Eleventy-One: Re-reading The Lord of the Rings 50 years on -- part four

 

Book One, Chapter 2: The Shadow of the Past

Indeed, [Frodo] at once began to carry on Bilbo’s reputation for oddity. He refused to go into mourning; and the next year he gave a party in honour of Bilbo’s hundred-and-twelfth birthday, which he called Hundred-weight Feast. But that was short of the mark, for twenty guests were invited and there were several meals at which it snowed food and rained drink, as hobbits say.

Always having felt a bit odd myself, as if on the outside looking in, I relished Frodo's wholehearted embrace of eccentricity. Part of the oddity for me was always being fascinated by words and languages. My mother taught me bits of Latin and French, my grandmother Irish, my father German, my brother Spanish. So, words like 'hundred-weight' were a delight to me. (I recognized it from the tables of 'useful information' on the back of my composition books, though I seem to recall some brief confusion since a hundred-weight in the US and a hundred-weight in the UK are not the same number of pounds.) 

I adopted the phrase 'it snowed food and rained drink, as hobbits say' at once. Some years later I read the following verses in the Prologue of the Canterbury Tales (343-48): 

Without bake mete was nevere his hous, 

Of fissh and flessh, and that so plentvous

It snewed in his hous of mete and drynke;

Of all deyntees that men koude thynke,

After the sondry sesons of the yeer,

So chaunged he his mete and his soper.

I was in high school when I first read these lines, and I recall gasping aloud in delight in class and having to explain my amusement to everyone: 'Thomas, would you share what's so funny with the rest of us.' 

Today what's catching my eye is the spelling of 'fissh' and 'flessh', and the variety of food reminds me of how well stocked Bilbo's larder had been before his adventures began. Chaucer has even more to say about the Franklin's table, and Tolkien has more to say of the 'high reputation' of Bilbo's. I am beginning to think that looking at The Franklin's Tale in this context would be very interesting.

And of course both Bilbo and Frodo leave unwashed dishes behind them when they leave. Bilbo was being hurried out the door by Gandalf. Frodo was being rather pettily spiteful towards the Sackville-Bagginses.

'work they may accomplish once, and once only' -- Silmarillion, p. 78

In a single chapter of The Silmarillion we learn that some creative acts require so much of their makers that they can perform them only once. 

Yavanna says she cannot repeat the creation of the Two Trees -- 'Even for those who are mightiest under Ilúvatar there is some work they may accomplish once, and once only' --  but that she could use the light of the Trees locked within the silmarils to revive them, if only Fëanor would break them (78).

Fëanor replies that  'for the less even as for the greater there is some deed that he may accomplish but once only; and in that deed his heart shall rest' (78). His creation of the silmarils is of the same order as hers of the Trees, and, 'if I must break them, I shall break my heart, and I shall be slain' (78).

When Fëanor demands that the Teleri give up their ships so that the Noldor can pursue Morgoth to Middle-earth, the Teleri respond that '[our] ships are to us as are the gems of the Noldor: the work of our hearts, whose like we shall never make again' (86).

Today I was discussing these passages with my friend, Richard Rohlin, of the Amon-Sûl podcast at www.ancientfaith.com. As we were talking it occurred to me that, while it might seem odd to think of Sauron as having a heart, especially one that ever rests, he did put so much of his power into making the One Ring that its destruction was virtually his own. So there is a certain analogy here. 

Eleventy-one: Re-reading The Lord of the Rings 50 years on -- part three

Book One, Chapter One: A Long-expected Party

Perhaps the most charming and moving aspect of the culture of The Shire is the practice of giving gifts to others on one's own birthday. The world would be a better place if we all did this, I thought. There was a time some years back when I decided that I was going to try it. I gathered more than a few strange looks from friends and co-workers -- as if I was only confirming their impression of me as a bit strange --  but I could see that it pleased them to receive the gift, however small and odd, and that felt good to all of us. As with Bilbo, the generosity made up for the weirdness. For a while I felt like a 'child of the kindly West', with more of good in me than I knew.

I resisted the urge to include snarky notes. 

Eleventy-one: Re-reading The Lord of the Rings 50 years on -- part two

Book One, Chapter One: A Long-expected Party

 

 

When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.

I loved this from the start. I hadn't read The Hobbit, didn't know Bilbo, and I had come to read The Lord of the Rings from reading Robert E. Howard. So I must have been expecting something very different. Conan never had birthday parties.

But I remember reading this first sentence and a smile creeping onto my face. There was just something about it that was so promising of a good story. Looking back it reminds me of the way the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice opens wide a door to a world. Both sentences are steeped in a similar wry and parenthetical humor. 

I had always loved words, and eleventy-first was a fine new one to me, funny and wrong of course, but perfectly clear in its meaning. Perhaps it was especially amusing because I was eleven myself. Another word that soon popped up was queer, as in strange or outlandish and so not quite right, but I knew that one. My Irish grandmother used it in the same way the hobbits did, and she used grand just as they did, too, to describe something wonderful rather than large. She would also tell me stories about fairies and fairy mounds in the Ireland of her youth. Being the same age as Tolkien's wife, she knew a world far more like the one he knew than the one I was growing up in.* I begin to think that my images of the Shire and County Cavan overlapped each other pretty quickly. For me this was a good thing.

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*I could argue that growing up in New York City in the 1960s after the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants had passed into the West bears a certain analogy to growing up in the Shire at the end of the Third Age when the Elves were going into the West. But let that pass.

Eleventy-one: Re-reading The Lord of the Rings 50 years on -- part one

Right about now in 1971 I am beginning to read The Lord of the Rings for the very first time. I had not read The Hobbit or even heard of it before I plucked the old Ballantine Books The Fellowship of the Ring, the one with the oddly fascinating cover illustration by Barbara Remington, from the spinner rack outside Ruth's Stationery store on Main Avenue in Ocean Grove, NJ, a seaside town much like the Shire would have been, had the Shire been settled by Methodists. That is, there were no pubs, and the older folks would have viewed Gandalf with as much suspicion as they would a Papist Papal Nuncio in a VW Bus with a Peace sign on the back.* We children, barefoot and oh so tan, would have loved him just as madly as the Hobbit children do. Beyond the borders of the town there were white spaces, with labels like 'beyond this be Pagans'** (on the Asbury Park side) and 'beyond this be Papists' (on the Bradley Beach side).

I loved the book at once, and re-read it at once. I cannot tell you how many times I have read it all told, but it has to be over fifty times, not counting extensive study and browsing. I would be lying if I said that it was not the most important book in my life. I still have those old Ballantine mass markets, yellow and brittle with the years, one of them even gnawed by a mouse. If I tried to read them, they would disintegrate entirely. There is always a copy of The Lord of the Rings open on my desk, however, and on laptop and on my tablet.

As many have done, I learned Old English (and so much else) because of J. R. R. Tolkien, though I wouldn't advise anyone learning it as I did, working my way through a couple of grammars on my own and plunging straight into Beowulf. The first time through was like wrestling with Grendel and his mother at once. But the second time through was much easier, and the third. I am looking forward to the fourth. I like to think Tolkien would have approved. 

To be brief, I am beginning to read The Lord of the Rings again in celebration of what I shall call my 'eleventy-first' reading. I will try to recall how I felt that first time I went through it and write about it.  Although I have been planning to do this for some time, I have taken added inspiration from my current reading, Katherine Langrish's From Spare Oom to War Drobe: Travels in Narnia with my Nine Year-old Self, a book I recommend while on my feet applauding. It's not out in the States just yet, but I hope it soon will be. 

I hope to put up the first post soon.

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* Really, I have nothing against Methodists, and I love Ocean Grove from the bottom of my heart. I was married by a Methodist minister whom I looked upon as my surrogate grandfather. 'One of my best friends' is a Methodist minister. But as a Catholic kid in Ocean Grove in those days, I got a lot of teasing for being a Papist. Yes, they used that word. And not just teasing. I once broke up with a girl I had started dating because, not knowing I was Catholic, she began making disparaging remarks about Papists. After letting her go on for about 20 minutes, I said 'I am a Catholic'. A silence most profound followed, which was broken by 'Oh, I didn't mean you, Tom.' This actually didn't annoy me as much as the assumption that I must root for Notre Dame.

**Aside from being a general den of iniquity and Rock and Roll, Asbury Park had a bar called Mrs Jays which often had a row of motorcycles belonging to the Pagans motorcycle gang out front.