Tolkien Tuesday -- "Pride and Prejudice"

I had read The Lord of the Rings many times before I discovered Jane Austen. Yet the tone of the beginning sounded so familiar. I can easily imagine that, if Bilbo had married a silly person, and had had five daughters, the oldest two of whom would be remarkable, Mr Baggins and Mr Bennet would have had much in common.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

“My dear Mr. Bennet,” said his lady to him one day, “have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?”

Mr. Bennet replied that he had not.

“But it is,” returned she; “for Mrs. Long has just been here, and she told me all about it.”

Mr. Bennet made no answer.

“Do not you want to know who has taken it?” cried his wife, impatiently.

“You want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it.”

                    Pride and Prejudice, chapter 1


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

Bilbo was very rich and very peculiar, and had been the wonder of the Shire for sixty years, ever since his remarkable disappearance and unexpected return. The riches he had brought back from his travels had now become a local legend, and it was popularly believed, whatever the old folk might say, that the Hill at Bag End was full of tunnels stuffed with treasure.

This is probably not what was expected for Tolkien Tuesday, but here it is. There may be more later.

And I do think that Pippin would be very Mister Bingley.

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

Book One, Chapter One: A Long-expected Party

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

And the sound of them sank deep into his heart

But to Sam the evening deepened to darkness as he stood at the Haven; and as he looked at the grey sea he saw only a shadow on the waters that was soon lost in the West.  There still he stood far into the night, hearing only the sigh and murmur of the waves on the shores of Middle-earth, and the sound of them sank deep into his heart.

(RK 6.ix.1030)

I just wrote about this passage in a note on The Lord of the Rings, but right now this quote isn't about Tolkien.  It's about me, and life, and reading.  The day after I published that post I went down the Jersey Shore.  Once I lived there, close enough to the sea to hear it through my bedroom window, late at night when the town lay sleeping and every sound but the waves on the beach, and the summer breeze tousling the sycamores, had been stilled.  Nearly every summer of my life from the time I was eight until the time I was forty I spent beside the sea; and for years too short and too few I lived there year round.  The sounds and smells and movements of the sea, the way it looks in every kind of light, winter or summer, day and night, in the clear or the black storm or the gray day's rain -- all of this sank deep into my heart long ago, where it lives with every word I have ever devoured about the sea, from Homer to Melville to Tolkien to Patrick O'Brian, from Odysseus weeping by the shore for Ithaca to Jack and Stephen playing duets in the cabin as they sail down the Med.

For me, dwelling beside the sea was like living in some other, more sacred realm, some other Eden, upon the nearer shores of Faerie.  Every place I have ever lived since seems short a dimension, graceless, fallen.  And though I have liked some of these places betters than others, all are to some degree lonely, and not home -- never home -- because they are not the sea and the shore.  And at one point, sunk in a double sorrow, I so longed for home and an end to my unhappiness that, as I watched the final shot of the movie, The Perfect Storm, in which the last fisherman, soon to die, soars up the climbing slope of a gigantic wave, I thought it wouldn't be such a bad way to go.

But in a strange and literary and not entirely insane way that scene comforted me, because the solitude of the character reminded me of my own, and my longing for the sea drew me in, and the awareness that the author had to be able to imagine a scene and loneliness that no one ever witnessed.  And that scene led me to think on others, on the whole sequence in Persuasion, that incomparable joy of a book, in which Anne Eliot, who lives immersed in such loneliness, visits the seaside at Lyme Regis, and suffers from her misapprehensions of Captain Wenwtorth's feelings for her; and that in turn led to that letter of hope and anguish he writes to her later in Bath.

So it's not that Sam Gamgee stood by the sea listening to the waves, as I did a couple of weeks ago.  It's that someone who had this experience of one close enough to it that he could cast it into a form that I could recognize as something I felt and knew.  What I felt and imagined, others did too.  I could stand there on the shore, with the waves washing around my knees, and look at all the people I didn't know, and see their love of being there and the pleasure they took in it, and I could understand it entirely.  I could watch the children play in the waves, as I did.  Watch the children watched over by their fathers as mine watched over me.  Watch people swim and fish and sun themselves, just as I did.  I can look at these people and almost inhabit them because I have not forgotten what all these things are like, never will.  And there was the sound of the waves sinking in, and the long shadowed light of the evening sun, and the gin breeze, all heady and full of sleep.  And past and present, real and imagined, lived and read, were all pretty much one for a while there.

But for as long as they do last, books give us something else: Literature reminds us that we’re not alone on this planet. You’re not alone in this time. You’re not alone in this experience. And not only are you not alone in your city, your nation, your moment—you’re not alone in history. Sappho felt the way you feel. Or Shakespeare, or John Donne. We have this connection. And we are able to have a kind of conversation. The fragments we shore against our ruin—everything that we have read, whatever little fragments we retain, are part of our understanding of the world, the way we see the world, and our conversation that we have with ourselves and with the world. 

Claire Messud 

Just like the waves, the books sink deep into my heart.   For a long time I thought they allowed me to escape from this world.  But this is untrue. What they do instead is release me from bondage. I remain in the world, but they ransom me.