A couple of comments on The Inimitable Prancing Pony Podcast

On a recent episode (starting at 3:30) of The Prancing Pony Podcast, Alan and Shawn were discussing the question of whether the Ringwraiths had possession of their own rings or whether Sauron had them. Near the end Alan made an interesting point, to which I think I can add some support. Alan noted that on Weathertop Frodo could not see the rings of the Black Riders, even though the One Ring enabled him to see much about them that was invisible to everyone else present. 

As Alan admitted, this is an argument from silence. But it becomes far more persuasive when we recall that Frodo could see Galadriel's ring when Sam could not, which she attributes specifically to Frodo being the Ring-bearer (FR 2.vii. 365-66). These two points together strike me as pretty compelling, especially when added to the other evidence that Sauron held the Rings of the Nine.

On another episode (starting at 1:34:00) a question arose about the scene in Rivendell in which Bilbo tries to touch the Ring and Frodo sees him momentarily as a Gollum-like creature whom he wishes to strike. I have just a couple of observations here and a question.

• Frodo in this scene is in exactly the same place as Bilbo was in the scene with Gandalf in A Long-expected Party. Both are on the brink of violence towards someone they care deeply for because they see that person as a threat to their possession of the Ring. What Bilbo likely sees in Frodo at this moment is himself. Something similar will happen with Frodo and Sam in Mordor.
• One powerful effect of the Ring is to distort the reality of its bearer even when it is not being worn. Presumably this is connected to the temptations others not in possession of it feel.
• What are we to make of the way Frodo-the-narrator chose to represent this scene?

In the Dead Marshes We Hear No Larks at Morning

Paul Nash, We Are Making A New World, Imperial War Museum

Since at least the twelfth century larks at morning have featured in English poetry, at first not even in English, as these Latin lines from Alexander of Neckam show, playing on the similarity of 'lark' (alauda) and 'praises' (laudat) to derive a (false) etymology:

Laudat alauda diem, praenuncia laeta diei
    Laudat, et a laudis nomine nomen habet.
Quamvis moesta thorum properans Aurora Tithoni
    Linquat, surgentem laeta salutat avis. 

(De Laudibus Divinae Sapientiae, 2.765-68) 

The lark, day's happy herald, praises the day,
    She praises it, and from the name of 'praise' gets her name.
Though sad Aurora leaves in haste Tithonus' bed,
    The happy bird greets her as she arises.

Onward through the centuries in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Wordsworth, Meredith, and Hopkins, the lark is jubilant, protective of its own, and soaring high and free to greet the dawn. There's nothing to wonder at in all this poetry on the lark. For long ago in the quiet of the world when there was less noise and more green, every morning was full of birdsong. (In fact, it still is. Open your windows; mute your machines.)  As J. V. Baker, who knew firsthand what the poets he was writing about knew, said: 

 Any knowledge of the habits of the English lark will make it easy to see why it is always associated with rapturous and soaring flight; no bird is apparently more airy and carefree or ventures higher; yet it always has an invisible cord of attachment that pulls it back to its grassy nest concealed on the ground. My first recollection of larks is of hearing them above a wheatfield; the golden ranks of wheat, relieved here and there with blood-red poppies, stood right up to the edge of the chalk cliffs falling perpendicularly into the sea near Margate; and the blue sky was filled with the song of larks. 

(The Lark in English Poetry, p. 70)

It is thus no surprise that during World War One men raised on such poetry and such experiences would find solace in the larks that sang and soared about the fields of France at dawn. 'What the lark usually betokens' for the men at the front, writes Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory (p. 242), 'is that one has got safely through another night', though men were also well aware of the absurdity of the birds singing while around them swirled a nightmare of slaughter, something the poets of the war saw both sides of.

A Lark Above the Trenches  

Hushed is the shriek of hurtling shells: and hark!
Somewhere within that bit of soft blue sky-
Grand in his loneliness, his ecstasy,
His lyric wild and free – carols a lark. 

I in the trench, he lost in heaven afar,
I dream of Love, its ecstasy he sings;
Doth lure my soul to love till like a star
It flashes into Life: O tireless wings 

That beat love’s message into melody –
A song that touches in this place remote
Gladness supreme in its undying note
And stirs to life the soul of memory –
‘Tis strange that while you’re beating into life
Men here below are plunged in sanguine strife!

Will Streets

 And:

Returning, We Hear the Larks

Sombre the night is:
And, though we have our lives, we know
What sinister threat lurks there.

Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know
This poison-blasted track opens on our camp—
On a little safe sleep.

But hark! Joy—joy—strange joy.
Lo! Heights of night ringing with unseen larks:
Music showering on our upturned listening faces.

Death could drop from the dark
As easily as song—
But song only dropped,
Like a blind man's dreams on the sand
By dangerous tides;
Like a girl's dark hair, for she dreams no ruin lies there,
Or her kisses where a serpent hides. 

Isaac Rosenberg

Now, as has long been clear, Tolkien's experience of the Somme in WWI influenced his portrayal of Sam and Frodo's journey to Mordor with Gollum. We can see this most clearly in The Passage of the Marshes, as Tolkien conceded (Letters, no. 226), and as John Garth has amply demonstrated in his splendid (if hard to come by) " 'As under a green sea': Visions of War in the Dead Marshes". Now we should not expect Tolkien to have included every commonplace of English literature, nor of the WWI poets, in his translation of his experience. Nor would its absence be particularly noteworthy, or even noticeable, if he did not draw our attention to it:

As the day wore on the light increased a little, and the mists lifted, growing thinner and more transparent. Far above the rot and vapours of the world the Sun was riding high and golden now in a serene country with floors of dazzling foam, but only a passing ghost of her could they see below, bleared, pale, giving no colour and no warmth. But even at this faint reminder of her presence Gollum scowled and flinched. He halted their journey and they rested, squatting like little hunted animals, in the borders of a great brown reed-thicket. There was a deep silence, only scraped on its surfaces by the faint quiver of empty seed-plumes, and broken grass-blades trembling in small air-movements that they could not feel.  

'Not a bird!' said Sam mournfully.  

'No, no birds,' said Gollum. 'Nice birds!' He licked his teeth. 'No birds here. There are snakeses, wormses, things in the pools. Lots of things, lots of nasty things. No birds,' he ended sadly. Sam looked at him with distaste.

(TT 4.ii.626)

Larks belong to the serene, dazzling world of the golden sun, to a world where dawn came clear and bright, as it had not in the marshes that morning (TT 4.ii.625). Theirs is not the rotten, murky world in which the three hobbits seek to hide. Their absence is a silence that grieves and dispirits Sam. And Gollum, who regrets the lack of birds for a different reason, makes quite clear that their absence from the marshes is not merely a passing one. 

And Tolkien was well acquainted the image of the lark at dawn and the power it could have. He certainly knew it from Chaucer and from most if not all of the poets down to Meredith and Hopkins; and even if he had never read another WWI poet, he had edited Spring Harvest, the collection of his friend Geoffrey Bache Smith, who wrote of the lark in his poem 'Over the hills and hollows green' before perishing at the Somme. In The Lay of Leithian, moreover, he uses the image of the lark three times (Lays, 176, 291, 355), and then once in Aragorn's song of Beren and Lúthien in The Lord of the Rings (FR 1.xi.192).  But it is in The Silmarillion (165) that he uses it with most striking effect:

There came a time near dawn on the eve of spring, and Lúthien danced upon a green hill; and suddenly she began to sing. Keen, heart-piercing was her song as the song of the lark that rises from the gates of night and pours its voice among the dying stars, seeing the sun behind the walls of the world; and the song of Lúthien released the bonds of winter, and the frozen waters spoke, and flowers sprang from the cold earth where her feet had passed. 

Then the spell of silence fell from Beren .... 

That Tolkien here likens Lúthien Tinúviel, the nightingale who sings in the dusk, to the lark is fascinating in its own right, and I think this juxtaposition signals just how epochal the love of Beren and Lúthien will be. Yet more importantly for us here now is that in both these texts without the song of the lark silence has lease. In The Silmarillion Lúthien sings like the lark and breaks the spell on Beren, whose naming her Tinúviel, nightingale, then casts a spell of love over her, thus changing the world. In The Passage of the Marshes, without lark or song, things just get worse for Frodo and Sam. Ahead of them that very night are the 'things in the pools' that Gollum slyly alluded to, the dead from whom the marshes take their name (TT 4.ii.627-28); and when, still later that same night, they at last hear a cry upon the air and the rush of wings, it is no skylark welcoming the dawn, but a creature of horror whose coming snuffs out even the candles of the corpses: " 'Wraiths!' he wailed. 'Wraiths on wings!' " (TT 4.ii.630). As a result, a shadow falls on all their hearts. Gollum begins to revert to his former self, and Frodo himself grows increasingly silent, like Beren before Lúthien sang.  After two more such visitations (TT 4.ii.634-35), the chapter ends :

So they stumbled on through the weary end of the night, and until the coming of another day of fear they walked on in silence with bowed heads, seeing nothing and hearing nothing but the wind hissing in their ears.

(TT 4.ii.635)

So in The Passage of the Marshes not only does Tolkien eschew the common trope of larks at dawn, which is reasonable enough given the context, but by substituting the winged Nazgûl to break the larkless silence he reworks the trope to introduce the nightmare that will persist and deepen, with one contrasting interlude in Ithilien, until Mt Doom. 

___________________________________

Works Consulted

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James V Baker, The Lark in English Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Spring 1950), pp. 70-79

Priscilla Bawcutt, The Lark in Chaucer and Some Later Poets, The Yearbook of English Studies,Vol. 2 (1972), pp. 5-12

From Crickhollow to the Gates of Bree: States of Consciousness

In her splendid study, A Question of Time: J.R.R. Tolkien's Road to Faërie, Verlyn Flieger illuminates the role of time and dreams in The Lost Road, The Notion Club Papers, and The Lord of the Rings, all of which Tolkien worked on from the middle 1930s through the late 1940s, switching from one to another and back again, but always weaving and reweaving the web of his thoughts into a more complete portrait of time, dreams, and the realms of mortal and fairy. As Professor Flieger states:

[In The Lord of the Rings] dreams are not so much a part of the action as correlative to it. They correlate the waking and the sleeping worlds, they parallel or contrast conscious with unconscious experience, and they act as chronological markers. Free in a way the rest of the narrative is not to move beyond the confines of conscious experience, the dreams in The Lord of the Rings reach into unsuspected regions of the mind, bridge time and space, and so demonstrate the interrelationship between dreaming and waking that the two states can be seen as a greater whole. 

(175-76)

So comprehensive is her account of Tolkien's thought and practice in this regard that it is hard to imagine any future work on this subject being taken seriously which does not take hers into account.  There is one area, however, in which I think we might build upon and advance her analysis. Professor Flieger has likened the hobbits' time in the Old Forest and with Tom Bombadil to a dream, and suggested that here begins the waking dream or dreamlike state to which Frodo refers in Homeward Bound when he says that returning to the Shire feels like falling asleep again (Flieger, 198ff; RK 6.vii.997).

Now there are certainly dreams involved in the chapters where Bombadil appears, but other states of consciousness are also in play and just as widely visible.  In fact, I would argue, the entire sequence from the time the hobbits enter the Old Forest until they reach Bree at the end of Fog on the Barrow-Downs marks a journey into Faërie, and our first extended encounter with the various states of consciousness which we will meet over and over again throughout The Lord of the Rings.

We have previously seen such states touched upon: as when we learn that Frodo has been troubled by dreams of late (FR 1.ii.43); as when the moment with the thinking fox suggests a larger consciousness of and in the world than the hobbits know of (1.iii.72); as when Sam, Pippin, and Frodo meet Gildor and the Elves in the woods of the Shire (1.iii.79-85), and find themselves, respectively, "as if in a dream," "in a waking dream," and, owing to the enchanted properties of elvish minstrelsy, understanding and remembering songs sung in a language imperfectly known (1.iii.81, 82, 79).  All of these passages prepare the ground for the sequence involving Old Man Willow, Tom Bombadil, and the Barrow Wight.

To these suggestions of a larger world of perception than either "normal consciousness" or "dreams" can describe we may add various indications that emphasize the physical boundaries put between themselves and "normal" life in the Shire. Consider Sam's thoughts as they escape across the river in the fog (1.v.99):

He had a strange feeling as the slow gurgling stream slipped by: his old life lay behind in the mists, dark adventure lay in front. He scratched his head, and for a moment had a passing wish that Mr. Frodo could have gone on living quietly at Bag End. 

Note how the ephemerality of Sam's wish is doubly emphasized by 'for a moment' and 'passing.' It suits him.  Only that morning he had declared his resolution to go only forward on this 'very long road into darkness' as well as his certainty that he has 'something to do before the end, and it lies ahead, not in the Shire' (1.iv.87).  As if to make clear that a line has been crossed which cannot be recrossed, a Black Rider appears on the far bank behind them.  Merry asks 'What in the Shire is that?' (1.v.99). How small their world has been till now.

The next morning the fog still shrouds them as they depart the Shire and enter the Old Forest by crossing a hedge (1.vi.109-110), which is as much a defensive wall against what is outside as a boundary for what is within. This is not the first time that crossing a hedge has marked a departure from an old life.  When leaving Bag End, Bilbo 'jumped over a low place in the hedge at the bottom [of the path], and took to the meadows, passing into the night like a rustle of wind in the grass' (1.i.36). Seventeen years later, Frodo, together with Sam and Pippin, 'jumped over the low place in the hedge at the bottom and took to the fields, passing into the darkness like a rustle in the grasses' (1.iii.70). Surely the near identity of phrasing here is meant to draw a line under these two moments of transition, just like the words that mark their crossing the hedge which is the border of the only world they have ever known:

It was dark and damp. At the far end it was closed by a gate of thickset iron bars. Merry got down and unlocked the gate, and when they had all passed through he pushed it to again. It shut with a clang, and the lock clicked. The sound was ominous.  

‘There!’ said Merry. ‘You have left the Shire, and are now outside, and on the edge of the Old Forest.’ 

(1.vi.110)

With their world now behind them Merry cautions them about the sentience and ill will of the trees (1.vi.110), which the hobbits before long feel oppressing them (1.vi.111-112). In an effort to 'encourage' his companions Frodo begins a song, but unlike the song of the elves which drove off the Black Rider (1.iii.78), his song has only power enough to provoke the trees further (1.vi.111). Soon the hobbits themselves fall victim to the more powerful song of Old Man Willow, which only Sam manages to recognize and resist (1.vi.116-17). This allows him to rescue Frodo, which leads to a telling exchange between them:

‘Do you know, Sam,’ he said at length, ‘the beastly tree threw me in! I felt it. The big root just twisted round and tipped me in!’ 

‘You were dreaming I expect, Mr. Frodo,’ said Sam. ‘You shouldn’t sit in such a place, if you feel sleepy.’ 

‘What about the others?’ Frodo asked. ‘I wonder what sort of dreams they are having.’ 

They went round to the other side of the tree, and then Sam understood the click that he had heard. Pippin had vanished. The crack by which he had laid himself had closed together, so that not a chink could be seen. Merry was trapped: another crack had closed about his waist; his legs lay outside, but the rest of him was inside a dark opening, the edges of which gripped like a pair of pincers.

(1.vi.117)

"Old Man Willow" © The Tolkien Estate

Despite Sam's suggestion that Frodo has been dreaming, the reader knows otherwise. The beastly tree has thrown him in, and Old Man Willow's swallowing of Merry and Pippin proves it. Whatever Sam may think just now, this is no dream, but a state of enchanted consciousness.

Unable to help his friends, Frodo runs about crying for help, and Tom Bombadil comes hopping and dancing down the path. When Sam and Frodo rush at him in desperation, he stops them dead with a word and a raised hand.  With a song and a few (as always) rhythmic words he then turns the tables on Old Man Willow, forcing him to disgorge Merry and Pippin and sending him to sleep (1.vi.119-120).

‘What?’ shouted Tom Bombadil, leaping up in the air. ‘Old Man Willow? Naught worse than that, eh? That can soon be mended. I know the tune for him. Old grey Willow-man! I’ll freeze his marrow cold, if he don’t behave himself. I’ll sing his roots off. I’ll sing a wind up and blow leaf and branch away. Old Man Willow!’ Setting down his lilies carefully on the grass, he ran to the tree. There he saw Merry’s feet still sticking out – the rest had already been drawn further inside. Tom put his mouth to the crack and began singing into it in a low voice. They could not catch the words, but evidently Merry was aroused. His legs began to kick. Tom sprang away, and breaking off a hanging branch smote the side of the willow with it. ‘You let them out again, Old Man Willow!’ he said. ‘What be you a-thinking of? You should not be waking. Eat earth! Dig deep! Drink water! Go to sleep! Bombadil is talking!’ He then seized Merry’s feet and drew him out of the suddenly widening crack.  

There was a tearing creak and the other crack split open, and out of it Pippin sprang, as if he had been kicked. Then with a loud snap both cracks closed fast again. A shudder ran through the tree from root to tip, and complete silence fell.

He then encourages the hobbits to follow him to his house and sings and dances his way out of sight.  Following as best they can, the hobbits begin to feel the ill will of the forest again: 'They began to feel that all this country was unreal, and that they were stumbling through an ominous dream that led to no awakening' (1.vi.121). But again they are not dreaming, and this time they are able to resist the enchantment of the forest's malice, aided by the murmur of the river that flows downhill past Bombadil's house and the song of Goldberry, daughter of the river (1.vi.121).

Just in case the providential arrival of a powerful figure, who hops and dances instead of walking, and who sings and speaks in verse, were not a clear enough signal that the hobbits were not in the Shire any more, witness their arrival at Bombadil's door:

‘Enter, good guests!’ Goldberry said, and as she spoke they knew that it was her clear voice they had heard singing. They came a few timid steps further into the room, and began to bow low, feeling strangely surprised and awkward, like folk that, knocking at a cottage door to beg for a drink of water, have been answered by a fair young elf-queen clad in living flowers.

(1.vii.123)

As Corey Olsen has rightly pointed out more than once when speaking of this moment in his podcasts (Mythgard Academy, The Fellowship of the Ring, class 3, 14:34-25:00), similes usually explain the unusual by comparing it to the usual. Lines of soldiers advancing across a battlefield, for example, are likened to waves approaching a shore, the thickets of their spears to fields of grain. This simile turns that process on its head, and underlines the fact that the hobbits have entered a brave new world that has such people as Tom and Goldberry in it. And Frodo is so inspired by this meeting that he responds to Goldberry's welcome with a song, not in the iambic tetrameter which is characteristic of all the hobbit verse we've seen so far, but in the trochaic rhythms of Tom Bombadil.  Even this difference in metrical feet emphasizes the difference between where they've come from and where they are, for iambs and trochees are exact opposites.

‘Fair lady Goldberry!’ said Frodo at last, feeling his heart moved with a joy that he did not understand. He stood as he had at times stood enchanted by fair elven-voices; but the spell that was now laid upon him was different: less keen and lofty was the delight, but deeper and nearer to mortal heart; marvellous and yet not strange. ‘Fair lady Goldberry!’ he said again. ‘Now the joy that was hidden in the songs we heard is made plain to me.

   'O slender as a willow-wand! O clearer than clear water!
   O reed by the living pool! Fair River-daughter!
   O spring-time and summer-time, and spring again after!
   O wind on the waterfall, and the leaves’ laughter!’ 

Suddenly he stopped and stammered, overcome with surprise to hear himself saying such things.

(1.vii.124)

Three times told that they need fear nothing in the house of Tom Bombadil (1.vii.123, 125, 126), the hobbits go to sleep. Three of the four have dreams (1.vii.126-127).  Only Sam has none, just as he alone successfully resisted Old Man Willow's spell. Merry and Pippin's dreams are quite ordinary, and reflect their fears, which is hardly surprising given the day they've had. This is all quite different from the enchantment that the hobbits feel in the Forest and in the presence of Bombadil and Goldberry. These are clearly dreams and described as such.  The link back to Old Man Willow, and to the remembered (or repeated) advice of Bombadil and Goldberry to heed no nightly noises, underscores the difference between the one form of consciousness and the other.

Frodo's dream here is of course more visionary, as he looks across time and space to observe Gandalf's rescue from the pinnacle of Orthanc by Gwaihir. So Frodo's dream seems an enchanted dream, affected and likely even provoked by the spells that the songs of the Forest, Goldberry, and Bombadil have laid upon him. Neither of his earlier dreams have gone so far beyond the ordinary, though they have hinted at it (1.ii.43; v.108). His next dream will go even farther, as we shall see.

In the morning the experience of enchantment continues. Almost from the moment they wake up, the singing of Tom and Goldberry continues, while outside mist and a 'deep curtain' of rain isolate and insulate the house from the dangers of the forest and black riders (1.vii.128-29).  Within, the hobbits have rest and food and freedom from fear.  Indeed the only connection to the outside world is the stream that runs downhill past the house, down to the Withywindle, past all the troubles of the forest, and indeed of Middle-earth, to the Sea. And it would seem to be this stream of which Goldberry is singing:

As they looked out of the window there came falling gently as if it was flowing down the rain out of the sky, the clear voice of Goldberry singing up above them.  They could hear few words, but it seemed plain to them that the song was a rain-song, as sweet as showers on dry hills, that told the tale of a river from the spring in the highlands to the Sea far below. The hobbits listened with delight; and Frodo was glad in his heart and blessed the kindly weather, because it delayed them from departing.

(1.vii.129)

The story told by Goldberry's song is, moreover, but the prelude to a day of tales from Tom Bombadil, which seem to cover the entire life of Middle-earth, reaching back beyond 'the river and the trees.... before the first raindrop and the first acorn,' even to a time when evil had not yet entered the world (1.vii.131).

The hobbits sat still before him, enchanted; and it seemed as if, under the spell of his words, the wind had gone, and the clouds had dried up, and the day had been withdrawn, and darkness had come from East and West, and all the sky was filled with the light of white stars. 

Whether the morning and evening of one day or of many days had passed Frodo could not tell. He did not feel either hungry or tired, only filled with wonder. The stars shone through the window and the silence of the heavens seemed to be round him.

(1.vii.131)

Tom Bombadil © Alan Lee

This timeless day of rain, song, and story, moreover introduces the most remarkable moment of all. Bombadil puts on the Ring, and it has no effect on him. Nor, when Frodo puts on the Ring, is Bombadil blind to where he is in the room. Clearly Bombadil himself possesses a wider consciousness that perceives more than normal earthly senses can.  We've caught a glimpse of this before when Merry and Pippin wake from their dreams in the night and seem 'to hear or remember hearing' the words of both Goldberry and Bombadil to 'heed no nightly noises' (1.vii.127-28). The next morning Bombadil is aware that they awoke in the night without being told (128). Again, the hobbits are clearly not in a place where their normal reality applies, or with people subject to its laws.

Recall also that Bombadil, when asked the night before by Frodo if he had heard him calling and come to help them, denies that he had heard them, and asserts that it was 'chance, if chance you call it' (126), which is reminiscent of Gandalf's suggestion to Frodo that it was more than chance that Bilbo found the Ring (1.ii.55-56), and Gildor's statement to Frodo that '[i]n this meeting [of ours] there may be more than chance' (1.iii.84). There is a larger awareness in all three of these statements that fits in with what we witness with Bombadil and the Ring.

That night, having sat secluded all day behind a 'deep curtain' of 'grey rain' (1.vii.129), and having listened, 'under the spell of Tom's words' (1.vii.132), to tales that included 'strange regions beyond their memory and beyond their waking thought, into times when the world was wider, and the seas flowed straight to the western Shore' (1.vii.131), Frodo seems to dream a dream that again crosses time and space, but this time looks ahead to the moment when his own journey ends:

That night they heard no noises. But either in his dreams or out of them, he could not tell which, Frodo heard a sweet singing running in his mind; a song that seemed to come like a pale light behind a grey rain curtain, and growing stronger to turn the veil all to glass and silver, until at last it was rolled back, and a far green country opened before him under a swift sunrise. 

The vision melted into waking; and there was Tom whistling like a tree-full of birds; and the sun was already slanting down the hill and through the open window. Outside everything was green and pale gold.

(1.viii.135)

From the morning of his prophetic dream, which contains elements from his experience and the tales he had heard the day before, and which links back to the dream of the sea Frodo had in Crickhollow immediately before they entered the Old Forest (1.v.108), Frodo wakes into the morning of Tom Bombadil's world. And it is time for the hobbits to begin the journey back to their own. So they go on their way, armed with advice from Tom about the next dangers that lay before them -- the Barrow Downs -- and with a song that will ensure that he will hear them this time if they need help (1.vii.133-34; viii.135-36). As they depart, from a hilltop Goldberry shows them all the surrounding lands, bright and clear in the sunshine, in contrast to the misty world they had seen when they climbed the hill in the Old Forest, a contrast to which the narrator calls our attention (1.viii.135-36). Though they leave her in hope and high spirits, before the day is old things begin to take a darker turn: 'A shadow now lay round the edge of sight, a dark haze above which the upper sky was like a blue cap, hot and heavy' (1.viii.136, emphasis mine). 

At noon they climb another hill, from which, as on the hill in the Old Forest, 'the distances had now become all hazy and deceptive' (1.viii.137, emphasis mine). And despite the 'disquiet' they sense from the barrow covered hills that loom over them (1.viii.137), despite the 'warning' of the standing stone that the sun could not warm (137), despite the admonitions of Goldberry to 'make haste while the Sun shines' (1.viii.136), 'they were now hungry and the sun was still at fearless noon; so they set their back against the east side of the stone' (1.viii.137, emphasis mine), just as they had set their backs against Old Man Willow.

Riding over the hills, and eating their fill, the warm sun and the scent of turf, lying a little too long, stretching out their legs and looking at the sky above their noses: these things are, perhaps, enough to explain what happened. However that may be: they woke suddenly and uncomfortably from a sleep they had never meant to take. The standing stone was cold, and it cast a long pale shadow that stretched eastward over them. The sun, a pale and watery yellow, was gleaming through the mist just above the west wall of the hollow in which they lay; north, south, and east, beyond the wall the fog was thick, cold and white. The air was silent, heavy and chill. Their ponies were standing crowded together with their heads down. 

(1.viii.137)

Note how the 'perhaps' in the first sentence raises the possibility of a mundane explanation that the 'However that may be' in the next sentence instantly dismisses; and how all the 'nows' and the 'still' in the paragraphs leading up to this moment emphasize the steady encroachment on the hobbits' mind of the barrow wight's 'dreadful spells' (i.viii.140). Their attempt to escape through the fog once they awaken is reminiscent of the moments before they escaped the forest and reached the safety of Tom Bombadil's house, when 'they began to feel that all this country was unreal, and that they were stumbling through an ominous dream that led to no awakening' (i.vi.121).  Only this time Tom's house lies behind them and the peril ahead. And what seems like hope and the promise of escape is nearly their undoing:

They were steering, as well as they could guess, for the gate-like opening at the far northward end of the long valley which they had seen in the morning. Once they were through the gap, they had only to keep on in anything like a straight line and they were bound in the end to strike the Road. Their thoughts did not go beyond that, except for a vague hope that perhaps away beyond the Downs there might be no fog.  

Their going was very slow. To prevent their getting separated and wandering in different directions they went in file, with Frodo leading. Sam was behind him, and after him came Pippin, and then Merry. The valley seemed to stretch on endlessly. Suddenly Frodo saw a hopeful sign. On either side ahead a darkness began to loom through the mist; and he guessed that they were at last approaching the gap in the hills, the north-gate of the Barrow-downs. If they could pass that, they would be free.  

'Come on! Follow me!' he called back over his shoulder, and he hurried forward. But his hope soon changed to bewilderment and alarm. The dark patches grew darker, but they shrank; and suddenly he saw, towering ominous before him and leaning slightly towards one another like the pillars of a headless door, two huge standing stones. He could not remember having seen any sign of these in the valley, when he looked out from the hill in the morning. He had passed between them almost before he was aware: and even as he did so darkness seemed to fall round him. His pony reared and snorted, and he fell off. When he looked back he found that he was alone: the others had not followed him. 

(1.viii.138-39)

The spells of the Barrow-wight lead the hobbits to a very different door at the top of a very different hill, where Goldberry is not waiting.  Unlike under the eaves of the Old Forest, here there is no wholesome enchantment to combat the darkness of the barrow wight's.  The song Bombadil had taught them has been for the moment forgotten, whether from their own fear or because they are bewitched.

As we can see, enchanted consciousness can cut both ways, for good or for ill, depending on the source of the enchantment.  The whole narrative in this passage, from the moment the hobbits wake up to the moment Frodo is taken by the Barrow-wight, is vague and dark, full of fear and deceptions, the reader having no more idea of what is going on than the characters do (1.viii.140). By contrast, the vivid description of the tales Bombadil tells reads more like the hobbits were witnessing the events rather than just hearing them retold: 'and still on and back Tom went singing out into ancient starlight, when only the Elf-sires were awake' (1.vii.131).

Song has this power in Middle-earth, to fascinate the mind, to shape its perceptions, and even to bring visions of what is being sung; and this has evidently been so since Ilúvatar said 'Behold your choiring and your music' to the Ainur (The Book of Lost Tales 1.55; Silmarillion 17).  We have seen this before with Old Man Willow, Bombadil, and Goldberry.  We will see it later in Rivendell (2.i.233).  We are seeing it now, I would argue, in the perceptions of the hobbits in hours leading up to their capture. Somewhere, as the narrator's dismissal of a more prosaic explanation above, and as Frodo's statement to Merry below, that he 'thought that he was lost' (1.viii.143, emphasis mine), strongly suggest, the Barrow-wight was singing from the moment the hobbits stopped for lunch.

When Frodo awakes in the barrow, a familiar scene greets us.  Three hobbits in one state of consciousness, and the fourth in another. Somehow Frodo has sufficiently escaped the enchantment -- perhaps because the Barrow-wight is focussed on the three beneath the sword while casting a further spell upon them -- to take two actions that will combine to save his friends.

Suddenly a song began: a cold murmur, rising and falling. The voice seemed far away and immeasurably dreary, sometimes high in the air and thin, sometimes like a low moan from the ground. Out of the formless stream of sad but horrible sounds, strings of words would now and again shape themselves: grim, hard, cold words, heartless and miserable. The night was railing against the morning of which it was bereaved, and the cold was cursing the warmth for which it hungered. Frodo was chilled to the marrow. After a while the song became clearer, and with dread in his heart he perceived that it had changed into an incantation: 

   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.

(1.viii.141, emphasis mine)

Faced with this horror, Frodo finds his courage.  'Suddenly' he seizes a sword and slashes off the wight's hand, which seems to free him completely from the spell and gains him the moment he needs:

All at once back into his mind, from which it had disappeared with the first coming of the fog, came the memory of the house down under the Hill, and of Tom singing. He remembered the rhyme that Tom had taught them. In a small desperate voice he began: Ho! Tom Bombadil! and with that name his voice seemed to grow strong: it had a full and lively sound, and the dark chamber echoed as if to drum and trumpet. 

   Ho! Tom Bombadil, Tom Bombadillo!
   By water, wood and hill, by the reed and willow,
   By fire, sun and moon, harken now and hear us!
   Come, Tom Bombadil, for our need is near us! 

There was a sudden deep silence, in which Frodo could hear his heart beating. After a long slow moment he heard plain, but far away, as if it was coming down through the ground or through thick walls, an answering voice singing: 

   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. 

There was a loud rumbling sound, as of stones rolling and falling, and suddenly light streamed in, real light, the plain light of day. A low door-like opening appeared at the end of the chamber beyond Frodo's feet; and there was Tom's head (hat, feather, and all) framed against the light of the sun rising red behind him. The light fell upon the floor, and upon the faces of the three hobbits lying beside Frodo. They did not stir, but the sickly hue had left them. They looked now as if they were only very deeply asleep.

(1.viii.141-42, emphasis mine)

As different as the songs of Frodo and the wight are from each other, they are the same in one respect.  Both are invocations of a power they do not themselves possess. Despite what we've seen so far, the 'dreadful spells' of the Barrow-wights are limited. The words of the invocation may be 'grim, hard, cold words, heartless and miserable,' but they are also words of deprivation and despair: 'The night was railing against the morning of which it was bereaved, and the cold was cursing the warmth for which it hungered' (1.viii.141). For some kind of redress or revenge, the wight looks to the ending of the world and an unholy resurrection of the dead by the dark lord, whom he cannot or will not name. By contrast, Frodo calls upon Bombadil by name and by all that the wight lacks and hates. A silence falls that is as sudden as the beginning of the wight's song, and Tom's arrival in answer to Frodo's song is as sudden as Frodo's grabbing a sword and striking the wight.

Bombadil's three songs invoke nothing but his own place within the world, and simply issue commands, banishing the wight to the outer darkness (1.viii.142), of which he is just as aware as the wight, and summoning Merry, Pippin, and Sam back from the same long dark (1.viii.143). Tom's power is his own; Tom has no fear; Tom is Master. The wight's invocation goes unanswered. He can no more withstand Tom than Old Man Willow could.

In awakening the hobbits, Tom raises his hand as he sings, which links to the gesture he made when Frodo and Sam rushed desperately at him and the blow he delivered to Old Man Willow (1.vi.119-120), and contrasts the ineffectiveness of wight's invocation of the dark lord who will 'lift his and / over dead sea and withered land' (1.viii.143). Yet, though the wight's final song fails, his earlier spells had no inconsiderable power, putting Merry into a dream in which he re-lived the life and death struggle of one of those originally entombed in the barrow, a dream whose effect intrudes briefly on normal consciousness. This takes the dream consciousness even further in some ways than Frodo's dream of the far green country, since, however briefly, Merry puts on the consciousness of someone else. And this is so potent an experience that he assumes that identity even into the waking world. While Frodo's 'vision melted into waking' (1.viii.135), Merry returns to himself with a bit of a jolt.

But this encounter with the not so dead past effects even Bombadil, who, in breaking forever the spell on the barrow by removing and scattering its treasure, picks out a brooch for Goldberry.  He sadly remembers its former owner, and, therefore, clearly knows whose barrow this is: 'Fair was she who long ago wore this on her shoulder.  Goldberry shall wear it now, and we will not forget her!' (1.viii.145).  Tom draws a further connection to that time by giving the hobbits swords from the mound, 'untouched by time, unrusted, sharp, glittering in the sun,' and tells them something of their history and the Men of Westernesse who forged them (1.viii.146).

And more than that, Bombadil bridges that gap of time for the hobbits, not just in his person and memory, but by conjuring, just as Macbeth's witches do for him (Macbeth 4.1.116-148), a vision of generations of kings:

'Few now remember them,' Tom murmured, 'yet still some go wandering, sons of forgotten kings walking in loneliness, guarding from evil things folk that are heedless.' 

The hobbits did not understand his words, but as he spoke they had a vision as it were of a great expanse of years behind them, like a vast shadowy plain over which there strode shapes of Men, tall and grim with bright swords, and last came one with a star on his brow. Then the vision faded, and they were back in the sunlit world. It was time to start again.

(1.viii.146)

And so it was.  With Tom as escort, the hobbits make their way fully back to 'the sunlit world.' And just as they had to cross a hedge to leave the Shire, so now they must cross a dike and a line of trees, and pass through the hedge that surrounds Bree (1.viii.146-47; ix.150). 'The shadow of the fear of the Black Riders came suddenly over them again' (1.viii.147, emphasis added) as they come to the border of Tom's land, which 'he will not pass' (1.viii.148). Unbeknownst to the hobbits, moreover, even as they take their leave of Bombadil and approach Bree, the man whom they saw in their shared vision, the man who will wear 'a star on his brow' is 'behind the hedge' listening to their conversation (1.x.163-64; 5.vi.848). This last experience of enchanted consciousness passes the border that Bombadil will not, linking past, present, and future across the boundary between the normal world and Faërie.

Think about it.  The hobbits first enter a perilous, enchanted, sentient forest, where 'lived yet, ageing no quicker than the hills, the fathers of the fathers of trees, remembering times when they were lords' (1.vi.130).  That is, they remember the times before even the Elves awoke. The hobbits must then cross a haunted land, full of the menace of evil, resentful spirits who inhabit the bodies of the dead, but it is also a land of far more recent origin than the Old Forest, with descendants still wandering the earth, 'sons of forgotten kings,' who, rather than resent what they have lost or what they lack, exercise an anonymous guardianship over others. It is a land pregnant with two possible futures, one of dark resurrection invoked by the barrow-wight, and the other of renewal brought by the man with 'a star upon his brow.'

Precisely between these two lands they find a day of refuge at the house of Tom Bombadil, whose 'country' all this is, not as owner but as 'Master of wood, water, and hill' (1.vii.124, viii.148).  Even the Ring seems to have no power here; at least it has none over Tom (1.viii.132-33; cf. 2.ii.265). He is essentially timeless. If the trees were there before the Elves, Tom was there before the trees. If the barrow-wight looks to the return of the Dark Lord (Morgoth, not Sauron), Tom was there before he came the first time.  If Tom can remember the most distant night of ancient starlight, he can also foresee the coming of the future king 'with a star on his brow,' and conjure visions of him for others. 'Eldest, that's what I am' (1.vii.131) is perhaps the most accurate and the least cryptic of his statements about himself.

His awareness and memory of all these things across time show that he is not simply the hopping and singing eccentric figure he seems to be, not simply the pre-existing character that Tolkien just had to fit in somehow, not simply 'the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside' that Tolkien had invented in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, but rather the 'enlarge[d]...portrait' that he suggested to Stanley Unwin (Tolkien, Letters, no. 19).  Far from doing 'little to advance the story,' as some have held, his role is pivotal in weaving together the various states of consciousness that bind together past, present, and future in The Lord of the Rings.  And his connection to, and unexpected awareness of, people and places beyond his borders -- like Gildor and the Elves, like the Shire and Farmer Maggot, like the Prancing Pony and Barliman Butterbur, like Mordor and the Ringwraiths, and finally like the Dúnedain and Aragorn -- establish the relevance of what goes on within his evidently not impenetrable borders to what goes on outside them.

For most hobbits the lands beyond the Shire are unknown and uninteresting. '[Frodo] looked at maps, and wondered what lay beyond their edges: maps made in the Shire showed mostly white spaces beyond its borders' (1.ii.43). To be sure, Frodo and his companions are hardly ordinary hobbits, but Sam, for example, for all his fascination with old stories of Elves and Dragons, does not even know 'what sort of folk are ... in Bree,' and Merry, though more knowledgeable about the townspeople and the inn, seems never to have been there himself (1.viii.148).  Tom's land is the first that they pass through beyond their own. And though they come through the dangers in the Old Forest and the Barrow-Downs unscathed, they do not emerge from his land unchanged.

This journey through Tom's land is so much more than the beginning of a waking dream.  It is rather an awakening to a wider world, which does and will require the hobbits to deal with every state from normal consciousness to dream consciousness again and again.  These will shape their experiences and be shaped by them until the end of the Tale. They are the beginning of the process of growth that enables them to face the crises with which their errand presents them.  It is no accident that in Homeward Bound Gandalf tells them 'you must settle the [Shire's] affairs yourselves; that is what you have been trained for' directly before he leaves them at the exact place on the road where they had left Bombadil (6.vii.996). Gandalf, moreover, with his task in mortal lands now at an end, crosses over into Tom's land, not to be seen again by the hobbits until they meet him on his way to the Grey Havens.

This moment, when Gandalf has vanished across the Barrow-downs, is also the precise moment at which Frodo remarks to Merry that returning to the Shire feels like falling asleep again.  Yet, as we have seen, consciousness is not merely a binary divide between the normal consciousness of waking and the dream consciousness of sleeping. We can easily enough identify three other states:

• Dreamlike Consciousness -- in which the individual seems to himself or another to be dreaming, or in which words such as 'dreamlike,' 'as if in a dream,' 'half in a dream,' etc., would be an apt description.
• Enchanted Consciousness -- in which the individual's perceptions are altered, for good or for ill, by means of enchantment.
• Wider Consciousness -- in which the individual perceives more than what the five senses can communicate.

Yet how to arrange these three between the other two is difficult, probably impractical, and most likely irrelevant. The states overlap and blend. Dreams, for example, can be ordinary, like those of Merry and Pippin in Bombadil's house; they can combine with a wider consciousness, like Frodo's that cross time and space; or they can partake of enchanted consciousness as Merry's dream in the barrow seems to do. There is thus no hedge, no river, no line of trees, to mark a clear boundary. The interplay between these states and between the normal world and Faërie argues that these are all, not alternative states or worlds, but integral parts of a greater whole.  This greater whole includes Faërie, for the moment, but the references in the passages we have discussed to the seas being bent, to Gandalf's task being done, and to the isolation of Tom's land within Middle-Earth, suggest that Faërie is being increasingly lost.  This is in keeping with what we are told elsewhere in The Lord of the Rings of the fading of the Elves, and of the winter of Lothlórien, 'the heart of Elvendom on earth' (2.vi.352), that will nonetheless never see another spring (2.viii.373, 375).  Nor it is at all accidental that the prophetic vision Frodo dreams in Tom's house -- of 'a far green country under a swift sunrise' (1.viii.135) -- resumes in the vision he sees in The Mirror of Galadriel of a ship which 'passed away' westward 'into a grey mist' (2.vii.364).

But that is a discussion for another day.

___________________________

My thanks to my friends Jeremiah Burns, Simon Cook, Richard Rohlin, and Oliver Stegen, who have all seen and commented on an earlier version of this study.  Any errors are of course my own.

Below I have gathered, categorized, and aranged all the references to dreams in The Lord of the Rings. These are passages in which the words dream/dreamed/dreams/dreamless/dreamlike/dreaming and nightmare occur. I have also included passages in which there is no form of the word, but the character is clearly dreaming.

I believe the near absence of recorded dreams after Frodo's 'far green country' dream is significant, but I have not yet sorted out how. I also find it quite interesting that Merry is almost always associated with bad dreams.  

Dream Recorded:

FR 

1.v.108 (2x -- Frodo at Crickhollow); 1.vii.127: House of TB Frodo (2x), Pippin (3x), Merry (word not used, but he dreams); 1.viii.135 (Frodo, far green country); 2.i.233 (Frodo, enchantment, song, water, 2x), 2.i.237 (Frodo, referring to previous); 2.iii.290 (Frodo).

TT

4.vii.699 (Sam).

RK

none.

Dream Reported/Cited:

FR

1.ii.43; 1.viii.143 (Merry/Carn Dum); 1.x.173 (Merry); 1.xi.177 (Frodo); 1.xii.202 (Frodo); 1.xii.204 (Frodo, half in a dream); 1.xii.211; 2.ii.246 (three times -- Boromir/Faramir); 2.ii.261 (Frodo, referring to 1.vii.127); 2.viii.368;

TT

3.ii.427 (Aragorn); 3.ii.429 (Legolas); 3.ii.434 (Éomer refers to Boromir's dream); 3.ii.442 (Legolas); 3.iii.444 (Pippin, 3 times, "dream-shadows"); 3.iii.448 (Pippin); 3.iii.450 (twice, Pippin and Merry); 3.vi.515 (Théden); 3.vi.516 (Gandalf to Théoden re previous); 4.ii.634 (Frodo, a fair dream, but unremembered); 4.iv.649 (Gollum); 4.iv.655 (Frodo, twice, another fair, unremembered dream); 4.v.671 (twice, Faramir about his/Boromir's dream);

RK

5.i.747 (Pippin); 5.i.748; 5.iii.800 (Merry); 5.vii.852 (twice, Faramir, fevered); 5.viii.858 (twice, Merry, black breath); 5.viii.860 (twice, black breath); 5.viii.863 (black breath); 5.viii.865 (Faramir); 5.viii.868 (twice, Éowyn); 6.i.910 (Frodo, 4 times on page, first and last referring to real dreams); 6.ii.922 (Frodo, dreams of fire); 6.iii.936 (Sam, probably both dream and not dream); 6.iv.951 (first use of three on this page 'and in a dream'); 6.v.962 (the green wave); 6.ix.1024 (Frodo, half in a dream); 6.ix.1030 (Frodo: 'as in the dream in the house of Bombadil').

Dream Metaphor/Simile/Poetry:

FR

1.iii.81, iii.82 (waking); 1.vi.121; 1.vii. 126 (TB); 1.ix.159 (man in the moon); 2.ii.239; 2.iii.272; 2.iii.283; 2.vii.356 (that which haunts our darkest dreams); 2.vii.362; viii.379 (elvish dreams);

TT

3.ii.434; 3.iii.452 (Grishnákh to Uglúk); 3.iii.452 (nightmare); 3.iv.477 (poem: 'dreams of trees'); 3.v.497 (Sauron); 3.viii.547 (Gimli on the Glittering Caves); 3.ix.563; 3.ix.565 (twice); 3.x.580 ('like men startled out of a dream' -- Saruman's voice); 3.x.585; 3.xi.596; 4.ii.627; 4.ii.628; 4.ii.630; 4.ii.632 (nightmare); 4.iii.645 ('as if ... dreaming'); 4.vii.695 (twice); 4.viii.704; 4.ix.725; 4.x.728; 4.x.729; 4.x.734.

RK

5.i.752; 5.ii.788 (?); 5.iii.791 (half-dreaming); 5.viii.871; 5.ix.877; 5.x.886; 6.i.907 (perhaps an allusion to a real dream of Valinor, but more likely metaphorical -- how would anyone know what orcs actually dream?); 6.ii.931 (nightmare); 6.iii.935 ('but the time lay behind them like an ever darkening dream'); 6.vii.997 (Merry and Frodo).

Dream Mistaken/Denied/Dreamless:

FR

1.iii.85; 1.vi.117 (3 times, Old Man Willow); 2.i.219 (Frodo); 2.iv.318 (twice, Frodo, Gollum's eyes, first time clearly not dream, second maybe); 2.vii.358; 2.ix.382 (Sam, Gollum, River, 3 times); 2.ix.383 (Sam, same).

TT

4.v.666 (twice)

RK

5.viii.868 (Éowyn, cf. above dreams reported. 3rd time not a dream -- Théoden); 6.i.910 (Frodo, 4 times on page, 2nd and 3rd not real dreams); 6.iv.951 (Sam, 2nd and 3rd times); 6.ix.1027 (Sam: 'seems like a dream now').

sometime 'half in a dream' seems figurative, sometimes literal

The Black Rider, the Fox, and the Elves

Just over the top of the hill they came on the patch of fir-wood.  Leaving the road they went into the deep resin-scented darkness of the trees, and gathered dead sticks and cones to make a fire.  Soon they had a merry crackle of flame at the foot of a large fir-tree and they sat around it for a while, until they began to nod.  Then, each in an angle of the great tree's roots, they curled up in their cloaks and blankets, and were soon fast asleep.  They set no watch, for they were still in the heart of the Shire.  A few creatures came and looked at them when the fire died away.  A fox passing through the wood on business of his own stopped several minutes and sniffed. 

'Hobbits,' he thought. 'Well, what next?  I have heard of strange doings in this land, but I have seldom heard of a hobbit sleeping out of doors under a tree.  Three of them!  There's something mighty queer behind this.'  He was quite right, but he never found out anything more about it.

(FR 1.iii.72)

From the first time I read this passage at eleven years old I have been charmed by it. As I grew older I came to regard it as a last vestigial intrusion of the much more forward and obvious narrator of The Hobbit, the same one who made the rather jarring comment of Gandalf's fireworks that 'the dragon passed like an express train' (FR 1.i.28).  I always smiled to read it or recall it, but I didn't give it much more thought than that.

Until the other night. I had finished the second in my series on Sam and Story, and was reading through the next passages I wanted to examine, when suddenly I heard an echo of the fox's thoughts in an unexpected place.  The next night the hobbits unexpectedly meet Gildor and the Elves in the woods Sam had been asking about:

The hobbits sat in shadow by the wayside.  Before long the Elves came down the lane towards the valley,  They passed slowly, and the hobbits could see the starlight glimmering on their hair and in their eyes.  They bore no lights, yet as they walked a shimmer, like the light of the moon above the rim of the hills before it rises, seemed to fall about their feet. They were now silent, and as the last elf passed he turned and looked towards the hobbits and laughed, 

'Hail, Frodo,' he cried.  'You are abroad late.  Or perhaps you are lost?' Then he called aloud to the others, and all the company stopped and gathered round. 

'This is indeed wonderful!' they said. 'Three hobbits alone in a wood at night! We have not seen such a thing since Bilbo went away. What is the meaning of it?' 

'The meaning of it, fair people,' said Frodo, 'is simply that we seem to be going the same way as you are. I like walking under the stars. But I would welcome your company.' 

'But we have no need of other company, and hobbits are so dull,' they laughed.  'And how do you know that we go the same way as you, for you do not know whither we are going?'

(FR 1.iii.80)

And while I know I have heard (and forgotten) this particular echo before, I think it resonated differently for me this time because of my examination of the next scene in which Sam asks 'Do Elves live in those woods?' First there was the fox on his way through the woods on business of his own, who stopped when he did not have to and specifically noted the strangeness of three hobbits in a wood at night. Then the Elves do precisely the same thing.

This makes me think that the appearance of the sentient fox  -- who is aware of 'strange doings in this land,' who of course does not see 'this land' as 'The Shire' because to him it is not The Shire, and who seems to be a folklore or fairy tale archetype of cunning in Middle-earth also -- is more than merely the vestige of The Hobbit I had long believed him to be.¹ Rather he is another example of how the hobbits have already entered the world of Story without straying at all far from home and without their even knowing it yet.  The fox is a link backwards to the Black Rider who questions the Gaffer right outside Frodo's front door earlier that same evening -- no one knew anything about him and his connection to another world then either -- and forwards to the reappearance of the same mysterious Black Rider in a more menacing way the next day,² and the arrival of Gildor and the Elves. Much like them, the 'thinking fox,' as he is described in the index (RK 1156), shows that the world is other than the hobbits understand.

_____________________________________

¹ In two widely separate passages Gollum is likened to a fox in cleverness. In the first the speaker is Aragorn, who calls Gollum 'slier than a fox' (FR 2.ix.384); and in the second Faramir says that Gollum 'gave us the slip by some fox-trick' (TT 4.iv.657).  Clearly the cunning of the fox is well-established in both the north and south of Middle-earth.  One could not make such statements otherwise.  It would be absurd to imagine that the reputation of the fox was established in any other way than in stories, just as it has been in our world from ancient times.
² Note how the Black Rider is more frightening when he is near them in lonely places and in darkness (FR 1.iii.74-75, 78) than he was at the door of Bag End (1.iii.69, 75-76). This of course agrees with Strider's description of them (FR1.x.174). See my discussion here.

A Very Long Road, into Darkness: Sam and Story (III)

From Frodo's mind the bright morning -- treacherously bright, he thought -- had not banished the fear of pursuit; and he pondered the words of Gildor.  The merry voice of Pippin came to him.  He was running on the green turf and singing. 

'No! I could not!' he said to himself.  'It is one thing to take my young friends walking over the Shire with me, until we are hungry and weary, and food and bed are sweet.  To take them into exile, where hunger and weariness may have no cure, is quite another, even if they are willing to come.  The inheritance is mine alone.  I don't even think I ought to take Sam.'  He looked at Sam Gamgee, and discovered that Sam was watching him.

'Well, Sam!' [Frodo] said, 'What about it?  I am leaving the Shire as soon as ever I can -- in fact I have made up my mind now not to wait a day at Crickhollow, if it can be helped.'

'Very good, sir!' 

'You still mean to come with me? 

'I do.' 

'It is going to be very dangerous, Sam.  It is already dangerous.  Most likely neither of us will come back.' 

'If you don't come back, sir, then I shan't, that's certain,' said Sam. 'Don't you leave him, they said to me.  Leave him! I said.  I never mean to.  I am going with him, if he climbs to the Moon; and if any of those Black Riders try to stop him, they'll have Sam Gamgee to reckon with, I said. They laughed.' 

'Who are they, and what are you talking about?' 

'The Elves, sir.  We had some talk last night; and they seemed to know you were going away, so I didn't see the use of denying it.  Wonderful folk, Elves, sir!  Wonderful!' 

'They are,' said Frodo.  'Do you like them still, now you have had a closer view?' 

'They seem a bit above my likes and dislikes, so to speak,' answered Sam slowly. 'It don't seem to matter what I think about them.  They are quite different from what I expected -- so old and so young, and so gay and sad, as it were.' 

Frodo looked at Sam rather startled, half expecting to see some outward sign of the odd change that seemed to have come over him.  It did not sound like the voice of the old Sam Gamgee that he thought he knew.  But it looked like the old Sam Gamgee sitting there, except that his face was unusually thoughtful. 

Do you feel any need to leave the Shire now -- now that your wish to see them has come true already?' he asked. 

'Yes, sir.  I don't know how to say it, but after last night I feel different. I seem to see ahead, in a kind of way.  I know that we are going to take a very long road, into darkness; but I know I can't turn back.  It isn't to see Elves now, nor dragons, nor mountains that I want -- I don't rightly know what I want: but I have something to do before the end, and it lies ahead, not in the Shire.  I must see it through, sir, if you understand me.'

(FR 1.iv.86-87)

Only a day before this conversation the hobbits had stood gazing down the road at the woods in which they now find themselves and Sam had asked if Elves dwelt here.  Since for Sam the Elves are virtually synonymous with Story, his wide-eyed question, posed as he looks 'across lands he had never seen to a new horizon' (FR 1.iii.73), is at least as much about entering the world of Story as it is about coming to the dwellings of flesh and blood Elves.  Yesterday's Sam was still very much the lad with his head full of Mr. Bilbo's stories of Elves and Dragons when he should have been thinking about cabbages and potatoes (FR 1.i.24; ii.44-45), still the comic gardener who could not help eavesdropping on his master's conversation with Gandalf about the Ring (FR i.ii.63), still the childlike adult who shouted for joy and then burst into tears when told he was going to see the Elves (FR 1.ii.64). Consider finally his response to the very sound of the Elves singing to Elbereth, before they have even come into his sight:

'Elves!' exclaimed Sam in a hoarse whisper.  'Elves, sir!' He would have burst out of the trees and dashed towards the voices, if they had not pulled him back. 

(FR 1.iii.78-79)

And when he first meets them (but has not had the chance to speak to them), '[he] walk[s] along at Frodo's side, as if in a dream, with an expression on his face half of fear and half of astonished joy' (FR 1.iii.81),

How very much he has changed overnight.  This is not 'the old Sam Gamgee that [Frodo] thought he knew.'  The lessons of the day before have gone home to him. Frodo's indirect answer to his question yesterday had suggested that the World of Story begins the moment you step out your door.  And the menace of the Black Riders, which emerges later that same day, confirms this.  For within hours of entering those woods, the hobbits encounter their first Black Rider, whom Sam quickly identifies as the stranger who had questioned the Gaffer, quite literally right outside his door (FR 1.iii.74-76). Frodo himself had actually overheard some of that conversation, but regarded the inquiries of the unseen stranger as yet another example of the vulgar prying of others into his affairs (FR 1.iii.69). Nor had Sam, eager to be on his way and a bit dismissive of his old father, given it much thought.

Yet what Frodo thought a mere nuisance two evenings ago now seems to have been the beginning of their Story, just as Bilbo's lesson about the dangers of stepping into the Road might have suggested.  The literal outlandishness of this Rider  --  one of the rarely seen, often troublesome, Big People, heavily cloaked and hooded, 'sniffing to catch an elusive scent,' talks funny -- is something Frodo finds 'very queer and indeed disturbing' (FR 1.iii.75).¹  In fear he considers using the Ring, and reminds himself that he is 'still in the Shire' (75), as if that meant he could use it safely. Once the Rider is gone he remarks to Pippin and Sam that he has 'never seen or felt anything like it in the Shire before' (75).

But it takes more than one fright to shake even these hobbits wholly out of their insular complacency.  After discussion of the Black Rider they continue on their way, taking some precautions as well as the necessary comfort of a meal (FR 1.iii.75-77).²  Their spirits rise again with the stars and they begin to sing a song about Adventure, which fits well with Frodo's The Road Goes Ever On of the day before. However, the song's there-and-back-again view of Adventure  --  Then world behind and home ahead / We'll wander back to home and bed -- is immediately set at naught by the return of the Black Rider (77-78).  And though the timely arrival of the Elves causes the Black Rider to withdraw, the seriousness with which they view his presence only serves to emphasize the threat he poses, a threat made more frightening by the mystery surrounding him, which the Elves refuse to dispel (78-83). Even so Frodo still balks at the way his Story, his Adventure, has started before he was quite ready for it:

'I cannot imagine what information could be more terrifying than your hints and warnings,' exclaimed Frodo.  'I knew that danger lay ahead, of course; but I did not expect to meet it in our own Shire.  Can't a hobbit walk from the Water to the River in peace?' 

'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 for ever fence it out.' 

'I know -- and yet it has always seemed so safe and familiar. What can I do now?  My plan was to leave the Shire secretly, and to make my way to Rivendell; but now my footsteps are dogged, before ever I get to Buckland.'

(FR 1.iii.83)

Gildor's point is well made. The perspective of Frodo and the other hobbits needs to shift.  The world is not what they supposed.  Nor is 'our own Shire.'  And the Tale has already begun.  Which brings us back to the point at which we started, the morning after the hobbits' near miss with the Black Rider and meeting with the Elves.  As in the earlier passage about the road ahead, the reactions of the three hobbits to the events of the previous day are illustrative.

Frodo awakens already prepared to waste no time getting to Buckland (after breakfast of course), but on the cheerful, resilient Pippin yesterday's dangers have cast no shadow that the morning sun cannot dispel (FR 1.iv.86).  Though he asks Frodo if he learned anything about the Black Riders from Gildor, he seems disappointed only that Frodo did not ask about the sniffing.  A moment later he is larking about, 'running on the green turf and singing' (86).  Pippin's mirth makes as deep an impression on Frodo here as Sam's question about the Elves had done yesterday.  It makes him think seriously about the possible consequences of his errand for those who accompany him.  For after his long conversations with Gandalf he knows far better than Pippin what is at stake; and Gildor's last words to Frodo about the Riders made clear that they were a deadly peril, not a thing to be spoken of openly, but to be shunned, feared, and fled (FR 1.iii.84).  Thus no bright morning can allay his fears. Frodo stops looking back here.

And he turns from Pippin to Sam, intending to leave them both behind, in 'our own Shire.'  In contrast to the ebullient Pippin, Sam is sober and thoughtful. (Bear in mind that at all points during Sam and Frodo's conversation Pippin is running about in the background singing.³) Without fuss or hesitation, Sam declares himself ready to go along.  This is not the same Sam who shouted 'Hooray!' and wept at the prospect of going to see the Elves (FR 1.ii.64), nor even yesterday's Sam who wondered if Elves lived in these woods.  To that Sam the Elves were figures of Song and Story, kings like Gil-galad and Thranduil, or lore masters like Elrond.⁴  To this Sam they are different, not at all diminished by the acquaintance, but made more than just heroic characters.

And it is precisely because Sam has learned to see the Elves in a more complete, more 'human' way that his perception of himself and of the Road before them has changed.  The text presents this change in two different ways.  First, we get his reaction as told to Frodo (thus 'sir') at some later time, and only afterwards his immediate response.  First things first.  Let us once again attend to the portrayal of the three hobbits.

'This is poor fare,' [the Elves] said to the hobbits; 'for we are lodging in the greenwood far from our halls.  If ever you are our guests at home, we will treat you better.' 

'It seems to me good enough for a birthday party,' said Frodo. 

Pippin afterwards recalled little of either food or drink, for his mind was filled with the light upon the elf-faces, and the sound of voices so various and so beautiful that he felt in a waking dream. But he remembered that there was bread, surpassing the savour of a fair white loaf to one who is starving, and fruits sweet as wildberries and richer than the tended fruits of gardens; he drained a cup that was filled with a fragrant draught, cool as a clear fountain, golden as a summer afternoon. 

Sam could never describe in words, nor picture clearly to himself, what he felt or thought that night, though it remained in his memory as one of the chief events of his life.  The nearest he ever got was to say: 'Well, sir, if I could grow apples like that, I would call myself a gardener.  But it was the singing that went to my heart, if you know what I mean.'   

Frodo sat, eating, drinking, and talking with delight; but his mind was chiefly on the words spoken.  He knew a little of the elf-speech and listened eagerly.  Now and again he spoke to those that served him and thanked them in their own tongue.  They smiled at him and said laughing: 'Here is a jewel among hobbits.'

(FR 1.iii.82)

Of the three, Frodo's response is the most subdued, in keeping with his greater age, knowledge, and burden, as well as with the likelihood that he has met Elves before.⁵ He is happy and relieved, but not overwhelmed like Sam and Pippin, and his calmness bookends and highlights their more profound experiences.  Pippin's is a beatific vision, a dream trip to Faerie, complete with food and drink that he must describe by extravagant, lyric comparisons because he can only dimly remember the food itself.  Sam's experience is, like Pippin's, beyond direct description.  He must resort to a metaphor about gardening, and a simple statement of what affected him most.  But while Pippin's comparisons exalt the Elves and make them seem otherworldly, Sam's bring them down to earth.  Their songs, unsurprisingly, go to his heart.  The Elves themselves, however, remain simultaneously beyond him and yet still a part of this world.

That is what he means the next morning when he says that the Elves are 'a bit above [his] likes and dislikes' (FR 1.iii. 87).  Old and young, gay and sad -- Sam understands each of these things.  They are part of his everyday life, of every hobbit's everyday life, but individually, not blended together simultaneously as they are in the Elves.  That's why he qualifies the words 'so old and so young, and so gay and sad, as it were' (FR 1.iii.87, emphasis mine).  As he also says, they were not at all what he expected.

And it is this denial of his expectations (whatever they were) that has pushed him to see the world differently, to see the larger picture in which the tales told by the Elves' songs represent only details, moments isolated in a continuum of long years. And that, together with their telling him not to leave Frodo, allows him to begin to see himself, Frodo, and Pippin as having become part of a story themselves. People do not speak as Sam does in the last paragraph quoted at the top of this page unless they see themselves as part of a larger narrative.⁶  The words bear repeating:

... I don't know how to say it, but after last night I feel different. I seem to see ahead, in a kind of way.  I know that we are going to take a very long road, into darkness; but I know I can't turn back.  It isn't to see Elves now, nor dragons, nor mountains that I want -- I don't rightly know what I want: but I have something to do before the end, and it lies ahead, not in the Shire.  I must see it through, sir, if you understand me.'

(FR 1.iv.87)

And Sam's submission to what he must do is absolute, humble, and emphatic: 'Very good, sir!'  Last night he had to be restrained from running through the woods in the darkness towards the sound of the voices of the Elves.  This morning he sits calmly and thoughtfully declares that he will not turn back or be deterred.  He has put aside childish things.  Precisely as one must before setting out on a very long road, into darkness.

__________________________

¹ Compare the words of Strider to the hobbits at Bree: 'Drink, fire, and chance-meeting are pleasant enough, but, well -- this isn't the Shire. There are queer folk about' (FR 1.ix.157). 'Queer' seems a favorite word among hobbits.  Compare also Merry's reaction as he glimpses the Black Rider through the fog from the ferry: 'What in the Shire is that?' (FR 1.v.99)

² It bears noticing that Frodo already seems to steering them away from the easier route to Buckland when he chooses to take the right fork in the road, a lane leading to Woodhall rather than towards Stock. " 'That is the way for us,' said Frodo." (FR 1.iii.76)

³ It's hardly fair to Pippin, I know, but somehow I just can't help thinking of the opening of The Sound of Music.

⁴ It is of course impossible to know just what 'stories of the old days' Bilbo had told Sam (FR 1.i.24). From Bilbo's own story he would have learned about Thranduil and Elrond, and Bilbo also taught him about the War of the Last Alliance (FR 1.xi.185-86). The mention of Gondolin in Bilbo's story would have raised questions in a curious mind like Sam's, and that could have easily led on to Ëarendil, whom we know was of interest to Bilbo later on. But this is speculation.

⁵ Frodo certainly doesn't act like Elves are new to him. Cf. FR 1.ii.42-43: 'Merry and Pippin suspected that he visited the Elves at times, as Bilbo had done' and Gildor's remark at 1.iii.80: 'We have often seen you before with Bilbo, though you may not have seen us.'

⁶ By the time they have reached Rivendell Sam has already come to see them as part of a story: FR 2.iii.273-74.

The Black Riders at Bree

In the hobbits' room at the Prancing Pony, Frodo and Strider are discussing the worrisome failure of Gandalf to appear as promised:

'Do you think the Black Riders have anything to do with it -- with Gandalf's absence, I mean?' asked Frodo.

'I don't know of anything else that could have hindered him, except the Enemy himself,' said Strider.  'But do not give up hope!  Gandalf is greater than you Shire-folk know -- as a rule you can only see his jokes and his toys.  But this business of ours will be his greatest task.'

(FR 1.x.172)

At this point Merry bursts into the room saying that he has just seen the Black Riders.  There follows a discussion of the Black Riders in which we receive our first clear and significant information about them.  But we are more than merely informed. The very structure of the narrative linking this scene, which ends the present chapter, Strider, and the first two scenes in the next chapter, A Knife in the Dark, not only confirms what Strider tells the hobbits, thereby helping to establish his character and that of the Black Riders, but it also affords us a glimpse of the early use of a technique which Tolkien will use with great success in The Two Towers and The Return of the King.

First I want to sound a note of caution, especially for those of us who have read the work more than once. We need to beware of hindsight here.  For while it is true that Gandalf mentions the Ringwraiths back in The Shadow of the Past (FR 1.ii.51), neither Frodo nor the first time reader will know that the Black Riders are the nine mortal men Sauron ensnared with rings of power until Gandalf explicitly tells Frodo this in Many Meetings (FR 2.i.220).  When the hobbits met the Elves in the Shire and asked Gildor who the Riders were, Gildor refused to answer, though he issues a stern and prophetic warning to flee them (FR 1.iii.80, 83-84).¹ Bombadil, too, seemed to know something about the Ringwraiths (FR 1.vii.132, viii.147), but told the hobbits nothing.  At this moment in this scene the hobbits, and the reader, know little more than that the Black Riders have come from Mordor in search of the Ring, and that there is something innately frightening about them.  And even in this scene Strider, who doubtless knows the identity of the black horsemen, withholds it from the hobbits.²  

Nor is it just the characters who are reticent.  The narrator, too, who is not averse to providing information about mysterious predatory evils in his own voice elsewhere, also holds his tongue throughout the first book of The Fellowship.³ So, while we might put the refusal of the characters to speak down to a reluctance to name an evil -- since naming calls -- we cannot do the same for the narrator.

This suggests that we need to pay close attention, because the text is telling us something more than their name alone could tell us.  For even if Strider had explained that the Black Riders were in fact the Ringwraiths of whom Gandalf had spoken, that would not tell the hobbits or the reader very much.  For Gandalf said little more than that they were Sauron's 'most terrible servants' before he, too, stopped talking: 'But come!  We will not speak of such things even in the morning of the Shire.' (FR 1.ii.51)

So what does the text say? The first thing we learn is that the Riders have a power great enough to hinder Gandalf, but what that power is we don't yet know. And, since we have not yet seen 'Gandalf the Grey uncloaked,' the assertion that the wizard is 'greater than you Shire-folk know' is suggestive but not very revealing.⁴ Strider means to inspire hope, but by increasing expectations of Gandalf's power, he necessarily does the same for the Riders.  The stronger Gandalf is, the stronger they must be to 'hinder' him.

With Merry's arrival, our information starts to become more definite.  Alone, outside, and in the dark, Merry had felt that 'something horrible was creeping near,' something he can at first perceive only as 'a sort of deeper shade among the shadows.' (FR 1.x.173) But the Rider withdraws at once, and Merry follows: 'I could hardly help myself.  I seemed to be drawn somehow.'  This sounds more like Merry's will is being influenced than mere hobbit curiosity, or the foolish stoutness of heart that Strider had believed it to be at first.⁵  As he draws near the Black Rider, he sees him talking to a man (almost certainly Bill Ferny passing on the word of Frodo's disappearance).  Then Merry is seized by terror and turns to go, but he is overwhelmed from behind by 'something' he has trouble describing:

 ...I fell over....I thought I had fallen into deep water...I had an ugly dream, which I can't remember.  I went to pieces.  I don't know what came over me.

(FR 1.x.173)

Strider identifies this without hesitation as The Black Breath, a power the Riders can evidently employ at will, since no one else we have seen them approach so far has been similarly affected.⁶ But now that the Black Riders know they have found the Ring, the next question becomes obvious, and its answering is revealing:

'What will happen?' said Merry. 'Will they attack the inn?'

'No, I think not,' said Strider. 'They are not all here yet.  And in any case that is not their way.  In dark and loneliness they are strongest; they will not openly attack a house where there are lights and many people -- not until they are desperate, not while all the long leagues of Eriador still lie before us.  But their power is in terror, and already some in Bree are in their clutch.  They will drive these wretches to some evil work: Ferny, and some of the strangers, and, maybe, the gatekeeper, too.  They had words with Harry at West-gate on Monday.  I was watching them.  He was white and shaking when they left him.'

(FR 1.x.174)

First Strider flatly rejects the likelihood of an attack because the Riders are not all present, and then, more importantly, he dismisses the very idea of one out of hand (thus, 'And in any case that is not their way.').  From such 'terrible servants' of the Enemy we might expect an approach both forceful and direct now that they have found the Ring, and, as Strider's statement also makes clear, such an assault is something of which they are entirely capable. But they prefer not to.  For 'their power is in terror;' and they like it that way.

To jump ahead just a little bit to illustrate this point, consider the Witch King's attack on Frodo on Weathertop a week later.  He is armed not only with a sword, but with an enchanted knife that reduces its victim to a wraith enslaved and tormented by Sauron.  It is this weapon the Witch King chooses to stab Frodo with when he could just as easily have killed him with his sword. (FR 1.xi.195-96; 2.i.222)  He chooses the application of terror over the application of force.  Because that is their way.

Nor is terror a power they use merely to subdue their opponents, as it is with Merry. It is a tool by which they 'drive' others to do evil, as happens with Bill Ferny, the southerners, and Harry the gatekeeper.  And again, since not everyone they approach is terrified, (or, like Merry, at least not terrified at once,) this power seems to be under their control, to be exerted when it suits them.⁷ It is precisely this use of their power of terror against which Strider is guarding the hobbits as chapter ten ends.

And the very next scenes, which open the chapter A Knife in the Dark, illustrate everything Strider has just said about the 'way' of the Black Riders. At Crickhollow (FR 1.xi,176-77) the night is dark, and the dwelling stands lonely, with 'the nearest house, more than a mile away.'  Inside are not many people but one, and he in terror. The Riders approach slowly but not too stealthily -- Fatty Bolger, a hobbit not a Ranger, sees them coming! -- allowing his fear to mount throughout the day until they finally attack in the dead of night, shattering the door with a single blow.  When they meet opposition because Fatty has fled and raised the alarm, they withdraw, openly and with clear contempt for the hobbits.  Back in Bree the following morning (FR 1.xi.177-179), the hobbits wake to find that their rooms, where Strider had urged them not to sleep, have been broken into through the windows and ransacked, as if by burglars and vandals.  This was Ferny and the other 'wretches,' driven by terror to 'some evil work,'  If Strider's words in the last chapter were not enough to make this clear, the contrast between the first two scenes in this chapter should be. When the Riders do attack, they do so openly.  They break down doors; they don't do windows.

Thus, as we see, these three scenes not only establish the character of the Black Riders in terms of their power and 'their way' of using it, but also confirm the capability and and trustworthiness of Strider, since events bear witness to his account of them.  We might even allow that these scenes plant a seed for our understanding of Gandalf and his power, given the implicit comparison of his with theirs.  For just as the power of the Ringwraiths consists in the terror they can inflict, whether as goad or weapon, so Gandalf's consists in his ability to inspire hearts to hope against the darkness.⁸

In switching the scene back to Crickhollow for a moment, we can also see Tolkien dividing the narrative into separate but related threads for the first time, as he will do later in The Two Towers and The Return of the King when he follows a number of interwoven strands that diverge and come together and diverge again in different ways before they finally all meet again in The Field of Cormallen: Merry and Pippin; Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli; Frodo and Sam; Gandalf and Pippin; and Merry and Éowyn.  These later instances differ significantly from this one, however.  They narrate large scale developments of significance to the Tale as whole, and continue at length, usually for at least a few chapters.  With Crickhollow, however, the narrator shifts the scene for a mere page and a half, and only, in a sense, to prove that Strider's description of the ways of the Black Riders is accurate,

To be sure the "incident at Crickhollow" is dramatic in itself, haunting and visual, taut with mystery and fear, brought off as masterfully as in the the best horror film. There is the 'brooding threat' that had been growing all day, the peeking of Fatty Bolger out the door, and the ghostly opening of the garden gate, seemingly by itself. There is the heroic blowing of the horn call of Buckland to rouse the hobbits to face a threat they cannot imagine.  There is the suitably epic allusion that whets our taste for events beyond our ken -- 'not since the white wolves came in the Fell Winter, when the Brandywine was frozen over' (note the famous capitals in Fell Winter, which tell us that this story is unknown only to us).  There is the "thin and menacing" voice of the Black Rider -- no longer whispering or hissing, but demanding the door be opened in the name of Mordor -- and then the heavy hand that breaks down the door with a single blow. And most remarkable of all there is the brief shift into the perspective of the Riders themselves --

Let the little people blow! Sauron would deal with them later.  Meanwhile they had another errand: they knew now that the house was empty and the Ring had gone.  They rode down the guards at the gate and vanished from the Shire.

(FR 1.x.177)

It is all quite breathtaking.  I can recall the thrill the first time I read it.  It's a wonderful scene and I love it.  The Tale would be far less rich without it.  But the plot would suffer little were it not there.

________________________________

All citations of The Lord of the Rings refer to the single volume fiftieth anniversary edition.  Thus, for example, RK 6.ix.1030 cites The Return of the King, book six, chapter nine ( = The Grey Havens), page 1030.

¹It is hardly surprising that it is in precisely this context that the famous line 'Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes' occurs.

²Strider ignores every opportunity to identify the Riders, even when telling the hobbits more about them (FR 1.xi.189, xii.197-98, 204).  On the way to Weathertop, Frodo had joked that he was getting so thin that he would become a wraith, and was rebuked by Strider 'with surprising earnestness.' (FR 1.xi.184) It is surprising only because of the hobbits' ignorance.  When Glorfindel arrives (FR 1.xii.210), he refers to the Riders as 'the Nine,' which is the first time their full number has been mentioned. (Strider twice indicates that he knows their number, but never gives it (FR 1.x.165, xii.197).)  Although Gandalf had spoken of the Nine to Frodo (FR 1.ii.50-51, Frodo does not make the connection.

³Shelob is a perfect example of this, whom the narrator pauses and intrudes into the narrative to identify  (TT 4.ix.723-24).  After an introduction in a high mythic register, detailing her evil, ancient and heedless even of Sauron, the narrator then turns back to say 'But nothing of this evil which they had stirred up against them did poor Sam know.' Cf. also TT 4.iii.644: 'Its name was Cirith Ungol....'

⁴Gandalf's threat -- 'Then you shall see Gandalf the Grey uncloaked' (FR 1.i.34) -- could suggest that not even Bilbo has seen this, and to be sure the Gandalf we see in The Hobbit does not show much 'power' of the kind displayed by him at times in The Lord of the Rings: at first offstage at Weathertop (1.x.183, 187, 2.ii.264), in Hollin against the wargs (2.iv,297-99; and, most famously, against the Balrog (2.326-27, 329-31; TT 3.v.501-02).

⁵Cf. FR 2.vii.366, where Galadriel speaks to Frodo about the use of the Ring and 'the domination of others,' an ability which she, herself the keeper of one of the three elven rings, demonstrates during the Company's stay in Lórien in the famous scene where she tests their hearts (FR 2.vii.356-58).  The power of terror wielded by the Ringwraiths is a different manifestation of this ability to dominate others that goes with using Rings of Power.  As the testing scene itself demonstrates, some are better than others at resisting domination.  For further discussion of this scene, go here.


⁶So far the Riders have been close to or spoken to the Gaffer (FR. 1.iii.69-70, 75-76), Farmer Maggot (1.iv.93-94), and Butterbur (1.x.167-68), all of whom were more 'put out' by them than anything else; but Harry the Gatekeeper (1.x.174) was frightened, as was Butterbur's servant Nob.  Frodo overhearing the Gaffer's conversation with the Rider finds himself annoyed. During their journey across the Shire in the chapter Three Is Company and A Short Cut to Mushrooms, Frodo, Sam, and Pippin have several near encounters with the Black Riders of course (1.iii.74-76, 78-79; iv.90-91),but they do not seem to grow seriously afraid until the third time, when they hear the Black Riders calling out to one another, cries which were 'chilling to the blood.'(1.iv.90) So, clearly, mere proximity to the Riders does not produce the effects of The Black Breath or induce panic and terror. Nor does the Rider attempt to intimidate the Gaffer, and he offers Maggot gold for information.  The openness of the Riders' dealings with all of these people is worth noting.

The Black Breath is identified in the index of persons, places, and things with The Black Shadow (RK 1145), and cites other passages (FR 2.ii.256; RK 5.860, 864, 865, 871), the most relevant of which is 5.viii.860.  Cf. especially the condition of Merry after striking the Witch King: RK 5.viii.858-59.

⁷See note 6.

⁸ Cf. Círdan's words to Gandalf as he gave him the Ring of Fire: 'with it you may rekindle hearts in a world that grows chill.' (RK 1085) See also the description of Gandalf (Olórin) in The Silmarillion (1977) 30-31 and The History of Middle-Earth x.147, 152, and especially 203, where Christopher Tolkien quotes a handwritten addition of his father's to the typescript of the Valaquenta, which he says was wrongly omitted from the published Silmarillion: '[Olórin] was humble in the Land of the Blessed; and in Middle-earth he sought no renown. His triumph was in the uprising of the fallen, and his joy was in the renewal of hope.'

One might object, not without reason, that this is 'retcon,' and so should be omitted from our consideration of The Lord of the Rings. If we were discussing Galadriel or Isildur, whose characters underwent substantial change and revision after the publication of The Lord of the Rings, I would entirely agree. But this characterization merely writes Gandalf and what we already can see in him in The Lord of the Rings into the 'older' text of The Silmarillion. There is no change in him as there is with the others. On Galadriel and Isildur see Unfinished Tales (1980) 228-267, 271-87 and listen to the discussions on Galadriel and  Isildur during The Mythgard Academy's free course on Unfinished Tales.