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. 

Faramir and the Shards of Boromir's Horn

Quite a while back I came to the conclusion that Faramir doesn't actually see Boromir's funeral boat, as he is convinced he does, but a vision of it, as Frodo insists. It is of course impossible to prove either way; and that is probably as it should be. The mythic aspect of Faramir's vision is far more significant than whether it is factually true. I daresay even Faramir would have thought so, regardless of what he believed. His openness to the idea that the boat could have survived the Falls of Rauros because it came from Lothlórien is sufficient evidence of this notion.

Yet the other day I noticed a detail in The Chronology of The Lord of the Rings, edited by William Cloud Hicklin, and just published as a supplement to volume XIX of Tolkien Studies. In the entry under 28 February 3019, Tolkien wrote 'First shard of horn of Boromir found' (56), and under 30 February* 'Second shard of the horn of Boromir found' (58). Hicklin comments in a single footnote to both entries (57): 'The entries regarding Boromir's horn are in pencil'. Since the Chronology is otherwise written in ink of different colors, the pencil insertions would seem to be later additions. 

Now we already know from TT 4.v.667 that the two shards were found on two different days in two different places, and we know from The Tale of Years in Appendix B (1092) that Faramir saw the boat on 29* February. Thus the first shard was found on 28 February; Faramir saw the boat on 29 February; and the second shard was found 30 February. At some point before 7 March, when Faramir speaks of the shards to Frodo, word of their discovery reaches both Faramir and Denethor. 

What I find curious in all this is that only The Tale of Years gives us a date for Faramir's sight of the boat, and only the Chronology gives us dates for the shards. The Chronology says nothing of the boat after 'Boromir's funeral boat sent down over Rauros' in the entry for 26 February (54). It could be that each text is telling us something different here. 

The silence of the Chronology on Faramir's sighting of the boat may not prove that what he saw was a vision, but it is consistent with that interpretation. As Faramir himself tells Frodo: 'Tidings of death have many wings. Night oft brings news to near kindred, ’tis said' (TT 4.v.665).

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* In the Shire Reckoning all months had 30 days, February included.

The First Sentence of 'The Lay of the Children of Húrin'

Lo! the golden dragon   of the God of Hell, 

the gloom of the woods   of the world now gone, 

the woes of Men,   and weeping of Elves 

fading faintly   down forest pathways,

is now to tell,   and the name most tearful           5 

of Níniel the sorrowful,   and the name most sad

of Thalion’s son Túrin   o’erthrown by fate.

                (The Lays of Beleriand 5) 

What really got me to stop and look more closely at the first seven lines of The Lay of the Children of Húrin was a question: Does 'fading', the first word in line 4, modify 'weeping' or 'Elves'? Is it the sound of the Elves' weeping which is fading, or is it the Elves themselves who are fading? That, after all, is something they are known to do, an exceptionally important part of the Doom of the Elves. It's also true that the two other participles in these lines, 'gone' (2) and 'o'erthrown' (7) must be taken closely with the nouns, 'world' (2) and 'son Túrin (7), just before them, as 'Elves' is just before 'fading.' On the basis of these two points I am much more inclined to take 'fading' with 'Elves' than with 'weeping.'

But while I was considering this, I noticed something I find much more interesting in the structure of the sentence, which has six subjects, four before and two after the verb phrase -- 'is now to tell'. The first four are the dragon of Morgoth, the gloom of a lost world, and the sufferings of Men and Elves within that world. Having set forth the particular agents of the general misfortunes of the two kindreds in that lost world, the sentence then pivots on the verb, like a lever on a fulcrum, to name the particular victims, Níniel and Túrin, whose sorrows are the focus of this lay. Lines 1 and 7, moreover, enclose the whole, opposing the dragon and Túrin as well as the figures of Morgoth and Húrin whose conflict shapes the unfolding of the tale they watch from afar. The reference to fate and the description of Morgoth as 'the God of Hell' also serve to tie this tale into the larger themes of the problem of Evil and its relationship to the plan of Ilúvatar which Tolkien saw as fundamental from the beginning of his legendarium.

It's a very nice little package to introduce the Great Tale and link it intimately to what we might call the Great Themes, a unity further underscored by the six subjects with a singular verb.*

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* An alternate reading would be to construe the six words I take as the collective subject of 'is' (in one big noun clause) as the objects of 'tell.' It may also simply be that 'is' takes its number from that of the nearest subject, which doesn't happen often in English of late, but Tolkien knew any number of languages in which it did.