Dwarf-ridden

'Dwarves!' said Bilbo in pretended surprise. 

'Don't talk to me!' said Smaug. 'I know the smell (and taste) of dwarf -- no one better. Don't tell me that I can eat a dwarf-ridden pony and not know it! You'll come to a bad end, if you go with such friends, Thief Barrel-rider.'

(Annotated Hobbit 281)

The most obvious interpretation of 'dwarf-ridden pony' in this, or perhaps even most contexts, is 'ridden by a dwarf'.

But that's not the only possibility, and in a conversation so full of riddling and wordplay as that of Bilbo and Smaug we might want to consider the following.

From Old English bӕddryda, or bedreda, comes the modern 'bedridden.' From 'bedridden' by analogy descend various words, e.g., 'bird-ridden' (1835), 'bug-ridden' (1848), 'bureaucracy-ridden' (1861), 'capitalist-ridden' (1844), 'caste-ridden' (1840), 'chair-ridden' (1885), 'chamber-ridden' (1856), 'child-ridden' (1843), 'class-ridden' (1842), 'conscience-ridden' (1617), 'crime-ridden' (1801), 'devil-ridden' (1707), and, not to belabor the point 'dragon-ridden' (1922) 'pixie-ridden' (1893), and even 'Nazi-ridden' (1942). A search in the OED for *ridden reveals these and over a hundred other such formations from the beginning of the alphabet to the end, only a few of which -- such as 'overridden' the past participle of 'override' -- have other than a decidedly negative connotation. The noun modified by the *ridden adjective is oppressed, beset, infested, or otherwise disabled by the first part of the compound.

From Smaug's perspective, then, ponies ridden by dwarves are also infested by dwarves, vermin-ridden, as it were. The dragon's wordplay in this sentence is followed up in the next, as he promises Bilbo, who came from 'the end of a bag', that with friends like dwarves he will come to a bad end. The tongue of the worm doesn't miss a turn, any more than the pen of Tolkien does. 

***

Note: I would like to thank my friends, Shawn Marchese and Alan Sisto, of The Prancing Pony Podcast, since it was while listening to their reading of this passage on my way to work this morning that the other interpretation of 'dwarf-ridden' occurred to me.

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Works Consulted

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From the Bliss of the Gods to a Jewel Shining in the Darkness -- What Tolkien's Kilbride Dedication Can Show Us

The sale at Sotheby's in London on 4 June 2015 of a first edition of The Hobbit for £137,000 has certainly drawn its share of attention, for having nearly tripled the last previous auction price of such a volume, and for Sotheby's misidentifying as Elvish a dedication which Tolkien had inscribed to Katherine Kilbride in Old English.¹ Here is an image from the page in the Sotheby's catalog:

We may transcribe the verses at the bottom of the page

 as follows:

Fela bið on westwegum werum uncuðra,
wundra and wihta, wlitescyne lond,
eardgeard ylfa, eorclanstanas
on dunscrafum digle scninað.

And translate them:

There's many a thing on westward ways unknown to men,
Wonders and creatures, a land of splendor,
The homeland of the Elves; precious stones
In mountain caves secretly shine.

The first thing we must note is that the last word, scninað, is a rather surprising scribal error by Tolkien.  There is no such verb in Old English as 'scninan.' Clearly it should be scinað, which means 'shine.'  Professor Susan Irvine of University College London, whom The Guardian consulted for its article, has also rightly pointed out that the last line and a half of this poem -- from eorclanstanas to the end -- diverges from a similar poem found in Tolkien's The Lost Road (44):

Thus cwæth Ælfwine Widlást:

Fela bith on Westwegum werum uncúthra,
wundra and wihta, wlitescéne land,
eardgeard elfa, and esa bliss.
Lyt ænig wat hwylc his longath sie
tham the eftsithes eldo getwæfeth.

Which Tolkien himself renders in prose as:

Thus said Ælfwine the far-travelled: "There's many a thing in the West-regions unknown to men, marvels and strange beings, a land fair and lovely, the homeland of the Elves, and the bliss of the Gods. Little doth any man know what longing is his whom old age cutteth off from return."

(LR 44)

Now Tolkien had been working on The Lost Road in the year or so just before The Hobbit appeared (21 September 1937), and it's entirely reasonable to think that as he was casting about for some verses to inscribe in this presentation copy his mind came to rest upon the lines from The Lost Road.  These verses, however, have a much darker tone, which Tolkien perhaps judged inappropriate for his former student, Katherine Kilbride, who was an invalid.  So, he removed the grim bits and wrote new lines that he deemed more fitting for the occasion and for the nature of the gift he was giving.

This much is prologue, I would argue.  For to describe these two poems as 'similar' and to say that the poem in The Hobbit 'diverges' or 'varies' from the poem in The Lost Road is quite an understatement.  As Tolkien himself famously remarked in On Fairy-stories:² 

... to take the extreme case of Red Riding Hood: it is of merely secondary interest that the retold version of this story, in which the little girl is saved by wood-cutters, is directly derived from Perrault's story in which she was eaten by the wolf. The really important thing is that the later version has a happy ending (more or less, and if we do not mourn the grandmother overmuch), and that Perrault's version had not. And that is a very profound difference....

A 'variation', a 'divergence', would be Bilbo's 'eager feet' (FR 1.i.35) and Frodo's 'weary feet' (FR 1.iii.73) in The Road Goes Ever On.  There a small change of the sort that Tolkien was so good at alters the tenor of the poem, and thereby the characterization of the speakers, suggesting something about their views of the roads they were about to set out upon.  We may also say the same of the last version of the The Road Goes Ever On (RK 6.vi.987), which in a few new lines reveals yet another road and the speaker's attitude toward it. These changes are improving variations on a theme. Each is linked to the next, each reflects the story that is, and hints at the journey to come, just as the very first version of this poem, sung by Bilbo at the end of The Hobbit (313), relishes looking back down that road as part of the joy of returning home. He knows where he is going, and what he has escaped.

But we have nothing like these variations, these evolutions, in the poems we are considering here. The verses in the Kilbride dedication and from The Lost Road differ from each other as much as Errantry and Bilbo's Song of Eärendil in Rivendell (FR 2.i.233-36). For all the similarities of word and rhyme and meter in Errantry and Eärendil, for all that both tell of a mariner who sets out on a journey to convey a message, the two are different poems.  For the tale told in Errantry is silly and funny and the message slips the easily distracted mariner's mind, compelling him to start all over again, which is part of the humor of the poem. Eärendil, by contrast, is about the tragedy and triumph of a determined messenger who saves the world by delivering his message at great cost to himself.  The same is true here.  We have distinct poems that share part of a sentence.

Let's look first at those shared lines, ignoring the orthographic variations.

Fela bið on westwegum werum uncuðra,
wundra and wihta, wlitescyne lond,
eardgeard ylfa,

As so often in Tolkien, going all the way back to the early poems Goblin Feet and You and Me and the Cottage of Lost Play (The Book of Lost Tales 1.27-32) there is the image of a road and a journey. Westwegum, literally 'westways,' places the end of this road in eardgeard ylfa, the shining homeland of the elves: Elvenhome. This suggests not only the West beyond the sea in Middle-earth, but also -- and this is especially true for those unacquainted with Tolkien's legendarium in 1937, which is to say, for almost everyone -- conjures the other mythic western lands of the great sea, from the Isles of the Blessed to Tír na nÓg, from Atlantis to the unknown destination of Scyld's funeral ship (Beowulf 26-52). We can also likely detect a connection to England itself in this word, since, as Tolkien would have known, vestr-vegir, the cognate phrase in Old Icelandic, referred to the British Isles themselves; and of course Tolkien once meant to make England itself the homeland of the Elves (BoLT 1.22-27).

In The Lost Road the wonder and splendor to be revealed in the West reaches yet higher. Not only will we men find Elvenhome, but we will glimpse esa bliss, the bliss of the gods. Though not for long, it seems. Esa bliss slips quickly away, beyond our grasp.  We are left only with longing and old age.  The wonder and beauty of the first lines turn dark because we cannot attain such bliss. It is not for us.  Even the sight of it awakens a longing we can neither turn from nor satisfy. The divide between us and them could not be more clear.

These lines, moreover, are 'laden with the sadness of Mortal Men,' as Legolas puts it after hearing Aragorn recite a poem of the Rohirrim in their own language (TT 4.vi.508).  As such they touch upon themes of 'Death and the desire for deathlessness' which Tolkien later said lay at the heart of The Lord of the Rings.³ Not only does The Lost Road employ these lines with immediate personal relevance to the characters speaking and hearing them, a son and his aged, failing father, but it affords them a wider application.  For with this work begins the Tale of Númenor, the island where men reject the fate of death and try to seize immortality and the 'bliss of the gods' by force, with cataclysmic results. Tolkien continued to develop this story for decades (as was his wont), in The Lord of the Rings, in The Notion Club Papers, in Akallabêth, and finally in Athrabeth Finrod Ah Andreth, which depicts men as already embittered about their 'swift fate' before the First Age had ended.⁴ The verses in The Lost Road may be said to contain within them the seeds, and perhaps the summary, of these themes. In the end, every man knows the longing for the bliss of the gods from which old age and death cut him off.

How different is the world the Kilbride dedication depicts. So far from an elegy of loss and longing, here a treasure shines secretly before us in the mountain caverns of Elvenhome. This is of course quite apropos in a presentation copy of The Hobbit, as is Tolkien's use of eorclanstanas, another form of which, eorcanstan, in the singular gives us arkenstone.  But eorcanstan itself brims with allusion, as this marvelous post by Dr Eleanor Parker makes clear, most prominently to Sigurd and to Christ, both of whom are likened to precious jewels using this word -- for Sigurd it's the Old Norse cognate jarknasteinn -- and both of whom fight dragons. 'And,' as Dr Parker points out,

'there's not as big a gap as you might think between Sigurðr and Christ; the scene of Sigurðr killing the dragon appears on early carvings in a Christian context, which are difficult to interpret but may show Sigurðr's triumph being cast as a battle between good and evil.'

And in Tolkien's The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, which he was also working in the 1930s, there exists for Sigurd, though dead, the promise of bliss after death and the world's ending.

In the day of Doom
he shall deathless stand
who death tasted
and dies no more,
the serpent-slayer,
seed of Óðin:
not all shall end,
nor Earth perish.

On his head the Helm,
in his hand lightning,
afire his spirit,
in his face splendour.
When war passeth
in world rebuilt,
bliss shall they drink
who the bitter tasted.

(Völsungkviða en Nýja ix.80-81)

This mention of bliss here is interesting because even the possibility of it seemed to be denied to men in The Lost Road verses, and the defeat of old age and its sequel appeared quite final.  As above, it is not so difficult to see what Sigurd has to do with Christ: bliss beyond the ending of this world in a new heaven and a new earth. Others words, too, in the Kilbride dedication provide a link to Christ and his ancient enemy, the dragon. For the words 'on dunscrafum digle' allude to the bestiary poem The Panther* in the collection Physiologus.

Just as the common lines of both Tolkien poems begin by enumerating how 'many are' (fela bið) the wonders and creatures of the world, before narrowing the focus down to the homeland of the Elves, The Panther also begins by stating how 'many are' (monge sindon) the different kinds of creatures across the wide world, before drawing our attention to one single animal,the panther, who is the most wondrous of them all. He guards a far land and dwells æfter dunscrafum (12), 'among mountain caves.' Kind to all other creatures, he has but one enemy, the dragon, to whom he does all the harm he can (15-18).⁵  Twice he is described in terms familiar from the common lines of Tolkien's verses (19: wundrum scine; and 26-27: scinra / wundrum). And again after further descriptions of his beauty that dazzles the eye, with each of his hues more lovely than the last (19-30), and of his mild and moderate character, except when it comes to the dragon (30-34), we are told he retires to sleep for three days digle stowe under dunscrafum 'in a secret place beneath the mountain caves' (36-37). In the latter half of the poem (38-74), the panther is explicitly identified with Christ, now risen from the secret places of the earth (dīgle ārās, 62), and the poet ends with a formula like that with which he began:

monigfealde sind geond middangeard
god ungnyðe  þe ūs tō giefe dǣleð
and tō feorhnere Fæder ælmihtig,
and se ānga Hyht ealra gesceafta
uppe ge niþre. 

Many are the good things across middle-earth,
Abundant goods which the Almighty Father
Assigns us for grace and for salvation,
And he the only Hope of all creatures
Above and below.

So clearly points of contact exist between these texts, which help Tolkien to create the more hopeful tenor of the Kilbride dedication. For even if the reader of The Hobbit soon learns that the arkenstone glittering in secret beneath the mountain halls is guarded by a dragon, heroes, whether Sigurd or Christ, can also shine like a jewel in the darkness and defeat that venomous, ancient enemy (33-34: þām āttorsceaþan, his fyrngeflitan). And given his faith and his words on the wonders of far off Elvenhome, it is rather tempting to think that in the words geond middangeard Tolkien saw the meaning 'beyond Middle-earth.' However that may be, the allusive links are not to be doubted, even if in 1937 only C.S. Lewis and perhaps a few others could have felt their full import.

Within these two distinct poems -- for that is what they are -- we can see Tolkien working masterfully to create opposite effects through the 'divergence' of his materials. In The Lost Road we find elegy, in the Kilbride dedication to The Hobbit hope. And the difference that this makes suits the Tales he is telling in each work.  For The Hobbit is a Tale of hope and happy endings, of renewal and return. In The Lost Road the Tale of Númenor could only have ended in cataclysm, with the great green wave sweeping across the land and a world lost forever, just as it does in Akallabêth:

In an hour unlooked for by Men this doom befell, on the nine and thirtieth day since the passing of the fleets. Then suddenly fire burst from the Meneltarma, and there came a mighty wind and a tumult of the earth, and the sky reeled, and the hills slid, and Númenor went down into the sea, with all its children and its wives and its maidens and its ladies proud; and all its gardens and its halls and its towers, its tombs and its riches, and its jewels and its webs and its things painted and carven, and its lore: they vanished for ever. And last of all the mounting wave, green and cold and plumed with foam, climbing over the land, took to its bosom Tar-Míriel the Queen, fairer than silver or ivory or pearls. Too late she strove to ascend the steep ways of the Meneltarma to the holy place; for the waters overtook her, and her cry was lost in the roaring of the wind.

(Silmarillion, 279)

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*Before anything else I would like to express my thanks to Dr Eleanor Parker for her gracious conversation and correspondence on the verses discussed above. It was she who brought The Panther to my attention. Any errors of translation or interpretation are entirely my own.

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¹The initial error in the Sotheby's catalog is doubly wrong, first as to the language of the dedicatory lines, and second in seeming to name John Rateliff as the source of that attribution: 'Rateliff identifies the Elvish verse as an extract from Tolkien's The Lost Road.' But in Rateliff's The History of the Hobbit (second edition, 2011) appendix v, which Sotheby's cites, Rateliff makes no mention of the language in which the verse is written. It is possible that Sotheby's did not intend the sentence to be read that way.

² On Fairy-stories has appeared in print and on the internet so many times that referring to a page number in any one edition is almost unfair. I shall follow the practice adopted by Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson in their Tolkien on Fairy-stories (2014), where they number the paragraphs. The quotation in the text above is from paragraph number 24.

³ See letter 203 (Letters 1981): 'But I should say, if asked, the tale is not really about Power and Dominion: that only sets the wheels going; it is about Death and the desire for deathlessness. Which is hardly more than to say it is a tale written by a Man!' And also 211: 'It is mainly concerned with Death, and Immortality; and the "escapes": serial longevity, and hoarding memory.' These letters date from 1957 and 1958, respectively.

⁴ The Athrabeth, or The Debate of Finrod and Andreth, seems to date from 1959 or a little earlier. See Morgoth's Ring (New York 1993) 303-304. The bitterness about their brief lives compared to the Eldar and the resentment men felt over it runs throughout the Athrabeth (303-366), appearing within the first page of the dialogue (307-308):

'More than a hundred years it is now,' said Andreth, 'since we came over the Mountains; and Bëor and Baran and Boron each lived beyond his ninetieth year.  Our passing was swifter before we found this land.'

'Then are you content here?' said Finrod. 

'Content?' said Andreth. 'No heart of Man is content.  All passing and dying is a grief to it; but if the withering is less soon then that is some amendment, a little lifting of the Shadow.' 

'What mean you by that?' said Finrod. 

'Surely you know well!' said Andreth. 'The darkness that is now confined to the North, but once'; and here she paused and her eyes darkled, as if he mind were gone back into black years best forgot. 'But once lay upon all Middle-earth, while ye dwelt in your bliss.' 

'It was not concerning the Shadow that I asked,' said Finrod. 'What mean you, I would say, by the lifting of it? Or how is the swift fate of men concerned with it?  Ye also, we hold (being instructed by the Great who know), are Children of Eru, and your fate and nature is from Him.' 

'I see,' said Andreth, 'that in this ye of the High-elves do not differ from your lesser kindred whom we have met in the world, though they have never dwelt in the Light.  All ye Elves deem that we die swiftly by our true kind.  That we are brittle and brief, and ye are strong and lasting.  We may be "Children of Eru", as ye say in your lore; but we are children to you also: to be loved a little maybe, and yet creatures of less worth, upon whom ye may look down from the height of your power and your knowledge, with a smile, or with pity, or with a shaking of heads.'

⁵ I find it impossible not to think of Aslan while reading of the panther, but it seems equally impossible that no one has never noted that before.

Not By Taters Alone: Sam and Story (I)

Did any reader ever guess -- could any reader ever have guessed -- when first reading the early chapters of Book One that Sam Gamgee would become the final narrator of The Lord of the Rings?  It hardly seems likely.   While it's true of course that the Prologue twice refers to a 'Samwise' in connection with The Red Book (FR 13 and 14), his surname is never given; nor in the Tale itself is Sam ever called Samwise until Frodo does so over six hundred pages later in The Passage of the Marshes (TT 3.ii.624).¹ And for most readers, even if they assumed that Sam and Samwise were the same, the identity of the third person narrator was probably not a question that arose.

And yet the seeds of this transition, of the moment when the telling of the Tale is handed over to Sam, are planted in the very first dramatic scene of the book, in which Sam's old father (the Gaffer) and several other hobbits meet over a pint at The Ivy Bush on a late summer evening.  The recent announcement of Bilbo's party has sparked conversation about 'the history and character of Mr. Bilbo Baggins,' and as the long time gardener at Bag End the Gaffer 'spoke with some authority' on the stories about him (1.i.22).  Towards the end of the conversation, however, the Gaffer also singles out his son Sam, who is not present, as one who has always taken a very special interest in stories.

But not for Sam are the gossipy stories with which these hobbits have busied themselves this evening: Bilbo's rumored secret hoard of 'gold and silver, and jools;' or the strangeness of Bucklanders who live 'on the wrong side of the Brandywine River, and right agin the Old Forest....a dark bad place, if half the tales be true;' or about the mysterious demise of Frodo's parents who were 'drownded' while out boating, of all things; or the just frustrations of Bilbo's relations, the hyphenated and universally detested Sackville-Bagginses (FR 1.i.22-23).  Even the hint of the foreign and the strange that comes into these tales -- the Old Forest, Bilbo's journey to a far land and return with (reputedly inexhaustible) wealth -- is nothing more than grist for the local gossip mill, and indirect proof that 'Bag End's a queer place, and its folk are queerer.' (1.i.24)  The Gaffer and his fellows shine a lurid light on every bit of it. Indeed the one ray of approval in the whole conversation is the statement that Old Gorbadoc Brandybuck kept 'a mighty generous table' (1.i.23)  And despite the Gaffer's denial of the tales about Bilbo's wealth and his stout defense of Bilbo's character, he, too, is clearly have a grand time 'holding forth' on these matters.

No, as the Gaffer makes inimitably clear, it is tales of an entirely different kind that interest his son:

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

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

(FR 1.i.24: the italics are Tolkien's)

Not that Sam is unique in knowing his letters of course.  The hobbit-children who see Gandalf arrive can recognize the G on his fireworks (1.i.25).  The sign on Bilbo's gate and the written invitations -- to which came written replies -- also strongly suggest a widespread basic literacy (1.i.26).  To this we may add the notes Bilbo left with his gifts, two of which refer to letter writing, and one to book borrowing (1.i.37-38). (The Gaffer, by contrast, receives 'two sacks of potatoes' (1.i.38) among other strictly useful gifts.)  And finally there is Bilbo's will, carefully read right through by Otho Sackville-Baggins and found to be 'very clear and correct (according to the legal customs of hobbits, which demand among other things seven signatures of witnesses in red ink).' (1.i.39)

So it is rather literacy of a certain kind -- one that allows or encourages reading books full of 'stories of the old days' and of 'Elves and Dragons' -- that makes hobbits uneasy, so much so that the Gaffer finds it necessary to defend Mr. Bilbo's intentions in teaching Sam and to express his own hopes for the best.  Part of the answer made to the Gaffer by Sandyman, the miller, 'voicing common opinion,' touches on the same concerns that the Gaffer voices himself.  For the miller refers to visits to Bag End by folk, like dwarves and Gandalf, whom he describes as 'outlandish,' which here we should probably take quite literally (1.i.24).  Those stories Sam is crazy for all involve things beyond the Shire and far older than it.  It is no accident that 'maps made in the Shire showed mostly white space beyond its borders' (1.ii.43).

And, at least when it comes to Sam, this level of literacy is clearly linked to the dangers of getting above oneself. In the Gaffer's mouth, more so than in any other's, 'cabbages and potatoes' is a quite pointed reproach.  After all he and Sam are both gardeners. 'Cabbages and potatoes' reminds Sam not only of his station but of his very identity.  Sam is not (to borrow a much later phrase) 'Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age' (RK 6.i.901).  'Stick to your taters, Sam, my lad,' the Gaffer might have said in a quieter mood (if he ever had one).

It is perhaps for this reason that Sam later appears to conceal how literate he actually is. We later learn that he can recite poetry about Gil-galad from memory (FR 1.xi.185-86).   Frodo is convinced that Sam has composed the troll song he performs, an assertion that Sam does not deny (1.xii.206-208). In Moria Sam expresses a desire to learn the poem Gimli recited (2.iv.315-16). And in Lórien Sam comes out with a (spontaneous?) quatrain on Gandalf's fireworks, to add to the lament Frodo has been composing; Sam immediately denigrates his own verses, but Frodo just as quickly flatters him by comparing his ability to Bilbo's (2.vii.359-60).

Most revealing, however, is the detail that emerges almost as soon as we actually meet Sam, one chapter and seventeen years later, in a scene parallel to the one with the Gaffer in chapter one.  Again we find ourselves in a pub, and with a similar cast. Yet the times have changed somewhat.  The world beyond the comfortably blank edges of Shire maps is in turmoil:

Little of this [news], of course, reached the ears of ordinary hobbits.  But even the deafest and most stay-at-home began to hear queer tales; and those whose business took them to the borders saw strange things. The conversation in The Green Dragon at Bywater, one evening in the spring of Frodo's fiftieth year, showed that even in the comfortable heart of the Shire rumours had been heard, though most hobbits still laughed at them.

Sam Gamgee was sitting in one corner near the fire, and opposite him was Ted Sandyman, the miller's son; and there were various other rustic hobbits listening to their talk.

'Queer things you do hear these days, to be sure,' said Sam.

'Ah,' said Ted, 'you do, if you listen.  But I can hear fireside-tales and children's stories at home, if I want to.'

'No doubt you can,' retorted Sam, 'and I daresay there's more truth in some of them than you reckon.  Who invented the stories anyway?  Take dragons now.'

'No thank'ee,' said Ted, 'I won't.  I heard tell of them when I was a youngster, but there's no call to believe in them now.  There's only one Dragon in Bywater, and that's Green,' he said, getting a general laugh.

'All right,' said Sam, laughing with the rest. 'But what about these Tree-men....?'

(1.ii.44)

Now that we finally meet Sam, we can quickly see that he is as different from 'most hobbits' as the last scene suggested he would be.  Though they are laughing for now (thus, 'still') at the 'queer things you do hear these days,' Sam does not find these matters funny.  While he can take Sandyman's joke at his expense and laugh along, he can also be stung (thus, 'retorted') by the miller's none too subtle hint that he has not left childish things behind him.  He is relentless in his belief that these queer tales have relevant information in them that the others should attend to.  Thus even before the laughter has died, Sam has pressed on to the next queer thing: 'But what about...?'  For which he will also be mocked and dismissed (1.ii.44-45), as for the thing after that (the Elves: 1.ii.45), and the thing after that (Frodo and Bilbo: 1.ii.45).  But his faith in the importance of tales of this kind is unshakeable.  This characterizes Sam and sets him apart.

But there is another detail that distinguishes him even more, here and throughout this Tale, and it's easily missed.  Beyond the importance of stories about dragons and Tree-men and the departing Elves, there is another question: 'Who invented the stories anyway?'  Sam is not just 'crazy about stories of the old days,' he is thinking about them in a critical way.  And his next words --  'Take dragons now' -- are also worth noting.  He doesn't say 'Take Smaug now' as you might expect him to do if he were only trying to disprove the miller's suggestion that all such tales are childish fabrications. He is thinking about dragons plural, about dragons in general, about Dragons in the context of where stories come from.

That's not to say that Sam has any answer, or was about to blurt out some homespun version of On Fairy-stories if the miller had not deflected the conversation with a joke.  But he is on a path that is important in a Tale in which the background and continuity of other older Tales are very significant.  He thinks about stories in a larger sense because his profound desire for dragons is about more than the dragons themselves.  It is about Story itself.  So it is no accident and no surprise that Frodo entrusts Sam with finishing the Tale (RK 6.ix.1027), or that this scene ends with Sam returning home in the evening, his head full of Story, and that this book ends with Sam returning home in the evening, to take up his life and take up the work Frodo has left him (RK 6.ix.1031).

So I am going to be following this idea of 'Sam and Story' from the beginning of The Lord of the Rings to the end.  I have no idea how many posts it is going to be, how long it will take me, or whether the posts will in fact appear in order from beginning to end (though that is the plan).  The  posts I've linked to here are in a sense part of this study, but I imagine that by the time I have worked my way through the Tale all the way to the end I'll have more to say than I have said there already. I guess we'll see.

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¹ Again it is true that Sam is called Samwise in the synopsis at the beginning of The Two Towers that appears in three volume editions. It is also true that he is referred to as Master Samwise in the Table of Contents: The Choices of Master Samwise. Even so, that would nevertheless place the first clear identification of the Samwise of the Prologue with the Sam Gamgee of the Tale at the beginning of The Two Towers. Nor does everyone read the Prologue, or pay close attention to it if they do. There was a long time when I did not.

29 July 1954 -- 29 July 2014

The other morning I stopped at the deli counter of my local market.  As I was placing my order with one person, another suddenly began speaking to me rather passionately, telling me how much she loved the shirt I was wearing.  Since most of me is often submerged in my own thoughts, it took a moment to realize that the ardent voice I heard was addressing me and not someone else.  I am also not accustomed to anyone getting this enthusiastic about my clothing.

As it was, this young woman was admiring my t-shirt -- black with (for a t-shirt) a rather subtle rendering in a chalky red and gray of Smaug and the Lonely Mountain from The Hobbit -- and saying that the trailer for the third part of Peter Jackson's adaptation looked pretty cool.  I agreed about the trailer and thanked her for the compliment.  She was very kind and warm and spontaneous; and chance meetings (as we call them in Middle-earth) with strangers who share your interests are always welcome.

But from a certain perspective this meeting of ours was not entirely by chance.  It had been arranged for us before ever we were born, on 29 July 1954, the day The Fellowship of the Ring was first published.  At that time no one foresaw the eventual success of The Lord of the Rings.  Quite the contrary in fact.  The publisher thought he might be about to lose a lot of money, but considered the book a work of genius, which merited publication regardless of the risk.  And to be sure, if The Lord of the Rings had been the failure the publisher feared, there would have been no published Silmarillion, no Unfinished Tales, no History of Middle-earth, no movies, no trailers, no t-shirts, and no chance meeting with which to pass a friendly moment.

Of course the publication merely set the stage.  For everyone who responds passionately to a work must find something in it that corresponds to something in themselves.  What the work offers, and what the reader needs, must answer each other.  This most often happens in the short term.  A book, a movie, a tv show becomes popular for a time.  Interest burns white hot.  Then it's gone.  

Other works possess a more enduring interest.  For most of my life The Lord of the Rings has been popular, though never so much as in the years since the first of Peter Jackson's movies appeared.  For me the work has held my interest since I first encountered it at the age of eleven. <!-- copyright thomas patrick hillman 2014 --> Then it was the adventure, the heroism, the mythic vision of a whole world that Tolkien had so clearly in view even if the legendary past of Middle-earth was  -- for us in the days before The Silmarillion was published -- no more than echoes in song and mountain peaks rising from beyond a veiled horizon.  As I've grown older, I've learned to see far more than that in terms of style, and characterization, and description, and themes, and the way he weaves them all together to advance the whole Tale.  Always, though, the tone of 'elegiac retrospect' that permeates almost all of Tolkien's work has found in me a sympathetic reader.

So, since I enjoy reading and discussing Tolkien so much, I've decided to try something out. I will soon begin posting on this page some of my observations about The Lord of the Rings.  But to help organize them and make them easier to find as their numbers grow I've created one page for each of the six books of The Lord of the Rings, where I'll have links and very brief summary of each post.  Since I've been looking at the later books rather a lot lately, posts about these will be the first to appear.  In time, however, I will be posting notes on every part of the Tale.

And perhaps these will lead to more chance meetings.

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'Elegiac retrospect' is a wonderful term Tolkien coined (as far as I can tell) in his commentary on Beowulf to describe, in Edith Wharton's phrase, 'the poignancy of vanished things.'