Hobbits and the Shire: The strength of the hills is theirs also.

Yesterday, a friend sent me something he was working on about The Lord of the Rings, and what he had to say about Hobbits and the Shire in it immediately made me think of the passage I have quoted below. I couldn't remember where I had read these comments before, though. I was pretty sure it wasn't in anything Tolkien wrote, and I thought it was in Lewis. As it turned out, I was right. It just took me a while to track it down. So to prevent me from forgetting the location of the comments again, I am sharing it with all of you.

The allusion to the 95th psalm in the penultimate sentence just makes me think of Tom Bombadil himself as well as old Tom's assessment of Farmer Maggot: ‘There’s earth under his old feet, and clay on his fingers; wisdom in his bones, and both his eyes are open' (FR 1.vii.132). Remember, too, that the Shire has a power of its own (FR 2.i.222) and it was in the Shire (faced with the redoubtable Gaffer and Farmer Maggot) that 'the hunters before whom all have fled or fallen' faltered (FR 2.ii.260. And am I the only one who hears an echo of T. S. Eliot in 'We are synthetic men, uprooted'?

Tolkien once remarked to me that the feeling about home must have been quite different in the days when a family had fed on the produce of the same few miles of country for six generations, and that perhaps this was why they saw nymphs in the fountains and dryads in the wood-they were not mistaken for there was in a sense a real (not metaphorical) connection between them and the countryside. What had been earth and air & later corn, and later still bread, really was in them. We of course who live on a standardised international diet (you may have had Canadian flour, English meat, Scotch oatmeal, African oranges, & Australian wine to day) are really artificial beings and have no connection (save in sentiment) with any place on earth. We are synthetic men, uprooted. The strength of the hills is not ours. My pen has run away with me on this subject.

C. S. Lewis, Letter to Arthur Greaves, 22 June 1930

Not to find them, not to bind them -- Elrond and the Ring verse

'Yet no oath or bond is laid on you to go farther than you will.'

(FR 2.iii.280)

As I was listening to Corey Olsen on episode 226 of Exploring the Lord of the Rings say that Elrond refuses to 'bind' the members of the Company to the Quest, the word 'bind' suddenly leaped out at me. For obvious reasons (though they were obscure before the moment). The most prominent and important use of the word 'bind' in The Lord of the Rings comes of course in the Ring verse:

One Ring to rule them all, One ring to find them
One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.(FR 2.ii.254)

And as soon as I thought of this verse in this connection, my mind then leapt to a statement Elrond made at the start of the council:

‘That is the purpose for which you are called hither. Called, I say, though I have not called you to me, strangers from distant lands. You have come and are here met, in this very nick of time, by chance as it may seem. Yet it is not so. Believe rather that it is so ordered that we, who sit here, and none others, must now find counsel for the peril of the world.

(FR 2.ii.242)

Elrond's entire approach (not to mention Gandalf's) rejects the kind of control and domination Sauron seeks and the Ring was created to impose, and embraces 'chance as it may seem' and hope. 

A Random Thought about Bill the Pony

I was listening to episode 221 of Corey Olsen's Exploring The Lord of the Rings podcast today (I am about 20 episodes behind -- hey, when I retired I no longer had an hour of driving a day. So my podcast consumption plummeted like a sheep in Monty Python), and the subject of why Bill the pony is so called. Everybody not unreasonably assumes that Sam named Bill after his previous owner, the hateful Bill Ferny. There is some evidence to support that Tolkien saw it this way at least in passing, since in one of the drafts he says Sam called the pony 'Ferny' (Treason 173). So between the inference and the evidence, it may well be true that Sam named Bill after his cruel former owner whom Sam had hit in the nose with a thrown apple (FR 1.xi.180), and whom the pony had kicked the first chance it got.

Bill Ferny flinched and shuffled to the gate and unlocked it. ‘Give me the key!’ said Merry. But the ruffian flung it at his head and then darted out into the darkness. As he passed the ponies one of them let fly with his heels and just caught him as he ran. He went off with a yelp into the night and was never heard of again. 

‘Neat work, Bill,’ said Sam, meaning the pony.

(RK 6.viii.999)

Given Sam's love for the pony and loathing of Ferny, it's hard to see why Sam would have given it the name of a villain who had cruelly mistreated it. As a joke? Perhaps, but to me at least that doesn't seem a joke Sam was likely to make. It would seem hurtful to Bill and too good for Ferny. I just don't see it as in his character. Contrast this with the humor we hear of in The Grey Havens, where we learn that the renewed Bagshot Row came to be known as Sharkey's End, a 'purely Bywater joke' for the place where the Saruman met his end (RK 6.ix.1021-22). But Sam was not from Bywater and Saruman was hated. The bitterness of the joke was founded on a very real sense of Saruman's deserts.

Now to be honest I can only admit that my incredulity proves nothing. It's not much of an argument. Yet who else could Bill the pony be named after? Is there any other alternative? There is, though I concede it's not the strongest or most direct. I just like it better.

What if Bill the pony is named after Bilbo? After all Sam loved the old hobbit, whom he met again in Rivendell after many years, and as far as we can tell it was in Rivendell that Sam first began using the name for the pony. It is there in any event that our attention is drawn to this fact. The text, moreover, supplies us with a parallel for a hobbit naming a pony after a beloved friend. In Minas Tirith Frodo gets a pony which he will ride all the way home. He named the pony 'Strider' and the only time its name is mentioned is in conjunction with Bill (RK 6.ix.1027): 

On September the twenty-first they set out together, Frodo on the pony that had borne him all the way from Minas Tirith, and was now called Strider; and Sam on his beloved Bill.

The unforgiving, unforgotten minute.

It was Sam’s first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man’s name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace – all in a flash of thought which was quickly driven from his mind. For just as Mablung stepped towards the fallen body, there was a new noise....

(TT 4.iv.661)

The moment is as transient in itself as it is enduring in its significance. If only these moments could persist on our memory as it did in this man's, or Sam's, or Tolkien's, to be recalled later in reflection. Part of the tragedy of our species is that with the passing of the individual all these flashes of thought, all the leaps of pity in the dark, all the instants of transcendent beauty glimmering above the things we call good and evil here below -- all these moments are lost. 

We forget (and want to forget) the horrors which we have inflicted on each other and which we have suffered at each other's hands. And forgetting them all, we suffer and inflict them all again, in a thousand other Sommes, a thousand other Treblinkas, a thousand other Hiroshimas, a thousand other Potato Famines, a thousand other Trails of Tears, a thousand other Middle Passages. 

 

Another Allusion to Macbeth?

Tolkien quite famously supplanted Shakespeare's humdrum imagining of Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane with the march of the Ents upon Isengard. Even better known thanks to Peter Jackson's film of The Return of the King is Éowyn's clarification for the Witch-king of just how tricky a thing prophecy can be.* I have also long believed that the hobbits' vision, prompted by Bombadil, in which 'strode shapes of Men, tall and grim with bright swords, and last came one with a star on his brow' (FR 1.viii.146) owes something to the vision given to Macbeth by the witches of Banquo's Stuart progeny (Macbeth 4.i).**

This morning, even before coffee, I believe I found another allusion to Macbeth. In The Taming of Sméagol, as Frodo and Sam are trying in vain to find a way down from the heights of the Emyn Muil, Frodo decides they have done enough search for one day:

‘Well,’ he said, at last withdrawing his eyes, ‘we cannot stay here all night, fix or no fix. We must find a more sheltered spot, and camp once more; and perhaps another day will show us a path.’ 

‘Or another and another and another,’ muttered Sam. ‘Or maybe no day. We’ve come the wrong way.’

(TT 4.i.604)

Did you catch the cadence of Sam's answer about tomorrow? The iambic meter of Sam's 'another and another and another' and Macbeth's 'tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow' match perfectly (Macbeth 5.v). Each repeats a three syllable word with the stress on the second syllable, and punctuates the tedium of its creeping pace from day to day with the stress it places on the repeated 'and' which binds them. 'And', as Patrick Stewart says in the clip below, quoting Ian McKellen's advice to him, is 'the important word' in that speech. It carries the burden of what the speaker is feeling, whether it's Macbeth or Sam. 

When I catch things like this, I swear, for a moment I can hear the Inklings laughing.

 

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* As I noted back in 2016, the prophecy about the Witch-king comes true, not in one, but three unexpected ways. Éowyn is no man; Merry is no Man; and the smith who had forged the blade long ago is no living Man. One thing I am going to have to do, I have just realized, is to look beyond Tolkien's reinterpretation of the misinterpreted prophecy to the equivalence of the Witch-king and Macbeth.

** In keeping with Tolkien's belief that Shakespeare was best studied on the page as a concomitant to its being viewed on the stage, I did not make the connection between the vision of Banquo and his  descendants and of Aragorn and his ancestors until I was watching Kenneth Branagh's staging of the play some years ago. Banquo's descendants appeared and strode off across the stage much as the hobbits saw the 'sons of forgotten kings' do in their vision.