Transcript
00:05 - Julia Golding (Host)
Hello and welcome to Mythmakers. Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding and this is one of our sidecasts where we are taking an author's look at the writing of the Lord of the Rings. And we have reached chapter 12 in the Fellowship of the Ring, which is called Flight to the Ford. This actually comes at the end of the first book. Now, the first thing I notice when I come to this chapter is it's extremely long and there's a sort of aimlessness and difficulty and frustration in this chapter, which reflects the experience of the hobbits and Strider trying to make their way to Rivendell after Frodo having been attacked on Weathertop. I wonder too if there was a certain element of difficulty that Tolkien was experiencing in writing this, because it does feel laboured and pained, but also entirely brilliant as a result because of the mimetic effect of that difficulty, making it quite a long chapter, difficult chapter to read. So that you get an overview of what's going on in this chapter it starts with the immediate aftermath of the attack on Weathertop, which we'll look at in a second. Then there's a journey where Frodo is put on bill and they keep taking wrong turnings or can't find a path. It's uncertain that they're making good time and in the right direction. There's a ticking clock in this chapter which is the state of Frodo. So they're battling not only the Black Riders but also Frodo's condition. So if you're thinking about it in a writerly way, that's a good strategy for giving urgency to counteract the feeling that they're going in the wrong direction. Then there's the one sign of hope, which is finding the jewel on the bridge, a sense that maybe someone else is out there to help them before they wander off into the lands which bring them into connection with the troll story from the Hobbit. So we get a revisit to a famous incident in the previous novel. Then we meet Glorfindel. Things seem to be getting back on track and the end of the chapter speeds up hugely. And then there's a very dramatic, action-packed scene at the end which gives the chapter its title the Flight to the Ford. So I suppose that's four main bits, isn't it? There's the initial aftermath of Frodo's injury, there's the feelingly frustrating journey, there's the troll episode and then there's the flight to the Ford. So let's take those individually.
03:14
So I think one of the first things you notice about the response to the Weathertop attack is that Tolkien shows how fiction can do very easily what is much harder for, say, a film to do, which is have a section where the characters explain how they experience the same event very differently. So whereas for the Hobbits it was a very the Hobbits aside from Frodo that is it was confusion. There were cries in the dark. They weren't sure what was happening. Frodo is the one who sees the pale kings, the wraiths, because he's in the half world of the ring, and of course Aragorn is seeing it as a scene of combat because he's the one who comes in with fire and drives them off. And many of you will have watched the films of course I suspect almost all of you and what a film can't do is break off very easily to show the different points of view. So in the film all of the hobbits are equally threatened and they're cleared out the path until Frodo is the last man standing, falls over, gets stabbed, aragorn arrives. So there isn't that confusion in the same way as there is in the narrative, and that's because the film in a way tidies things up, because it's trying to give a clear description in celluloid what's going on and the book is allowed to let the confusion, the fog of war carry on existing. It's an experience of battle which no doubt Tolkien knew very well from his own time in the Great War.
04:53
It's interesting here that, if you remember, we all have sort of having read the whole series. It's hard to go back to the innocent first reading. And Sam, in a way, is reflecting perhaps what we should be feeling, which is a distrust of what exactly Strider is. In this section what we see is Sam to trust him and he asks Sam to help him as he tries to heal Frodo. And he sort of confides in Sam. It's as though he recognizes that Sam is the one responsible for looking after his master. It's an old-fashioned relationship, the kind of thing you might get with a valet or a body man or as they would call it in the military in the first world war um. So that puts him in relationship to saying I've got to go through sam if I'm going to do something for frodo and by recognizing that, it's almost trying to persuade sam to trust him.
05:59
There's some lovely um features in this section. We've got the arrival of the grey dawn, which is the same point to which the knife melts, and here these images of greyness, disappearance of the knife, connects with the fact that Frodo is in serious peril of turning into a wraith or going into the wraith world. That kind of disappearance grayness is fading is how his jeopardy is described. And we see Strider taking on a sort of even more authoritative tone than he has to date, with Frodo out of the picture to a certain degree, because Frodo was the leader of the hobbits before this. He is taking over with a series of declarative statements and authority and you also get a hint of what later is revealed as his kingship in the ability to heal. So he finds the Athelas King's foil clues in the name, and we are told that the men of the West brought this to Middle Earth. So we're getting a glimpse of his background, a hint it's very subtle which we can enjoy on a second reading, probably not notice on a first.
07:19
And then we get the description of the smell of the Athelas, once it is broken down and sort of turned into a aromatherapy moment, shall we call it where it's sort of put in hot water and the smell is released. Now there's a learning point here for all of us who are doing descriptions, if we're going to have a dominant sensory moment which isn't sight. It's very good to do it when sight is excluded or dimmed, so in the grey light of dawn is a perfect time to do this, and we get, as a result, as a reader, a much stronger impact of that steam and how it is described by those who are feeling it, how it lightens their spirits, and it also connects to our own memories of scent. Scent is one of those things which really mainlines it straight to recreating experiences in our head. I've got various scents which immediately catapult me back to places I've smelt the same thing, like my primary and you know those sorts of things. The first place I worked in London, the. The scent does it in a way that a picture doesn't, and I think this is going on with scent. And for Tolkien it might mean something like the use of incense in church, because as a Catholic he would be used to the burning of incense which has a wonderful, powerful slap in the face. Scent which associates with something holy, something healing, something spiritual, sacramental, and I think all of these are wrapped up in the use of Athelas. And of course this is one of our prefiguring events, because this little moment of healing then becomes a bigger moment in Gondor when Aragorn is brought in to heal those who have fallen under the Witch-King. But that's coming later.
09:17
What I like about this section is the insight it gives us into Frodo In the film version, because Elijah Wood was painfully young when he was cast. Frodo always feels a bit like a sacrificial victim offered up to carry the burdens of the grown-ups. This isn't at all the Frodo of the book. He is more of an officer class. He's in his 50s, so he's a fully mature hobbit. And he's also far more active in the story because we are inside his point of view.
09:49
Certainly in this first novel we are, and I like the fact that he is full of self-recrimination. He's not a victim here. He feels he participated in his own downfall, however overwhelming the odds were, however overwhelming the odds were and the sentence go. He bitterly regretted his foolishness and reproached himself for weakness of will, for he now perceived that in putting on the ring he obeyed not his own desire but the commanding wish of his enemies, feels a bit like the lord's prayer lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. He was tempted and he didn't escape, and that's a key thing. He isn't a saintly figure, frodo. He is flawed, though. He does resist far better than many other people would do, and that point is also made. He himself is aware of his own failures, which is why he is such a great character and why he truly is a hero. It's not an easy job that he is doing, so a little bit of lightness takes over from this dark moment of Frodo's injury.
10:58
We see Bill comes into his own. He's unloaded, frodo is able to sit on him and the things that he was carrying are redistributed around the rest of the company and I love the fact that you've got these values that keep coming up. So Sam shows pity to Bill, helps nurture him, feed him up, and that pity and care and concern is rewarded by Bill being able to carry his master for him. And that theme of taking pity on someone who is, or some thing, some creature, is, of course, repeated in the story of Gollum, which is absolutely pivotal to the eventual success of the quest.
11:46
So we set off for this frustrating series of paragraphs about walking through a cheerless land where you are not sure exactly where you are going, and it is all summed up at the end, after four days have passed, by a description of the times when they're at rest, the night scene and it's a quintessentially Tolkienian sentence. They dreaded the dark hours and kept watch in pairs by night, expecting at any time to see black shapes stalking in the grey night dimly lit by the cloud-veiled moon. But they saw nothing and heard no sound but the sigh of withered leaves and grass. So you've got the sense of darkness, cloud-veiled moon, the grey night being stalked by black shapes and the inability to see their way forward and it almost being soundless, except for the sighing of withered leaves and grass, except for the sighing of withered leaves and grass. And there's a reflection of how they feel in that landscape, particularly Frodo's state of mind, because we are told that he feels he's in a half world, a half existence, a grey existence. He feels withered, fading. So the world around them is reflecting what Frodo is experiencing and of course, the threat here of the black shapes being the dark, the black riders following them, keeps the sense of peril going. In this context, the one point of clarity is Strider. So he is their geographical guide and his description of exactly where they are. Even though he feels a bit lost and doesn't know quite the trail, he knows where they are. He just doesn't know how to get from A to B without being caught. And his description is so good that this is exactly the point where you will turn to Tolkien's maps and realise what a realised world this is, because you can chart exactly where they are on his maps. It feels almost as though, having read this, you could get out an ordnance survey map, which is in the UK it's our sort of detailed map and plot exactly where they are.
14:06
And after having this sort of map moment, we carry on in the difficultness of the journey. Frodo is fading, the hobbits are suffering and the black riders are stalking them, but even so we get another bright spot. This is what Tolkien does, even in those dreadful passages in Mordor. There is moments where they find a little stream of water or something to lighten that darkness, or see a star in the sky. Here the hope is very tangible.
14:40
They come across a jewel, a single pale green jewel that has been left in the roadway to mark that a bridge is safe to cross. Aragorn takes that as a clear sign. We're told it's an elfstone barrel and we know from or we get to know, I should say and what Aragorn here already knows is that elfstones don't just drop by chance. You'll remember when Pippin leaves his brooch in the mud in the passage, when he and Merry are carried off by the orcs in Rohan and Legolas, gimli and Aragorn are following. Aragorn sees the brooch and says, not idly, do the leaves of Lorien fall? So we know that these things are left on purpose and he takes it as a sign that there is help potentially on the way. So from the cheerless lands of the pre-Elfstone moment we go into threatening and unfriendly lands and this is again a mimesis, a sort of echo of the fact that Frodo is getting progressively ill and it's noticeable here.
15:56
It's a very clever set of hints, because Frodo's thoughts go to Bilbo's journey from the Hobbit and we get lots of little hints of what's about to happen. And Strider also gives us a bigger historical view. So whereas Frodo is thinking of fairly recent history in Bilbo, strider gives a brief recap of the history of Angmar and the end of the Northern Kingdom, which those of you who know will know is his kingdom potentially and this is an example of the vistas that we don't get explained that Tolkien felt was the source of the power of his story. You always want to not know every story. There's got to be disappearing horizons. And certainly until the publishing of the third volume and much later, the Silmarillion, these were not explained, these references. So the first lot of people reading this will just have these wonderful hints where they don't know exactly what's going on.
17:01
And Pippin, who is of course the youngest of the hobbits, of the shortest attention span and life span, he's the one who's saying attention span and life span. Here's the one who's saying well, how on earth do people remember all of this? The Shire itself is a relatively new place, but for Pippin the Shire is basically what history is about. It's a bit similar to say, like an American feeling, that America's history begins with the Pilgrim Fathers and things before that didn't really exist. It's a bit similar to that. And it's Aragorn who has the longer view here, where he says that the heirs of Elendil remember Hint, hint, and also that Rivendell, where Elrond lives, which of course is an elven kingdom, has a much longer memory than someone like a hobbit would do. And there's also a hint here to the future romance. It's not a romance in the sense of romantic love, lord of the Rings, but he does mention that Rivendell is where his heart is so a little nod to Arwen, one imagines, though we could also say it's where he feels at home.
18:17
We go to from having had a cheerless land, threatening and unfriendly land. We then get wetness and difficulty. It's raining. They're feeling super miserable and if you're going to be doing a chapter which is dangerously, uh well, backtracking and struggling, changing what that struggle is, helps because it helps the reader organize it in their head. Otherwise they may give up and put the book down. And Strider here is also suffering, but of course he's the most stoic of them. But he isn't superhuman and he is aware that he's made mistakes. He's worried that they've wandered into troll country. Another hint, remember.
19:07
Frodo is thinking about Bilbo's journey. We know what's coming, all this foreshadowing. But what's important about what he's saying here is how he concludes his worries about his own mistakes. He says do not give up hope, sam. Do not give up hope. And in a way that one line sums up the message throughout Lord of the Rings If you're fighting the long defeat, if the elves are going to leave, if we're moving from a golden age into a less glorious future, do not give up hope. And that is really what Strider Aragorn stands for it's the return of hope. Aragorn stands for it's the return of hope.
19:57
And now we have the bit which connects the journey in the Hobbit to the Lord of the Rings. If you know anything about the writing of the Hobbit, you'll know that it was originally conceived as not being part of Middle-earth but was gradually folded in as time went on and revised, so that the journey that Bilbo goes on, which was in an undefined landscape as regards the legendarium material that Tolkien was already devising, is now firmly fixed onto the same, pretty much the same path that Frodo is taking to Rivendell. And there's a pleasure here of just. We all might twig at different points, and I think that that is really fun for Tolkien to consider. When do they guess that I'm going to do this? When is my reader going to realize?
20:47
And there's plenty of hints. So they've come across a path and Pippin says strong arms and heavy feet made it. Okay, that's a hint. And then they come across an empty troll hole and at this point Frodo says nothing. So I think there's a hint here that he and Strider are ahead of the game from the others. And then, of course, they come across the statues of the stone trolls who were the ones who stopped Bilbo and the dwarves and were contemplating eating them until they were turned to stone by the dawn, in one of the sort of early adventures in the Hobbit. And Frodo laughs here. Such a relief to find Frodo laughing after all of his suffering and he says we are forgetting our family history. So after the darkness, the difficulty, the wetness, the rain, all of those frustrations, we are in a way back on familiar paths and things begin to speed up and cheer up for a bit, enough to have one of their breaks for poetry where Sam sings what is one of Tolkien's recycled poems.
22:18
So Tolkien would write poems as a bit of fun and when he came to a part in the novel where he needed a song, he would go to his poetry books and convert it into a Middle Earth appropriate song and put it in. So if you look at his collected poems, a monumental task has been done. In the three-volume collection of his poems you can trace the evolution of this poem from one that did sort of have references to more modern folkloric elements to something which fits, which loses those frame breaking you know, take us out of Middle Earth to a more modern setting, loses all that and becomes part of the world of this period of the ring, and Sam is the one who is given the authorship of it. I think there's a suggestion here that Sam represents the troll Tolkien Tolkien when he's in his comic verse vein and Frodo says about Sam that he has gone from being a conspirator to a jester and maybe he will become a wizard and a warrior, which in a sense certainly a warrior he does get to be. We also have some answers here.
23:37
We learn from Frodo what became of the treasure that Bilbo had? Frodo said he gave it all away because he didn't feel it belonged to him. And do you remember that? Right early on, when Bilbo leaves, he becomes a folkloric figure of mad Baggins who pops back in with carrying bundles of treasure. There is a sense how that image of Bilbo has separated from the real Bilbo. The real Bilbo was one of social conscience, shall we say Charitable Bilbo, as opposed to the comic folkloric figure that he becomes in the Shire. So the trolls are a happy, cheering incident and it's a longer section here than the way it's portrayed in the film.
24:31
In the film they didn't want to lose the tension and so Frodo only sees it in a kind of fever dream. Here it's actually road and they hear hooves and bells. This is reminiscent of how Tolkien started writing the whole novel, because in the first attempt, when the hobbits were setting off on their journey, they heard hooves and bells on the road. And it was going to be Gandalf, but he changed that and turned it into a black rider. Here we've got the same connection of hooves and bells, but we have it being Glorfindel, who is one of the great elf lords. Now he got cut from the film version, so it's great fun, if you want to find fresh pastures, to dig a little bit into this character, because he has a long history. You can trace him through the extra material and he's a high elf and so that means he's one of the lineage like Galadriel, who are of a more noble nature, rather than the woodland elves and the sylvan elves.
25:52
The description here is borrowed for how Arwen first appears in the film. So Glorfindel to Frodo, it appeared that a white light was shining through the form and raiment of the rider, as though through a thin veil. So the elves have, or the heists of the elves have, this almost spiritual presence and the description, the conversation that then follows. We see the interlacing of the plot. We see the interlacing of the plot that the reason Glorfindel is there isn't because Gandalf has arrived, but because Gildor sent word. Now, gildor those of you who are keeping up Gildor is the elf who they met in the woods of the Shire and he actually turns out to be one of the dominoes that sets the whole row of dominoes going, because people know to look out for Frodo, the good guys know to look out for him. So it makes that seemingly isolated episode actually is lacing its way through to have the result that Gildor's arrival isn't coincidence but intentional. You don't want to put too many coincidences in a novel because it means that it doesn't feel earned, whereas this feels like an earned arrival.
27:20
Glorfindel, like Aragorn, also has healing skills, and here things begin to speed up. Frodo is put on the horse and the elf horse that is, poor old Bill, gets a break, and then we have one of the cordials, one of the special magic foods. Remember, the elves in the woods of the Shire also had special food. We get the sort of drink, this flask, pass round, which has this pepping up power to it, and then we get to the last section of this chapter. So just recapping we've had the aftermath of the attack, we've had the difficult journey, we've had the troll interlude and now we're getting the full-scale gallop to the Fords of Bruinin and it's a sudden burst of activity.
28:17
What I like about the way this is described by Tolkien in preference to the Peter Jackson film is that Frodo is active. In the Peter Jackson film he's basically well, he's not even Elijah Wood. He's like a little stuffed puppet sitting on Arwen's lap and you can kind of tell that he's out of it. And it's Arwen who's the hero in the film. Here it's Frodo. So he doesn't want to ride off and leave his friends.
28:47
But Glorfindel gives one of our wonderful lines of Elvish always love this one Norolim, norolim, ashfaloth. So off he goes, the horse carrying Frodo away. And Frodo is still present, he's still active. But he's also half in the world of the wraiths, even though he hasn't got the ring on. He's near the end of his strength because of the wound in his shoulder and he writes, or Tolkien writes. He could see them clearly now, robed in white and gray, and we have in this section a wonderfully hair-breast escape where there's short sentences. He feels rather than sees the presence of those Chasing him is literally just getting out in front of the nose of the lead horse. Very, very exciting, wonderful piece of writing. If you want to find out how to write a chase, have a look at this section.
29:47
And then you get a moment of stillness where he gets into the river and he knows that he cannot escape them. If they cross, then he that's it, and so he defies them and he says go back. And he names elbareth and Luthien the fair. It's wonderful that in this world of mainly masculine heroes, actually the most powerful names are feminine. Elbareth is a female god, gvalar and Luthien, of course, is the Luthien, and Beren, the elf maiden who confronts Morgoth or Melkor, the original bad presence prior to Sauron, the darkest of all dark lords, and it's female beauty that he puts up against the darkness of the black male black riders. And then there's the intervention of the release of the spell which brings the waters down on the black riders.
30:54
And it's fitting that, because we've had Frodo hanging on, he barely sees what's happening and then he passes out. So it ends with him hearing and seeing no more. But he does glimpse the boulders and the white horses white horses, black riders. So there's the one. He sees it in a dreamlike confusion, but we get the sense of power. But also because it's the end of the first book, it is a cliffhanger. He is unconscious. Has he survived? Has he been swept away? We don't know, because that's where the chapter ends and it's one of the strongest chapter ends in Lord of the Rings, because it's also, fittingly, the end of the first book.
31:46 - Speaker 2 (None)
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