Transcript
[0:00] Hello, and welcome to An Author's Journey, a sidecast of the Mythmakers podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives. And today we have reached Chapter 5, A Conspiracy Unmasked. Now, we are still in the Shire, just about, but this is where there's like a tonal shift shift is just beginning to start. So, as most of us will know, when Tolkien started writing The Lord of the Rings, he thought he was writing a follow-up to The Hobbit. And for a long time, in his letters and to his friends, he refers to it as the Hobbit book. And you notice in his letters, as the 1940s begins, he occasionally starts to call it Ring. And there's one reference that I've come across to Lord of the Rings.
[1:04] That's just singular, Lord of the Rings. So he's obviously playing around with suitable titles, but he's still very much thinking about it as this earlier stage because this part is written in the 30s. Obviously, he's continually revising. And The Conspiracy Unmasked is still akin to what you read in The Hobbit. Things that make it that sort of more childlike tone are the bath song, song which is sort of full of absurdity and the pranks of spilling the water on over the floor.
[1:40] Their sort of fixation on mushrooms get more food that's very sort of the feast, aspects that you've got a lot of in the hobbit and you've still got the sort of fatty bulger type comic uh hobbit character though interesting with fatty because even though he is this this stay-at-home, literally, hobbit, he is the one who is warning of the perils to come. There's a debate about, I'd rather have my job than your job. So he does actually begin to serve more of the person who is warning that adventures may be ahead. And that, of course, as a reader, you want those adventures to come. And there's also another song in this chapter, which is the one that Mary and Pippin have prepared. For Leaving, which is set to the same tune as The Dwarf Song. So if you are listening to this book and you're listening to the Andy Serkis version, he sings the same song as The Dwarf Song in The Hobbit film.
[2:46] Which actually is quite a repetitive tune. Personally, I prefer the one in the BBC version of this, the dramatized version in the 80s.
[2:55] Anyway, so what is beginning to change the tone? Well, I think one of the things that I'm noticing in this chapter is the very specific.
[3:08] Details of landscape we've had this already on the walking episodes but you can really see not just a vague wilderland it's it's very specific so when they cross the brandywine river we get, details about brandy hall and the history of brandy hall how it looks how it feels and how while Gorhundad Oldbuck, who establishes the family, crossed the river to set up this colony of the Shire. And you can actually see, it's such a visually created impression of something which has no bearing on the story. And this is one of the beautiful things about Tolkien's writing, is there seems to be this sort of room and depth. And that was certainly part of the spell it cast on me, that I felt you weren't going to rub through, you know, it wasn't silver plate, it was silver. You didn't just rub the plate off and find common old tin underneath. It's all the way through. And this is one of those passages.
[4:15] I reckon if this was sent into HarperCollins today, I publish at HarperCollins, I can imagine an editor today striking that out, saying unnecessary, unnecessary detail. But of course, it's all part of the, well, you know, it is a slow narratorial tone. He feels he's got time to tell us this. And I think this is one of the challenges for someone who is reading Lord of the Rings reluctantly, is these opening chapters do take a long time to get going. And the tone is often childlike. And you get things which have no bearing on the main story.
[4:55] And you have all that prologue material. So I can see why people give up.
[4:59] It would almost be an argument if you've got a friend who doesn't like the book or can't get going on it. It may be say, right, start here because this is the chapter, as we'll see in a minute, where Frodo actually makes his decision to go the next day and suddenly things start to speed up and we're getting more into the pace that the rest of the book follows. So that's why this is an interesting, pivotal It's as though Tolkien suddenly thinks, right, this is what I'm going to do with this story. I know where I'm going with it. So there's some little details in this, which I really appreciate.
[5:38] When we're talking about Buckland, there's a note about sometimes people keeping their doors locked. Now, unless you've had the experience of living in an English village, you might think that's a bit of a strange detail. But actually, even now, in some villages, the doors will be open. They won't be locked. In fact, where I live, which is in the middle of a village these days, some friends came around for supper and gave up because our door was locked they thought it would be open i haven't been i've been in cities you see so i don't keep my doors open but it's quite common for doors to be unlocked with this idea that you can just call around so we know that, buckland is more dangerous because people they're to the other side of the river so they feel feel there may be strangers wandering around so we're edging out into a wilder more dangerous landscape there is a another difference here which is worth sort of drawing out which is an authorial decision versus what you might do as a screenwriter so if you remember this part as.
[6:47] In the film in fact what they do is they jump over the next couple of chapters but just this bit where they're coming from farm and maggot is driving them to the ferry and they meet mary at the ferry it's slow it's they aren't under immediate threat there's a conversation the threat is in fact from mary they they see this rider coming towards them and they wonder who it is and there's a moment of tension his voice is muffled they think it might be an enemy and then it's revealed as Mary so it's a very low level not a jump scare it's a low level moment of tension in the film version Peter Jackson and Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh gave this the chase through the woods and being chased by the horseman jumping onto the ferry Frodo almost not managing it and having to do that leap so it's obviously much more um an action sequence and And then they cut, they forget all about Crick Hollow, Decisions, Old Forest, Tom Bombadil, and they go straight from there to Bree. But one of the absolute joys of having a good film series and an excellent book is that the reading the book is still a very different experience.
[8:06] And there's loads more to come in this chapter and the next, and the one after that, which are some of the best bits in Fellowship of the Ring, I think. There is one, when I was reading it closely for this podcast.
[8:21] There was one element which I found I wondered about, which is when they see the rider sniffing at the bank on the opposite side of the river, they're relatively safe because they've taken the ferry with them. It's like you do your own polling across the river.
[8:43] Frodo asks Merry if the horse, you know, can they reach us? And mary says oh they've got to go up to the bridge and i've never known which is you know miles up the river or maybe horses could swim but i've never heard of it the problem about this is frodo spent a lot of time in buckland and he would know this it's uh you try not to get, characters telling each other something they both know i personally think it'd be better if sam had asked that question because sam is the one who's ignorant of anything outside.
[9:21] You know hobbiton and its environs so i just noticed that as being i'm not sure about that i think that that's the wrong person to ask that question anyway tiny tiny tiny detail it doesn't matter and it's the first time i've noticed it there is another thing i've noticed as an author reading this passage, or this whole chapter, is the Access All Areas narrator. So we've had the narrator dipping back into the past, telling us about how the Buckland was founded. There's actually quite a funny series of colonies being set up here, because in the prologue material, the people of Bree regard the hobbits of the Shire as people who've been sent out to the colonies, like they've colonized the Shire. thinking they're the original community. And now the people of the Shire think the Bucklanders are the colonisers.
[10:19] So being the historian of the piece, that voice, giving the history, is that sort of omniscient idea. But the conceit that Tolkien had in his mind when he was writing is, of course, this is an account of the story compiled. Compiled, first it starts off with Bilbo compiling it, then Frodo compiling it, then Sam finishing off. So one way of looking at this ability to know all of what's going on all around is a bit like, I don't know, the way a gospel is put together from the accounts of all the people who saw it. So it's like a patchwork of people's experiences, which explains why in this chapter after you get to see Frodo's anxiety that he is going to have to tell his friends that he's about to leave the Shire but you also get the other side of that conspiracy you've got Pippin saying to Merry oh he's about to he's about to tell us so you see both sides it is an interesting variation on the omniscient narrator.
[11:33] And I hadn't really thought about this reading backwards from the Red Book. In fact, before he finished the story, in his letters, Tolkien is projecting.
[11:47] Forwards how he is going to finish. And at that point, he's saying, oh, I think the last chapter will be Sam reading this book to his children. Like a reveal that this is sort of of Sam reading the stories put together by Frodo and Bilbo and himself, which explains, I think, how it isn't a static... It's not Tolkien being the narrator, I suppose is what I'm saying here. It's the characters inside the world sharing like a patchwork experience that is the consistent thread throughout.
[12:23] And another thing I've noticed as an author looking at the way he writes this chapter is the idea of a conspiracy is very economical so what this allows him to do is immediately have the other people going on the journey already up to speed on what they're doing why they're doing it and even better they've got everything ready and this is where the pace picks up because i think if we got to this bit and then we'd had proto having a long discussion a quick Frick Hollow about how they need to leave the Shire and then saying, no, don't go Frodo. That would have just been horribly, horribly long. So it's almost as if we're right at the edge of the Shire. Let's get going. What's the quickest way to get going? And one of the things to differentiate between the hobbits here is that you see Merry is he acts something like...
[13:18] Uh lieutenant to it to frodo frodo's the captain of this little group and sam is like his valet his batman not batman but you know he's his valet or helper which was something you would get in the army when during the first world war in a comic world if you've watched any of the black adders it's the um baldrick role but that's that's a comic version of this and mary here is acting like the right-hand man right-hand hobbit to frodo having worked out the logistics so he's got the money he's hired the ponies he's planned an exit strategy and mary very often has that role whilst they're on their own. We'll see that when we get to Bree as well. So I think it's easy to sometimes think all the Hobbits are a bit the same. Merry and Pippin are interchangeable. But Merry is that bit older. Pippin is the younger one. Pippin is the more mischievous one, the one who's playing the pranks. And it's nice to see these distinctions brought in here.
[14:34] And then we have Frodo's decision. We must go at once. You know, I've got to go. I've got to leave. Immediately and this is where finally we get to leave the Shire but before we do leave the Shire the next morning there is one last moment which is the night and Frodo's dream I think this dream serves a number of purposes I think it adds to the sense of doom because the last image is the noise of thunder and a sudden light in the sky which one assumes with the thunder is lightning and there is a sense of Frodo's end. It's as though...
[15:17] He's already dreaming about where he ends because he dreams of the sea, which he says he's never seen with his waking eyes, but he often dreams about. It's as though the powers that be in Lord of the Rings are hinting his end. And there's a sort of poetry in this where you foreshadow what's going to happen to a character really early on, so that when we get to the last chapter of the last book, it seems right that that's where he's going to go. But it also gives us a very rare glimpse of what happens further west of the Shire, because he describes in his dream, he has a great desire to climb a tall white tower, standing alone on a high ridge. And if you look at the map, you see the Tower Hills. And if I remember rightly, one of the signs of the flourishing of the hobbits at the end is that future generations go out and colonize. There's that word again. They go out and colonize that part of the Shire. They spread a little bit beyond the old boundaries. And I think it's one of the places where the Red Book is kept. So there's a lovely interlacing here of details which are very resonant about the end of the story coming here as the last thing before you leave the shire.
[16:39] And with that, we are now ready to get up early the next morning and go into the old forest.
Thanks for listening to Mythmakers Podcast, brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. Visit OxfordCentreForFantasy.org to join in the fun. Find out about our online courses, in-person stays in Oxford, plus visit our shop for great gifts. Tell a friend and subscribe, wherever you find your favourite podcasts worldwide. [MUSIC PLAYING]
