legolas can boat because the elves of Mirkwood know their river, Boromir because he is of Gondor, Aragorn because he is of the Rangers. Alone, this feels neither here nor there (and perhaps can be taken as a way of giving the reader some insight into their peoples through them, rather than purely their own skillsets, a little hand gesture of wider worldbuilding), but it is not alone throughout the book, and exists within a lingering tradition (looking at you D&D) of fantasy racial essentialism, where one’s skills, abilities and preferences are determined by one’s race or one’s people. It suggests that, if Legolas can handle boats because he is and elf of Mirkwood, that being an elf of Mirkwood has a homogeneity to its legacy and imprint on its people that seems out of keeping with my experience of the world.

And yet, as Tolkien often does, he goes on to undercut this immediately. After Celeborn speaks, Merry pipes up immediately to say that he, too, knows how to handle boats. Which we, the readers, already know – not all hobbits are wary of water, as we learned before we left the Shire. As above, does this entirely resolve the sense that often comes through in the story that heritage is destiny? No. But it goes some little way to saying that Tolkien allows complexity to exist within it. A complexity that a lot of the works that exist in the fantasy lineage after him entirely fail to incorporate.

So far I’ve been quite heavily focussed on the first of the three chapters, and indeed I think there is a lot in that one worth lingering on. The following two are a return to travelling through the landscape, about which I’ve talked plenty. It is possibly interesting to note that this may be the first truly unpeopled land they go through – even the empty places previously bear witness to those who have lived there before – and also a land they travel past rather than through. They float along the river seeing this wild place, but do not interact with it directly until they reach the borders of Gondor’s hold, and the ruins of a place that once was worked by human hands. The true wilderness, the one that has never borne the touch of people, is a place not worth daring the visit, perhaps.

But while there’s less to discuss, there’s not nothing. One of the key things that crops up again and again through this chapters is the idea that the fellowship are avoiding making a critical decision, and that they are taking an easier way out for as long as possible, and may choose to continue to do so. The decision to go east or west, to journey to Mordor or Minas Tirith, has been and is posed repeatedly. Boromir makes clear his position. But Aragorn and Frodo seem undecided, and reluctant to make the choice at all.

That Tolkien characterises Minas Tirith as the easy path – and he lingers on the idea that they could find respite there for a time to emphasise this – feels like an interesting choice. We’ve been with these people long enough now to start thinking of at least some of them as heroes. But that does not mean they are infallible, and cannot be tempted into avoiding the harder and more dangerous things before them. There’s no sense of blame in it, and Minas Tirith has been proferred as a legitimate and reasonable option throughout. But it now starts to build that this isn’t the right path, foreshadowing a choice to come.

And, of course, foreshadowing Boromir’s part in Frodo’s choice. His determination to go to Minas Tirith has been peppered through the last few chapters, and arises more and more here. But what now builds with it is his belief that the Ring, and its bearer perhaps, ought to be going with him. This culminates in a slow and, to my mind very well crafted, scene in which he first attempts to persuade Frodo and then eventually snaps, and tries to take the Ring from him, before awakening from his madness to regret.

That he will be overtaken by his wanting in spite of reason or wisdom has been well foreshadowed, and his arguments become sinister as he makes them. But one line stands out to me against the backdrop of these:

‘And they tell us to throw it away!’ he cried. ‘I do not say destroy it. That might be well, if reason could show any hope of doing so. It does not. The only plan that is proposed to us is that a halfling should walk blindly into Mordor and offer the Enemy every chance of recapturing it for himself. Folly!’

And… well… is he wrong? What has he seen so far of Frodo that would lead him to believe that he could undertake this monumentally dangerous journey? It is absolutely clear that he has been overcome by desire for the power of the Ring, it’s true. But there is a seed of reason at the heart of it, just as there is a seed of good aims, a drive to do the right thing, that has been twisted into this rapacious wanting.

There are two mirrored scenes that this connects to. The first is Galadriel a few chapters back, when Frodo offers the Ring up to her. Like Boromir, she is motivated by pure desires, wanting to take down their enemy, drive him and his power from the land. But unlike Boromir, she knows that the Ring will take this desire and twist it, and that if she used its power, it will end with her twisted too, a dark queen, rotted out by the use of a power that cannot be trusted. And so she refuses and passes the test. Boromir, who has repeatedly been shown to be very set in his beliefs about how the world works, how the Enemy can be defeated, what is worth doing and by whom, cannot see himself out of those trammelled views and so is captured in the Ring’s siren song, and seeing Aragorn, or himself, as the wielder it needs to call up the Men of Gondor to ride against Sauron.

Which brings us to the other mirror – Aragorn. When the rest of the party realise Frodo is missing, they determine that they must stop him leaving, they must find him, they musn’t let him go. But Aragorn alone pauses to wonder, maybe the decision should be left to Frodo, maybe they should just let him make it and go.

On the face of it, this seems slightly mad. To let a hobbit, someone who doesn’t have particular training or experience alone in the wilds, make such a vital and dangerous journey alone seems bonkers. But it sits in opposition to Boromir’s rational concern that turns to trying to exert his own will on the situation. His concern may be a reasoned one, but his actions are ill. Aragorn’s willingness to let Frodo go alone seems out of kilter with the facts as we know them, but demonstrates a quality he shares with the others we have been shown are wise so far in the story: openness to possibility. Maybe this situation isn’t one for big armies and men with swords. Maybe a hobbit can be the thing they need. Maybe something else, something different, something new.

And we have seen in previous chapters that, like Frodo and Gandalf, Aragorn too sometimes can connect to the knowledge of the world outside of himself, gain wisdom and feelings of the shape of the narrative that are beyond him. He was the one, when they went into Moria, who felt something about Gandalf’s impending fate. Perhaps his connection to that sense of fate drives him here.

Boromir is not open – not to possibilities outside of his experience, nor to the touch of that Unseen World and its knowledge. His is constrained by his worldview, and that is his undoing. He progresses from gentle persuasion, to bullying, to physical threat, and fails in the ideal of himself he holds to be true. The Ring has driven him to it, yes, but as we see through the story up to this point, it works on what was already there at least in part. And so the conversation between them feels all the more real because it draws so heavily on character work done on Boromir throughout the story so far.

It also makes plain that, as has been hinted before, Frodo already had made the decision to head to Mordor. Looping back to that theme of avoidance, he knew his desire to go to Minas Tirith was “the way that seems easier” and “refusal of the burden that is laid on [him]”. The conversation with Boromir serves then not only as his character journey, but an externalising of Frodo’s decision-making, where the decision is not go or stay, but to bring himself to actually do the thing he knows he needs to do. The threat Boromir suddenly presents forces him to make the decision he had fully made, to act on his instinct to do the right thing.

Which brings him, in his flight while wearing the ring, up the hill of Amon Hen, the Hill of the Eye of the Men of Númenor. Whether because of some innate power of the hill or his access to the Unseen World as ringbearer, this position gives Frodo a sudden escape from his singular viewpoint and a grasp of the wider scope of the story – out to many of the other players in the game like Isengard, Rohan, and Minas Tirith, and out further to Mirkwood and the land of the Beornings and Harad. Right here, at the end of the story, he grasps the full scale of what’s at stake and what turns towards this great problem. And as he does so, as he stands on the Hill of the Eye, his is matched and mirrored himself by the Eye of Sauron, who becomes aware of his gaze looking out across the world, and reaches out power and focus to find him. At this point, he feels conflicting voices within himself, whether the seduction of the Ring and his own wisdom and will, or perhaps the influence of Sauron and some other, more kindly force (my read on this is that perhaps it is Gandalf), and chooses to take off the Ring and step out of sight just in time. And then, finally, he is resolved to do what he must.

This ending, with two powers looking out from their respective high places, I can’t help but think of as a little foreshadow of what’s to come in the next book, as well as an effective (if not awfully subtle) demonstration of the good and evil working in the world and in the story. All that is left is for Sam to find him and resolve to accompany him, and the story is ended.

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But because this is the last session for the book, this is not where my thoughts end – I have some general wrap ups to do as well².

In no particular order, the things that linger with me from rereading The Fellowship of the Ring with such a close focus are:

How much the fandom conception of it, the way it is generally talked about in discussions I see, differs from the reality of my experience of it as a text, in many ways. The one that stands out most strongly is the criticism often thrown that there is SO MUCH poetry to be skipping, for the people who don’t like it. Now that I’ve finished, I’m struck by the opposite – how little there seems to be in comparison to all the grumbling. Like many big touchstones, the version of the text that lives in the popular imagination does not always resemble the thing itself. I’ve been watching some Star Trek recently, and the comparison that seems apt is how fandom’s view of Captain Kirk, iterated over and over into a caricatured version of whatever consensus was once reached, no longer seems to map to the character as one experiences him in his context. Likewise, this text, especially in light of the effect of the films, does not entirely map onto the thing I see discussed frequently, and I think I need to hold that thought in mind, to remember the text as the complex, textured, often beautiful thing it is to my mind.

This is especially true for how open, fluid and slippery the story is willing to be, and how open to metaphorical readings rather than literal. These are both things I deeply appreciate in texts, and both things that are often missing from Tolkien’s subsequent imitators. I must not judge the book by what came after it, and must remember that not all those later works took the same key things I found in the books away with them. Where I value that complexity, fluidity and abstractness, they may have lingered on perhaps the arc of the epic, or the worldbuilding.

Which is another big thing I hold onto now I’ve finished. There is the common view that Tolkien is a worldbuilder before all else, that he wrote a story to give people to speak his made up languages and live in his made up world. That… is not my experience of him reading now. As I said in one of the previous sessions, I think instead the heart of his work is the recreation of something in the region of… not quite theme. Perhaps the sense, the feeling of a certain type of ancient story, evocation of the spirit of a type of myth. The worldbuilding, the language, the maps, all of those concrete pieces feel to me as tools that bend to this ultimate goal, rather than ends unto themselves, and I think that is what makes the story what it is. The worldbuilding is indeed rich and dense and beautiful, but it is purposeful, and it needs that purpose to be as good as it is. This is my belief now, and one I shall hold close, and fight for.

My last thought, the one that stuck out to me today as we were discussing our final thoughts, is a wider one. Reading Tolkien of course prompts wider thoughts about Fantasy as a genre, because of its position within the canon and the megatext. One of the things I’ve been thinking about recently is the idea of SFF as being defined as a genre in conversation with itself – the texts that draw upon one another to form a corpus. Reading The Fellowship of the Ring now, seventy years after its original publication, makes clear to me how little of that genre is in direct conversation with this specific text anymore. Maybe in dialogue with the works several iterations down the chain of conversation. Maybe in conversation with Tolkien and his work as a set of ideas. But the work on the page, here, feels no longer close to the fantasy I read published now. And if that’s so, if that gap has widened out, how much does that definition of SFF hold true? We’ve marched on, into new places. The lens of the now has shifted away from the things this one guy cared about, his love of walking, his obsession with landscape, the way he thinks about good and evil, the way he uses language. The legacies are still there, of course, but this text and its legacies no longer feel so close as they once might.

That definition of genre is one that doesn’t quite work for me. Finishing this close reading is just giving me another angle to pick at it from, another way it does not fit the nebulous shape of how I want to think about genre that is, slowly, forming. It’s not there yet. Maybe it never will be fully. But the process of thinking about it is a productive one, just as the process of coming back to this text, this strange, beautiful, uncomfortable, difficult, fascinating text, is.

There is an awful lot here to linger on, to pick at, word by word, between two people who want to dig into the depths of it. Reading a text like this, one that has the richness and complexity to support that unpicking, is a joy, even when not all to be found is good. I think the process is making me a better reader, and it has brought me closer to a text I once found impenetrable. I have finally, with help, in wonderful ongoing conversation, got under its skin. Even if I’m not sure about SFF as a genre in conversation with itself, it is within conversation about and within it that I find myself most enriched by its works and its ideas. That conversation is, for me, the best of reading.

1. Discussed previously, still uncomfortable. ↩︎
2. This is turning into a long one, and I apologise, but I think it was clearly inevitable that this was going to happen. ↩︎

The penultimate episode of our close reading brings us out of Moria, and into Lothlórien, with Chapter VI – Lothlórien and Chapter VII – The Mirror of Galadriel, with a sharp contrast against the preceding Dwarf Time^TM, with Tolkien going two-footed into elves elves elves.

These two chapters are full of some really quite beautiful, evocative descriptive prose, and also not really a whole lot of goings on, when compared with the previous section. Starting with a brief detour for Gimli and Frodo to look into the Mirrormere outside Moria, the events of the chapter are just the journey into Lothlórien, some chats with elves, hiding from some orcs, meeting the Lord and Lady of the wood, and then looking into Galadriel’s mirror. But what it may lack in Happenings, this section more than makes up for in things to think about. Especially if you want to be sad about elves¹.

I, it turns out, do want to be sad about elves. Call me a basic bitch all you want, but elves are just cool! They look good, they lean all the way into their ridiculous aesthetic, they get to mope about lamenting their immortality and dispensing wisdom, drop banger poems and, if we’re lucky, turn up to save the day on their jingle jangle horse². And, beating the same drum again as I have all book, they’re kind of fairies. And I fucking love fairies in literature. So two chapters of pretty elven tree houses and Portentous Bangers are kind of my happy place.

It’s nice that we got All Dwarf All the Time and then immediately got our elfy chaser. Nice little bit of balance. But Tolkien does a lot of mirroring between those sections, beyond the obvious (though the Mirrormere and the Mirror of Galadriel are right there as a pair). There are a lot of small, paired moments throughout, where Legolas’ romanticism and love for his people and this, the heart of their culture in Middle Earth, echoes Gimli’s sadness at the remnant’s of a once-great dwarven stronghold. Both of them come from a people diminished by time, for whom the great deeds of the past hang heavy over the present. There’s a ramping up, though, from Moria to Lothlórien – Gandalf hints that the time for the dwarves to reclaim their mines was not yet, but every single moment of speech with the elves in these chapters make clear just how inevitable their decline is.

But it is equally clear that Tolkien just… really loves his elves. There’s so much dwelling in these two chapters, so much lingering description of place and nature and the magic of a location that has been deeply infused with elven magic and just the very feeling of it³.

Which unfortunately brings me to my first less-than-ideal moment in these two chapters: the interweaving between people and places. On the surface, it feels easy to embrace Tolkien’s love of connecting his particular peoples with the lands they have been shaped by and shaped in turn. But there’s a specific phrase used in The Mirror of Galadriel:

“Now these folk aren’t wanderers or homeless, and seem a bit nearer to the likes of us: they seem to belong here, more even than Hobbits do in the Shire.”

I find it hard to read this and not read a little into that sense of “belonging” in opposition to those who are wanderers. For all that Tolkien has a relatively complex view of displaced peoples, and definitely not a universally negative one, he also very clearly does value and hold up as some of the most emotively charged pieces of the narrative those who are so thoroughly settled in their homeland that their relationship develops something magical. And it just… does not sit quite as happily for me.

That being said, that magical relationship gets a little lost in the sea of quite a lot of other magical and fey-adjacent content, as happens when you have the concentrated force of sheer elven bullshit going on on the page. When turned up to eleven, the elves really do let show their fairy roots – what is Lothlórien but the fairy lands? The river sings in the voice of a lady long lost, the denizens move silently amid the trees, and the laws of nature are suspended, the seasons upended. Time passes strangely and without measure for the fellowship. The trees remain in leaf through the winter, and a carpet of grass and flowers remains despite being in the full dark of the year. Where, in the rest of the book, the elves seem to be in tune with nature, enhancing it and being enhanced by it, here instead their relationship with it stretches it beyond its natural bounds into something deeply strange. No wonder Boromir is discomfited by being in the woods, even if the rest of the company aren’t.

And this is intensified yet more by the portrayal of Lothlórien – quite explicitly on the page – as an island amid the darkness and power of the enemy (and, less explicitly but I think still fairly obviously, that island in time, a land where the power of the elves has not diminished as it has in the rest of Middle Earth). Now where have we had a description like that before? Yep, it’s Rivendell; Elrond likewise casts it as an island in the darkness of the enemy’s power. Which brings us another of those echoes that seem to be everywhere in these two chapters – Rivendell, the most elvenly elven place we have encountered so far in the story, is being held up in conversation with Lothlórien and being shown as the pale shadow of this, the fiery heart of elvendom.

And again, Tolkien is pretty clear putting this on the page. Throughout the story, elven things have been described with moonlight and starlight, soft, gentle, and welcoming descriptions, pretty, aloof and distantly chill. Even when they are powerful, they feel safe. But those descriptions are upended in the woods, and this is a land described in gold and in sunlight. The leaves, the hair of the lady Galadriel, the warmth and the brightness, they all exceed the gentle descriptors we’ve had up until this point. Is this just an intensifier of those, proving that they are pale shadows of what they once were? I think not. Or not just. I think the key comes back to those aesthetics of good and evil I’ve talked about before, where the cold, pale, white lights sit wholly on the side of goodness. Because the crescendo of these two chapters is the testing of Galadriel, as Frodo freely offers her the One Ring, and she grapples with her desire to wield it, and the knowledge that no matter what good she may start and may intend with it, that good would ultimately be turned to evil. By switching up his aesthetics of goodness here, and centring that switch on Galadriel herself, Tolkien is foreshadowing and intensifying her potential to wield this great and terrible power and to be a force to reckon with upon Middle Earth. She is not, herself, evil. And so her aesthetics remain tied to white, to light and to much of those trappings of good we’ve seen so far. But some of it and her realm turns a little, just a little, to the others side of his duality, reflecting her capacity to do the same.

And Galadriel herself is a great centre of another duality – that of the nature of elves themselves. Throughout the story, they have shown the capacity to be both the merry fey of myth, and beings of great power and import (though mostly each elf as portrayed sticks to one or the other). Galadriel then gives us both. She is the fey queen, the mistress of a land outside time, the embodiment of its sunlight and beauty, one who likes to test travellers in her realm. But she is also the wielder of Nenya, the ring of Adamant, and we get a glimpse – one she tells us she is showing us directly – that the power she wields is something fiercer and harder⁴. As she says to Frodo:

“But do not think that only by singing amid the trees, nor even by the slender arrows of elven-bows, is this land of Lothlórien maintained and defended against its Enemy.”

But just as her chapter ends on her own lessening – physically seeming smaller, as well as her declaration that she will diminish and go into the west – the whole chapter has been here to tell us that the elves as a whole are doing likewise. Have been doing likewise – the “long defeat”, as she calls it.

It’s hard to distance myself as a reader from my knowledge of these stories in a context that includes the films, and also in a context where I just know what’s coming, but I wish I could remember what reading this was like for the first time, and how I would have felt on grasping this idea of the extended but inevitable doom of elf-kind. It’s too laden down with other things for me now, and beyond reach, but I wonder perhaps that I might have come to it differently without a soundtrack and a knowledge of the ending.

In any case, with all these elves and elfy places, we are wholeheartedly back to one of my favourite Tolkien modes – descriptions of place and nature. It’s just a good fucking time, especially when so intense as it is here. And here again, as with both Caradhras and, way back early on, Old Man Willow, he’s dipping into ensouling that place, giving it a sense of… if not quite personhood then at least will. Lothlórien quiets when the orcs move through it, and responds to the presence of those it welcomes. It is deeply imbued with power, and with the stories of the elves who have lived there. There’s a sense of almost apotheosis of place, where something about it becomes so intense that it begins to enact back on the world that shapes it. I can’t quite form that into any kind of meaning, but it’s something I very much enjoy reading, and there’s just something kind of appealing in the idea of a land that can take on a character of its own after a while (even if that character is just “mountain mad at you”).

Unfortunately, there’s another thing that comes to the fore in these two chapters (though it has been laced throughout the book so far) and that is the comedy stylings of Master Samwise Gamgee. They’ve always been there as sort of… tonal punctuation (and I have commented positively previously about how Tolkien uses tonal variation to good effect). But here… I don’t know if I’ve got a little worn out on them through the course of the book, or if there were just a few too many in one place, or if the whole class aspect of who is the joker/butt of the joke is getting a little tired, but I was somewhat impatient with his lines at several points here. I should probably add that the films have never left me particularly sympathetic to Sam⁵, so I’m coming in with some bias, but I tried to keep an open mind while reading because I knew that over-simplicity of character is something the films do suffer from. And equally, I know – I can see very clearly – that a lot of what’s gone into Sam is a bunch of class feelings and background assumptions baked into Tolkien and the time he lived and wrote. But the character that is the output of all of that… I just don’t like him very much. And 366 pages in, I think I can say I did my best to try to be a bit more generous with him but it’s not really bearing fruit.

The moment we dwelled on in discussion was Sam’s own vision of the Shire in the mirror, before Frodo looks. Where Frodo’s visions are more abstract, metaphorical and wide-reaching, Sam’s are very grounded in the material realities of the Shire, and accordingly are very clear and literal in how they come across. He’s seeing events that may be happening at the time he looks, or are in the close future⁶, but this is foreshadowing on Tolkien’s part of story we have yet to see. And that’s fine, I get that part. But I think the differentiation between him and Frodo here is interesting and telling. Tolkien is highlighting that Sam’s concerns turn inward and homeward, and concern events on a personally-applicable level – the felling of a tree, the building of a factory, the ousting of the Gaffer. His concerns are small. Frodo, meanwhile, gets the wide view.

We talked a little about why this might be. Ed offered that, perhaps any of the non-Frodo hobbits might have been portrayed likewise, and that it is Frodo’s distinction of being the ring-bearer that is being made plain here. Or that Tolkien is highlighting how tied Sam is to home, and that his test forces him to grapple with this thing he holds very dear being under threat, but chooses nonetheless to remain with Frodo, in spite of what he has been shown. But I can’t help but linger on the fact that to illustrate this distinction, this focus back and in, away from the grand narrative, it was Sam specifically that Tolkien chose. Why not Merry, whom Elrond threatened to send home in a sack? Why not linger on that connection? Is it class shit again? I am inclined towards this reading of it, because, if in doubt, I am always inclined towards class readings. Tolkien then gives us the respective reactions of the two characters to their visions, with Sam somewhat overcome and Frodo responding stoically and… c’mon, surely you can see a class reading in that too?

Anyway, between that and the jokes, I do find I struggle with the portrayal of Sam, and consequently with my enjoyment of time spent with him as a character. The Return of the King will, I expect, be a struggle in this regard⁷.

And yet again in contrast to all this, these are some chapters where Tolkien gives us some of the most metal lines we’ve had in the whole book so far. My particular favourite is, of course, a portentous Galadriel banger, which runs thus:

“The love of the elves for their land and their works is deeper than the deeps of the Sea, and their regret is undying and cannot ever wholly be assuaged.⁸“

Just… fuuuuck. He knows how to drop lines when he needs to.

This is, then, a pair of chapters full of contrasts and dualities, between elves and dwarves, elves and other elves, good and evil, Frodo and Sam, and plenty else besides. It is a section that gives absolutely gorgeous descriptive prose, and the deep love Tolkien has for living places, and very clearly has for the elves and their sorrows as he has drawn them. But the intertwining of people and place, and indeed a lot about the elves themselves reveals a deep conservatism about the work, embodied in the elves as the last vestiges of a glorious past that dips below the horizon, falling ever further beyond reach of the lesser beings of the present. He sells his vision of them as inherently romantic and sad, and he sells it hard, and it is so, so easy to buy into that (god knows I find myself doing it) by the power of his writing. But I cannot ever quite forget (nor should I) what it all implies when put together and thought through to its end point. Especially when taken in conversation with the characters he gives us and how he chooses to portray them, this section has that biggest duality of all, twinning the best and most compelling of what he can do with language, description and the crafting of atmosphere – there’s a reason so much of Galadriel’s scenes are lifted wholesale into the films – with some of the worst that underlies it, when thought through.

Up next… the closing chapters of the book! Heading out of Lothlórien, to the river and the breaking of the fellowship. As it’ll be our last session, we’re planning to have some hobbity snacks to eat with the session, hopefully with some home baked bread, and then we’ll be done with Tolkien close reading until at the very least after Christmas.

1. If you don’t want to be sad about elves, why are you even reading Tolkien, bro? ↩︎
2. Not today though. I think we’ve seen the last of Glorfindel and I’m kinda sad about it. Haldir, who is here, is MA BOI in the films, but book-Haldir lacks the panache of his horse-riding kindred. ↩︎
3. And flets. He got a lot of use out of that word in a very short time. ↩︎
4. Being slightly fanciful, the thing I wrote in my notes was “adamant wrapped in silk”. ↩︎
5. I have a long-held “Sam would have voted for Brexit” take that I do not recant. ↩︎
6. I’m sure chronology for this exists, I can’t be bothered to look it up. ↩︎
7. Certainly that was the one I struggled with when first reading the trilogy before the films came out, and I have hazy memories of being about 2/3 in and just glazing over as I turned the pages. I would like to hope I’ve grown a little past that but we’ll have to see. ↩︎
8. I haven’t even gone into my half formed thoughts about how absolutely Catholic this section is, and all this stuff about guilt and grief. There is only so much time in the world. ↩︎

Episode six of our close reading takes us through chapters III – The Ring Goes South, IV – A Journey in the Dark and V – The Bridge of Khazad-dûm. In contrast to the last section, a whole lot of doing gets done, and we cover a lot of ground both in geography and plot. We’re also straight back into a number of the themes remarked upon in previous chapters, sometimes with the subtlety of a thrown brick.

As alluded to in the title of this post, the main thing which stood out to me in this section is foresight and an awareness of the world that extends beyond the boundaries of the senses. At various points, all of Elrond, Gandalf, Frodo and Aragorn have a feeling about what is to come, or powers in the world, and voice or act upon it, or in spite of it. More critically, at several points, this foresight is forestalled, and that feels like a bigger insight into its function for Tolkien within the text than its presence ever does.

There are two key pieces for this. The first, from Elrond as they are readying to leave Rivendell:

‘Then I cannot help you much, not even with counsel,’ said Elrond. ‘I can foresee very little of your road; and how your task is to be achieved I do not know. The Shadow has crept now to the feet of the Mountains, and draws nigh even to the borders of the Greyflood; and under the Shadow all is dark to me.’

And the second from Gandalf, as they come to the mountains:

‘We must go down the Silverlode into the secret woods, and so to the Great River, and then —-‘
He paused.
‘Yes, and where then?’ asked Merry.
‘To the end of the journey – in the end,’ said Gandalf. ‘We cannot look too far ahead.’

Both come from characters whom we have seen access knowledge about the world and its nature – and the future, in some ways – beyond the reaches of themself. But it is in the edges of that knowledge that we see what bounds it. For Elrond, it is the power of the enemy, the rise of a force that challenges the dying light of the elves. Rivendell has been described as an island in a sea of rising evil, and this is the evidence of that tide coming in. Where once there might have been certainty, the encroachment of the power of Sauron robs Elrond of that, leaving the errand of the ringbearer up to chance he cannot know. For Gandalf, meanwhile, the boundary is a far more personal one. Whether he knows it or not (I am not certain my belief on this either way¹), his knowledge does not reach beyond the borders of his imminent fall in conflict with the Balrog. Unlike Elrond, his knowledge of the world isn’t in conflict with a specific power that actively obscures, but with his own experience of the upcoming future. I think this says some interesting things about how we are supposed to envisage both of them as pieces of the wider Middle Earth, and their connections to the Unseen World.

But as the two with the greater access to knowledge of the world in this way suffer its limitation, we also see a continued growth of Frodo’s awareness. En route to Moria, he senses the evil of the Watcher in the Water, though cannot quite name what he fears. And then within the mine, he begins to sense the greater evil, both behind them and ahead, as well as having sharper sight within the darkness. As he bears the Ring – whose weight he likewise is beginning to feel with a sense beyond senses – he is being pulled into this realm of awareness that is usually the province of those far more magical than he is.

What seemed clear to me, across all of these, as well as the more third person description of the Balrog as we first encounter it:

What it was could not be seen: it was like a great shadow, in the middle of which was a dark form, of a man-shape maybe, yet greater; and a power and terror seemed to be in it and to go before it.

Is that Tolkien has given some key characters access to a sense of the essence of things, people and the world, as well as their influence upon the world and moral valence. Watsonian-ly, this feels apiece with what we’ve already been told of the Unseen world. But in a more Doylist sense, I really like this as a way to give the reader a very ready shorthand to understand how key conflicts and entities fit into the wider shape of Middle Earth. He does not need to break out of the flow of text to turn to the reader and tell us – instead we can experience the exposition with the characters, through their access to the fundamental nature of the world. It just feels a very neat way of handling context. It also means this section was absolutely rampant with foreshadowing which, given it’s a pretty ominous couple of chapters that ends with a dramatic(ally bad) moment, seems pretty apt.

Hand in hand with that limitation of power, we’re back with a vengeance into the sense of a world fallen from past glory. Not only are the great powers faltering – and indeed Gandalf himself is just as prone to this, having forgotten some of the words of power – but the story takes us across lands abandoned, whose very stones lament for the elves that passed out of them. Likewise, the inscriptions on the doors of Durin make clear (as does Gandalf) that they were made in a time of openness, trade and movement, in contrast to the darkness, empty landscape and paranoia of the story’s present. We know already about the time of the elves passing, but this is the first sense of a wider idea that events and people have a time. Specifically, Gandalf remarks on the folly of Balin attempting to reclaim Moria, for it is not yet time for that. There is a schedule to these things, and his foolishness was not in his aims, but in contravening the march of fate across the world. Whatever happens in the smaller moments in the story, Tolkien is telling us clear that some things are built into the fundamentals of the system.

But, while the old powers of good seem to be waning, by contrast this section introduces a number of older powers from deep places or past times who are somewhere from malevolent to evil and seem entirely full of the strength to impede the Fellowship. First of these is Caradhras, the mountain, which is determined not to let them pass. There’s a little ambiguity in the text just quite how much this is the actual intent of the mountain, but I quite enjoy reading it as literal – it’s a natural world already plenty embodied, so what’s one more?

This is closely followed by the rather more direct onslaughts of the Watcher in the Water – which is far creepier than the films, if only for the description of one of the tentacles as “fingered”, a deeply cursed adjective in context which I hope never to encounter like that again – and the Balrog at the crescendo of the section. The Balrog scene is obviously a big culmination; I’d forgotten quite how directly the film lifts this section almost word for word and beat for beat. But it’s not hard to see why. Through the encounters with Caradhras, the wargs and then the Watcher, as well as the looming threat inside Moria, Tolkien has steadily been ramping up the tension. When that tension finally crests, and the Balrog in its shadowy, fiery, possibly-wingèd² ferocity looms over the party, we’ve been primed to react to the drama of it, and Tolkien delivers some of his sexiest prose in the shadow, the fire, and Gandalf’s stand against it. He’s allowed himself to go full epic, and he is just good at that.

What also helps to sell this is something that, again, has been running throughout the whole of the book but which has really come to the fore in this section: the aesthetics of evil. This time, it’s laser focused in on a couple of particular aspects of it – light and shadow, hot and cold and colour. Whether it’s the blood-red slopes of Caradhras, the shadow and flame of the Balrog, the exhale of smoke from the door of Moria behind them, or the fiery cleft in the very floor of Durin’s halls, Tolkien has a coherent picture of evil here, a touchstone of darkness and flame to which he keeps returning. And, in opposition to it, an equally coherent view of the power that resists it – light, white and consistently cold. Glamdring, Gandalf’s sword, is described in its cold light multiple times in this chapter, and it is that cold light that opposes the Balrog. Tolkien has, not even particularly subtly, been priming us for this elemental opposition for several chapters. Goodness comes from the cold light of the moon and stars (the stars which the elves love), and it’s a visual he just cannot help but come back to. This is simply the payoff of that obsession.

It is also a moment when those aesthetics most lend themselves to a Christian picture of the world. A creature of evil and flame from the depths you say? It’s giving devil, and is more than helped by the vision of a red star in the sky that made Ed think of Pern, but nudged me somewhat more towards Lucifer. There’s a heaven and hell vibe and a half to the conflict between Gandalf and Balrog, after all. But at the same time, this is a somehow deeply pagan section too – fuller than many with the embodiment and personhood of the natural world. Why choose when you can do both at full throttle, eh JRRT?

But as he’s been doing all along, this isn’t a section that commits to that full throttle in a single tone all the way. Part of why the build up to a dramatic fight works is that he keeps up the tonal variation with some excellent comedy moments: Boromir³ swimming to create a path through the snow, Gandalf and Legolas having a sassy little bitch off, hobbits being hobbits and yearning for a dining room and indeed the habitual class-laden comedy stylings of master Gamgee. But it is also here that it becomes clear how else Tolkien manages tone in dramatic conflict moments: by choosing how much of them to actually write. There are three critical fight scenes in these chapters, and in all three he follows a similar pattern of writing a dramatic opener, which possibly includes the first foray into the fight, and then summarising the rest of the conflict in a shorter piece of text. In the initial fight with the orcs in Moria, this shorter piece is essentially a single paragraph. It means that he manages the tone of the engagement through the opening piece and dictates how we want to view its focus, but never lets the text wallow in a blow by blow account in a way that might let the emotional throughline trail off. As someone who never likes reading fight scenes, I’m extremely here for it, but it’s an interesting contrast to his approach to e.g. walking, where he piles it on and on. But he clearly loves the walking. Maybe he just isn’t interested in writing fights. But if so, his focusing on only what he actually cares about still leaves us with a good pacy text where it could so easily have been bogged down.

And of course, while we’re on walking – we missed out on it in the last two chapters while loafing about in Rivendell, but now we’re back out in the world JRRT is chucking it in in spades. But as per usual, I don’t hate it. Even more than usual, the walking here (and the preparation for walking) are a lingering on the practicalities of traversing an open world. Months are spent in Rivendell as scouts go out and return, which all passes in a couple of passages, and then many miles and days on the road to get to the mountains and the mine. Where it was pleasant before, however, the changing of the season has made a significant impact on the hostility of the environment, and as we’ve headed out into the epic, so too have we headed out into a journey that is more characterised by struggle.

Though not unrelentingly. There are still the usual plentiful bits of gorgeous descriptive prose, of lights and fires and landscapes, interspersed with the increasingly creepy emptiness of Hollin that walks us up the path into the right emotive state for Moria. The two alternate fantastically, and he never lets us linger too long in one feeling before bringing up the seesaw with the other. Whatever evil there is, in the world and in this place particularly, it cannot erase the beauty fully. I lingered for a little while on the image of the two enormous holly trees that flank Durin’s doors, dwarfed by the enormity of the cliff behind them but imposing once approached.

My favourite visual moment, though, comes inside Moria, when Gandalf briefly illuminates a hall in the darkness thus:

He raised his staff, and for a brief instant there was a blaze like a flash of lightning. Great shadows sprang up and fled, and for a second they saw a vast roof far above their heads upheld by many mighty pillars hewn of stone. Before them and on either side stretched a huge empty hall; its black walls, polished and smooth as glass, flashed and glittered. Three other entrances they saw, dark black arches: one straight before them eastwards, and one on either side. Then the light went out.

It’s not just the capture of a moment of visual – though that’s great too – but the sense of it as fleeting, as the light drives away the shadows, and then they rush to return, that makes this wonderful.

This is, of course, all part of showing the first bit of the dwarven world in the book (the “vastness of the dolven⁴ halls”), and it is by turns beautiful and deeply sad. While the light of the elves may be fading, this is a place not only lost, but recovered, and then lost again to an evil risen from the depths. The brevity of Balin’s time there, as attested in the patchy journal discovered and read, makes it all the sadder likewise, and is crowned by the stunning visual of his tomb illuminated by a single shaft of light from a high window.

The last thought I want to linger on from this section is the one I think was the most moving for me, but also the one I am still most unsure about my thoughts on.

At the start of the section, as they ready to leave Rivendell, Pippin puts himself and Merry forward to accompany Frodo (indeed, insists upon it). Elrond is doubtful of his use in the quest, but is talked round by Gandalf, who muses on the value of loyalty. Yes, he admits, Pippin probably is ignorant of the danger he faces. But so too, he argues, are most of the rest of the Fellowship really, and indeed, perhaps their loyalty and friendship in spite of (or because of) that ignorance are of greater worth than the aid of a great elf-lord like Glorfindel. The mention of Glorfindel particularly, who has in fact already defeated a Balrog in times past, is an interesting one. When discussing it, we had two thoughts. The first, that Gandalf knows this task cannot be achieved by direct means. They will be overwhelmed if they just try to have it out with Sauron. And so someone like Glorfindel, despite his greatness, “could not storm the Dark Tower, nor open the road to the Fire by the power that is in him”. That’s not how they are going to achieve it, and he’s taking unexpected tools for an unexpected job. But equally, I wonder if this is some War Shit^TM coming through as well. Tolkien has seen the bravery of the ordinary. It’s a theme being picked up again and again. Is Gandalf’s certainty in the value of the hobbits not just another evocation of this?

It’s interesting to have this alongside the confrontation with the Balrog too. Gandalf tells the party to flee, and the hobbits do, as do Legolas – who has recognised immediately what the Balrog is – and Gimli – who immediately know it for Durin’s bane. Only the two men, the ones who don’t have a cultural link into knowledge of what this monstrous thing is, that it is beyond them, stay to fight with Gandalf. Bravery born out of ignorance then? But laudable for that.

And then, feeding into this even more, the parting words of Elrond as they leave Rivendell, in which he lays a charge on Frodo as the Ringbearer, but demurs from doing so for the rest of the party. Yes, there is already an intention laid that they should split up, so of course they won’t be bound to follow all the way to Mordor. But no oath at all? Again, I am in two minds about this. My initial thought was again, back to War Shit^TM, and to wonder if this is a kindness embodied in Elrond by a man who has seen people’s bravery in safety come up to face an enemy beyond it and falter. Is this grace being given in the knowledge that even someone with the best intentions may stumble when faced with something monstrous? Or, as Ed suggested, is this a callback to Elrond’s knowledge of the sons of Fëanor, and calamity those oaths wrought? Or both. I’m always willing to buy an argument of both. Although it is becoming clear that Ed likes Watsonian arguments and I prefer Doylist ones. I wonder what that says about us⁵.

Either way, I found it a very touching moment, but one that does feed into the sense in this section that Tolkien has a lot of thoughts about what bravery is, and its limitations. Which feels like quite the thing to admit in an epic fantasy, and one I think is not always handled so well in the stories which have followed on.

Which brings us to the end of this section. And hey look – I managed to do a whole one of these without getting bogged down in the verse⁶. It… probably won’t happen again.

Up next, we were planning to tackle the rest of the book in one big chunk (of around 100 pages in my edition). However, since a) this section took us over two hours of discussion and b) these posts have been running LONG, we decided to split it up into two. As such, our next section will take us two chapters into Lothlórien, shifting back to a less haps happening pace, and leaving us with a final three chapters to finish up hopefully before the end of December.

1. Though Aragorn does give us, in his own piece of foresight, this clue: He will not go astray – if there is any path to find. He has led us in here against our fears, but he will lead us out again, at whatever cost to himself. ↩︎
2. I only learnt today about the Balrog wing discourse. ↩︎
3. Probably not worth spending the time for a whole section on it here, but I do enjoy how much in these chapters Boromir comes off as a himbo. ↩︎
4. This sent me, rather. I think this is a step too far even for Tolkien. ↩︎
5. Ok in part what it says is that Ed knows the wider corpus of Tolkien better than I do. But it might be other things too. ↩︎
6. There are a few pieces in this section. All are fairly standardly iambic, and closer to doggerel than Tolkien normally goes. One of them has the feel of a poem for children to memorise to learn things (which is apt in context). Is it because iambic tetrameter? I can think of a lot of kids’ poems in iambic tetrameter. That being said, the two major ones are still extremely sad. ↩︎

The fifth section of our close reading brings us into the start of Book 2, with chapters I – Many Meetings and II – The Council of Elrond. We just tackled two this time, because the second one is a bit of a chonker, at least in content heft (possibly less so in page count).

In terms of actual action, all that really takes place here is Frodo reawakening (at 10 o’clock in the morning on October the 24th, per the meme) in Rivendell, a bit of a feast and a whole lot of conversations. The bulk of the purpose of both chapters, but predominantly the latter, is to fill us in on the goings on in the wider world beyond the scope of the Shire, the depth of the problem at hand, and what comes next, and, tonally, to fully transition the narrative into the full epic it is going to be.

Yes, that means I am doing the big crime, and calling The Last Homely House East of the Sea a liminal space. I’m very sorry and will try to keep it to a respectable minimum, but I do think it’s a defensible position.

Before I go into any specifics, however, I want to highlight that The Council of Elrond is the first time in this reading that I’ve had cause to fault Tolkien as a writer. I don’t like Tom Bombadil, sure, but I acknowledge his place in the narrative and how well he fulfills his purpose, so that was just a taste thing. Here, however… I think there’s a lot of exposition getting crammed into not a lot of space, and the seams are showing a little bit. The chapter just drags. This is especially true for those sections (predominantly belonging to Gandalf) that are conducted in large part as directly reported speech. I’ll admit, on a personal taste level, I hold a particular loathing for the type of storytelling one encounters in daily life where someone recounts “So I says to him… and then he says to me… so I says to him…” and so on. But it’s not just a me problem. So far in the story, a lot of the worldbuilding, lore, and other accoutrements going on have been pretty well synthesised with the movement of the story – things occur seemingly naturally as the hobbits encounter them in the world, and are never overburdened with explanations. The world is given texture by snippets of explanation or storytelling, and indeed by the verse inclusions (which we will come back to later¹), but as part of the way JRRT manages tone throughout, they never linger. The Council of Elrond is one big, lingering exposition bomb. There’s no real way around it.

It’s not wholly awful – the way he brings in different characters from the different parts of his world and different backgrounds is a great way of demonstrating meaningfully the true scope of the problem Middle Earth faces, in a way that hasn’t truly been clear before, as well as giving us a real sense of their differences. I enjoyed that. Boromir and Legolas and Gloin and Bilbo and Elrond all do speak and conduct themselves distinctively. Elrond, particularly, has a very clear voice that I realised how well was actually conveyed in the films. But in terms of information that needs to be conveyed… I think it’s some of his weaker writing so far. At times, it descends into full blah blah blah proper name, place name, backstory stuff, like so:

I rode away at dawn; and I came at long last to the dwelling of Saruman. That is far south in Isengard, in the end of the Misty Mountains, not far from the Gap of Rohan. And Boromir will tell you that that is a great open vale that lies between the Misty Mountains and the northmost foothills of Ered Nimrais, the White Mountains of his home. But Isengard is a circle of sheer rocks that enclose a valley as with a wall, and in the midst of that valley is a tower of stone called Orthanc. It was not made by Saruman, but by the men of Númenor long ago; and it is very tall and has many secrets; yet it looks not t be a work of craft. It cannot be reached save bvy passing the circle of Isengard; and in that circle there is only one gate.

I want to make it clear that my objection isn’t that any of this “isn’t necessary”. What does that even mean, really? Another essay entirely. Everything is precisely as necessary as everything else in a piece of fiction. What I do think is the problem however is that in giving all this density of information, much of which has not been previously contextualised, the pace of the storytelling is slowed down, which runs counter to the mounting feeling in the chapter that all of this stuff is very important and time sensitive. If one wanted context, one could, I suppose, go look at the map² in the front of the book, but as a piece of text otherwise it’s just very opaque. Some of it is about to be contextualised (especially who Saruman is and his importance to the story), but much of it not, or not for a good while. For the moment, it’s just… texture, but of a less elegant type than Tolkien has thus far been providing.

Maybe he’s just trying to make clear that Gandalf is a rather verbose storyteller. If so, he achieves that with bells on, I suppose. But I don’t like it.

But even aside from Gandalf, all this exposition essentially amounts to a group of speakers speedrunning the reader through an entire age of Middle Earth’s history, and that’s just… a lot. This story has its roots far back in the mists of time, and JRRT wants us to know that (by god he does), but I think he has, in this rare instance, leaned a little too heavily in on it.

Anyway! Aside from that gripe, I do think there’s a lot to dig into in this section, though not much of it that forms an overarching theme as we’ve had in other places, possibly as a result of quite how much content does need to be got through in not a vast number of pages.

I’ll start off with liminal Rivendell, to get it out of the way. Up until this point, the amount of danger faced by the hobbits has been growing – we’ve seen the increasing intrusions of this epic narrative onto the story, especially once they meet Strider – but Rivendell I think presents a doorway through which the characters must walk to become a part of that epic. It is here we learn quite how deep the roots go, quite how big the stakes are, and it is only by Frodo choosing to take up the burden of the Ring that he progresses from the reduced scope dangers of the early story into the full, wide world³. We are very much not in Hobbiton anymore – farewell domesticity; hello great deeds. And so, The Council of Elrond, where Frodo is presented with all of the information to see what a burden he carries and the length of the road it needs to travel, is the door, but Many Meetings before it is the farewell.

It’s an indulgent chapter, in the best possible way, full of verse, lush descriptions of the House of Elrond and its current inhabitants, and much storytelling and poetry. There is a particularly beautiful section where Frodo is lulled into something near to sleep by the stories and songs around him, and it is hard to tell, in that moment, if the magic being described is something unworldly coming from the elves doing the talking, or simply the magic of oral storytelling itself, a belief I would quite happily ascribe to Tolkien, I think, and one I just rather like myself. Whatever its cause, it is a moment of loveliness, and a brief time of not just safety but comfort, in a world that has become dark, and is about to be a whole lot darker. Truly, the last homely house.

Featured heavily here, unsurprisingly, are, as Ed rather nicely put it, the two genders of elves. To quote Sam, there are “Some like kings, terrible and splendid; and some as merry as children”. That word, “merry”, crops up rather a lot, as does “merrymaking”, and the warmth and comfort is in no small part because of the evident joy coming through from them here. Bilbo even remarks on their obsession with poetry and tales that they like them “as much as food, or more” (banging my “elves are fairies” drum again). We see them teasing, when Bilbo recites a poem about Eärendil and Elwing, we see them making music, laughing, speaking, and being in this place in the world that is theirs, strange and magical to Frodo’s eye. Indeed, there are some moments of beautiful description of Glorfindel, Elrond and Arwen that mark how much they are different and magical, with their ageless beauty and, in the case of the latter two, full of the light of stars^{4 5}.

The shift into the following chapter takes us from “merry as children” into “terrible and splendid”. There are several elves saying various portentous things, but none more so than Elrond, who in this chapter gets to deliver banger after solid banger. Unsurprisingly, many of those were lifted verbatim into the film, so I found myself hearing them delivered in Hugo Weaving’s voice. I don’t mind, exactly – I love Weaving and his performance of the role – but it’s one of the few moments where I’ve been noticeably sad that I don’t have any memory of my experience of this story before I watched the films. It happened. I must have had pictures and sounds in my head. But they have long been washed away by Jackson’s vision of this world, and I don’t think I will ever separate the two, now. No matter how much I think Weaving did a great job with this material (and I do! I really do!), I love Elrond, his character and his many dire pronouncements so much, I would love to be able to recapture my experience of them simply as they are in the text. Not least because he does so much work here, alongside the descriptions of the various elves, to convey just how different elves are as beings than the others around them.

And, as something of a tangent, I find it interesting that, as the post-Tolkien genre has developed, we’ve drawn the lines between these different peoples very differently. In the book so far, it has been very clear to me that there’s a division between elves, the Eldar, a race apart, and all the other, mortal races⁶. However, if I look more generally at both modern fiction and D&D, the dividing line is far more “humans” vs “all the other, fantastical beings”. I don’t really have any thoughts about why that might be, but I do find it an interesting shift, given just how heavily Tolkien leans in on the specialness inherent to elves in his work, and that is being made abundantly clear in this section.

One of the axes of which is a brief dip into talking about the Unseen world, which we’re told elves particularly can just see into, and be within, when discussing Glorfindel’s interactions with the Ringwraiths. In one of the most accurately lifted scenes that make the film from this section (along with Gandalf’s pronouncement of the black speech inscribed in the Ring), Bilbo jumpscares Frodo with a brief shift into a horrible creature that resembles Gollum, before subsiding and admitting that the Ring has passed beyond his grasp. Like the moment on Weathertop when Frodo puts on the Ring, is this an intrusion of that Unseen world into his consciousness, permitted by both Bilbo and his relationship and affinity with the Ring? I don’t know. But for Frodo, it is an access that is only permitted by his proximity to this deeply magical object. For elves, it is simply what they are. A different manner of being altogether.

Not to lean too heavily on comparisons with the film, but there is something else critical to talk about here – Arwen. In these chapters of the book, she appears and is described (in detail) several times. She is obviously beautiful and has a piercing gaze that Frodo remarks upon. But she never speaks. Thus far, I believe the only women in the story who have done so are Goldberry and Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, in fact, and neither of them at great length. Arwen’s role here is, thus far, to sit around looking starry and ethereal. And for all that I enjoy the descriptions of her very much, I’m not a big fan of this from a gender perspective. And so, I do think Jackson’s conflation of her into Glorfindel’s role at the ford, and just giving her a bit more prominence by foregrounding her relationship with Aragorn… makes sense. I like her getting lines. I like her getting to do things⁷. It is… unavoidable, reading it now, how little space there is in the book for women, even when they appear on page. This is hardly a revolutionary observation, but it is what it is.

There is, however, a… not exactly a negative, but a definite loss from the book in this approach, which feeds into a wider thing that I only notice now I’m spending the time in the book – the flattening of the elves generally. If we stick with the “two genders” approach, Jackson only really retains the latter. Arwen is splendid as a king at many points, getting no end of dramatic pronouncements and moody, artistic shots full of portent. Elrond gets his dire statements of doom. Galadriel gets to be ethereal and a bit scary. But none of them are really merry, and even the more comedy leaning moments of Legolas don’t really tend that way. By conflating their roles, Jackson cuts out Glorfindel on his jingle-jangle blinged up horse, and I’m not gonna lie, I think that’s a loss to the complexity of this world.

It’s not just the elves, even. I’ve mentioned in previous sections, but it bears repeating again that Aragorn also loses some of his merriment and mischief, which Many Meetings sees crop up again in his friendship and discussions with Bilbo.

What stands out more, however, in our discussions of Aragorn in this section is his role as king. It’s interesting just quite how up front he is in the story about it – he flat out just tells Boromir the sword will be reforged and he’ll be coming to Minas Tirith. That part of the story is simply not where Tolkien is interested in building tension, and I enjoy very much the variation around things he is quite happy to divulge up front, and where he chooses to let uncertainty and suspense creep in⁸. But because we are talking about Aragorn, about his ancestry and his role in the story to come, that means we have to deal with the unfortunate fact of the blood of Númenor, and the deteriorationist view of history that is endemic to The Lord of the Rings. In this chapter, it is more clearly explained on the page than it previously has been that Aragorn and the Dúnedain are the remnant of the Númenóreans, and Aragorn himself the heir of Elendil. And it is likewise made clear that the Númenóreans are just better than other “lesser men”, and that no matter the many, many generations that have passed since their fall, the blood in their veins still marks them out as other and better. And that is quite uncomfortable reading, I’m not going to lie. It also sits strangely alongside the theme that Frodo and Sam represent of smaller, humbler people being able to do great deeds when they find courage within themselves. I suspect this is something I’m just going to keep coming back to because the two do not fit well together for me.

Still a little uncomfortable, but more interesting is the wider arc of this deteriorationist view of history. Mythologically, it’s a common approach – we need only look at the myth of the ages⁹ in Ancient Greece for a comparator, for instance, and no end of literature the world over convinced that things were better in the age of our grandfathers, when everyone did the rituals they were supposed to and were good and righteous, not like kids today – but it’s interesting seeing it crop up in a work at the time Tolkien was writing, when, I think, it had become a little more common to see the arc of history as bending towards progress¹⁰ than typical in a lot of older literature. Is this Tolkien being a historian (not improbable)? Is this a man disillusioned at the idea of progress because of The War (also believable for me)? Or something else? I don’t know, but again, I think a productive space for thought. But when paired with the above, both the inherent specialness of the elves (whose time is passing) and the erosion of the power and presence in the world of the blood of Númenor… what is this saying about the state of the world, and which powers in it make things good? Especially knowing the role Aragorn and his return to the throne of Gondor will play? It’s all just, yeah, really quite fucking uncomfortable.

Much less uncomfortably, however, is the insight we get of Saruman and his fall from goodness, in which Tolkien is convinced that spending too long interacting with the cursed texts is gonna get you good and cursed along with them, which feels like a depressingly apt observation for our own times. Equally, the lingering of the various speakers in The Council of Elrond on how the problem they face cannot – should not – only be postponed for a future generation to deal with, but must be resolved once and for all, given that previous postponements of Sauron’s rise to power have now come back to bite them. And while this is a good and equally applicable message, what it also brings is the enjoyable vibe of Glorfindel, keeno and problem solver, having his every suggestion shot down by Team Doom and Gloom, Elrond and Gandalf. The jingle jangle elf just wants to help but apparently “chuck it in the sea” isn’t the solution. Everyone’s a critic.

I’m not sure that part was actually meant to be funny, but I found it so. I think I just find Glorfindel hilarious now¹¹. There were, however, a selection of lols that did, eventually, break up the tone of solemnity of the council, predominantly in Bilbo enquiring after snack breaks. As Ed put it, Bilbo is still in The Hobbit, even if no one else is, and he’s quite right. I think that, coming in at the end of The Council of Elrond as it does, really underscores that shift into the new mode of the story into which Frodo is about to embark. Also Saruman’s raimant has now shifted to rainbow – a sequence in which Tolkien very much wants us to know he understands how prisms work – and his grandiosity is rather undercut by Gandalf’s simple pronouncement that he “liked white better”.

And finally, the verse again. I really am finding myself lingering over them as I’m reading this time, scanning them, thinking about alliteration and rhythm and rhyme, and I think I do just need to spend some time reading up on the type of verse Tolkien will have been drawing on to make them. They are grabbing so much of my attention, I want to put the work in to get to grips with them better, just because I know juuuust enough to see how much more depth there is to burrow into. I have some ideas of where to start, and it may take a while, but if anyone has any recommendations for resources on Tolkien, verse and how it interacts with historical verse, I’d be very interested, especially if it’s willing to go into lots of detail. But even without that depth of knowledge, there are some wonderful pieces in this section, not least a reiteration of Bilbo’s rhyme about Aragorn, and a verse that comes to Faramir and Boromir in a dream which prompts Boromir’s journey to Rivendell. It is that verse – which is a very odd duck to all the tools I have to look at it – more than any that makes me think I need to learn more. And which makes me think the doing so will be a rewarding task.

Next up, we venture south, and then into Moria.

1. If you’re a Tolkien poetry hater (or worse, a skipper), I think it’s safe to say I’ve made it clear we don’t agree on that point. I am going to keep talking about it in these. I am not sorry. ↩︎
2. A thing I will literally never do when reading. I look when I first open the book and marvel at it as an aesthetic object, but I will never refer to it mid-story. I’m not starting now. ↩︎
3. Yes, I did just read “Diana Wynne Jones and the Portal-Quest Fantasy” by Farah Mendlesohn in Diana Wynne Jones: The Fantastic Tradition and Children’s Literature why do you ask? ↩︎
4. In two successive paragraphs, Tolkien particularly uses the stars as description reference points for first Elrond and then Arwen. I wondered if this was intended to echo their relationship with Eärendil and his silmaril crossing the sky, but Ed thinks it’s just marking out the light of the Eldar and the beings who were first under the stars. ↩︎
5. He also gives us a very interesting description of Gandalf, whose eyes burn like coals, and I can’t quite fit this anywhere in the main discussion but it’s just so good when JRRT really flexes his “make it dramatic” descriptive muscles. ↩︎
6. Plus a few weird exceptional beings, like Gandalf. But I’m talking in the generalities here. ↩︎
7. And giving us one fewer character to keep track of isn’t the worst decision. ↩︎
8. Also I very much enjoy that at at least three points in The Council of Elrond he just declares he’s skipping over a bit of exposition (because we already experienced it, because it was in the Hobbit, and because Elrond has written it down elsewhere, respectively). More books should take that rather meta and blunt approach to exposition, I feel. ↩︎
9. Which Hades 2 has me thinking about a lot recently. ↩︎
10. Not that that’s a wholly better view of it all or anything. ↩︎
11. Not at all helped by a Tiktok of someone talking about reading the books to her children who did a French accent for Glorfindel, and now deeply regrets it because he’s the children’s favourite character. I did inflict comedy French Glorfindel on Ed and I am not sorry for it. ↩︎

In this fourth section we cover another three chapters: X – Strider, XI – A Knife in the Dark and XII – Flight to the Ford, bringing us to the end of Book 1. One sixth of the way through LotR, assuming we don’t tackle the appendices¹.

This section including a fair amount of talking, followed by some genuinely quite pacy parts, alongside the mandatory walking segments, culminating in some honest-to-god action.

There are two heralds who proclaim these changes to the tone/pace of the narrative, the first of which is, as the chapter header tells us, Strider in The Prancing Pony in Bree. Initially mistrusted, though not for long, Strider is immediately interesting because he brings with him an intrusion of the epic into the story. We’ve had weirdness and magic, but Strider brings Drama and Gravitas and Scope. He knows about the Enemy, and other things that warrant extraneous capital letters. And gets a whole crop of absolute banger lines, because he gets to show up with an amount of wider knowledge about the world, history and the state of the imminent conflict, and so he can use all of those to be portentous as fuck. And I love that for him.

Once again, I cannot help but compare him to his appearance in the films, and I find both his slipperiness and his… almost cheekiness in the book endearing. His dialogue is just genuinely fun! Chapter X is a slow one, and full of back and forth conversations, which gives a bit more space for doubt, distrust and even some banter that the speed necessitated by the pace of the film version simply does not allow for, even if the rough shape of the scene here is the same. Even within a couple of pages of meeting him, he’s a complex, developed character with contrasts and depths beginning to show, and that only increases as we walk with him towards Rivendell.

In some ways, he also represents a… well, not an end-point, I suspect, but a significant waypoint in the journey out of the Shire and the intrusion of the world beyond, with all its problems, into the lives of the hobbits. While the journey so far hasn’t been safe or hazard free, the wider scope of the problems to be faced in the book has been shaded out. With all his capitalised nouns and talk both of the Enemy and of the history that led to this point (in snippets), Strider’s inclusion forces the narrative to start filling out that scope.

This is only emphasised by the beginning of Chapter XI, in which the lens of the story briefly swings back to Buckland, where Fredegar Bolger is menaced at Frodo’s house by some of the Black Riders – those dangers which have been skulking in the Shire now make themselves known as an active threat, and the horns are blasted and the call of danger put out – the problem cannot be ignored any longer. And this sound echoes in Frodo’s once-again-portentous dreams.

The story then slips back into our old favourite, walking time. I mock, but with love. I am finding on this reading so far that I truly do love Tolkien best in his walking sections, and this one is no different – as the danger has increased, so too does the landscape become less hospitable, but the descriptive prose doesn’t falter. The lines that particularly stood out to me in this section tended to be moments of rest between marching, as Tolkien gives us a number of snapshots of Strider under starlit or fire glow, telling stories or watching or smoking, the attention of the prose signalling, just as Strider’s own dialogue has, the significance he is going to have on the plot going forward. But it’s so often rooted, here, in light and shadow, and especially stars. And, knowing a little about the wider appendices, the later parts of the story and general info, I am primed to think those references to stars are not just Tolkien leaning into his dark/light dichotomy (which we’ll come back to dubiously in a moment), but on Arwen and her lineage, and other stars in the history of both the elves and the men of the West. There are also several descriptions, particularly of Weathertop and its broken stones ringing the peak, that call to mind crowns, (because we’re not being subtle here). Whatever their import, though, these sections of description are just lovely to linger in:

As Strider was speaking they watched his strange, eager face, dimly lit in the red glow of the wood-fire. His eyes shone, and his voice was rich and deep. Above him was a black starry sky. Suddenly a pale light appeared over the crown of Weathertop behind him. The waxing moon was climbing slowly above the hill that overshadowed them, and the stars above the hill-top faded.

It’s not ornate or particularly purple, but it is effective in its use of the contrasting lights and their effect on the scene, simple pieces that sit together and craft a vivid image of a scene in that darkness. It is then very shortly followed by an attack from the Black Riders, and that emphasis on light and shadow comes straight back to the fore, when Frodo puts on the Ring and sees through the cloaks of shadow on the Riders to see what lies beneath – “terribly clear”, “white faces” in which “burn keen and merciless eyes” and topped with “helms of silver”, and one of whom – I assume the Witch King himself, because I do know this story – his hair “gleaming”, and whose sword and the hand that holds it “glowed with pale light”. Tolkien’s aesthetics of evil (again, I will come back to this) may predominantly focus on shadow, darkness and blackness, but in this section of light and dark, there is a switch into light as clarity as much as goodness. Putting on the Ring lets Frodo see, for the first time, what they are truly dealing with, and that light is a cold fire, where only one page previously we’ve been languishing in the gentle warmth of fire and stars.

After Weathertop – and a fight much less long or dramatic than its cinematic counterpart – begins Frodo’s slow decline from his injury at the hands of the Witch King. Again, the space granted to it in the book gives it more complexity than the franticness of the film. Yes Frodo is hurt, yes he’s weakening, but they still have days of travel to get through, and in this time his condition is one of peaks and troughs, rather than an immediate plummet. It gives time not only for Strider to give us more lore in healing plants brought to Middle Earth by the Men of the West – texture for a world long lived in as well as more hinting at his own place in it all – but for some little call backs to The Hobbit, and Bilbo’s encounter with the trolls. Which is nice in and of itself, but it’s a moment of tonal respite, which have continued to occur throughout this section because Tolkien knows the flow works better if it’s not just grim piled on grim. Yes, they are afraid and cold and hungry, but they can still joke about the midges and sing a silly song about trolls, because that’s the authentic experience of tramping through the cold and the wet. It’s just what people do, and these walking scenes continue to be a great vector for conveying this cast of characters as genuine people.

But Frodo does decline, and their struggles through the landscape to get to Rivendell eventually bring us to our second harbinger of change: Glorfindel.

Reading this second meeting with an elf, my response to the text splits. On the one hand, he is another play with that light and darkness theme, who appears, at least to Frodo, as though “a white light was shining through the form and raiment of the rider, as if through a thin veil”. Is this light as clarity or light as goodness? ¿Por qué no los dos? But alongside that… he turns up on a horse covered in star-glitter-like gems and tinkling bells who goes “clippety-clip” and I’m sorry… I cannot take him seriously for that, a glowy fancy man on his fancy horse. It’s slightly ridiculous. But within that ridiculousness, I am forced right back to my “elves and how they draw on fairy folklore” point of a previous post, because the horse with bells on is trotting right out of exactly those stories, just as their un-pin-down-able, intrinsic magic is, which Glorfindel immediately demonstrates by healing Frodo a little more and better than Strider has managed to. Not all the way, but still, his elven self can be the healing light that counters the darkness of the Riders, if only for a little while.

Where Strider brings the change of tone into the epic, what Glorfindel brings, however, is a shift of pace. From the moment he appears, events begin to shift a lot more quickly, even than they have in the last chapter which was itself a shift from previous. Where before we got full days depicted sequentially, chapter XI gives us a zoomed out view in which they can pass in clumps barely marked. But zoomed out is one thing, and does not necessarily feel like haste. It is this that Glorfindel brings – the text lingers less and acts more, increasing the pace steadily throughout the rest of Chapter XII to a crescendo at the ford, in which Frodo, suffering and acted upon by the force of the Riders, must resist as best he can before the river washes away his pursuers. While I haven’t found any of what’s gone before this slow, exactly, and I have made clear how much I enjoy those walking sections, this shift into action and drama is a welcome one. The stakes have been steadily climbing, both from the ratcheting up of the dread and fear and risk presented by the encroaching Riders, and from the incursion of stakes that Strider brings to give greater context to the Ring and its dangers to both bearer and world, and it is fitting that this chapter, which closes out Book 1, acknowledges those and gives them a clear tonal resolution. It’s dramatic, it’s cathartic and it marks a clear shift out of this portion of the story, heralding the changes and new information due to come to light in the next chapter.

Across the whole of this section, there are also two wider points that struck me. The first is around Tolkien and his management of information – the fact that he almost never hides any of it from the reader, but rather presents it succinctly and leaves it there to wait until context catches up with it. It feels notable for being quite unlike how I’d expect those same pieces of information to come in a more modern novel. Thinking purely about Strider, very early on he shows them the broken sword (which I know to be Narsil) and talks about how it will soon be reforged. He talks about the heirs of Elendil, about the Men of the West, about how his heart remains in Rivendell. It is, 25 years on from when I first encountered this story and having lived in a world saturated with it, hard to put myself into the mind of someone coming to it truly fresh, but my best belief is that a lot of this info would read to that version of me as just texture and noise, and would only shift into focus when some things become clear, as I assume they will, in soon-to-come chapters. But I know who Strider is. I know what his lineage means, what that sword represents, and all of that feels like something that might, in a more modern story, be hidden, or at least a little obscured for the time being. I don’t know that I particularly prefer either way, but I do enjoy the… up-front-ness of Tolkien’s approach here. This isn’t a mystery novel, and obscuring information wouldn’t do much to support the atmosphere or themes or narrative direction he’s crafting here, so he simply doesn’t. But nor does he spend time explaining things when they can become clear more organically later. Like the hobbits, the reader will simply have to wait for their understanding to catch up with the knowledge presented to them. That a lot of those pieces of information are heavily supported by visual and allusory cues is interesting, though, and speaks to the value of approaching The Lord of the Rings a second time to appreciate the depth of how that information is presented to a knowing reader. As I’ve said before, I am enjoying just how much what Tolkien puts on the page is capable of supporting and encouraging that kind of reading.

But now, we must come to the other thing that, while present throughout the book so far, really comes to the fore in this section: Tolkien’s aesthetics of evil. We’ve dealt a little with the light and shadow part already, which is a traditional enough dichotomy in fiction as to be almost background noise to me at this point. What sits alongside it is, however, blatant. Throughout the story so far, the Riders have been described as “black”, and with the films colouring how I imagine the story in my mind, I have been on the fence about exactly how to take that adjective. I can’t pull myself away from reading it as a descriptor of a person as being racialised, but the way it has been used, given the wrapping and shadow and mist descriptions of them, has at least obfuscated some of it. Here… there is little in the way of obfuscation. In The Prancing Pony, we meet a group of travelling southerners, one of whose number turns out to be on the side of the Enemy, giving information to the riders. He is described in clearly racialised terms, whether lingering on his skin tone or the shape of his eyes, and our last view of him has one of the hobbits suggest goblin heritage in his ancestry. It’s not good. Yes, the rest of the southerners aren’t evil like this guy clearly is, but they don’t get physical descriptions that focus on their skin tone and eye shape. His physicality is bound up into his evilness in how Tolkien draws our focus that way. I don’t really have much to say on this of interest, other than it is as blatant as I was expecting it to be and yes, unpleasant to read. I know this will continue.

I suppose I’m talking about it not… because I have much to contribute about it, but because of how I think about older texts, and how I want to approach reading things with this kind of content in them. There’s been plenty enough written about problematic faves, and I don’t need to rehash it in depth, but for my own part… I have read plenty of Roman and Greek literature, as well as older English language stuff. I am well-used to texts whose approach to the world veers wildly away from a modern morality². I don’t follow the “separate the art from the artist” approach, because… I think that’s impossible. But nor do I want to close my eyes to the rest of the text because of it³. So I think it’s important to name these things, contextualise them within the reading, and absolutely join up the art and the artist – Tolkien is a man who, in writing evil, chooses to characterise it racially. That is a truth in my reading of this text. It isn’t something I can balance out against other things, as if on a ledger of good vs bad. It is there, and will continue to be there, no matter how good the rest of the text is. And so my approach is just to… hold that thought, I suppose. To keep it in my mind alongside all the other thoughts about the text, to never let it be submerged by excuses or obfuscations, and to know that this approach of his is just as critical a part of forming the story we end up with as any other – the whole must be assessed as the sum of all of its parts, which includes the ones I find uncomfortable.

And that’s going to keep coming up, and I am going to just have to keep seeing it, keep noticing it, and keep factoring it into how I think about this text. Which does suck, but that’s the text we have. Approaching it any other way would feel dishonest, to me.

And so ends Book 1. Next time brings us to the start of Book 2, where we will cover Chapter I – Many Meetings and a very chunky Chapter 2 – The Council of Elrond.

1. I am not sure I have the moral fortitude to tackle the appendices. ↩︎
2. And incidentally, I’m really glad we now have authors like Emma Southon writing popular history books who are willing to really centre those differences rather than awkwardly glossing them or assuming the reader knows and doesn’t need to be told again that slavery is bad, actually. ↩︎
3. This is mainly me thinking about dead authors. When it comes to the living, and those who still profit from their work and use those profits to do evil in the world, we’re in different territory. ↩︎

Our third session of close reading The Fellowship of the Ring takes us through four chapters: VI – The Old Forest, VII – In the House of Tom Bombadil, VIII – Fog on the Barrow-downs and IX – At the Sign of The Prancing Pony. It’s not actually a huge number of pages, covering 109 to 162 in my edition, but it’s a dense section for Things Roseanna Was Interested in, and an extra dense section for everyone’s favourite, Scansion Time.

But I’ll save that best bit until last.

We start here with the hobbits heading out of the Shire, through the hedge, and into the old forest, and it is here that we get the first of two hostile landscapes across these chapters. After already having had plenty of walking previously, and then a little bit more as a treat here as well, it’s interesting to see the shift from the landscape as a natural obstacle, in the way of mundane landscapes (though of course with Tolkien’s beautifully evocative prose that captures moment after brilliant moment of scenery in his autumnal world), into something willed and actively malevolent that hinders them with a force of intent. The travel they’ve done so far has not been completely easy, but now they’ve stepped outside of the Shire, the very woods are turned against them. But it is not a simple evil – right from the start Merry tells us about the antagonism between the hobbits and the forest, the bonfire built to drive it back, and so Tolkien positions this as a two-sided antagonism rather than a spooky place of unreasoned evil. He also blends his nature-descriptions seamlessly into it, lending a very plausible magic to scenes like Old Man Willow lulling the hobbits to sleep in a warm, peaceful glade. Coming back to it as I am now, I am appreciating that skilful prose in service to capturing the natural world a hell of a lot.

Two chapters later, there is another antagonistic landscape in the form of the Barrow-downs, and the two form an interesting pair to read together, because of the contrast in the nature of their malevolence. Old Man Willow is… I mean, he’s a tree. He wants to kill the hobbits, sure, but for seemingly tree-ish reasons. The Barrow-downs meanwhile have a far more human force working amongst them, in the form of a spirit who drags them into his barrow and leaves them as if part of a saxon burial, circlets, swords and all. Here there is none of the natural world, none of those beautiful descriptions, and instead the narrative turns inward, to Frodo finding his courage to save his friends, and then to the destruction and dissolution of the barrow and the wight’s power. There are a lot of parallels being drawn so far in the book that highlight contrasts between the natural and peopled worlds, and the fuzzy boundaries between them, so it’s interesting to see these two quite similar moments of peril made wildly different by their contexts.

And then, in between them, we have Tom Bombadil, and Goldberry. I will admit, I have never been a fan of him, even when I came back to LOTR and liked it better as an adult. I’m not sure I like him now, even. But this reading has given me a better respect for his role in the narrative than I had before, and for the work he does in erasing or confusing a lot of the possible boundary lines that might have been starting to form around concepts in the story so far. Because Tom Bombadil is a Problem. He defies categorisation. When first we meet him, the text even specifies that he’s too big for a hobbit and too small for a man, marking him out as something Else. This is only intensified any time any of the hobbits try to question him about his nature. What is he? Eldest. He is. He’s the master of this place. That’s it and all there will be. But in his actions we see that he behaves in ways that don’t match up to the information we’ve been given so far – he can handle the Ring unaffected, he can command the trees and dispel a wight, he knows more about the hobbits than it seems like he should, but he’s also just bros with Farmer Maggot and a big ol’ wife guy. He predates the coming of the Dark Lord. He can be summoned. He is a mess of contradictions, and one that Tolkien steadfastly refuses to clarify. And that’s brilliant, because he tells us that there are things in this world that are inexplicable, that defy clear delineation and which exist outside of the core conflict the plot is slowly driving us towards – all of which gives depth to the world, just as every bit of menace we encounter that isn’t driven by Sauron does too. The world is not singular, and does not yet revolve around the axis of the Ring and its bearer, and the need to destroy it, and it feels richer for having these threads which link outside of the main narrative.

But Tolkien cannot leave those nature descriptions alone, even so. I was struck throughout In the House of Tom Bombadil by how often and emphatically both Tom and Goldberry are marked as Of Nature. I think nearly all, if not all, of the descriptions of both of them (of which there are many) rely heavily on the natural world, whether it’s the dewdrop beads on a dress, or the fish scale shimmer of shoes, or the red apple colour of a wrinkled face and the forget-me-not blue of a tunic. I am tempted to suggest that Goldberry, daughter of a river as she is, stands for the natural world unpeopled, the wild and untouched things, and Tom for the cultivated wilds, based purely on the descriptions each is given, but I suspect that is a reductive reading – Bombadil tells us he predates the world as it is, and so to tie him to the land worked by hands when he existed before those hands seems like it might be a contradiction.

But whatever they are, the interlude in their house has a lot to say about how Tolkien wants us to approach his world, about the things which matter, and that not everything needs to bend to the will of the plot. However annoying I find Bombadil aesthetically, I enjoy that.

I also just love how this section is absolutely full of food descriptions as well. Next time we read, I think I need to do it with some cheese and bread handy to ward off the allure of all those moments of bread and butter, honeycomb and cream, cheese and herbs and hot stews with cold meats. They’re appealing for themselves – I am just appreciative of Tolkien as a descriptive writer – but also for the way they ground the story. Having the hobbits be big eaters, and ones who linger over and are clearly interested in their meals, gives the story natural moments of pause and dips in the tone. It’s just hard to maintain mortal peril over luncheon, it seems.

But that playing with tone happens elsewhere too. I mentioned it in our first session, but it’s come back with a vengeance in this one – Tolkien does seem to love to undercut the dramatic or the unsettling with brief interludes of humour, many of which come at the expense of Sam Gamgee. We have a scene where each of Frodo, Merry and Pippin experience a dream of horror or portent, and then Tolkien cuts to Sam sleeping like a log. Fair enough, you might say, but there are a number of moments like this, where Sam is the one to say or do something that punctures a burgeoning sense of dread or gravitas, and I can’t help but think that yes, there’s a class element to it. He’s not the only one – Pippin sometimes has a similar effect – but the way they each are deployed to achieve it feels different, and far more like Sam is the butt of the joke where Pippin is a participant or enactor of it. That said, for all my side-eye about his choice of vehicle, I can’t help but admit that the tonal variation works. A problem I often have with books is when they try to maintain (or steadily increase without pause) a sense of the dramatic/portentous/tragic unabated. If you don’t have moments of pause or change, I find it very easy to become inoculated against feeling what the book wants me to feel through constant exposure, and end up coming out of it a bit cold and unmoved. However, if you undercut a moment of life-threatening peril with a vision of a disembodied hand wriggling and then a hobbit having to run naked because he’s lost his breeches, I find it much easier to return to and maintain the looming weight of the story, and to more fully appreciate the characters as people.

Which is another thing that is really showcased in this section – seeing them deal with peril, and more importantly with reaching an unfamiliar place after a very long day and being discomfited by it simply being out of the norm for villages as they understand them (at least until they’ve sat near a fire and had a drink) is just… very personable. My notes are full of little asides about glimmers of character – Merry telling the others to mind their Ps and Qs (yes mother) or Frodo struck by cringe after making a spectacle of himself in front of a full pub – that are steadily building up portraits of them all as real, whole and complex people, and far more complex than their film counterparts are allowed to be. None of the hobbits are one thing only – like the competence of Pippin and Merry I talked about previously, we also get Sam’s distrust of the unfamiliar, and how that can be both a blessing and a curse, but alongside it his wonder at strange and new sights, and Frodo’s courage and reticence both.

In people, in nature and in the boundaries between places, Tolkien keeps on turning us away from easy dichotomies or simple stereotypes. Never is this more clear than in how he describes the people of Bree – at first we are given them from a Shire hobbit perspective, as something strange and Other, not Like Us, only to have this turned immediately on its head and have the hobbits confronted with the fact that Bree folk think exactly the same of them. It is also in this section that the narrative of insularity and the need for isolation is once again undercut, in a brief discussion of possible refugees into the lands of Bree – the Bree folk object, claiming a lack of space, a mere handful of pages after Tolkien has given us lingering descriptions of empty vastness, and he immediately follows up with a character saying quite clearly that they deserve a place to live “same as any folk”. Spoilers, this isn’t going to turn out all good, but nonetheless, the narrative that could be read so far of “the outside world is bad and dangerous” is being undercut, both by forcing the re-examination of what “outside” means, and by demonstrating that good, bad and everything in between exists out in the world and back at home.

I think this – this constant emphasis on a blurring of any boundaries that might come up – is the thing that is lingering with me most so far in this reading, and one I am appreciating a great deal.

But it’s not alone. I keep coming back to the descriptions of place, but for good reason – Tolkien is just really great at them. Their specificity, more than anything, is what grabs me. The plants he names are plants of the English countryside. The scenes being described are crystallised in a perfect moment in time, sensation, scent and sight all together, and tied to real things, often things that could easily exist just as described not all that far from where I sit reading. And for me, it’s that familiarity pulled from the specificity that makes it so effective – I can imagine myself in those spaces so very, very easily.

Which of course makes me wonder about reading this story as someone without those same natural reference points. This is too big of a point for this close reading, but how does Tolkien’s drawing from the reality around him to create LOTR feed into what becomes fantasy? He’s a big draw-er of influences – a thing I appreciate in much of my fiction¹ – and I wonder if he lingers so well because of it. You could spend forever pulling on all the different threads of Tolkien’s interests, and the living landscape is simply one of those, and is all the richer as a part of this world because it represents something he’s interested in, rather than just being a necessary building block. I’m sure someone much cleverer than me has written about that interest of one guy turning into a foundational requirement of fantasy. I assume, to be honest, that any opinion one might have about The Lord of the Rings has already been had in eloquent, erudite triplicate. I just like to join in. But in any case – I am bound by my own experiences into how I read Tolkien, and I am fully embedded in this view of the English countryside. I’m interested how it reads to someone without that same experience binding them.

Add to this the prose which really was prosing in this section – including my quoted line of the day which is:

He knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless.

But wait, there’s more.

Something I’ve been thinking about since we started, but which really crystallised for me in reading this section, is the common characterisation of Tolkien as a worldbuilder before all else. I am coming to the conclusion that this is, frankly, bollocks. I think his chief concern at any given point is… theme isn’t quite the right word, but it’s in approximately the right place. The evocation of the core ideas he wants to work with, some of which are thematic, and some of which are about drawing down a feeling that evokes a bunch of other texts, myths and history that he clearly finds incredibly productive as story matter. In my opinion, the worldbuilding will always bend to this. It shows most clearly in the Shire – the way it is the conception of an upper middle class man’s perfect home to be remembered, saved and hopefully returned to before it is a functional place in real terms – but also in the way the focus of the story tightens and widens, and shifts perspective, depending on how best to showcase the atmosphere he’s trying to evoke. This frequently means shifting exactly what information he does and does not show on the page – he may be interested in giving us exhaustive lore of the rings (or frequent interjections on the history of this or that kingdom, or the men of Westernesse), but he absolutely resists that same approach with Tom Bombadil. And in Bree, this means giving us a little bit of text heavily grounded in Shire-hobbit perspective, and then shortly after pivoting to a more Bree-folk centred narration.

Shit, that’s another thing I wanted to talk about. I’m sorry, this really is turning into a long one, but it really stood out to me how many things Tolkien does which I suspect would be given a side-eye in a book today. I’m used to reading people talking about narrative perspectives quite prescriptively these days – head hopping is a big nono, and we’re all about defining exactly what type of third person we’re doing in a given text. Tolkien is incredibly fluid about this, however. Not just in the sense of shifting exactly with which character the story lingers at any given time (though that is true, to an extent), but with conceptualising it in that way at all. His third person narrative is, in modern terms, a bit all over the place. Sometimes it’s right deep in the perspective of a fox that we will never come back to. Sometimes it’s a very wide, omniscient third with knowledge about the world none of the characters have. Sometimes it’s a close third up with Frodo. Sometimes it’s got a clear narrative perspective that suggests it’s coming from a person in a particular position. Sometimes it’s off doing something else entirely. It breaks a bunch of “rules” I’m used to seeing articulated and which, if I’m honest, I think are horseshit. This is getting way off track for a moment, but every time I see someone say a book is bad because it doesn’t conform to clear standards of perspective/person use, I write off that opinion. Mess around! Use all the persons! Have fun with it! I cannot fathom making a statement like “I hate books in the first person” because it just… makes no sense to me. Why hate a tool? And what Tolkien does, trespassing any sense of boundary about what that kind of narrator-positioning is supposed to look like, gives me strength and joy.

Ok, we’re nearly done, but one last thing before I shut up. It’s finally scansion time, because I couldn’t leave you without a bit of poetry chat.

This section is absolutely crammed with poetry, and I think every single bit of it is so remarkable for how well it articulates a particular aspect of the story Tolkien is trying to tell. Tom Bombadil introduces himself first with a song, before he has any in-text dialogue. It’s a weird bit of rhyme, with a very distinctive rhythm, and it stands out, which makes it very easy to spot that that exact rhythm carries over into his in-text dialogue. All of his speech follows that pattern, and once you spot it, you cannot unspot it. And if that doesn’t mark him out as the strange, special case he is, I don’t know what could.

But this section also has the Barrow-wight’s incantation that goes:

Cold be hand and heart and bone,
and cold be sleep under stone;
never more to wake on stony bed,
never, till the Sun fails and the Moon is dead.
In the black wind the stars shall die,
and still on gold here let them lie,
till the dark lord lifts his hand
over dead sea and withered land.

With its sad, slightly tumbling rhythm that drags down the end of each line, heavy with the weight of years and death and the stones overhead.

And it has Bilbo’s song which Frodo sings in the tavern, which begins with:

There is an inn, a merry old inn
beneath and old grey hill,
And there they brew a beer so brown
That the Man in the Moon himself came down
one night to drink his fill.

And then goes on for a good number of verses, steadily adding in elements until Tolkien just flat out parodies Hey Diddle Diddle, because… I mean, just why not, right? But the magic here is also in the shape of the verse as much of the words. That fourth line – which feels snuck in, pushing back the rhyme for an extra line, simultaneously sneaky and insistent – makes the reading rush to catch up to the final rhyme. The whole song has a bouncing energy to it precisely because of it, it keeps wanting to skip through those inserted “extra” lines to get to the rhyme resolution, and the song that results feels eminently chantable, and singable. I wanted to read it out loud, to tap my foot to its jaunty rhythm. Of course this is what Frodo sings in a busy inn – it has exactly that quality to it, along with the fun and playfulness of the wink to the reader, and the greater sense of Bilbo again as a big writer of rhymes, both serious and silly.

That’s not even all of them in this section, but every single one of them is doing a shift and a half in worldbuilding, atmosphere creation, character building and more.

If I take anything, then, from this section, it is this – I love Tolkien’s poetry. Every time I reach a new bit, I want to get my pencil out and scan it, I want to mutter it out loud and get the mouthfeel of it, sense its rhythm. And every single piece so far has rewarded that interest, because, like so much of what he’s been doing with prose, with description and with the craft of storytelling, not a single word of it is wasted. Everything has its layers, its links outside of the book itself, into all the broader interests Tolkien seems to have in a wide, wide range of parts of the world. I am incredibly glad we’re doing this close reading, because I am realising again just how rich, deep and substantial the text is, and how much it can support the scrutiny we are giving it.

It is, however, also making me want to approach other texts this way. Which would be fun, interesting and probably make me a better reader and reviewer, but my god who has the time? If wishes were fishes, and all that. But there’s something so satisfying about spending the time, about pondering, about discussing in detail and, yes, about getting the pencil out and doing the scansion, because² there is for me no better way to enjoy a book than to pick it all the way to pieces and figure out how it works.

1. The comparison I chose while we discussed this, because it was right in my eyeline, was Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire – it works so well as a story because she’s using space opera as vehicle, rather than destination, and cramming that bus full of a grab bag of motifs, themes, historical situations and ideas that she’s interested in. It works because it has so many ties to things outside of itself. ↩︎
2. Contrary to what I’ve been told by a number of people. ↩︎

The next section of our close reading takes us through Chapter III – Three is Company, Chapter IV – A Short Cut to Mushrooms and Chapter V – A Conspiracy Unmasked, a total of 44 pages in my edition. We decided that a pot of tea was the more hobbity approach to provisioning ourselves through the discussion, and were joined by the third resident of the flat to enjoy it.

The major themes of this section were, in no particular order:

• Playing with (and undercutting) the increasing tension and supernatural threat
• Walking through very real landscapes with very real company
• Cultural texture through the medium of songs
• Elves and mythology
• Foreshadowing and Knowing
• Pippin is baby
• What does the fox say?

This section sees Frodo – after a gap of 17 years since Bilbo’s birthday party – finally leave his house and set out to take the ring to Rivendell. I had forgotten quite how long of a gap the story waits before the journey begins, but the thing it made me think of while reading, and which I kept coming back to, was how Tolkien uses that slowness to increase the weight and the tension of the story. The overarching plot is kicked off by events that began thousands of years earlier; it makes sense that the activity of the story isn’t kicked into motion in a moment. It is far more befitting of the import of those events that it not, in fact. So knowing that 17 years have elapsed helps that tension feel all the more real.

Early in the section, as Frodo and Sam are leaving Hobbiton, they have their first encounter with one of the Black Riders, where Frodo overhears a conversation with the Gaffer. At first, the Rider is just a reported figure, a man in a black cloak. He is subsequently spotted from a hiding spot just off the road, where the only unusual thing about him is his animalistic sniffing, questing out his prey. Over the progression of their experience with the Rider from this point on, each time shifts him a step further away from humanity, from the mundane. He crawls, he screams, he becomes more shadowy and less substantial, but the effectiveness of that supernatural creep is in both the slowness, and the fact that it is constantly undercut by the prosaic realities of their journey. This is not a sharp rush into a world of mystery beyond the Shire, but a gentle descent into something intruding into this seemingly familiar and safe world, and is all the better for it.

That safe world – those prosaic realities – come through most strongly in the walking sections, of which there are plenty. This isn’t a complaint! I know the fact that we apparently all know that Tolkien was himself a big rambler about England, and it comes through gorgeously in those sections. Not only does he delight in his descriptions of the natural world, but he finds beauty in the practicalities of it all too. The Shire is a peopled place – this is a landscape that, like England, has been shaped by the people living and working it for hundreds of years. There are fields and roads to be traversed. But, equally, even in this peopled place, there are sections of mild wilderness that present significant travel difficulties for those attempting to cross them. Not only are those sections a delight to read – I did DofE, I know what an absolute bastard trying to get through thorny or swampy ground can be and I enjoy seeing that reflected on the page – but they also give a great canvas upon which to paint the easy camaraderie of the hobbits. It is through their (mostly minor) walking travails that we begin to understand Frodo, Sam and Pippin as people who relate to one another, and to feel their relationships. They remark on the weather, the sleeping conditions, the food. They wake at different times and respond to morning and hardship in different ways. And they laugh, eat and sing together, in a way that slips those pieces of poetry into the main prose extremely naturally – of course three people walking through the woods together would sing a song. Why would you not.

It’s easy, while reading, to contrast the book with the LotR films, and I’ve accepted that that is going to be a losing battle. But for this section, it was just as tempting to compare it to the fantasy fiction that has come since it, and necessarily exists in conversation with it. Those two pieces – the landscape and the songs – are where this was most unavoidable for me.

I have read a number of fantasy books in which journeys are undertaken, a number of which on foot and through landscapes. Very few of them present a landscape that feels so real. Obviously some of this is that Tolkien draws on a place with which I am myself extremely familiar, but some of it also a failing of what has come later. I can think of stories with journeys where the hardship of the walking is simply the act of walking, and it seems as though the characters just tromp across wide stretches of short grass, an empty, barren place cut through only with conveniently placed sources of fresh water or the odd rock and tree for hiding behind. The landscape isn’t a living, variable thing, something that presents a challenge even when it’s as safe and mundane as the Shire is, it’s just a space to be crossed, or a backdrop upon which to hang other parts of the story. Here, instead, the landscape is a participant in the journey, and its shape dictates how the characters act and react, to both it and each other.

And then the songs. I know the song haters are out there. They are simply incorrect. I found myself reading them out, wanting the mouthfeel of each as I arrived at it. They’re wonderful. The ones that the hobbits share while walking have the shape of exactly the sort of thing a small group might sing on a journey (though, as Pippin remarks, some of them are a little bleak, just as many real folk songs are). I’ve done very similar things (DofE really pulling its weight for contributions to this reading session). They fit, and they give cultural texture to the hobbits as a group, as well as an angle into their relationships with Bilbo (and Bilbo’s contribution to hobbit poetic culture).

But it’s not just hobbit songs. Not only is there one partly inspired by/drawn from dwarvish stuff (hello The Hobbit callback), but in this section, we meet some elves! In fact, one of the first things we see of elves is their own song, which is immediately different on the page to the hobbit ones we’ve seen before. Did I scan every song we read today? I don’t think I need to answer that. But the elf song, unlike the hobbit ones, is not the same obvious iambic¹. The structure looks different. This is a piece of culture from a whole other group of people, and Tolkien puts that difference right up at the front for us to see from the off.

Which is great, because the elves are also pretty different right from the off.

Obviously as a modern fantasy reader, the elves who live in my imagination are extremely sub-Tolkien stuff. There were decades of development, rehashing and cheap knock-offs before I picked up my first piece of fantasy literature, and so I have a lot of default assumptions about elves that contrast wildly with pre-Tolkienian folkloric elves. So the interesting and fun thing about this section is how much of a middle ground this first group of elves occupy between those two poles. They are not the po-faced, solemn and plot-driven-portentous beings of the Peter Jackson films. They are not a mundane group of people with pointy ears like D&D. They’re not purple-eyed, ripped, sexy men like bad romantasy. The thing this group mostly reminded me of was, in fact, traditional representations of fairies. Not entirely, not a copy of that, but they are merry, aloof, slightly cruel (in a laughing sort of way, without actual malice) and utterly alien, when held in comparison to the hobbits. The way they move through the world, even in the brief bit of story in which we encounter them, is wholly different, smoother and less troubled than the hobbits who have, just previously, been struggling their way through thorn bushes.

And, even beyond that, they are known to speak and relate differently to hobbits, to the point that Frodo remarks on it – elves don’t give straight answers to questions, and Gildor Inglorion is not disproving the point. But that slipperiness is one of the key things that made me think fey, alongside the ethereal sparkly glow, the makeshift but entirely civilised party in the woods, and the bowers of trees in which the hobbits fall asleep while the elves themselves sit about chatting unsleepingly. That and the fact that they have no interest in helping the hobbits until the Riders are mentioned – these aren’t altruistic, benevolent helpers. They call the hobbits dull. But they are interested in some of the greater problems of the world, and knowledgeable about them in a way that Frodo isn’t yet, and so they bend their aid against those powers starting to move behind the scenes.

Their knowledge is also… interesting. They immediately know things about Frodo, about the party, that seem outside of their grasp, and this intuitive access to the world comes through in a lot of their speech. They feel a part of the world, with a relationship to it mostly unlike the other characters we’ve met so far.

And yet, that intuitive foresight isn’t only their province. Both Frodo and Sam, at various points throughout this section (matching up to the ramping tension of the Riders) are seized by the knowledge that this journey is something More, and that they may not be coming back from it, at least not as they currently are. There’s no sense that this is a strike of prophecy from an outside force, however. They just tap into some sense of the story itself, and articulate that shape of its weight on the page for the reader, to add into the foreshadowing.

It is again interesting in contrast to a lot of more modern fantasy (thinking here a lot of things I read as a teen), where this sort of intuition does likewise strike, but with less subtlety and more overt pattern. Where Frodo might have a vaguely ominous dream at the end of A Conspiracy Unmasked, someone in one of those novels will have one that comes with a handbook, or at least a set of symbolic features which can be decoded with sufficient knowledge (and even possibly by the reader). Knowledge becomes something more direct and classifiable, where here it is either intuitive or formless, far more the stuff of mythic portents in older literature, where the meaning is, at best, opaque (if not downright treacherous). Which of course speaks to the different uses of it as a trope. Here, those moments of Knowing are a signifier of the rising danger, the seriousness of it, and its intrusion into the safety of the lives they’ve known before, rather than intended to give actionable information to characters or readers. It is “this is going to be epic (derogatory)” rather than a handbook to the specific events.

But it’s not all serious business. I said above that the tension is often undercut, and while the walking sections are one portion of that – contrasting the rising supernatural with the mundanity of travel through the world – there are other ways Tolkien does it as well. One of those is Peregrin Took, who is, in my opinion, baby.

I’m not entirely joking. I like the way he is cast as the little brother of the group – he’s the one who mostly pokes fun, who runs around a field singing, who splashes people with bathwater and has to clean it up before he can have dinner. But he’s not a substanceless joker either. He has his moments of capability, and is just as comfortable speaking to the elves as Frodo is, as well as defusing the situation with Farmer Maggot, making him a rather more complex figure than his film counterpart before we even hit 100 pages. But Tolkien deploys him carefully, and he is often the voice of counter-tone, that runs against drama when it rises too high, without overdoing it and spilling into silliness. Your honour, I love him.

In other silly things, I had entirely memory-holed the random fox that appears for a single paragraph to remark upon the doings of hobbits, and then departs. It’s entirely irrelevant and entirely delightful and again, varies up the tone rather than letting us wallow in the increasing shadow of the danger to come.

All of which to say – our talk of the homeliness of the Shire, the hereness of it as a place from which to leave safety and go out into danger, all that is steadily being called into question throughout these three chapters. Not only is danger visibly intruding – in the shape of the Riders, and also of talk of giants and the doing of Big Folk – but that sense of safety and inviolability is being disrupted right at the source. As Gildor says to Frodo:

‘But it is not your own Shire,’ said Gildor. ‘Others dwelt here before hobbits were; and others will dwell here again when hobbits are no more. The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.’

As we reach the end of the chapter, we see how this has always been the case, even if not acknowledged. The Old Forest is to Fatty Bolger a place no one ever dares go, but Merry has, in fact been there, as has Frodo. To Sam, people from Buckland are strange and cannot be trusted, and then Farmer Maggot turns that attitude straight back on him. If hobbits talk about hobbits in that distrusting way – and then we see both of them are just as true and helpful as each other – what does that say both for the world outside and the one within the borders? The High Hay is an impenetrable border… but it has a gate through which people may well come seeking Frodo. The inviolability of the Shire has always been an illusion – foreshadowing things to come a long way in the future – but Tolkien took us through the long route to get there.

I’ve already wittered a lot and I’ve not even really dug into the portrayals of male friendship and camaraderie in the face of danger (I think I just need a whole “war vibes” tag), the undercutting of the centrality of Frodo to the narrative (I love them all going “mate, you ain’t subtle, you were literally declaring it to the valleys and we’re not idiots” before making damn sure he knows they’ve got plenty of their own knowledge and expertise) or my increasing conviction that Tolkien is less interested in class than he is simply unable to escape from it. But this was a pretty dense section, and I think the things that will really stick in my memory about it are those walks through the landscape, and the mastery of tonal variation that let the chapters really flow, letting us look ahead to the grimness that is to come just as we say both our own hello and a goodbye shared with the characters to this perfect stretch of home ground that is the thing being left behind, and the thing worth saving.

Next time, we’ll be covering four shorter chapters, The Old Forest, In the House of Tom Bombadil, Fog on the Barrow Downs and At the Sign of the Prancing Pony. Not only will this get us all the way to Bree and Strider, but it will put to the true test whether I have grown as a reader and a person, as I discover if I still find Tom Bombadil annoying as all fuck. An adventure!

1. I scanned it, and then immediately got all stuck in my brain and overthought it, and have now convinced myself I’m an idiot who has forgotten how scansion. If it is, in fact, iambic, I can only apologise and ritually burn my verse comp uni notes. ↩︎

My partner and I decided a little while ago it would be a fun project (because we know how to party) to read The Lord of the Rings together, in small chunks and discuss it in detail over a number of weeks, picking at different threads and hopefully having a grand old time. While we’ve both read the books before, we have rather different histories with them.

For me, I read the whole trilogy before the first of the films came out (aged around 10 or 11) and I… did not exactly get on with it. I struggled my way through to the end of the third book, and while I adored the films, did not look back on the books with any kind of fondness. The reading was a duty to complete prior to watching, because this was in my unreconstructed “book as master template, must consume before and look out for inaccuracies” phase (which I have since outgrown, fear not). I came back to it later, and found a greater appreciation for it once I had a degree and fewer assumptions about what stories, and fantasy, were supposed to look like, but it has never been my fondest or dearest darling.

Meanwhile my partner picked the books up at a younger age than I did and loved them wholeheartedly nonetheless. He has read and reread them over the years – his copies are clearly careworn in their trilogy case – and while he may have gained nuance and critique on them, the light of the love has not dimmed, and his knowledge goes deep and broad on the wider context of a lot of what goes on. For him, they are a kind of foundational text.

Which felt like a good contrast of positions from which to have some fun discussions and, at least for our first go, I was not disappointed.

We covered in this part the prologue and first two chapters – A Long Expected Party and The Shadow of the Past, a total of 64 pages in my edition.

I knew going in that there were some themes I was likely to want to look for and dwell on, predominantly things that I remember from the films and found particularly resonant, so wanted to refind and consider in the books, just as well as some wider thoughts about prose and genre. There was always going to be an element of the films as context behind this – due to sheer number of rewatches, the films are the template of the narrative for me – but I was glad to find that I was not constantly finding myself comparing the two, either favourably or unfavourably. This is due in no small part, I think, to the joy of remembering how distinct a voice Tolkien is able to employ, especially in these first chapters and in the way he talks about (and in the voices of) the hobbits.

Of course, those hobbit voices are a large part of one of themes I had always expected to be dwelling on – class. I suspect that my recent dark academia disappointment lies a little behind this, but honestly, I am always looking for class in stories. And particularly class as I experience it in the UK, because I love to see that mirror held up against the things I know in my life. And here, there exists plenty of (expected) ground to cover. In his constructed pastiche of little England in the Shire, Tolkien plays out a merry (at least in what seems to be his conception of it) view of a middle and upper class, alongside salt of the earth, contented working class hobbits who speak in clear dialects that differ from their fellows – I had in fact forgotten how clear those voices are in the text until I got to the working hobbits discussing the state of the world in the tavern. There is a clear strand to me of how Tolkien conceives of insularity and willingness to take an interest in the world beyond the Shire’s borders through a lens of class – it is Frodo and Bilbo who speak with elves and dwarves, and the Gaffer and his fellows who distrust them, whose maps show only white outside the borders of the Shire. Sam exists as a cross-border person, but his interest in the elves – and in stories – seems to be linked in this section (by the Gaffer at least) with his association with the Bagginses who, it is added, taught him to read. It seems clear to me that Tolkien’s safe haven of the Shire has connections to the outside world in the elves who cross it to the Grey Havens, the dwarves who bring news, and to whom Frodo talks to find out what is afoot out in other lands. And so in this insular Shire, I feel like what is not being constructed is an idyll of isolation, but instead a stratified society in which outward-looking-ness is a trait of the middle and upper class (and, I think, portrayed as a positive one), but not shared by the working classes, who write off much of what we who have read the story before know to be true as superstitious tales.

So much, so of its time and place and author.

This crosses interestingly for me with both the fandom conception of Sam (i.e. the great hero of the piece), and my own mental image of him drawn primarily from the films, which clash rather. I don’t like Sam. But, as I have always known but is made clearer through looking at the text, my dislike of him comes from an awkward intersection of prejudices that put his approach to the world at odds with both the stated mores of e.g. Gandalf, and my own. The Sam of the first two chapters is, yes, more interested in the outside world than his pub-mates, but I know, as the story goes on, his position will come into contrast with that of e.g. Frodo, both when it comes to how they look at the world beyond the Shire’s borders, and in how they choose to treat those with whom they come into contact, most notably Gollum. This is something I plan to keep watching out for (as I expect class to be less visibly up front as we leave the Shire later on), and also re-examining as I unpick what I remember from what’s actually in the book.

Which brings us neatly to my second theme that I suspect I will keep watching – mercy, pity and forgiveness, and what right one has to deal out judgment and death to those around one. In the film narrative, from which my dislike derives, it is Sam who hates Gollum. Sam who kicks him and drags him through the sun which burns him. Does that hate push Gollum to betray them, or was Sam right to distrust him because that betrayal was inevitable? But I have always found myself stuck on Frodo (and Gandalf’s) mercy vs. the willingness of others to just kill Gollum and be done. And so it was interesting to see quite how early the seeds of this are sown in the book – in The Shadow of the Past, Gandalf checks Frodo’s initial disgust with Gollum, as well as his instant jump to claiming he deserves death, citing both “Pity and Mercy” in Bilbo’s hand. There is a utilitarian argument given about one’s inability to see all uses a person might have, one that foreshadows Gollum’s role in later events, but it is also clear, to me at least, that Gandalf clearly thinks it a moral right as well, not to pass judgement in this easy way. Frodo is not immediately convinced (contrast what feels like a much more immediate pity in the films), but right from the off the reader is primed to view Gollum in a frame that isn’t simply an evil to be destroyed. In a story that will, across its full span, involve so much death, it feels notable that it begins at this point of mercy, and also in finding commonality with someone being written off as evil – in drawing the connection between Gollum’s origin as Sméagol and the hobbits (and thus Frodo). It’s easy to slip in “ah, the war” for this all, but I also find it hard to believe that that doesn’t play a part in a contention that even familiar seeming people can do great harm and be corrupted to evil.

I suspect this presages a lot of moral quandary watching, and musing on how Tolkien portrays evil, the possibility of redemption, and humanisation, as we meet a wider cast of characters throughout. But it is interesting that it starts so very early with that mercy.

Other small things noticed include the focus on Gandalf’s affect (and how that may or may not tie in to the weight of narrative issues), especially as perceived through his outward age, as well as a close focus on facial expressions and the eyes. Also, the thread of very understated humour, the moments of extremely lowkey sass, and the playfulness to the writing when it comes to its constructed position as history. I did wonder, in reading the prologue, particularly about the intended identity/position of the narrator, how do they relate to the story they are telling? Clearly much later, I think most probably human, but also in-world, and in a position that takes the events of the story to be factual (even if possibly under dispute in the details due to multiple textual sources). And also how a first time reader, without any context for any of this, would have approached that historiography, and the names and details being dropped that won’t make sense within the context of the story for a long time (like Elessar).

I also spent an amount of time thinking about the construction of the Shire as reality, with the world outside being the place of story, and how this worldview is going to be both challenged and reinforced as the story progresses.

And, lastly, because it is the discourse du jour, how this story sits with such obvious lines outside of genre. Ed mentioned seeing in the opening sentences of chapter one a clear echo of Jane Austen, something I wouldn’t have thought of but immediately saw upon looking for it. If we’re talking about genre as a conversation, and the vitality of texts that are discussing with the foundational SF texts that preceded them, it is interesting to look at one of the foundational texts of modern fantasy and seeing it reaching out to literary realism and social commentary. Cross-pollination has always been the way.

I found myself enjoying the prose and the slowness of the evocation of the Shire as a place – not bogged down, but a steady wallowing in an atmosphere and a set of characters whose petty quarrels still do feel deeply real. Tolkien plays with voice (even if he uses that to dubious ends in his construction of class), and I had forgotten how clear that rang through in the text, and how much I enjoy that clarity. Likewise, the historiography section in the prologue is just fun to read.

On the whole, I think a successful discussion, and one with obvious throughlines that will be being picked up as we continue to read.

Next up, Three is Company, A Short Cut to Mushrooms and A Conspiracy Unmasked.