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01 November 2021

A Long-expected Parenthesis -- Part 1

When I first got the idea for this post, my idea was to write it up quickly. The more I looked at the evidence I had gathered (with the welcome support and feedback of Joe Hoffman), the clearer it became that a longer post was in order. Or a series of shorter ones. So let it be written. So let it be done.

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For some years now I have been inclined to believe that Bilbo is the narrator of the early chapters of The Lord of the Rings. But how far he carried on with the story remains hard to say. I had also heard that Michael Drout had a similar opinion, which he was kind enough to confirm for me, but we didn't have the chance to discuss details. Recently, however, I noticed something about the text that looks very much like it might be a clue. First let's look at what we know.

Bilbo's conversation with Frodo and Sam in Rivendell in Many Partings makes clear that he didn't get very far.

The evening deepened in the room, and the firelight burned brighter; and they looked at Bilbo as he slept and saw that his face was smiling. For some time they sat in silence; and then Sam looking round at the room and the shadows flickering on the walls, said softly:

'I don't think, Mr. Frodo, that he's done much writing while we've been away. He won't ever write our story now.' 

At that Bilbo opened an eye, almost as if he had heard. Then he roused himself. 'You see, I am getting so sleepy,' he said. 'And when I have time to write, I only really like writing poetry. I wonder, Frodo my dear fellow, if you would very much mind tidying things up a bit before you go? Collect all my notes and papers, and my diary too, and take them with you, if you will. You see, I haven't much time for the selection and the arrangement and all that. Get Sam to help, and when you've knocked things into shape, come back, and I'll run over it. I won't be too critical.'

        (RK 6.vi.988)

It has also been long observed that the narrator of the earliest chapters of The Lord of the Rings starts out sounding much like the narrator of The Hobbit, but that changes before too long. Further, we have Tolkien's remarks in letter 151 of September 1954.

Frodo is not intended to be another Bilbo. Though his opening style is not wholly un-kin. But he is rather a study of a hobbit broken by a burden of fear and horror — broken down, and in the end made into something quite different. None of the hobbits come out of it in pure Shire-fashion. They wouldn't. But you have got Samwise Gamwichy (or Gamgee).

In the Letters Tolkien uses 'style' many times, but almost invariably he is speaking of words -- of narrative, diction, and language -- when he does so. It's little likely then that his reference to Frodo's 'opening style' refers to anything but his writing style, a remark he offers as a concession of some regard in which they were a bit alike. We might expect Frodo, then, to begin in a style similar to Bilbo's, but to develop his own reasonably soon. But when does his portion of the narrative 'open'? And when does his style begin to diverge from Bilbo's?

I would suggest that the punctuation gives us a clue. During a recent reading of A Long-expected Party I noticed, not for the first time, that the narrator made an awful lot of parenthetical remarks. I found myself relishing the marvelous running social commentary the narrator was  offering on his fellow hobbits. 'For what do we live', we might almost hear him ask, 'but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?' That so much of this commentary is nested in and around parentheses made me wonder. On reflection I could not recall it as a conspicuous feature of the entire work. 

A quick search revealed my impression was correct. The entire Lord of the Rings (removing the appendices) contains 158 parenthetical remarks, 20 percent of which (32/158 = 20.25%) occur in A Long-expected Party. If we discount the 25 instances in the Prologue, which we know was written by a Man rather than a Hobbit, the portion in A Long-expected Party approaches a quarter (32/133 = 24%). Numbers aren't everything of course, but this compares rather well with An Unexpected Party, which contains 25 parenthetical remarks out The Hobbit's total of 120 (25/120 = 20.08%) in The Hobbit as a whole.*

Two thirds (22/32) of the parentheses in A Long-expected Party occur before or during the party up to the reactions of the guests to Bilbo's disappearance (FR 1.i.31: 'with a few exceptions'). Of these 22, 14 are funny per se or in their context, and eight simply add information (e.g., 1.i.22: 'the Old Took himself had only reached 130'). There is, however, not a single parenthesis in all of Bilbo's argument with Gandalf about the Ring or in Frodo's brief conversation with Gandalf after Bilbo has gone. The remarks resume again the following morning in very much the same generally humorous vein. Only two of these ten comments are strictly informational ('two Boffins and a Bolger' and 'old Odo Proudfoot's grandson', both at 1.i.39).

Surely it is noteworthy that a long (5+/21 pages), centrally located, and thematically crucial section of this chapter has none of the types of comments we find on almost every other page of it. True, the two scenes found in these pages (31-36) are much more dramatic, more dialogue than narrative, which leaves less scope for parenthetical remarks; but it is also true that there is nothing that either the characters in these scenes or their narrator found in the least amusing. It is a bitter, uneasy darkness at the heart of the chapter, bracketed, as it were, by the far brighter sections on either side (pp 21-31, 36-42).


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I have found Joe's friendship, humor, and commentary invaluable for some years now. He is also my second if I am challenged to any duels. 

*The Hobbit is also far more densely packed with parentheses: 120 in 95356 vs 158 in 481,103. The Hobbit also raises its own questions about narrators, which we shall examine elsewhere in connection with the narrators of The Lord of the Rings. The interested reader should look to Paul Edmund Thomas' 'Some of Tolkien's Narrators' in Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth, edd. V. Flieger and C. Hostetter (2000).


6 comments:

  1. I find the analysis of the parenthetical comments very interesting. Surely the Professor meant to imply known authorship (either Bilbo or Frodo) however maybe ultimately he was unsettled on the intended author (or IMHO deliberately coy on the subject as part of the mystic of the frame narrative). Part of the charm of a good story is not answering all the questions. I don't want to know what the Watcher in the Water is, what happened to Celeborn, Elladan, and Elrohir, what happened to the Entwives, or the stories after Aragorn became king. It is enjoyable to speculate but firm answers seem to remove the wonder of it all.

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  2. True enough, Sean. In his Beowulf essay, Tolkien warns against the perils of 'vivisection' to mythmaking, a thought which is akin to 'breaking something to learn how it works.' I don't believe that I will be able to say definitively where Bilbo stops and Frodo picks up, though I do have an idea of where that is (which I might changed my mind about later anyway). It's more fascinating and probably more profitable to notice how the very structure of the first chapter seems to reinforce so very subtly the darkness of the scene with Bilbo and Gandalf arguing about the Ring.

    Thanks so much for your comment and for reading my blog in the first place.

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  3. Sean, I was about to post your follow-up comment, but I seem to have deleted it by accident. If you want to resubmit it, I will post it.

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    1. No worries, mostly for your consumption. :)

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  4. A key piece of supporting evidence that, as far as I know, no one has ever discussed: Bilbo's speech at the Party Tree is not in quotation marks, but italics, indicating, I think, that it is (within the Red Book conceit) a distinct document copied (the italics appear very early in the composition process, in the second version of Ch. 1). The italics could be explained by the "author" of the initial chapters being Bilbo: he brought his speech with him to Rivendell and copied it verbatim into his book. My guess is that JRRT thought of Bilbo having written the initial drafts of all of Book I based on his own recollections (Ch 1) and conversations with the hobbits during and after Frodo's recovery. The first two chapters of Book II would come from his direct experience, and we could even--if we pushed it--see his narration as continuing to where the Fellowship sets off with Bilbo's teeth-chattering good-bye as the end point. Bilbo could have drafted, written, and polished all of this from December to March, before he lost his vigorousness with the destruction of the Ring. The parenthetical remarks you note, then, would be more Bilbo's style, and it would be interested to check to see if they are more common in Book I exclusive of A Long-Expected Party than elsewhere. It would also be an explanation for the "talking" fox, as that being the more whimsical kind of material that seems more characteristic of Bilbo. You should write this up as an article or note and submit it to Tolkien Studies!

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  5. Thanks so much for commenting, Professor Drout. I find very persuasive the idea that the italics in chapter 1 arise from a written version of Bilbo's speech. I am still formulating my guess about the extent of Bilbo's involvement, but you have given me much to think about. Part 3 of this series of posts will cover the parentheses from 'At the Sign of the Prancing Pony' through 'Flight to the Ford'. There will, I think, be more interesting points to consider in those chapters, but I don't want to get ahead of myself.

    I am intending to write all these posts up as one article once I am done. At the moment I am wrestling with writing an introduction to my book and getting ready to submit it for consideration to a publisher who has expressed interested.

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