Tolkien and Amazon

Amazon to Adapt J.R.R. Tolkien’s Globally Renowned Fantasy Novels, The Lord of the Rings, for Television with a Multi Season Production Commitment 

Full Release Here

By now I doubt there's a Tolkien fan who has not heard this news. I have said very little about it, though I've been skeptical. Perhaps the smartest thing I've heard anyone say about it was when my friend Katherine Sas​ tossed a Tolkien quote into the middle of a heated discussion, and then vanished in a puff of logic. In the famous letter to Milton Waldman (Letters, no 131), Tolkien discussed the future he had once foreseen for the tales he was composing.

"I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd."

While an older Tolkien here dismisses his own youthful dreams, he underestimates the scope and power of his vision, still rippling outward a century on.  But in the days Tolkien first dreamt these dreams, he had just lost the boyhood friends, Rob Gilson and Geoffrey Bache Smith, who, together with Christopher Wiseman, imagined a great future for themselves:

'Really, you three, especially Rob, are heroes,' [Wiseman] wrote. 'Fortunately we are not entirely masters of our fate, so that what we do now will make us the better for uniting in the great work that is to come, whatever it may be.'

(quoted in Garth [2003] 137)

'The great work that is to come', and '[o]ther minds and other hands' are bitter counterpoints indeed to '[b]y 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead' (FR xxiv). Not that Tolkien meant Gilson, Smith, and Wiseman when he spoke of other hands, but it may be that the idea of a cooperative vision he shared with them continued here in a different form. This would be no surprise since one might to some degree characterize the development of his legendarium as an attempt to answer the question of G. B Smith, who had asked Tolkien what the first Eärendil poem was all about when he heard him read it in 1915. 'I don't know. I'll try to find out' (Carpenter, 75).

I would love it if someone made a series that was consistent with Tolkien's vision in the sense that it remained 'high fantasy'. We've already seen how very close to that mark Peter Jackson's films sometimes came, and yet how embarrassingly far off he was at other times. There were spectacular moments in them, both good and bad -- inventions, adaptations, disasters -- and I am sure that we could not all agree on what these bad and good parts were. One invented character I have spoken of before is Tauriel. She is an excellent case in point for me. I like the character -- she falls within the 'scope of other minds and hands' -- but she was shoddily and clumsily used in the service of an insipid subplot. Or so I believe. Many others, people whose opinions I respect, hate Tauriel root and branch. 

Today's tendency in stories with large amounts of 'action' is that each installment must be a new spectacle that outdoes what came before. It's hard to go back to The Hobbit after you've made The Lord of the Rings, and not try to remake it in the image of its more grown-up successor. By making The Lord of the Rings first, Peter Jackson filmed himself into a corner. But we can see this effect at work even where the books are concerned. The pull of The Lord of the Rings led Tolkien to try to rewrite The Hobbit completely in the early 60s. Master of Retcon that Tolkien was, he failed.

We can also see a similar phenomenon in the reaction of many to the long denouement of The Lord of the Rings, who believe that we could do without much of the Tale after the coronation and marriage of Aragorn. I am not here to argue this point, though I disagree. I will, however, gladly concede that the pace of the Tale certainly downshifts once the hobbits turn for home. Everything from the last words of Book IV -- "Frodo was alive but taken by the enemy -- the words that catapulted my eleven year old self out the door, onto my bike, and over to Ruth's Stationery on Main Avenue in the desperate hope that the third volume was still there, which, thank God, it was -- everything from those words on until the end of The Steward and the King passed in such breathless terror and joy that no one (except perhaps Tolkien) would have complained much if the book had ended with that chapter's final words:

And Aragorn the King Elessar wedded Arwen Undómiel in the City of the Kings upon the day of Midsummer, and the tale of their long waiting and labours was come to fulfilment.

(RK 6.v.974-75)

But while I am sure that in the long nights of his wandering Aragorn had meditated 'on the very great pleasure which a pair of fine eyes in the face of a pretty woman can bestow', The Lord of the Rings is no Jane Austen novel. Its meditations don't stop there. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)  Aragorn's love of Arwen is an important, if underplayed, element of the story, as is Sam's for Rosie Cotton. But both Sam and Strider also see the world at times sub specie aeternitatis. The hobbit raises his eyes to the stars to glimpse the transcendent (RK 6.ii,922); the Man looks beyond the Circles of the World (RK App. A 1063). 

Is it an accident then, I wonder, that Sam's first (recorded) thoughts of Rosie come after he has recognized that 'in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing' (RK 6.ii. 922; iii.934, 939)? 

Such thoughts are more often than not lost in a two or three hour film. More often than not, though perhaps not always. Yet the small screen affords writers far more time to develop the subtle characterizations and character histories that make such moments work. I have seen shows like Babylon Five and the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, for example, blend action (and plenty of it) with plot and character so expertly over time that all of a sudden this viewer found himself on the verge of tears, both kinds. And I still do when I watch again.  Both of these series, moreover, are structured more like novels, B5 at least intentionally so, with very little that is merely episodic. I am sure that there are further examples that will spring to the mind of those better versed in recent television drama than I am.  And it is these series' adaptation of the approach to storytelling found in books that gives me hope that a television series might be the best place for telling stories of Middle-earth.  So Amazon may be the best place after all, provided the writers keep Middle-earth a world of high fantasy. 

I Hear the Tentacles Singing: Once More "A Wrinkle in Time" and "Babylon Five"

A Pak'ma'ra from Babylon 5

In chapter 11 of A Wrinkle in Time I came across what might be another link to Babylon 5. Having arrived on a new planet, Meg sees creatures like none she has ever seen before approaching her, her father, and Calvin:

They were the same dull gray color as the flowers. If they hadn't walked upright they would have seemed like animals. They moved directly toward the three human beings. They had four arms and far more than five fingers to each hand, and the fingers were not fingers, but long waving tentacles. They had heads, and they had faces. But where the faces of the creatures on Uriel had seemed far more than human faces, these seemed far less. Where the features would normally be there were several indentations, and in place of ears and hair were more tentacles. They were tall, Meg realized as they came closer, far taller than any man. They had no eyes. Just soft indentations. 

After Meg is healed by these beings, she quickly becomes quite attached to one whom she calls Aunt Beast:

"Please sing to me, Aunt Beast," said Meg. 

If it was impossible to describe sight to Aunt Beast, it would be even more impossible to describe the singing of Aunt Beast to a human being. It was a music even more glorious than the music of the singing creatures on Uriel. It was a music more tangible than form or sight. It had essence and structure. It supported Meg more firmly than the arms of Aunt Beast It seemed to travel with her, to sweep her aloft in the power of song, so that she was moving in glory among the stars, and for a moment she, too, felt that the words Darkness and Light had no meaning. and only this melody was real. 

The first passage made me think at first of the Ood from Doctor Who, and of course nothing prevents L'Engle's description from having an influence on Doctor Who, but I was also reminded of the Pak'ma'ra from Babylon 5. Both of these species have tentacles on their heads in front of their mouths. Now, admittedly this doesn't match the description of the unnamed beings in A Wrinkle in Time, creatures who also have tentacles instead of fingers. It is unclear to me whether their voice comes from the waving 'finger' tentacles or from the tentacles on their heads. 

But it was the astonishing and uplifting beauty of their singing that struck me, and made me think more of Babylon 5, in the last episode of which the main characters are conversing over a meal:

"You know, Londo never liked the Pak'ma'ra. I mean, they're stubborn, lazy, obnoxious, greedy--" said Vir.

"They kinda look like an octopus that got run over by a truck," said Garibaldi. 

"That too, but .. one day Londo and I were walking past their quarters .. and we heard them .. singing."  

"Singing? They can sing?" asked Sheridan. 

"There's nothing about that in the literature,"said Dr Franklin. 

"Apparently," Vir continued, "it's something they only do certain times of the year as part of their religious ceremonies. You may not believe this, but .. it was the most beautiful sound I've ever heard. I couldn't make out the words, but I knew it was full of sadness and .. hope and wonder and .. terrible .. sense of loss. I looked at Londo and -- this is the amazing part -- there was a .. tear running down his face. I said: 'Londo, we should leave.' And 'This is upsetting you.' He just stood there and .. listened. And when it was over he turned to me and he said: 'There are 49 gods in our pantheon, Vir. To tell you the truth I never believed in any of them. But if only one of them exists, .. then god sings with that voice.' "

The additional detail of the sadness and the terrible sense of loss with which the Pak'ma'ra sing may also point to the influence of Tolkien and the third theme of the Music of the Ainur, whose beauty comes from its sorrow. 

But it's not every day you can point to tentacles and singing in support of an argument. This may be axiomatic.

'Mary had a little lamb' from "A Wrinkle in Time" to "Babylon 5"

When I was a little boy, my aunt Sally (sit terra tibi levis) gave me A Wrinkle in Time for my birthday. At the time I was too grown up for children's books, and so I smiled, thanked her, and put it on the shelf, where it has always been ever since.  Being younger than that now, and having run across a series of quotes by Madeleine L'Engle that I found interesting, I decided to read it.

This morning, as I lay in bed reading chapter 7, I arrived at the following passage, in which the three children encounter a menacing stranger with red eyes who can communicate telepathically and who has, it seems, dominated the minds of the men, women, and children on this world. As he attempts to control the children's minds, too, Charles Wallace, the youngest, a preternaturally clever and creepy five year old, whom for the life of me I can only hear speaking in the voice of Stewie Griffin, resists.

'...For you, as well as for the rest of all the happy, useful people on this planet, I, in my own strength, am willing to assume all the pain, all the responsibility, all the burden of thought and decision.' 

'We will make our own decisions, thank you,' Charles Wallace said. 

'But of course. And our decisions will be one, yours and mine. Don't you see how much better, how much easier for you that is? Let me show you. Let us say the multiplication table together.' 

'No,' Charles Wallace said. 

'Once one is one. Once two is two. Once three is three.' 

'Mary had a little lamb!' Charles Wallace shouted. 'Its fleece was white as snow!'

'Once for is four. Once five is five. Once six is six.'

'And everywhere that Mary went the lamb was sure to go.'

J MS

The instant I read this, I sat up in bed. I had seen it before. In J. Michael Straczynski's brilliant SF series Babylon 5, a group of human telepaths have run away from Psi Corps, which is about as evil as it sounds. ('The Corps is mother; the Corps is father.') Now in the episode, A Race through Dark Places, they find themselves hunted by a Psi Cop, Alfred Bester -- that's right, Alfred Bester, and played magnificently by Walter Koenig -- who is strong enough to read their minds whether they want him to or not. Since they refuse to go back, they fear he will kill them. And so they prepare to resist both physically and mentally. To keep him out of their minds, they, too, recite 'Mary had a little lamb' over and over. 

Alfred Bester,  SF Author

Given the context in each scene, as well as how allusive and literary Babylon 5 is, I have little doubt this allusion to Madeleine L'Engle is intentional.  Nicely done, JMS. Nicely done.

Allusions are one of the ways in which reading, or, in this case, reading and watching teach us that we are not all alone in the night. And A Wrinkle in Time and Babylon 5 are both rich in allusions to, and quotations from, literature and poetry. That's why I've worked several allusions of my own into this note: to a C. S. Lewis essay, to an apocryphal C. S. Lewis quote, to Bob Dylan, three times to Babylon 5. I didn't do so (merely) to be clever, or because, if you get them, then we'll both be clever, but because they will reveal a fellowship between us as reader and writer, between us as readers, and between us and the texts from which the allusions derive. Because it's this kind of connection that makes us human in a higher and better way that links us through past, present, and future.

Alfred Bester, SF Monster

The world's been looking pretty bleak in recent times. Whichever side of the issues that are dividing us each of us may be on, I don't think many of us are feeling too hopeful; and some of us are downright scared.  To compare small things with great, I just wrote a testimonial for Mythmoot, which aimed to convey just how wonderful it was to be with all those people who understood each other's allusions and got each other's jokes. Allusions let me in. They let us all in. That's why reading glitters with hope. For it tells me that the connections we need to make can be made. Not only that, but the irony of this allusion is so sweet: it connects two sets of people, a writer and readers, to two sets of characters who are using 'Mary had a little lamb' to prevent a connection from being made at all. Which in turn makes me laugh, a proof of intelligent life according to the Minbari. I think I like that. I think I like that a lot.

Hobbit Verses Versus Verses by Hobbits: Orality, Poetry, and Literacy in Bilbo's Shire

On Saturday 3 October I had the good fortune to attend the The Mythgard Institute's Midatlantic Speculative Fiction Symposium at the University of Maryland. It was as fine a mixture of work and play as you could want, with never a dull boy to be found. Among other subjects, we spoke of Star Wars, Philip Pullman, Prophecy and Predestination, Lovecraft, Tolkien, The Kalevala, film adaptation, On Fairy-Stories, Twin Peaks, Babylon 5, Ted Chiang, Frank Herbert, and Stephen Sondheim. Discussion was lively, and laughter abundant.

But for me the two highlights of the day were a trivia contest focusing on hapax legomena (words that occur only once) in The Lord of the Rings, and Sørina Higgins' interview of Verlyn Flieger about her latest book, a scholarly edition of J.R.R. Tolkien's first prose tale, The Story of Kullervo, which, alas, will not be published in the States until next spring. (If you can't wait -- I couldn't -- you can order it directly from Blackwell's, and doubtless other places as well.)

In all it was a wonderful time. I had the chance to become better acquainted with several people I had only met briefly before, or only on the web, and to chat for the first time with others I had not known at all.  I very much hope that we'll see more meetings like this in the near future. Supporting The Mythgard Institute will help that happen.

I was also fortunate enough to present a brief paper, Hobbit Verses Versus Verses by Hobbits: Orality, Poetry, and Literacy in Bilbo's Shire, which I have added below for all who may be interested. I plan to expand it at some point in the future, to discuss some of the material I had to relegate to the footnotes during my talk, the material I mention in my final paragraph, and other hobbit poems, like Sam's Oliphaunt, and Frodo's spontaneous verse, after the fashion of Tom Bombadil, when he first sees Goldberry. But for now, here it is.

_______________________________

One summer evening in the Ivy Bush Gaffer Gamgee was denying that Bag End was ‘packed with chests of gold and silver, and jools’ (FR 1.i.23):

‘… my lad Sam will know more about that. He’s in and out of Bag End. Crazy about stories of the old days he is, and he listens to all Mr. Bilbo’s tales. Mr. Bilbo has learned him his letters – meaning no harm, mark you, and I hope no harm will come of it. 

‘Elves and Dragons’ I says to him. ‘Cabbages and potatoes are better for me and you. Don’t go getting mixed up in the business of your betters, or you’ll land in trouble too big for you,’ I says to him.

(FR 1.i.24, emphasis original)

Only a few days later Bilbo sent out so many party invitations that both local Post Offices were overwhelmed, and needed volunteers to handle all the replies: ‘There was a constant stream of them going up the Hill, carrying hundreds of polite variations on Thank you, I shall certainly come’ (1.i.26).

These few brief quotes suggest that basic literacy in the Shire was quite common, but not universal.[1] Moreover, the Gaffer’s defensiveness and his insistence that gardeners like him and Sam – thus  ‘cabbages and potatoes’ – shouldn’t get above themselves, point to a class distinction between those who can read and those who cannot, an impression reinforced by the colloquial illiteracies of his speech – ‘j-oo-ls,’ ‘learned’ as a synonym of ‘taught,’ and ‘says’ as a first person singular.[2]  That Sam, unlike his father, has learned to read is a sign of change, as are the children who witness Gandalf’s arrival and seem able to recognize the letter G in at least one and perhaps two writing systems (FR 1.i.25).

But there’s reading and there’s reading. Hobbits, we’re told in the Prologue, ‘delighted in such things [as genealogical tables], if they were accurate: they liked to have books filled with things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions’ (FR 7). Thus, of the many works later composed by Merry, the best remembered in the Shire were his Herblore of the Shire, his Reckoning of the Years, which relates the calendars of Elves and Men to those of hobbits, and his Old Words and Names in the Shire (FR 15).  Among hobbits, The Old Farmer’s Almanac would have been a perennial bestseller.

The kinds of stories that Sam wants to read are of precisely the sort that hobbit literacy has no time for, stories of Elves and Dragons that take place in the ‘queer’ lands beyond the borders of the Shire which hobbit maps mark only with ‘mostly white spaces’ (FR 1.ii.43).[3]  Gil-galad may have been an elven king all right, but his name won’t fetch you a pint at The Ivy Bush.  A proper hobbit poem, however, might do just that.  But what’s a proper hobbit poem?

One type would be songs like Frodo’s The Man in the Moon Stayed up Too Late (FR 1.ix.158-160) or Sam’s The Stone Troll (FR 1.xii.206-208), drinking songs, if you will, that invite their audience to join in a rollicking good time.[4]  Another we would find in the songs which speak of life’s simple pleasures, such as long walks, cold beer, hot baths,  supper and, of course, bed.[5] Songs of this type share in a common meter, iambic tetrameter, which occurs so often in these poems that we may well call it ‘hobbit meter.’[6]  We can even see elvish poems translated by hobbits – like Gil-galad Was an Elven King and the hymns to Elbereth – rendered in this meter.[7]

A particularly noteworthy aspect of this type of hobbit verse is its mutability.  We have four versions of The Road Goes Ever On, each of which differs from its predecessor in its adaptation to the occasion.  Bilbo’s first version at the end of The Hobbit clearly reflects his hopes, fears, and sorrows as he returns home (313). His shorter, simpler version, sixty years later shows the heart’s ease he feels once free of the Ring (FR 1.i.35), just as Frodo’s alteration of a single word reveals the weight of the burden now upon him (FR 1.iii.73).[8]  The final version differs yet again, with more thorough changes in keeping with the end of Bilbo’s Road now being in sight, and Frodo’s just around the bend (RK 6.vi.987).  And in the only other poem that we get two versions of in ‘hobbit meter’ – Upon the Hearth the Fire Is Red – there are likewise changes to suit the occasion (FR 1.iii.77-78; RK 6.ix.1028).

So we have here a form of poetry with an easily remembered four-beat line, with words that are readily changed to suit their context, and simple rhyme schemes, using couplets (AABB) or alternating lines (ABAB).[9]  Even the more rhythmically complex pub songs have mostly four-beat lines, and fairly straightforward rhyme schemes.[10]  Both these types of hobbit verse explicitly reuse old tunes, and seem to rely on oral transmission.[11] 

But there are other verses by hobbits which do not quite fit within these parameters.  More meditative and elegiac, they pursue paths that the other hobbit poems can suggest, but do not treat in detail.[12]  Bilbo’s  I Sit Beside the Fire and Think is the first clear example of this kind of verse (FR 2.iii.278-279).  Not only is its subject more somber, but only the even lines always have rhymes.  Frodo’s When Evening in the Shire Was Grey is even more directly concerned with death, though it remains traditional in rhyme and meter (FR 2.vii.359-60). But the most significant of all, I would argue, is Sam’s In Western Lands beneath the Sun (RK 6.i.908-09).

For through this poem we can see the arc of Sam’s growth as a storyteller and poet in parallel with the growth of hobbit poetry and literacy in a more literary direction.  After the good fun and nonsense of The Stone Troll we get Sam’s attempt to add to Frodo’s elegy for Gandalf, but The Finest Rockets Ever Seen is too full of childlike wonder at the ephemeral to touch the elegiac (FR 2.vii.360).  In Western Lands beneath the Sun, however, Sam not only leaves behind iambic tetrameter for alternating lines of tetrameter and trimeter, but rises above even the contemplation of death we see in I Sit beside the Fire and Think and When Evening in the Shire Was Grey to meditate upon a beauty forever beyond the reach of the transient evils of this world.[13]  And the very words which introduce this poem describe that arc:

His voice sounded thin and quavering in the cold dark tower: the voice of a forlorn and weary hobbit that no listening orc could possibly mistake for the clear song of an Elven-lord. He murmured old childish tunes out of the Shire, and snatches of Mr. Bilbo's rhymes that came into his mind like fleeting glimpses of the country of his home. And then suddenly new strength rose in him, and his voice rang out, while words of his own came unbidden to fit the simple tune.

(RK 6.i.908)

Finally let us turn to a poem that in both form and substance reaches beyond such stuff as hobbit poems are made on. All That Is Gold Does Not Glitter, with its three-beat lines of irregular length, its nameless because un-nameable meter – iamb, anapest, anapest – and its simultaneous embrace of history, legend, and prophecy, is also the only poem in The Lord of the Rings that is actually presented to the characters in written form.  ‘It is not a very hobbity song,’  as Corey Olsen put it.[14]  It’s about as far from Sing Hey! For the Bath at Close of Day as we can get.

What we see here is Tolkien, with his uncanny heed of the smallest detail, suggesting a slow process across generations and classes, a shift from oral to written and a growth of the literary to extend beyond mere literacy. In this Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam all play their parts.  Had we the time, we might also examine Errantry and Eärendil and the poems in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil.[15] And finally we might inquire how Sam’s ‘seed of courage’ had been nourished by poetry and tales of Elves and Dragons while it ‘wait[ed] for some final and desperate danger to make it grow’ (FR 1.viii.140).[16] But that is for another day.

---

[1] In addition, we may see Bilbo’s written notes to those to whom he gave gifts upon his departure.  He expects the recipients to be able to read them, and in two cases – Milo Burrows and Dora Baggins – he makes specific references to their literacy: FR 1.i.37.

[2] To be fair to the Gaffer, with ‘jools’ he is repeating what another has said, but that tends to reinforce the point about class since it shows more than one hobbit speaking so. Note also his description of Frodo as a ‘gentlehobbit’  and his concern to know whether ‘my Sam had behaved hisself and given satisfaction’ (RK 6.viii.1014).

[3] Though the Gaffer says that Sam is keen to listen to tales of Elves and Dragons, his words also clearly establish a link between such tales and Sam’s being taught to read by Bilbo. Sam’s later (mistaken) insistence that Bilbo ‘wrote’ The Fall of Gil-galad also suggests a connection with reading and writing (FR 1.xi.186).

[4] In At the Sign of the Prancing Pony Frodo sings his song a second time, ‘while many of [those in the room] joined in; for the tune was well known, and they were quick at picking up words’ (FR 1.ix.160). Note ‘words,’ not ‘the words,’ suggesting that they were good at this in general, as those who rely more on their memory than on writing would be.

If there should be any doubt that these two are in fact drinking songs, see HoME VI 142 n. 11, where Christopher Tolkien quotes his father’s outline, referring to the song in The Prancing Pony as precisely that.  It is also the case that Bingo (>Frodo) was originally meant to sing The Root of the Boot, an older troll song that evolved into The Stone Troll.  All versions of the troll song are sung to the tune of The Fox Went out on a Winter’s Night.  Subsequently  Bingo was given The Cat and the Fiddle to sing, which again evolved into The Man in the Moon Stayed up Too Late, and the troll song was made over to Sam and moved to its present location. See HoME VII.142-47.

Interestingly, Tolkien’s famous recording of the troll song deviates from the printed text of both The Root of the Boot and The Stone Troll, which lends indirect support to my suggestion below, p 4, that hobbit poetry of this kind was oral rather than written.  See the links below for recordings:

·         Tolkien sings The Stone Troll

·         The Root of the Boot

·         The Fox Went out on a Winter's Night

[5] ‘They began to hum softly, as hobbits have a way of doing as they walk along, especially when they are drawing near to home at night. With most hobbits it is a supper-song or a bed-song; but these hobbits hummed a walking-song (though not, of course, without any mention of supper and bed). Bilbo Baggins had made the words, to a tune that was as old as the hills, and taught it to Frodo as they walked in the lanes of the Water-valley and talked about Adventure.’  This passage both identifies what ‘most hobbits’ are like and in what ways “our” hobbits are like and unlike them.  Consider Pippin’s statement to Denethor (RK 5.iv.807): ‘[I can sing] well enough for my own people.  But we have no songs fit for great halls and evil times, lord.  We seldom sing of anything more terrible than wind and rain. And most of my songs are about things that make us laugh; or about food and drink, of course.’  Does ‘my’ imply that Pippin makes songs, or only refer to the songs he knows?  Note ‘of course’ in both passages, as if this should be obvious to everyone. Cf. Sam whistling on his way home to bed in The Shadow of the Past (FR 1.ii.45).

[6] I am indebted here to the discussions in classes 15 and 16 of Corey Olsen’s Mythgard course in Tolkien’s Poetry in the summer of 2015.

[7] While Bilbo seems to have consciously translated The Fall of Gil-galad (FR 1.xi.185-86), Frodo’s rendering of his first encounter with the hymn to Elbereth is described rather differently, as a spontaneous understanding produced by the art of elven minstrelsy (FR 1.iii.79): ‘One clear voice rose now above the others. 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: Snow-white! Snow-white! O Lady clear….’ See also FR 2.i.233 for a more detailed description of this effect.

[8] Between Bilbo’s version in The Hobbit and the versions in The Lord of the Rings there is one other difference that I believe is quite significant, the shift from ‘roads’ to ‘road,’ which signals a degree of abstraction, and reflects the frequent capitalization of Road in The Lord of the Rings.

[9] In addition to The Road Goes Ever On and Upon the Hearth the Fire Is Red we have FR 1.iv.90: Ho! Ho! Ho! to the Bottle I Go; 1.v.101: Sing Hey! For the Bath at the Close of Day; 1.v.106: Farewell We Call to Hearth and Hall!; 1.vi.112: O! Wanderers in the Shadowed Land; 2.iii.273: When Winter First Begins to Bite; 2.vii.360: The Finest Rockets Ever Seen. Sing Hey! For the Bath at the Close of Day is also introduced as ‘one of Bilbo’s favorite bath songs,’ thus revealing the existence of a number of such songs.

[10] The Stone Troll has an A-A-B-C-C-A-C rhyme scheme, with four-beat lines that are basically iambic with some anapests and the odd trochee.  The fifth line in each stanza is the odd man out.  It has only four syllables, but I am unsure whether to take them as two trochees, or two spondees.  The Man in the Moon Stayed up Too Late has an A-B-C-C-B rhyme scheme, with the first, third, and fourth lines having four beats, and the second and fifth having three (anapest, iamb, iamb).  On these poems see also nn. 5 above and 11 below.

[11] Both The Man in the Moon Stayed up Too Late and The Stone Troll are said to be set to old tunes, using new words, as is Upon the Hearth the Fire Is Red.  At Bree the tune is familiar to the patrons, who are so ‘good at picking up words’ that they are already singing along the second time through.  Bilbo, moreover, taught Frodo the words he had made up for Upon the Hearth while they were out walking in the Shire. With this we may compare the history of Farewell We Call to Hearth and Hall!  For since Bilbo kept his book away from prying eyes (FR 1.v.105), the only way Merry and Pippin could have learned the dwarf song (Hobbit 22-23) on which they modelled Farewell We Call to Hearth and Hall! (FR 1.v.106), is by hearing it. So in both cases we have evidence of oral transmission.

[12] Both of Bilbo’s road poems open the door to wider reflections, but do not really cross the threshold until their final versions late in The Lord of the Rings (RK 6.vi.987; ix.1028).  I believe that one could argue that Bilbo began weaving more distant horizons and larger perspectives Into the songs celebrating the loveliness of the countryside and the simple life. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Bilbo expanded the “genre” to include these things.

[13] RK 6.ii.922: ‘Far above the Ephel Dúath in the West the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. His song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his masters, ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo's side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep untroubled sleep.’

[14] In class 16 of his class on Tolkien’s Poetry in the summer of 2015 at 1:22.45.  The recording is proprietary.

[15] The Adventures of Tom Bombadil purports to come from near the time of The Lord of the Rings (29-30).  It clearly identifies Errantry as Bilbo’s work (30), and the hand that scrawled the words ‘Frodo’s Dreme’ at the head of The Sea Bell (33-34) must have been familiar with Frodo’s story in some form.

[16] ‘When [Frodo] came to himself again, for a moment he could recall nothing except a sense of dread. Then suddenly he knew that he was imprisoned, caught hopelessly; he was in a barrow. A Barrow-wight had taken him, and he was probably already under the dreadful spells of the Barrow-wights about which whispered tales spoke. He dared not move, but lay as he found himself: flat on his back upon a cold stone with his hands on his breast.

‘But though his fear was so great that it seemed to be part of the very darkness that was round him, he found himself as he lay thinking about Bilbo Baggins and his stories, of their jogging along together in the lanes of the Shire and talking about roads and adventures. There is a seed of courage hidden (often deeply, it is true) in the heart of the fattest and most timid hobbit,

wailing for some final and desperate danger to make it grow. Frodo was neither very fat nor very timid; indeed, though he did not know it, Bilbo (and Gandalf) had thought him the best hobbit in the Shire. He thought he had come to the end of his adventure, and a terrible end, but the thought hardened him. He found himself stiffening, as if for a final spring; he no longer felt limp like a helpless prey.’ 

(FR 1.viii.140).

With this passage on Frodo compare Sam’s famous discussion of the Great Tales with Frodo on the Stairs (TT 4.viii.711-13), his song in the tower (RK 6.i.908-909), his thoughts on the star and the song (RK 6.ii.922, quoted above n. 13), and the seeming death of hope (RK 6.iii.934).