Transcript
Hello and welcome to The Lord of the Rings, a Writer's Journey, a special sidecast of Mythmakers where we take a deep dive from a writer's perspective into The Lord of the Rings. My name is Julia Golding. I'm a Tolkien enthusiast and also an author. And today we have reached Chapter 2, The Shadow of the Past. So the first thing to say about this is hold on to your hats because this chapter is chock full of really essential sayings and information that's going to set us up for the rest of the journey. But let's just have a little think about the chapter title before we go on, because it is very appropriate. The chapter is all about the burden of the past on the people in the present, but also it matches with the key location, which is inside Bag End as Frodo and Gandalf are discussing matters concerning the ring. Outside all is sunny but inside they're in a room with a fire with the curtains drawn, so there are shadows in the room. Anyway, so let's start at the beginning of this chapter. An interesting thing here is that it is a mirror chapter of the previous beginning chapter, except with the next generation. So structurally you get the same things happening. You get the first part is seen from the perspective of they, the Hobbit folk, rather than our lead characters. And it moves towards a conversation between Gandalf and Frodo, mirroring that one of Bilbo and Gandalf. I think this is one of the reasons why Lord of the Rings seems to take a little bit of time to get going, because it is a kind of repetition. It feels as though we're not going anywhere, not getting anywhere, though of course there is a lot of key things being established. In that sense, this is another of those 'do not try this at home' because I'm not sure that this would work for most novelists. Anyway, let's have a look at the opening moves. We get a reprise, how the people have seen Bilbo's disappearance, and we get the sense, or we're told, that the baton has passed to Frodo, who's in a lonely fashion carrying on the tradition of the joint birthday party. And here we also get the mention of two key characters, that is Peregrine Took, usually called Pippin, and Merry Brandyback. His real name was Meriadoc, but that was seldom remembered. And the first important thing we find out about them, did you notice this? The first independent view we hear of them is that they're watching Frodo very carefully, and we get their suspicion that Frodo is off visiting the elves. This lays the ground for what is later called the conspiracy where the friends have worked out what his plans are, even though he thought he was being very clever and very secret. We also get a repetition of the worrying theme that those who have the ring don't grow older. And this reminds us of that heartbeat that carries on underneath every chapter that the ring has this effect on whoever is carrying it. And remaining in this frame of the general wisdom of the hobbits, we get little snippets of what they're hearing about events in the outside world. It's actually quite a clever way of telling us just enough about what we need to know about the gathering shadows and trouble without burdening us with too much detailed reporting of the politics of it all. We're understanding it in the same sort of shaky way that the hobbits understand it. Then we come to the first conversation in this chapter, which happens down at the Green Dragon. If you remember, in the last chapter, we had all the old gaffers sitting in the Ivy Bush. The Green Dragon is obviously the happening place because this is where the younger generation is having their conversation, including the sons of a couple of the characters who were present in the Ivy Bush, notably Sam Gamgee and the younger Miller Sandiman. In this conversation, the theme of the worrying events outside the Shire is repeated, but you get here also an insight into Sam's character because he has to put up with some ribbing from the rather obnoxious Miller's son, Ted, whose relationship with logic is somewhat shaky and he's applauded for things which really have no logical sense about them at all. But Sam laughs along with everybody else, so we get a sense that he isn't too demanding of those people around him. But we also have the setup here that Sam is ripe for adventure. He is the one who mentions dragons. He is the one who mentions elves. And he has this strange moment, this poetic moment, where he chants about how they're sailing, sailing, sailing away. We can see that he has this longing for things that are outside the Shire, even though on paper he's the most stay-at-home hobbit of them all, being a Gamgee, close to the earth and his potatoes. Another part of this conversation which I enjoy is the fact that there are stories here that we never actually get to the bottom of. There are rumours, in fact Sam is the one telling us, about giants who are seen walking on the moors, like elm trees, which leads to one of Ted Sandiman's nonsensical responses saying that there are no elm trees, so therefore it didn't exist. But it does foreshadow the Ents, but we never go back to that. Sam never says, "Ah yes, that must have been what I saw, or what my relatives saw." So it's just left out there, gesturing to a bigger world which we can never grasp. And this sense of the world beyond the borders, Tolkien points out that a lot of the Shire maps have just white space beyond their borders. The world beyond their borders is something we're never going to get to the bottom of. It all adds to the sense of very similitude about Middle Earth that is bigger than any of us can understand. We then get a bridging passage about the length of time that Gandalf has been away. It actually takes quite a bit of reading to understand it, because it seems to sort of circle back on itself. It says, "Just about that time Gandalf reappeared." Then he said, "Three years after the party." Then he's been popping back and forth. The best way of actually working when this reappearance of Gandalf happens is to pin it to Sam's conversation down the pub because it specifically said that he comes on the same night that Sam is walking home from that Green Dragon conversation. So it puts it in Frodo's 50th year because that's stated earlier. Anyway, we've got Gandalf arriving and then they go to bed. The next morning their conversation is where the mirroring is most apparent because the two of them are sitting alone by an open window enjoying the comforts of Bag End. But there are some important differences. We are appreciating the autumnal feel of the conversation between Bilbo and Gandalf. Here we are in the green of spring and everything is just beginning to wake up. Gandalf is having spring thoughts as well. So the whole mood is upbeat even though there is a fire in the grate, which means it's not that warm. But you've got the sounds of Sam outside going about the garden. Anyone who has a garden in England knows that certainly April and May the garden suddenly wakes up and gets turbocharged and there is a lot of gardening to be done at that period. So this conversation is the one which I was referring to, which is absolutely stuffed full of key information. But it is also a massive slab of retelling or backstory presented to us. Doing backstory like this is really difficult. So how does Tolkien carry it off so that we don't just feel we're reading some kind of extended prologue? Well, there are several features here which might be useful to draw out. One is that you have to make it matter. What is being told isn't just an account of the ages. It's absolutely essential and we know this from how Frodo is reacting, that Frodo understands the gravity of the situation he finds himself in. In fact, half of the conversation is really a big build-up to the revelation that Sauron has heard of the Shire and the family of Baggins. But that's kind of buried a bit later. The other thing Gandalf does in his account is he does keep it relatively brief. It is a large amount of information, but as he moves through the information, he keeps going. There's a real sense of momentum. And then the other very important part to keep this as a lively discussion is Frodo is sitting there basically being us, asking the questions we would want to ask, reacting, responding. So it's a give and take. It's a dramatized scene, not just a solid slab of information for us to take in. And the final thing to point out is that the style of narrative changes when Gandalf reaches perhaps the most interesting element of it psychologically and certainly for when we meet Gollum later in the book. He stops the account of Tale of the Ages and he turns it into a dramatized scene. He says what he thinks Smeagol says. He says what he thinks Deagol says. We can picture it. So it's a storyteller's technique. He's changed it up on us so that we are entertained whilst we're listening to something very important. And I would just say that this is a section which gets richer every time you go back to reading Lord of the Rings because you understand more about it and you see more levels in what's going on here, foreshadowing things that happen later or referring to earlier events. On that note, very early on in his explanation of the rings, Gandalf mentions the Elven smiths of Eregion. Now Eregion we are actually going to go to a bit later when the Fellowship get travelling. They also call it Hollin. And if you're looking for it on your map from the book, just look for Moria. It's outside the doors of Moria on the west side. He doesn't go into great detail here, but if you're trying to link the events of Lord of the Rings to the Silmarillion or the Rings of Power series on Amazon, the smiths that make the rings are living with Celebrimbor, who is the master smith. He's the one who makes the three great Elven rings. And it's that character who is the leader of the land of Eregion at this time when the rings were made. And this is one of those little comments which will enrich our understanding of later journeys of the Fellowship and also when they're reading the doors of Moria, that name will come up. And if you have a long good memory, you can then connect it back to the making of the rings back in this section. We also get another early mention here of Saruman. And this is before Gandalf has been trapped in Isengard, but already he is distrusting his superior, the leader of the White Council. He is going his own way and fortunately hasn't mentioned anything about his suspicions about the ring at this point, which does give Frodo a little bit of a breathing space as we shall see. This section could be subtitled, "What's at Stake?" So we know there's a lot at stake for the wider world because the ring is so powerful, but what's at stake for Frodo personally? And here we get a clear explanation of the bad effects of the ring and how it affects different people in different ways. And it's done through a discussion of what effect it had on Bilbo. And here we have a nice echo of the first chapter because Gandalf says of hobbits that they're as soft as butter and tough as tree roots. And one of the symptoms that Bilbo reported, which made him decide to leave the Shire, was he felt like butter spread over too much bread. So we've got this image of butter, which of course fits with the agrarian trencher man hobbit. And here it's used again. We also get the repetition of the litany of hobbit names that we had three times in the previous chapter in a slightly truncated form. But this time, the list of names is given by Gandalf and we get the reversed point of view. This is Gandalf's view of the hobbits. We've heard a lot about what the hobbits think about him. And here he says he thinks about the hobbits as charming, absurd, helpless hobbits, which of course the majority are, but it's very important that some of them, they may be charming, they can be absurd, looking at you Pippin, but they are certainly not helpless. They become the movers and shakers of what is to be the big confrontation to come. And then the other subheading for this chapter is what's the motive of the adversary. And here they discuss Sauron seeking malice and revenge. So we've seen a lot of the admirable qualities of Frodo and Bilbo, which include kindness, generosity, all these kinds of excellent heartwarming qualities. And this is up against a dark Lord whose main happiness would be to see such characters as the hobbits in slavery. So we know which side we're going to be on in this coming confrontation. Then we get the test. You'll remember from your reading of the book that you have the beautiful inscription written there and then in the wonderful elvish script. And then you get Gandalf's translation, which introduces us to the second poem in the main text, which is the one ring to rule them all poem. And this leads on to the clarion call, the call to adventure in a sense, which is the pronouncement that the test has proved that this is the master ring and that the dark Lord must not get it. That is now what the rest of the book is going to be about. There's also an interesting aspect here, which I've been worrying about, which is that it's clear as Gandalf puts the ring in the fire and takes it out again and passes it to Frodo that he's actually touching the ring. He knows that it's cool. So this suggests that he's touching it with bare skin rather than just the tongs. He takes it out with the tongs and then passes it to Frodo. I'm guessing that he isn't in any way claiming any ownership over it. So it doesn't have quite the same effect as it does when it's passed over in ownership. But anyway, it's just a little note because it seems to be one of the few moments when somebody else touches the ring. And before we move on from this early part of their conversation, I just want to underline the most brilliant exchange in the book, possibly in a lot of English literature, which is of course Frodo is disturbed to find that this responsibility has come to him. And you get this fantastic exchange. Frodo says, "I wish it need not have happened in my time. So do I said Gandalf and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." Now remember that Tolkien is allowing us to make this applicable to our own lives. And I certainly personally have found it very helpful at many times. But it must also have been his thoughts as a young man as the First World War broke out and that he and his bookish companions all had to go to war, something which none of them would have sought out. It was thrust upon them. And of course, so many of them lost their lives. I also find it quite helpful when I'm thinking about such difficult issues as the threat of climate change. Gandalf's words are something of a talisman. So if you haven't noticed them already, I just want to draw your attention to them. There's also something that Gandalf says, which I thought would be worth elucidating in case you missed it, which is he talks about the outcome that the Dark Lord is trying to achieve, and that is trying to spread a second darkness. Now, there is no explanation of what this means, but you can find the answer in the Silmarillion. So the world begins under starlight and then the Valar over in the Elven lands create lights. And the first set of lights they create are two trees, but Sauron's overlord, the sort of big baddie of them all, attacks them with a spider, Ungoliant, who is the ancestor of Shelob, who is obviously that scary spider that we meet much later. And this action where the spider, this massive spider consumes all available light, swallows it all up, is what plunges the world into darkness the first time. So that's the first darkness that's done by Melkor. And Sauron is attempting to do his own version of this. I think we're to understand it as a sort of darkness of spirit and a ruination of the land rather than a literal eating up of the sun and the moon. But that's what the history has told us is possible if evil prevails. So Gandalf gives us a brief history of the ring and the place where he stops to expand is as I've said, the drama between Smeagol and Deagol. It's a great little episode of the proto-hobbits fishing by the stream and it's Deagol who finds the ring, not Smeagol. And Smeagol's future path is carved out for him by the fact that he takes the ring in an act of murder, completely unlike Bilbo who finds it by chance, even Isildur who takes it in battle as part of a heroic act and Frodo who takes it on as an inheritance. Smeagol, who is to become Gollum, takes it through greed, possibly under the influence of the ring because the ring has this malign presence about it which does drive people into extreme actions. But it clearly is going to be a downward path for him because he not only takes it, he also does it as a sort of perverted birthday present idea. We know that hobbits in the modern era give things on their birthday. It seems that Smeagol's people receive presents and he makes up this story which he comforts himself with. He excuses his evil on the flimsy ground that he should have got it because it was his birthday. It's also notable that even before he found the ring, Smeagol was looking down, not up. And there is much made in the book about looking up to the stars. That's the place of hope. It's the place that the elves sing about. Up is good, down is not good. So that's already signalling his alignment. This story leads to a very important conversation between Frodo and Gandalf. Definitely worth going back and re-reading if you can't remember what they say. But Frodo's immediate response is to try another Gollum. He doesn't want to accept that he is anything like the hobbits and he says he is a nasty creature. He basically wants to disown him as having anything to do with hobbits. And Gandalf is really, really interesting here. He is in his conversation, he is teaching Frodo to pity Gollum and this characteristic is so important. Dipping back into Gandalf's past, some of the few mentions we have of him in his existence before he came to Middle-earth is that he is sitting with the Vala Nienna who teaches him pity. So he has learnt pity from the very top and I think this is Gandalf's key characteristic that he brings with him into Middle-earth. And here we get a master class in trying to understand the enemy and feel pity for them. And he talks about how Gollum both hates and loves the ring. It's a fascinating insight into the psychology of an addiction, of course. There is one comment here though that I'm pondering which is Gollum wasn't talking to Gandalf and Gandalf said he was forced to put the fear of fire in him. Do we think that Gandalf would have threatened him with some form of torture? I remember I was really shocked in watching the Peter Jackson version of the film when Faramir's men basically rough up Gollum which seemed very not at all the spirit of Faramir. Are we to understand that Gandalf did this? I don't know. I think it's probably more like Gandalf did with Bilbo that he exposed something of his true nature. He says when he's confronting the Balrog that he's the servant of the secret fire. So perhaps he is referring to the fact that he unmasked his true power to Gollum and Gollum reacts to whoever is the most powerful in the room. So perhaps it's that. I don't know, but that's one little comment which I've wrestled with and haven't got a very good answer for. This moves the conversation onto the discussion of why the ring has come to Frodo. This is one of those places where we get the closest to the sense of some kind of divine providence happening in Lord of the Rings. Tolkien actually says in his letters that he went back through and took out any overt references to religion and that kind of thing. He doesn't need it, but he does hear gesture through Gandalf to the idea of Frodo being meant to have the ring and that there are forces of good and forces of evil at play. It's the battle between those two that Frodo is caught up in. There is actually a reference to gods or demigods in Lord of the Rings, but they're quite hidden. I noticed recently that when the Oliphant or the Mummikhil flees the attack and is stampeding towards Frodo, Sam and Faramir's men, they appeal to the men of Gondor to the Valar to save them. This is the closest thing to a prayer I think that I've come across in Lord of the Rings. This section also establishes the ring as a character in its own right. It's got a will. It leaves Gollum. It is trying to get back to its master. Going back to the film versions, I think the idea of the whispering ring that you get in the film versions actually helps bring this out. But you have to look for those mentions in the text and then you also see it by the influence it has on others in the story. It's good too, I think, in this conversation to increase our interest in it and also the sense of tension in that there is a bit of testiness going on between Frodo and Gandalf. Frodo is actually quite cross. He didn't want this to happen to him and he does snap back at Gandalf and Gandalf snaps back at him. But you sense that this isn't because they are in any way not fond of each other. It's because they are both scared and they are both ill at ease. They've just discovered they've got the most powerful artifact in their world in that room and they're trying to work out what to do with it. Gandalf no doubt feels terrible that Frodo has been put in this situation and Frodo feels terrible too because he realizes that it's going to have an impact on himself and everybody in the Shire. So that sense that they aren't just talking calmly about it but they are being a bit rude to each other gives us a sense just how important, how much this matters. So we pass through two other important moments before we get the big reveal. One is the mention of Aragorn as the tracker who actually found Gollum and the other is Gandalf admitting that he made a mistake by not following up when he should have done. But that is all paled into insignificance by him saying that Gollum has revealed the existence of the Shire and the existence of Bilbo Baggins and the family of the Baggins to the Dark Lord. This leads to poor old Frodo saying quite understandably it's a pity that Bilbo didn't polish off or didn't kill Gollum when he had the opportunity. And this is the second most important thing that Gandalf says in this chapter. The thing that resonates through the whole story. Pity. It was pity that stayed his hand. Pity and mercy not to strike without need. And this of course becomes completely essential because it was Bilbo's pity who means that Gollum is there to actually help Frodo achieve the quest in the end. So look how the writer codes all of that in right at the beginning of his story long before we understand what its significance is going to be. We also have the nice trail that Gandalf says he thinks Gollum still has a part to play. So look out for Gollum he's saying. But that's not the end of the conversation. It has a really interesting ending because three things happen quite quickly. One is Frodo under challenge from Gandalf tries to destroy the ring and discovers just what a grip it's got on him which must be a horrible moment of realization. But then after Gandalf made him see that he turns the tables on Gandalf by offering him the ring and Gandalf's reaction shows just what a terrifying thing this is because he knows that part of him would take it and the part that would take it is pity. He would take it out of pity but he knows the consequences well enough not to succumb to temptation. So he is the first of the important characters to pass the test of not taking the ring for himself which becomes structurally a very important part of how the story is told. We're going to go on and we're going to see Galadriel passing a similar test, Boromir failing the test but his brother Faramir will very nobly succeed even though he's forfeiting potentially his own life by that decision. And of course there are others who will also face the same test. But then the story takes a couple of dramatic leaps. The first is Frodo surprising Gandalf by realizing that he has to leave. This takes Gandalf by surprise. This is where Frodo really is taking the initiative. He's not just a passenger in this journey, he's actually making the play by deciding he'll have to leave behind Bag End and the Shire. And then we suddenly get an insight into just how grim it could be because Gandalf fears they're being listened to by a spy. That's basically what he's thinking here. And he hauls Sam Gamgee into the room through the window. We've had several mentions as the chapter has progressed of garden noises outside and it's the silence that alerts Gandalf to the potential of an eavesdropper. Gandalf, it depends how you read this, is Gandalf genuinely considering that perhaps in some way Sam Gamgee has been corrupted? Frodo doesn't think so. He knows Sam very well. I think it's fair to say that Gandalf is giving it serious consideration until he senses the reactions of Sam are honest and charming at the same time. He hasn't heard very much, he says. He just heard about an enemy and rings and Mr. Bilbo, sir, and dragons and a fiery mountain and elves. So basically he's heard everything, hasn't he? And I think it's that enthusiasm which makes Gandalf stand down from his code red response. This leads to the end of the chapter, which comes to the decision that Frodo is leaving the Shire and Sam is going with him. And it has a really good end, which sums up the mixed feelings of Sam. He says, hooray, and then bursts into tears. So what as a writer do we make of chapter two? I think it shows us that Tolkien is clearly not a writer who is worried about spending a long time on backstory, but he has very clever techniques of making that backstory feel earned. And he changes the way he tells us things. So we go from the frame of Shire knowledge with its faint grasp of what's going on to Gandalf's expert knowledge. He's found out far more than anybody else has known. So we have the lure of being taken into a secret and we have some wonderful, important things being said about the core values of Lord of the Rings. Is it taking too long to get started? Well, I guess if it was being written today, you would say that it is. Certainly not the current fashion for narration. I can imagine a present day editor putting a great big red line through this and say, show us this, don't tell us this. But because Middle-earth is so full of rich textual links, there is a story behind everything that's mentioned that having an early chapter saying, here's the problem, here's the ring, and here's just a fragment of the massive history of that ring, helps us buy into the idea of the reality of Middle-earth, the reality of the problem and the sense of urgency. But of course, the odd thing is that they don't get going at the beginning of chapter three after all.
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