Sidecast - LOTR: An Author's Journey, Book 2 Chapter 1

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, and this is one of our sidecasts where we take a author's look as we travel through Lord of the Rings together. And we have reached, as we travel through Lord of the Rings together and we have reached the midpoint of the Fellowship of the Ring, we've reached book two, chapter one, which is called Many Meetings. This is what happens immediately after the confrontation between Frodo and the Ringwraiths at the Fords of Bruinin, and it starts with him waking up. Now I was looking at the shape of this chapter. It's a long book. How do you structure a long book so that your reader is able to follow you as you go along? And this chapter is one of those, which is mainly about recap and gathering together threads that you want the reader to notice, as well as advancing us into the next stage, and it's basically in four parts, if you recall. It begins with Frodo waking up, and we'll look at that section. Then it goes to the reunion with his friends who survived the journey with him, and then it moves on to the feast and then there's a section at the end with the reunion with Bilbo. 01:31 So the first thing I remember being told when I was writing by a friend who another author, john Dickinson, is when you have a waking up scene, you're going to have quite a lot of them in a story. In this one they'll be waking up when you're sleeping outside, or when you're waking up in Lothlorien and so on. Each one has to have its own flavour so that it's not repetitive or feels dead as a passage. And this is a particularly good example of a waking up, which is a slow gathering of the threads and there's lingering as the passage follows the slowly coming to awareness of where they are, what he's doing. So I suppose it would say the flavor of this is take your time and appreciate safety. And then we find the first sort of thing that is spoken as Frodo comes back to awareness is fair enough, it's where am I and what is the time. 02:41 And we get one of these wonderful Frodo and Gandalf conversations. We had one right at the beginning, just after about the second or third chapter, where you get the long chapter where Frodo and Gandalf decide what to do with the ring, and here it's like a reprise. It's just the two of them, and you see their relationship very, very here, and it's picking up that conversation in many sense here, between what Gandalf is like as a wizard and imagine Saruman, the other wizard. We see, though, we obviously meet Radagast briefly, but what we get here is something Gandalf says about Frodo. It's his admiration for Frodo's courage, and you can't imagine Saruman saying this. It's his admiration for Frodo's courage and you can't imagine Saruman saying this. This is why Gandalf is the best wizard it's because of his love for others. 03:53 So, after they talk about the, their conversation provides the recap to book one, and Gandalf has this. He says though I said absurd just now, I did not mean it I think well of you and of the others. It good people, as opposed to the one who's after power and only sees things being about himself. Gandalf sees it about being about other people, and of course Frodo is saying well, why weren't you there? And this is where we get Gandalf gesturing to the bigger things going on outside of the adventure of the hobbits. He's sort of almost talking to himself. He says I was delayed, that's the answer to Frodo. And then he goes on and says this very interesting passage. And that nearly proved our ruin, and yet I'm not sure it may have been better. So so Gandalf is the one who is aware of the hand of fate or fortune on this. 05:13 And Lord of the Rings is famously a story that doesn't have the presence of the Valar or gods or sort of divine will as you get in the Silmarillion or sort of divine will as you get in the Silmarillion. But these little hints that somehow it was better so suggest that there is a bigger pattern behind the works of evil in this story. And actually, as I was making notes on this chapter, I almost kind of wanted to write everything Gandalf said down. It's full of wonderful stuff. Gandalf at his best. He says you know, he was delayed and held captive. And Frodo's shocked by this because he feels that Gandalf is somehow, you know, superhuman, super, super powerful. And Gandalf's response is yes, I, gandalf the Grey. There are many powers in the world, for good or for evil. Some are greater than I am against some. I have not yet been measured, but my time is coming. The Morgul lord and his black riders have come forth. War is preparing. 06:19 So, as well as giving us a sense of Gandalf's place in events, with the oversight, where he fits in the power structure. It's very economic, this passage. It also gives us a foretaste of where we are going. Frodo may think okay, I'm stopping here, done my job, dust off my feet, you know. Shake the dust off my feet, go back to the shire. Already there are hints from Gandalf that actually there is a much bigger struggle. That is not just about taking the ring to Rivendell. 06:50 And then we have the passage where, with Gandalf, frodo is thinking back over what has happened and he's sort of reviewing how he feels about his companions, particularly Strider. I love the way here Frodo is only just coming to terms with it because he's self-correct. He first of all says, oh, I'm fond of him and then he says fond is not the right word. I mean, he is dear to me, though he is strange and grim at times. And one of the things that is a theme through this chapter and through the whole book is this perspective of. Here is what the hobbits feel about things and here is the wider world. And coming back to this hobbit perspective is the strength of this story. It's why we feel much more affectionately about this book than, say, a story in the Silmarillion when we don't come back to the Hobbit level. 07:52 Frodo looking at Aragorn and saying, well, I'm fond of him, he's dear to me, but he's also someone I don't understand, because he's grim and strange at times, is the position the Hobbits are in all through this story. They're people and places that they grow fond of, but they're also beyond them and that is also the position of the reader. We feel like Hobbits in this world, not like elves and not like men of great renown. So it goes from strength to strength, this conversation. They then have a little chat about men and again we've got this difference between what a hobbit understands and how things might actually be in the wider perspective. Because they go on to talk about barley man and Frodo, sort of a bit dismissive, says oh, he's, you know, he's kind and stupid. And Gandalf says, well, actually he's wise enough on his own ground. You don't understand men if you think that's what men are about and he goes on to talk about there's a different kind of man in Aragorn that Frodo is only just meeting and you cannot dismiss someone as only a ranger. 09:15 So in a way Frodo's hobbit understanding is being pushed up and elevated in this chapter quite deliberately and we also here have more trailing of what is to come and heightening of our anticipation in what Gandalf is saying. He says that Aragorn is from the race of the kings from over the sea and that race is nearly at an end, and it may be that this war of the ring will be their last adventure. And it may be that this war of the ring will be their last adventure. You don't want to have a expectation at this point. Even though the last part is called Return of the King, we don't want to know that the king is going to return. We think they're going to. We want to believe that they might lose it all, that it may not be a happily ever after ending, that it may not be a happily ever after ending, and so we need characters like Gandalf to put in seeds of doubt. These are great people, strong and powerful, but yet this may be last time we see them in history. This may lead to failure. 10:21 So this is all the? I suppose, in a sense, what Tolkien is doing here is he's running up a series of future promises. It's going to be a war. It's going to be about the race of kings from over the sea, this mysterious people we don't yet understand. Um, certainly, when I first read this I had no idea he was talking about numenor, it was just a mysterious phrase but gave them a sort of royalty and mystery and awe and wonder about them. You run up all these expectations so that you can start to pay them off later in well, by book three in this case. 10:59 Okay, so I mentioned that this chapter allows us to connect to the previous book. It's full of recaps as well as drawing up an account for going forward. So in that way it's one of those pivotal chapters. This plus the Council of Elrond that comes next is it's quite static and it stays in one place, but there is. It is the one where the adventure heads in a new direction. And at this side it's still on the what's just happened side of things. And we get a recap of what Frodo missed because he passed out. 11:37 First of all, before they have the sort of narrative about the physical events, they discuss the nature of the ring race and Frodo is rightly saying that if he'd known exactly what was happening he may not have had the courage to. You know, it was too terrifying to take any action. And Gandalf's answer is an interesting one because it sort of sums up how things work. In this novel, frodo is helped by fortune or fate. There we are. That's the hidden hand, the wider pattern behind this. But he's also only done it because of his courage. You need both of that. You have to have the characters adding their own input into the fortune and fate pattern. So I suppose we're beginning to sense behind Tolkien's world what he feels is the. I suppose it is the religious dimension of it. It's not a world of randomness, it's a world that has a pattern, but it's also a world where individual actors in it have their own free will to add to the good side or to the bad. 12:48 One of the things that they discuss here is about how the raves are half in the unseen world, and this is something in Tolkien which is mentioned a number of times, but I've never actually really quite understood how it fits in that we know the elves stay in this world. When they die they go to the halls of mandos and eventually some of them can come back, but they don't go beyond the confines of this world. So this unseen world, I think perhaps I I understand it best as a world of pure power. It's like as if you looked at the world and were able to see the physical forces behind it, the atoms and the forces binding atoms as opposed to the solid matter. Maybe that's one way of understanding it, because the people who can see that are the elves, people like Gandalf, presumably, but also the wraiths and Frodo when he puts on the ring. That's why I was thinking it might be about power, that these beings all have a form of power which isn't available to ordinary men, ordinary hobbits and he talks about he being Gandalf in that case, the power that is in Rivendell. He says they live here, the Eldar. 14:11 Now, the Eldar are the name for those who have dwelt in the blessed realm, so that's people like Glorfindel, but it would also be coming later Galadriel. They live at once in both worlds. This is the world of the seen and unseen, and against both the seen and the unseen they have great power. Maybe the fact that it's not entirely possible to pin it down is part of what its point is, that it's gesturing to something glorious, something bigger, something greater, and that in Tolkien's letters is described as the vistas that disappear off into the horizon. It's one of those vistas, and there's quite a lot of time spent on Glorfindel's power here. But Gandalf also chips in that there's power of another kind in the Shire. So he's saying it's not all about the, I suppose the glamour and that's using that word intentionally not the glamour of the elves, because in the Shire there is a rootedness of the earth, of the hobbits, of being close to nature. I guess that's more akin to the power of Bombadil. 15:22 Now, looking at this from a writer's point of view, have you noticed there is something odd that happens here in this conversation where we have a changed point of view. We start very clearly in Frodo's point of view with his slow awakening, but then we get Gandalf looking at Frodo and this is something which I feel only Gandalf knows and I'm not convinced he would have told Frodo that he thought this about him. And it comes in my edition on page 235, where Gandalf takes a good look at Frodo and he says that he his sort of internal thoughts, he noticed a hint of transparency about him and he wonders what will happen to Frodo and he posits in his mind that maybe he won't go evil but he'll become like a glass filled with clear light. And the reason I'm pointing this out is very early on, when I was learning to. You know, do the job of a writer. I remember having a note from an American editor about don't jump heads. So if you're in the point of view of somebody, don't jump into somebody else's head. Here Tolkien is jumping heads. Now you could say this is something, because it's the idea of. 16:46 This is an account written by the Hobbits afterwards and maybe Gandalf said oh yes, I was really worried about you when you woke up in Rivendell. Or it may be a bit like the funny moment with the fox in the shire that it's just Tolkien breaking the rules. I guess I lean more to that. But he wants us to know this Tolkien, that is, wants us to know what Frodo looks like, what state he's in at the moment and what his possible future is. One wonders if, for example, when he does go to the Blessed Realms, if that's what he becomes like a glass filled with clear light. There is a sense of the ethereal about Frodo light. There is a sense of the ethereal about Frodo Breaking the rules, but possibly with an intent. There. You can decide for yourself if you think it is. I think perhaps you gain necessary information. So you just blink or don't notice at the broken rule. 17:45 Right now we get the proper recap where we get Gandalf telling Frodo what he missed when he swooned. And this is where we get the glimpse of the mischievous firework Gandalf, because he wasn't content just to send a load of water down the river with Elrond and grinding boulders, but he wanted to have white horses versus the black horses. And you get a sense of his kind of almost like academic pride. He says you may not have noticed, but some of the waves took the form of great white horses with shining white riders and there were many rolling and grinding boulders. You know, he wants Frodo to know because he fainted before it happened. Look at my wonderful touches and I love this. It's a slight hint of vanity about his art, about Gandalf, which I always love. He's not a perfect mentor. He has his lovable side which also produces dragon fireworks and this is where we see it here and, fitting with this sort of account, the conversation ends with frodo lapsing back into a sort of a little sleepy comedy, still in this mode of recap, where he says oh, I wish I could tell bilbo the cow jumped over the moon and the poor old troll. That's referring to the songs, of course, which Bilbo would particularly appreciate and again, that's a paying forward to what's going to happen in the rest of the chapter. 19:17 Now we then move into the getting up phase and we've got Sam running in after. Frodo is sort of feeling a bit more himself. He looks in the mirror and he looks younger. That would be nice, but the journey has toughened up Frodo in many ways, thinned him down, and we get this moment which reminds us we're talking about hobbits, not people, because Sam comes in. He ran to Frodo and took his left hand, awkwardly and shyly, he stroked it gently and then he blushed and turned hastily away. 19:50 That's not the behavior of an English gentleman of the time of when Tolkien is writing. It feels almost like it's something a child might do. It's like childish, something feminine. You know the softer skills, the brushing of the hand, and I choose to look at it not as a servile thing. It's. There is a bond of affection the hobbits are. There's an element of them which is a little bit more like a preacher in a burrow, and this is where we get that sort of hint that their behaviours are not our behaviours. At least that's how I choose to understand it, and it's described as a slightly awkward moment, but we get the sense that they are not stiff upper lip, edwardian interwar period, gentlemen, but these are hobbits, and we get to see Rivendell first of all here, from Sam's point of view. 20:51 Sam's motivation for leaving the Shire as well as serving Mr Frodo, of course is to see elves, and so we get to see the, the elves through Sam's eyes, and what we get is the sense of his pure joy. He is just loving it. Elves, sir, elves here, elves there, some like kings, terrible and splendid, and some as merry as children. And the music and the singing. Not that I have had the time or the heart for much listening since we got here, but I'm getting to know some of the ways of the place. So Sam is in heaven, really, he is living out his dream of seeing the elves and I think it's important for people who are coming at this from having read the Hobbit to get their expectations reset by Sam first, because the Hobbit elves are the Fala Lali down in the valley, singing, laughing in the trees, type people. And they're there, aren't they In the elves like children, meria's children. But he starts with elves like kings. So I think this is the gentle reset for the Rivendell of Lord of the Rings as opposed to Rivendell of the Hobbit. Then we get to go outside. 22:14 If you read the John Garth book about the locations that inspired Tolkien to write the various places in his book, his trip to the Alps as a young man is definitely behind rivendell and I was remembering this. I think the moment when the shadows leave a valley in the evening or arrive at dawn is very alpine. Anybody who has been to places with high mountains knows that feeling that down in the valley it gets dark very quickly and you can still see the light up on the cliff side. It's not something that there are many places in the uk that you get, because we don't have that dramatic very quickly and you can still see the light up on the cliff side. It's not something that there are many places in the uk that you get because we don't have that dramatic mountain landscape except in sort of like northern scotland and places in wales majority, majority of us like where I live on the downs it's all very gentle and you don't get that sudden contrast as the sun goes down. And that's how he chooses first to describe Rivendell. 23:11 So Frodo goes out with Sam and he finds his friend sitting on the porch looking east, the shadows had fallen in the valley below, but there was still a light on the faces of the mountain far above. The air was warm, the sound of running and falling water was loud and the evening was filled with a faint scent of trees and flowers, as if summer still lingered in Elrond's gardens. This is a hint of a quality of the elves spring or autumn about them, not so much winter. And then we get a classic Pippin and Gandalf moment here where Pippin puts his foot in it by declaring make way for Frodo, lord of the Ring, hint of the book's title. So of course we all sit up and pay attention and immediately Gandalf comes out of the shadows's title. So of course we all sit up and pay attention and immediately Gandalf comes out of the shadows and says oh no, we don't name evil things here. 24:13 The Lord of the Ring is not Frodo but the master of the dark tower of Mordor, whose power is again stretching out over the world. We are sitting in a fortress Outside, it is getting dark. A lesser writer would have stopped there and everyone would say oh yes, gandalf, you're exactly right. But no, pippin undercuts it by saying Gandalf has been saying many cheerful things like that he thinks I need keeping in order. But it seems impossible somehow to feel gloomy or depressed in this place. So the irrepressible spirits of the Hobbit bubble up, partly encouraged by the place, but also because this is Pippin, and I think this is why the Hobbits are such fantastic central characters to focus on, because they have this resilience in them which makes them find people to spend a long journey with. 25:05 So let's move on to the section about the feast. I'd say the theme of this section if we had the theme of recap in the first part. The theme of this section is look again, and we immediately enter into this when Frodo looks up at the high table and sees Gandalf, glorfindel and Elrond. And he looks again at his familiar friend Gandalf and sees a version of him that in a way he hasn't encountered before. He sees him like some wise king of ancient legend. In his aged face, under great snowy brows, his dark eyes were set like coals that could leap suddenly into fire. He's realised this majesty, this history to the wizard. And then we get Glorfindel. Little sidebar on Glorfindel. 26:01 We get a lot of time spent on Glorfindel in this book, in this central section of the book, but then he doesn't appear again, except in Briefly Mentioned, and it's one of the embellishments, excesses, in a sense, redundancies to spend a lot of time on a character who doesn't then carry forward. That is one of the underlying strengths of Tolkien's world building. Thematically, here we're going from Maya, like the demigods of this world, to the Eldar, the people from the elves from the Blessed Realm, which is Glorfindel, who are like ageless voice, like music, brow-sat wisdom and so on, and in his hand was strength. So he represents the elves who came from the blessed realms. And then we move to Elrond. Elrond is half elven. He is a blend of human and elf from both sides in his family and in a way he is both. So he's venerable as a king, like Gandalf, and yet hale as a warrior like Glorfindel. So he in a way brings the two together. He's a third way for Middle-earth. 27:23 And then we get of course the first mention of Arwen. And then we get of course, the first mention of Arwen. Now it can sometimes be a bit annoying that all of the notable female characters in Tolkien are always ineffably beautiful. I guess it's because they're elves, mind you, even Eowyn is beautiful. But anyway, let's just allow the. I suppose it's a chivalric sense here of the fine lady that people serve. Maybe that's what's going on, but we get here the family sketch. So we've gone from Elrond and we now go to Arwen, and it's nice to know that she's not just a pretty face, beautiful face. It's also mentioned that thought and knowledge were in her glance. 28:11 One of the disservices, I think, about the way the film portrayed Arwen and Elrond is that because they were featuring the relationship of them as father and daughter and that sacrifice, it was hard to also add in and hard to have the script convey that. Oh yes, by the way, she's also an elf of learning in her own right. That is the problem of the fact that you're an immortal family. But I just wanted to highlight here that Arwen is no fool. She knows what her role in Middle-earth is and she is wise and queenly in her own right. And in a sense Frodo falls in love with her, or in that sense of chivalric code, he sees the person. That is one of the most beautiful sights that he will ever see. And we also get mention here of the wider family, eladan and elro here, and the fact that they are often out on errantry to avenge their mother's death. 29:19 Now, just for those of you who are listening to this, who haven't read all the way through I can't imagine there's many of you but these characters do turn up again because one of the cuts made in the film version was of the Grey Company, which will be a thing we can enjoy later on in the story when the sons of Elrond ride to war. So from the elves we move to the dwarves and Frodo, after filling his stomach because he's a hobbit, get your priorities right. Nice character, note stomach because he's a hobbit, get your priorities right. Nice character, note as he looks around and sees he's sitting next to a dwarf who is beautifully described. He's all in silver and white. Just let's have a little look at how to describe a dwarf. His beard, very long and forked, was white, nearly as white as the snow white cloth of his garments. He wore a silver belt and round his neck hung a chain of silver and diamonds, looking very magnificent. And they have a lovely exchange of greetings, as befits a someone who knows dwarven manners, which Frodo, as a well-brought-up hobbit, does. 30:26 And here we get a reprise of the connections to the previous story of the hobbit, and this is a very economical snap, snapshot way of telling us where bilbo's journey went, the politics of it, when what's happened in the interim it's. So these moments where you have encounters and you can recap information, is a great way of without burdening your reader with masses of flashbacks, is a great way of saying this is what's been happening, so we get a sense of what's happened over at the lonely mountain and in dale and so on. There's no time to go there in this tale, but for those who us who have read the Hobbit, we want to know this. But it's not pointless, so it's not just to satisfy the Hobbit readers, because it winds up to mentioning that Barlin, ori and Owen have gone missing, and this will of course, become an important fact later in this book. Another oddity, though I just want to point out him here, which slightly I don't know, I'm not sure about it when they're discussing Bilbo, there's an odd past tense from Glowin. He says you were very fond of Bilbo, were you not? Now it may be in there to keep the Rita on tenterhooks. Maybe Bilbo has you know he's died because he was an old hobbit, possibly. But Bilbo is only in the next room. So I often have wondered why give Glowin a past tense there. Not sure I like it, but anyway it's there. 32:13 After the meal we move into the Bilbo section. So if the feast section was about, look again. The next section is about the relationship between Frodo, bilbo and poetry. They go into the hall and we hear that Bilbo didn't attend the feast because he's too old. And this is when Frodo gets to reunite with him. And there's a lot of good hobbit sense here, because Frodo says oh, why didn't anyone tell me you were here? And he said well, I knew you were fine because I've been sitting at your bedside. So that's why there's the delay. And then, and frodo is finally told it's a bit cruel. Someone should have said, by the way, bilbo's fine, frodo, but a bit more suspense if you do it this way, possibly. 33:00 And then we get um to see bilbo in a bigger world than we knew him before. So we saw him in the shire amongst the boffins and the bulges and the proud feet and so on Proud foot. And now we get to see him amongst the elves and with the Dunedain. And we get here a sense of the relationship that pre-exists between Bilbo and Strider, also known as Aragorn, also known as the Dunedain. And so we get to see Bilbo in a bigger world, as we also heard about Bilbo in a bigger world from the reverence paid to him by the dwarves. 33:43 There's a key moment here where the two ring bearers hold up the ring between them. In the film you may remember this was done as a jump scare and I do remember that when my children were younger and they came to this bit they couldn't bear it. This bit and the bit when Boromir turns on Frodo with the two bits they would often ask me to you know, fast forward. Or they would hide behind the sofa because the familiar person becoming the unfamiliar or the enemy is worse than ringwraiths. It's not presented like this in the book. Have a look at how it's done here. 34:26 It's actually done as a moment of realization for bilbo. He's asking to see it because he's curious. He's probably still feeling the pull of the ring. He knows that he's been told it's no longer your business, but he can't. It's temptation, isn't it? The ring is temptation, but frodo. Frodo is reluctant but trusts Bilbo enough to show him. So there's a strong familial love there which means he does something for Bilbo that he doesn't want to do for somebody else. 35:03 But there's also in the other way. The fact that Bilbo gave it up freely means that he doesn't try and take it back. In fact he's grown in stature to realise that he doesn't spell it out. But he says I'm sorry that this burden came to you. I understand now. And then he gives this very wise reflection. He says Don't adventures ever have an end? I suppose not. Someone else always has to carry on the story. And as this was being written during the Second World War, I sometimes wonder here if there is a reflection on the fact that one generation fought in the First World War. Another generation is now having to carry on the adventure and fight in the second, much to everybody's regret. So if there's an application here, that seems to me one that lends itself to this moment. 36:03 And there's another nice moment here. When you are writing, you have an instinctive story sense, of course, and everything should have a purpose. And there's a lovely moment here that fits that, which is we find out that Strider is watching the two hobbits fondly enjoying the fact that they're having this catch up conversation. Fact that they're having this catch-up conversation, and I think as well as the ring, is a test of the goodness of people's souls. How they respond to the hobbits is also like that, because the way the hobbits behave is relished by the best-hearted characters. It's a kind of generosity of spirit that they're able to relish the small. And this is a moment when we just briefly glimpse why Aragorn is going to be a great king it's because he cares for the hobbits and, of course, he finds time to help them with their poem. 37:10 So the next section in the Bilbo section is about poetry, and if you're wondering how to convey something which is so sublime that you lack words to do so, tolkien is brilliant at doing this, and one of the things he does is, when something is too much, he will describe the feeling of experiencing it rather than give us the thing that is being experienced. So we have Frodo here listening to the elven poetry. Of course Tolkien does write also very good, beautiful elvish poetry, but the very best stuff which he hasn't had a time to write for us, we get described and so we get the experience of listening to it. With Frodo Almost, it seemed that the words took shape and visions of far-off lands and bright things that he, as Frodo, had never yet imagined open out before him and the firelit hall became like a golden mist above seas of foam that sighed upon the margins of the world. So the prose there becomes poetry and we're transported by we know not what, to, we know not where, but we just know. It's a kind of Middle Earth golden state, very powerful, and that merges into the long poem Erendil was a mariner. Now, this poem in itself is fascinating. 38:52 If you have had a chance to look at the new collected poems of Tolkien edited by Christina Scull and Wayne G Hammond, they have a many versions. It appears in the Tom Bombadil poems as errantry, it appears here as Earendil was a mariner. And it has two other titles as well the Short Lay of Earendil. Actually I think it's the Elvish version of that title. It was a Jacobite song. Jacobites were the political force that supported the Catholic King James II of England in the Bonnie Prince Charlie era. They're the Jacobites. King James was his father, bonnie Prince Charlie's father. English politics, scottish politics, anyway. 40:13 There was a poem at the time called what's the rhyme to Porringer? Can ye the rhyme to Porringer? King James VII had a daughter and he gave her an oranger. So that is the rhyme and for some reason this just stuck in Tolkien's mind and he turned it into a poem, and the poem that's in Tom Bombadil, using the same meter, is of a kind of fairy world. It's more like the fairies of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It's the small world of the fairies, the sort of Tom Thumb world of fairies. And then you've got the absolute contrast here where erendil, who is elrond's father, who is the one who appeals to the valar, and the world is remade and he becomes a star in the sky. I mean, it's a heroic story, key to the sort of foundation of this, this age of middle earth. 41:17 So if you want to look into the background to this poem, do have a look at that section in the collected poems. But I think what's important here in terms of the story is it's a difficult meter. So bilbo is trying, bilbo slash tolkien is trying a difficult poem and he's laying the poem before the hardest critics, which are the elves. And it's as though tolkien slash bilbo is offering us this ambitious poem, hoping for a good reception, and we get three verdicts on it. One is the banter with Lindia, lindia saying I can't tell which bits are by men and which bits are by Hobbit because you're both the same to me, kind of thing. So not really passing judgment, but having a sort of gentle ribbing going on between them. 42:12 It shows how Bilbo exists in Rivendell. As a bit of a cherished oddity, shall we say, you also get Bilbo telling us Aragorn's view. Aragorn said you must put in the green jewel, the elf stone, which again is important to the lineage of the house. But also he says, aren't you really you know what we would say now, doing something above your pay grade? You're telling a poem about Elrond's mum and dad in his halls, telling the story of telling his story, in other words, which I suppose is the worry that Bilbo has, that he is punching above his weight or whatever you want to choose as a picture. But Frodo, dear old Frodo, says actually it felt right. And it feels right at this moment in the story, because what we have here is a blend of a hobbit view of an elven story, though it also of course involves men elf half-elven story. So it is a blend of all the traditions coming together to round off our evening of poetry. 43:34 And as we leave the hall it's as though we're leaving and stepping away from history. As they leave, bilbo and Frodo look back and Frodo sees a kind of tableau with the accompaniment of an elven song, our Elbereth Gilthoniel, a short lyric in Elvish, and he sees a tableau of Elrond in his chair, arwen, bart, aragorn, and here we see Aragorn for the first time in the washed and brushed up. Aragorn, the kingly Aragorn. His dark cloak was thrown back and he seemed to be clad in elven mail and a star shone on his breast. And there's a lovely second moment here where Arwen looks at Frodo and it's as though her eyes fell on him from afar and pierced his heart. There is a connection between Frodo and Arwen which we'll come to right at the very end of the story about how he goes in her place in a way. So their connection is forged here. 44:38 Very little is said. We don't sort of get a long discussion with frodo till way after the events are over. But this little touch here connects the two almost at the end here and we return after the high stuff of the elves, the high stuff of the kings, from over the sea to bilbo, and frodo just chatting. It's about their relationship, their love. It's a bedrock of frodo's character really. And what I like about here is that they've gone through the catch-up phase and the elven phase, if you like to put it, and it sums up what holds them together, what their love is based on them, but of the fair things they had seen in the world together, of the elves, of the stars, of trees and the gentle fall of the bright year in the woods, another extremely poetic passage. 45:44 There are these lovely moments in tolkien. His finest writings is when it becomes like a song, like a lyric, like a poem, and just so we don't spend too much time up in the starlit trees, we get Sam knocking on the door saying remember, frodo's only just got up. But he doesn't say that. He says is there anything else you'll be wanting? This is Sam in his valet phase. This is where he is at the moment stature. He ends the book as the hero, of course, but here he is the valet wingman to frodo and there's a good bit of hobbit sense from bilbo. He says you're absolutely right to cut us off. He's only just got up and I'm going to go out and look at the stars of Elbereth. And that kind of moment is a very lovely landing point for this chapter, which started with waking up and it ends with bedtime. 46:51 - Speaker 2 (None) 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 favorite podcasts worldwide.