'I sit beside the fire and think' -- Home, Hearth, Hobbits

For Tolkien Reading Day, 25 March 2018

I sit beside the fire and think
of all that I have seen,
of meadow-flowers and butterflies
in summers that have been; 

Of yellow leaves and gossamer
in autumns that there were,
with morning mist and silver sun
and wind upon my hair. 

I sit beside the fire and think
of how the world will be
when winter comes without a spring
that I shall ever see. 

For still there are so many things
that I have never seen:
in every wood in every spring
there is a different green. 

I sit beside the fire and think
of people long ago,
and people who will see a world
that I shall never know. 

But all the while I sit and think
of times there were before,
I listen for returning feet
and voices at the door.

Ever since the first time I read 'I sit beside the fire and think' as a young boy, it's been my favorite. It has always spoken to me of home, just as I think it does to Bilbo, but it speaks in a more complex and poignant way than most other hobbit songs.

Of these, Pippin's 'Sing hey! for the bath at close of day' (FR 1.v.101) is probably the most purely hobbit-like. In a simple meter -- iambic tetrameter, which seems characteristic of hobbit poetry* -- it embraces the beauty and pleasures of water in its various forms, but emphasizes the special joy and even nobility of the hot bath 'that washes the weary mud away'.  Few things could conjure a more comforting image of home than Water Hot which so thoroughly redeems our weariness that we end up playfully splashing water with our feet, or even, as in Pippin's case, creating a fountain.

Similarly in Three Is Company the hobbits sing a song -- 'Upon the hearth the fire is red' -- which begins and ends by evoking hearth and home, roof and bed (FR 1.iii.77-78). Yet Bilbo wrote the words to this song, and his experiences gave him a deeper perspective. '[N]ot yet weary are our feet' tells us that we are not ready for home and bed. Adventure and discovery await us before then. We never know where we may find 'the hidden paths that run / Towards the Moon or to the Sun'. All that we may meet on our journey, however, will in the end fade before the lights of hearth and lamp that summon us home to bed and board.

Immediately after the end of this song, however, the approach of a Black Rider impresses the dangers of the journey upon them. After their last near encounter earlier in the day the hobbits had seen Bilbo's warning about the perils of stepping out the front door take on new meaning, as it must when Ringwraiths show up down the lane. Adventures are too often 'not a kind of holiday ... like Bilbo's' (FR 1.ii.62), nor, as events at Crickhollow will show, do front doors keep all perils out (FR 1.xi.176-77).

We may also discover a little noticed counterpoint to the hobbits' song in the hymn** to Elbereth sung by the elves whose arrival drives off the Black Rider. The longing for their home '[i]n a far land beyond the Sea', which lies at this song's heart, balances the exile of the elves against the security the hobbits (wrongly) feel is their due in their own Shire (FR 1.iii.83). Though the elves know where to find those 'hidden paths', they linger 'in this far land beneath the trees.' Their 'chance meeting' with Frodo, who regards his own journey as a flight into 'exile' for himself and his companions, brings face to face those whose age-long exile is nearly over with one who senses that his home will soon be forever lost to him, if indeed it has not already been lost.

If we take a further step back towards that home, we come to the first song that Frodo sings, Bilbo's 'The road goes ever on and on', which he recalls, not from conscious memory, but from some deeper place beyond all names. Yet, as many have remarked, Frodo's version differs in a single word from the one Bilbo recited as he left Bag End seventeen years earlier. Bilbo sets off on the road, 'pursuing it with eager feet'  (FR 1.i.35), but Frodo's feet are 'weary' from the start (FR 1.iii.73). Recall 'the weary mud' in Pippin's bath song, to be washed off at journey's end. Recall the 'not yet weary' feet of Bilbo's walking song. These songs better suit the 'eager' feet of Bilbo, who embraces both journey and journey's end: 'I want to see the wild country again before I die, and the Mountains' (FR 1.i.33). That Frodo has a different attitude towards his journey is part of the tragic situation in which he finds himself, for which the Ring is largely, though perhaps not solely, to blame. Like Merry, who 'loved the thought of [mountains] marching on the edge of stories brought from far away', Frodo may have 'longed to shut out [their] immensity in a quiet room by a fire' (RK 5.iii.x.791). If  so, that was not to be.

Bilbo's embrace of journey and journey's end alike is also visible in 'I sit beside the fire and think', yet this poem is also firmly tied to the idea of hearth and home by the repetition of the initial line to begin the third and fifth quatrains and the variation of it in the first line of the last. It is the song of someone whose days of adventure are over, but for whom memory and reflection on the time he spent journeying enrich the life he now lives by hearth and home. Nor need we think of this poem as applying only to Bilbo in his years in Rivendell, where he introduces us to the poem. We can also easily imagine it across the decades he spent in the Shire after his return, dawdling with his book, walking the countryside with Frodo and talking of adventure, 'learning' young Sam Gamgee his letters and telling him tales of the Elves. The walking song he composed the words to, the evolution and distillation of 'The road goes ever on' from the poem we first see at the end of The Hobbit, and his meditations on the 'dangerous business' of stepping out of one's home and into the road, all point to the close connection between 'there' and 'back again'. So, too, does his exchange with Sam and Frodo at Rivendell:

'Books ought to have good endings.[said Bilbo] How would this do: and they all settled down and lived together happily ever after?'  

'It will do well, if it ever comes to that,' said Frodo. 

'Ah!' said Sam. 'And where will they live? That's what I often wonder.' 

(FR 2.iii.273-74)

And Bilbo's last quatrain, especially its final words, is significant in that it comes after the bow to approaching death in 'a spring that I shall never see'. For tales goes on despite death.  With 'I listen for returning feet / and voices at the door' Bilbo also accepts that his part in the tale has already ended and that others will carry it on and bring the word of their journeys back to him. In just this way he awaits the return of Sam and Frodo. In this way, too, Sam and Frodo, who both finally expect not to survive their quest, imagine that their part in the great tale in which they have found themselves will come to an end for them, but that others will have their own parts to play later on. It is no accident that the book itself ends with Sam at home in his chair by the fire. 

At the last, that is what all the tales are about.

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Works Consulted

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* 'I sit beside the fire and think' is not in iambic tetrameter, but in alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, which is more characteristic of Elvish poetry, and likely shows the influence of such poetry on Bilbo.

** If alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and trimeter distinguish Elvish poetry, one may rightly ask why the hymn to Elbereth is not in this meter, or in the single lines of heptameter which also occur (e.g., 'Nimrodel'). The answer lies in the fact that the song is mediated through the understanding of the hobbits -- as the text explicitly says at FR 1.iii.83: 

It was singing in the fair elven-tongue, of which Frodo knew only a little, and the others knew nothing. Yet the sound blending with the melody seemed to shape itself in their thought into words which they only partly understood. This was the song as Frodo heard it...

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All citations reference the single volume fiftieth anniversary edition of The Lord of the Rings, Houghton Mifflin (2004).

And his feet are faster -- Old Tom's Trochees (FR 1.viii.142)

copyright Alan Lee

Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow,
Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow.
None has ever caught him yet, for Tom, he is the master:
His songs are stronger songs, and his feet are faster. 

(FR 1.viii.142)

So I was driving down the road thinking of Tom Bombadil, as one does. The bit about the feet had long seemed to me to be only one of the many odd things Old Tom says. But now it occurred to me that there may be more here than eccentricity. For virtually every word out of Bombadil's mouth is poetry. Whether singing or speaking, his words are rhythmic and predominantly trochaic, though not perfectly regular. We can see this clearly in the lines I quoted, three out of four begin with slow and heavy spondees, but then suddenly switch to trochees and rush off to the end of the line. The other line is entirely trochaic:

Óld Tóm Bómbadíl ís a mérry féllow.
Bríght blúe his jácket ís, ánd his boóts are yéllow.
Nóne has éver caúght him yét, for Tóm, he ís the Máster:
Hís sóngs are strónger sóngs, ánd his feét are fáster.

A trochee is a metrical foot which in English consists of two syllables, the first stressed and the second unstressed. The English noun trochee comes from the Ancient Greek adjective τροχαῖος (trochaios). This in turn derives from the verb τρέχω (trecho), meaning 'run'. Τροχαῖος, moreover, is shorthand for τροχαῖος πούς (trochaios pous), which means 'running foot'. Trochees thus run. They are much swifter than their opposite, iambs (unstressed, stressed), which in poetry both Greek and English have long been used to represent the rhythm of normal speech. All of this will have been well known to Tolkien, who, like many educated Englishmen of his day, had learnt a great deal of Latin and Greek at school. It was this, he said, that helped him discover his love of poetry:

'[As a child] I was, for instance, insensitive to poetry, and skipped it if it came in tales. Poetry I discovered much later in Latin and Greek, and especially through being made to try and translate English verse into classical verse.'

(OFS ¶ 56)

In this connection it is also intriguing that most other poetry in The Lord of the Rings is iambic, though the lengths of the lines vary.  Hobbit poetry tends to be in iambic tetrameter, Elvish in iambic heptameter, or alternating lines of tetrameter and trimeter. Two things make this noteworthy. First, the first elf poem we encounter in The Lord of the Rings is in iambic tetrameter, which we normally associate with hobbits, but we are hearing this poem, which the Elves are singing in Elvish, as it is understood and represented by a hobbit (FR 1.iii.79). Second. Bombadil's songs are also in heptameter, but a largely trochaic heptameter. Thus their seven trochaic beats counterbalance the seven iambic beats of the 'elf meter.' Clearly Tolkien devoted thought to details of this kind, and one wonders what might lie behind this metrical opposition. When the poet is also a philologist who professes that '[t]he incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are in our world coeval' (OFS ¶ 27), there is certainly room for further inquiry.

So the faster feet of which Tom spoke may not be the feet we thought they were.

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Works Consulted

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