Chapter 3: Three is Company
Eric's Thoughts (2/13/14)
The chapter begins with Gandalf advising Frodo to wait for a while before leaving. Gandalf disappears, and Frodo sells his home to the Sackville Bagginses, who triumphantly take the keys. Frodo then sets off with Samwise and Pippin. At first the traveling through the Shire is beautiful and fine. A thoughtful fox makes an appearance, which made me laugh for its randomness:
Jacob's Thoughts (2/15/14)
You know, I've taken some swipes here at the Peter Jackson films, but I must give him due credit: the pacing of his film The Fellowship of the Ring was just right. Things slowed at important moments but didn't drag or linger, while the rest of the action barreled along at a clipped pace. (I'll leave alone for now how Jackson then so totally ruined the perfect pacing of The Hobbit ). All that is a round-about way of getting to something that Ben mentioned last week and that Eric mentioned in his most recent post, but that I'd like to foreground this week: the problem of pacing.
My childhood memories of reading Lord of the Rings does entail me remembering how painfully slow these early chapters could be, which felt like such a chore to get through before I could get to the good stuff, and those memories are all flooding back to me now. While I agree with Eric that the details are necessary for immersing one in a sense of reality so that the stakes are raised, I also believe there must be balance. Yes, the whole Lord of the Rings could've been narrated in a sentence as "some guys throw a ring into a volcano" (which radical abbreviations are a fun game I've played with my own students to teach them the importance of not writing in vague generalities), but I do not think the tale is well served by its turn into hyper detail, recording every single mundane occurrence, as though this were some Andy Warholian performance project (serious, I had to read a book by Warhol in grad school called a: a novel, wherein Warhol gives an amphetamine addict a tape recorder for 24 hours then transcribes every single word he spoke that day into a book. I can practically hear Eric's eyes rolling at that one, but I still feel Tolkien errors too far towards Warhol 's radical expansionism than towards radical contraction, and that these chapters could've benefited from more of a balance between these two extremes).
That all being said, I'm not a total crank, and there were a couple parts of this chapter I found genuinely thought provoking, which, at the risk of contradicting myself, I may not have caught nor appreciated if we weren't reading at such a leisurely pace ourselves:
"But it is not your own Shire...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 forever fence it out." -Gildor Inglorion
"He used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: as springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary. 'It's dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,' he used to say, 'You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to. Do you realize that this is the very path that goes through Mirkwood, and that if you let it might take you to the Lonely Mountain or even further and to worse places?' He used to say that on the path outside the front door at Bag End, especially after he had been out for a long walk." -Frodo Baggins
Ben's Thoughts (2/17/14)
Uh-oh. Here we go. The stretch from "Three is Company" up to and not including "Fog on the Barrow-Downs" is, in my opinion, some of the weakest and most self-indulgent material in LOTR. I always had to resist the urge to skim through these chapters when I read them for fun in years past, and I feel my old frustration creeping up on me now as I dive into them on this "deeper" re-read. As Eric and Bender noted, pacing is a huge problem. This chapter, for example, while is does have some witty banter between the hobbits and some beautiful description of the Shire, goes by at a crawl. I'll go through my thoughts, as usual, and address some of the problems I see in the chapter along the way.
First things first -- Gandalf. He doesn't stick around for very long, but my main problem is that he is extremely vague about where to go and doling out advice to Frodo. He doesn't say when Frodo should leave (the right response to Frodo's question should have been "right now") and doesn't even tell him where to go; only when pressed does he tell Frodo that he thinks Frodo should steer for Rivendell. Why this reluctance to direct Frodo? In Book 2, Gandalf has no problem with telling the whole Fellowship what to do and how to do it. I suppose it's just a desire not to insert himself too heavily into Frodo's affairs -- that "telling" him what to do is altogether too Sauron-like -- but it seems a silly thing to me when the fate of Middle-earth is at stake. At any rate, this reluctance mirrors Gildor's "advice" at the end of the chapter, but there it felt a lot more natural. It is implied, if not stated outright, that these "wandering" groups of Elves are, in the long run at least, headed to the Grey Havens and across the sea to Valinor, so it makes sense that they would not want to complicate themselves in the affairs of the denizens of Middle-earth any more.
The best part of this chapter by far is the sequence of Frodo leaving Bag End and heading out of Hobbiton. It's a beautifully-written sequence. Frodo's nostalgia at leaving is palpable (although his statement of "I wonder if I will ever look into this valley again" is a bit melodramatic), and image of everyone emptying out of Bag End and abandoning it to the mercies of the Sackville-Bagginses is very poignant. Gandalf's absence is very ominous at this point, and this apprehension mixes well with the arrival of the black rider to Bag End, which Tolkien wisely leaves off-screen as a conversation between the Gaffer and the rider.
But this brings me back to my complaint about this stretch of chapters. I really think the problem with these chapters is a narrative one, not really one of pacing. Tolkien let himself get really involved with hobbit "politics," if you will -- he seems intensely interested in the details of how Frodo is going to get himself out of the Shire without attracting attention. While I guess this has an in-universe explanation -- too much noise about his departure might alert the black riders -- it seems overdone. This is one major change that Peter Jackson did right in the movies. He skipped right over all this traveling around in the Shire, except for the hobbits' adventures running away from the riders (which is altogether too overdone in the movies, but more on that later) and then they arrive at Bree.
The trouble with trying to explain how Frodo sneaks out of the Shire is that it gets the narrative bogged down in interludes at Farmer Maggot's, Crickhollow, and then -- shudder -- the Old Forest. Thinking about it here, I can't decide whether all this really stems from Tolkien's need to explain Frodo's sneaking out in the context of what he already laid down about hobbits and how they react to events, or whether it was an extended lead-up explaining how and why Frodo meets Tom Bombadil, who, by all accounts, was a Tolkien favorite. I suspect that when I get to Bombadil in a few chapters, I will find it a delightfully written piece that would stand well by itself, but does NOT belong in LOTR. We'll see.
One thing that this chapter could have done, but ultimately does not do, is fill in the gaps about what we know of the hobbit main characters. At this point, we know very little about Frodo and Sam, and even less about sidekicks Merry and Pippin (but the less said about extraneous, useless characters such as "Folco Boffin" and "Fatty Bolger" the better). Here, Pippin is established as a bit of a wise-cracker, somewhat eager to shirk work and entirely ready to order Sam around (he fully expects Sam to have the breakfasts ready for the "gentle-hobbits," for example). But Frodo shows some of those same traits, as well (he complains about his pack when he first puts it on). If memory serves, Pippin is supposed to be considerably younger than Frodo at this point (I do know that Pippin, at least, is younger than Sam, as well) and it would be nice to have something more to distinguish that age gap or maturity level at this point (I think it gets explored a bit more down the road -- hopefully when all the hobbits get in the same room as each other in the Crickhollow chapter I'll be able to tell them apart. Aside from Sam, at this point, they all blur together.) And would it have killed Tolkien to physically describe these guys? Aside from Sam's "curly hair," we know nothing about what they look like.
On the black rider -- I forgot that the rider's initial on-screen introduction is so minimal. It's only there for a couple of paragraphs and then is gone. There's no indication that the rider can sense the Ring at this point -- indeed, the moment when Frodo touches the chain the Ring is hanging on is the moment the rider decides to move on down the road. I'm going to have to continually remind myself that the Nazgül of the books are a far cry from those of the movies. Peter Jackson's vision of the ringwraiths is one of physical power -- brooding, menacing, sword-wielding maniacs who slash and hack their way to the Ring. Not so here. The black riders, especially at this point, are a far more existential threat -- there's really no sense of what would happen if they caught the hobbits at this point. Even the rider who approaches the hobbits at the end of the chapter is crawling on the ground -- a disturbing image, perhaps, but not physically threatening. I'm looking forward to talking more about them as the threat to the hobbits becomes more clear.
Some final notes on the Elves. It was a nice surprise to see Gildor referencing his house. I remembered that Gildor was a Noldor, but didn't remember that he referred to himself as a member of the house of Finrod. For those unfamiliar with the lineage of the high-Elves (of which Elrond is a product), the high-Elves returned to Middle-earth from Valinor under the leadership of the hot-headed Feänor, creator of the Silmarils. After Feänor's death at the hand's of Sauron's then-boss Morgoth, the Noldor were ruled by a succession of "High Kings," none of which fared very well in their battles against the Enemy. One of these (Feänor's half-brother's son) was named Finrod Felagund, and he figures prominently in the "Lay of Luthién" that will be referenced by Aragorn later. In the Lay, Finrod battled Sauron (who was a powerful shape-shifter at the time) to save the lives of Beren and Luthién, sacrificing his life as a result. Who knows if Tolkien had any of this pinned down when he actually wrote LOTR, but it's still nice to see it referenced.
Gildor is a great one-off character. He and the other Elves are such a contrast from the hobbits or Gandalf or anyone else we've met to this point. His cryptic warnings serve to clarify and rack up the tension considerably ("Is it not enough to know they are servants of the Enemy?" "Flee them!") while at the same time establishing another perspective of what is at stake if Frodo fails (Sauron will wipe out the Elves as well as the Shire if he prevails). It is a nice interlude that helped distract me from my irritation at the hobbits' petty goal to sneak out of the Shire. It's interesting, but I think Gildor's character is better-established and enjoyable than any other Elf in the books, except for Galadriel. He's just the right mix of camaraderie for Frodo, amusement towards the other hobbits, and otherworldly connection to Elf-magic (brought in through the references to Elbereth especially). I'm looking forward to seeing if that will end up being the case throughout the series.
The chapter begins with Gandalf advising Frodo to wait for a while before leaving. Gandalf disappears, and Frodo sells his home to the Sackville Bagginses, who triumphantly take the keys. Frodo then sets off with Samwise and Pippin. At first the traveling through the Shire is beautiful and fine. A thoughtful fox makes an appearance, which made me laugh for its randomness:
A
fox passing through the woods 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 any more about it.
But
not soon after they are followed by a mysterious black rider that
sniffs. Frodo, when near the black rider, feels the temptation to put on
the ring. Fortunately, elves show up, and take Frodo and friends into
company, where they feast, drink, and receive vague warnings to run from
the black riders at all costs. But the elves don’t make an offer to
help the hobbits reach Rivendell, even though they know they are being
pursued by Mordor agents. Narcissistic elves, to say the least. (I sense
another plot hole.)
Frodo
really needed to say to that elf, “Thanks for nothing, Gildor. Take
your worthless two pages of advice and shove it up your--Sam! So glad
you're awake. Gildor and I were just talking.”
After
speaking with Jacob on the phone about this chapter, Jacob thought the
pacing was off at this point, but I didn’t particularly mind it. The
stakes are raised with the appearance of the black riders. I remember
the first time I read the book I kept thinking, Frodo, don’t go off the
road! Maybe these black riders can tell you something important! But you
quickly learn from the sniffing and from Gildor's warning that my
advice would have not have boded so well for Frodo, or Middle Earth.
In
terms of the writing, descriptions are becoming more common now.
Tolkien is describing roads, scent laden pines, the leaves whispering,
and starlit elf hair. These descriptions were much needed. But I still
would like a little description about Frodo, Pippin, and Sam, which at
this point is nonexistent.
With
the appearance of the elves, reading this chapter reminded me of Henry
Dyson, a member of the Inklings who, whenever an elf appeared in
Tolkien’s story (to which Dyson was listening in their book club), Dyson
would shout, “Oh God, not another elf!”
Steven
King noted that in order to create realism with horror and fantasy, 95%
of what you show needs to be mundane and very real, so when the ghost
appears you believe it. So I think all of the descriptions and passing
over the terrain is necessary to create that realism.
While
I agree the chapter isn't riveting in its pace, I think the pacing,
while maybe a tad bit slow, creates a sense of time, space and distance,
and ultimately, realism. Sure, Tolkien could have written, “And so it
happened that Frodo, Sam, and Pippin traveled night and day, and ran
into a black rider that sniffed, and they were scared, but gladly Gildor
of the elves showed up, and they feasted a merry night and slept
soundly.” But that wouldn’t have been very satisfying at all. Drawing
out the journey is necessary for a road trip book like Lord of the Rings.
Now,
something I think that's a valid critique is that I would have liked
more point of view for Frodo, or Sam, or Pippin. The point of view is
not very clear, and no thoughts of a particular character are apparent. I
think the story would have been stronger with a driving point of view
that let me into a character’s thoughts.
Overall, while a slower chapter in terms of pacing, I would rate this one as not riveting, but not bad.
Jacob's Thoughts (2/15/14)
You know, I've taken some swipes here at the Peter Jackson films, but I must give him due credit: the pacing of his film The Fellowship of the Ring was just right. Things slowed at important moments but didn't drag or linger, while the rest of the action barreled along at a clipped pace. (I'll leave alone for now how Jackson then so totally ruined the perfect pacing of The Hobbit ). All that is a round-about way of getting to something that Ben mentioned last week and that Eric mentioned in his most recent post, but that I'd like to foreground this week: the problem of pacing.
My childhood memories of reading Lord of the Rings does entail me remembering how painfully slow these early chapters could be, which felt like such a chore to get through before I could get to the good stuff, and those memories are all flooding back to me now. While I agree with Eric that the details are necessary for immersing one in a sense of reality so that the stakes are raised, I also believe there must be balance. Yes, the whole Lord of the Rings could've been narrated in a sentence as "some guys throw a ring into a volcano" (which radical abbreviations are a fun game I've played with my own students to teach them the importance of not writing in vague generalities), but I do not think the tale is well served by its turn into hyper detail, recording every single mundane occurrence, as though this were some Andy Warholian performance project (serious, I had to read a book by Warhol in grad school called a: a novel, wherein Warhol gives an amphetamine addict a tape recorder for 24 hours then transcribes every single word he spoke that day into a book. I can practically hear Eric's eyes rolling at that one, but I still feel Tolkien errors too far towards Warhol 's radical expansionism than towards radical contraction, and that these chapters could've benefited from more of a balance between these two extremes).
That all being said, I'm not a total crank, and there were a couple parts of this chapter I found genuinely thought provoking, which, at the risk of contradicting myself, I may not have caught nor appreciated if we weren't reading at such a leisurely pace ourselves:
"But it is not your own Shire...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 forever fence it out." -Gildor Inglorion
"He used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: as springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary. 'It's dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,' he used to say, 'You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to. Do you realize that this is the very path that goes through Mirkwood, and that if you let it might take you to the Lonely Mountain or even further and to worse places?' He used to say that on the path outside the front door at Bag End, especially after he had been out for a long walk." -Frodo Baggins
Ben's Thoughts (2/17/14)
Uh-oh. Here we go. The stretch from "Three is Company" up to and not including "Fog on the Barrow-Downs" is, in my opinion, some of the weakest and most self-indulgent material in LOTR. I always had to resist the urge to skim through these chapters when I read them for fun in years past, and I feel my old frustration creeping up on me now as I dive into them on this "deeper" re-read. As Eric and Bender noted, pacing is a huge problem. This chapter, for example, while is does have some witty banter between the hobbits and some beautiful description of the Shire, goes by at a crawl. I'll go through my thoughts, as usual, and address some of the problems I see in the chapter along the way.
First things first -- Gandalf. He doesn't stick around for very long, but my main problem is that he is extremely vague about where to go and doling out advice to Frodo. He doesn't say when Frodo should leave (the right response to Frodo's question should have been "right now") and doesn't even tell him where to go; only when pressed does he tell Frodo that he thinks Frodo should steer for Rivendell. Why this reluctance to direct Frodo? In Book 2, Gandalf has no problem with telling the whole Fellowship what to do and how to do it. I suppose it's just a desire not to insert himself too heavily into Frodo's affairs -- that "telling" him what to do is altogether too Sauron-like -- but it seems a silly thing to me when the fate of Middle-earth is at stake. At any rate, this reluctance mirrors Gildor's "advice" at the end of the chapter, but there it felt a lot more natural. It is implied, if not stated outright, that these "wandering" groups of Elves are, in the long run at least, headed to the Grey Havens and across the sea to Valinor, so it makes sense that they would not want to complicate themselves in the affairs of the denizens of Middle-earth any more.
The best part of this chapter by far is the sequence of Frodo leaving Bag End and heading out of Hobbiton. It's a beautifully-written sequence. Frodo's nostalgia at leaving is palpable (although his statement of "I wonder if I will ever look into this valley again" is a bit melodramatic), and image of everyone emptying out of Bag End and abandoning it to the mercies of the Sackville-Bagginses is very poignant. Gandalf's absence is very ominous at this point, and this apprehension mixes well with the arrival of the black rider to Bag End, which Tolkien wisely leaves off-screen as a conversation between the Gaffer and the rider.
But this brings me back to my complaint about this stretch of chapters. I really think the problem with these chapters is a narrative one, not really one of pacing. Tolkien let himself get really involved with hobbit "politics," if you will -- he seems intensely interested in the details of how Frodo is going to get himself out of the Shire without attracting attention. While I guess this has an in-universe explanation -- too much noise about his departure might alert the black riders -- it seems overdone. This is one major change that Peter Jackson did right in the movies. He skipped right over all this traveling around in the Shire, except for the hobbits' adventures running away from the riders (which is altogether too overdone in the movies, but more on that later) and then they arrive at Bree.
The trouble with trying to explain how Frodo sneaks out of the Shire is that it gets the narrative bogged down in interludes at Farmer Maggot's, Crickhollow, and then -- shudder -- the Old Forest. Thinking about it here, I can't decide whether all this really stems from Tolkien's need to explain Frodo's sneaking out in the context of what he already laid down about hobbits and how they react to events, or whether it was an extended lead-up explaining how and why Frodo meets Tom Bombadil, who, by all accounts, was a Tolkien favorite. I suspect that when I get to Bombadil in a few chapters, I will find it a delightfully written piece that would stand well by itself, but does NOT belong in LOTR. We'll see.
One thing that this chapter could have done, but ultimately does not do, is fill in the gaps about what we know of the hobbit main characters. At this point, we know very little about Frodo and Sam, and even less about sidekicks Merry and Pippin (but the less said about extraneous, useless characters such as "Folco Boffin" and "Fatty Bolger" the better). Here, Pippin is established as a bit of a wise-cracker, somewhat eager to shirk work and entirely ready to order Sam around (he fully expects Sam to have the breakfasts ready for the "gentle-hobbits," for example). But Frodo shows some of those same traits, as well (he complains about his pack when he first puts it on). If memory serves, Pippin is supposed to be considerably younger than Frodo at this point (I do know that Pippin, at least, is younger than Sam, as well) and it would be nice to have something more to distinguish that age gap or maturity level at this point (I think it gets explored a bit more down the road -- hopefully when all the hobbits get in the same room as each other in the Crickhollow chapter I'll be able to tell them apart. Aside from Sam, at this point, they all blur together.) And would it have killed Tolkien to physically describe these guys? Aside from Sam's "curly hair," we know nothing about what they look like.
On the black rider -- I forgot that the rider's initial on-screen introduction is so minimal. It's only there for a couple of paragraphs and then is gone. There's no indication that the rider can sense the Ring at this point -- indeed, the moment when Frodo touches the chain the Ring is hanging on is the moment the rider decides to move on down the road. I'm going to have to continually remind myself that the Nazgül of the books are a far cry from those of the movies. Peter Jackson's vision of the ringwraiths is one of physical power -- brooding, menacing, sword-wielding maniacs who slash and hack their way to the Ring. Not so here. The black riders, especially at this point, are a far more existential threat -- there's really no sense of what would happen if they caught the hobbits at this point. Even the rider who approaches the hobbits at the end of the chapter is crawling on the ground -- a disturbing image, perhaps, but not physically threatening. I'm looking forward to talking more about them as the threat to the hobbits becomes more clear.
Some final notes on the Elves. It was a nice surprise to see Gildor referencing his house. I remembered that Gildor was a Noldor, but didn't remember that he referred to himself as a member of the house of Finrod. For those unfamiliar with the lineage of the high-Elves (of which Elrond is a product), the high-Elves returned to Middle-earth from Valinor under the leadership of the hot-headed Feänor, creator of the Silmarils. After Feänor's death at the hand's of Sauron's then-boss Morgoth, the Noldor were ruled by a succession of "High Kings," none of which fared very well in their battles against the Enemy. One of these (Feänor's half-brother's son) was named Finrod Felagund, and he figures prominently in the "Lay of Luthién" that will be referenced by Aragorn later. In the Lay, Finrod battled Sauron (who was a powerful shape-shifter at the time) to save the lives of Beren and Luthién, sacrificing his life as a result. Who knows if Tolkien had any of this pinned down when he actually wrote LOTR, but it's still nice to see it referenced.
Gildor is a great one-off character. He and the other Elves are such a contrast from the hobbits or Gandalf or anyone else we've met to this point. His cryptic warnings serve to clarify and rack up the tension considerably ("Is it not enough to know they are servants of the Enemy?" "Flee them!") while at the same time establishing another perspective of what is at stake if Frodo fails (Sauron will wipe out the Elves as well as the Shire if he prevails). It is a nice interlude that helped distract me from my irritation at the hobbits' petty goal to sneak out of the Shire. It's interesting, but I think Gildor's character is better-established and enjoyable than any other Elf in the books, except for Galadriel. He's just the right mix of camaraderie for Frodo, amusement towards the other hobbits, and otherworldly connection to Elf-magic (brought in through the references to Elbereth especially). I'm looking forward to seeing if that will end up being the case throughout the series.
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