Sidecast - LOTR: Wrap Up of The Fellowship of the Ring

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 our wrap up of our Sidecast in which we have been reading our way through chapter by chapter, through books one and two of the Lord of the Rings and you may know that better as the Fellowship of the Ring. Now we've taken some highlights from the favourite chapters as people have listened to it. So we're going to begin by looking at the aftermath of the attack on Weathertop. So if you're following along in the book, this is book one, chapter 12. 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. Many of you will have watched the films of course I expect 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. 02:34 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 wooing 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 like 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. 03:40 There's some lovely um features in this. We've got the arrival of the grey dawn, which is the same point to which the knife melts. 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. 04:59 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 school and those sorts of things, the first place I worked in London. 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. 07:00 Our next excerpt we're going to be looking at the beginning of book two. This is when Frodo wakes up in Rivendell and finds a very welcome visitor by his bed and Gandalf has a chance to explain what exactly delayed him not meeting Frodo as expected. As expected, lord of the Rings is famously a story that doesn't have the presence of the valour or gods 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 this um, 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. 07:55 Gandalf at his best. He says, you know, he was delayed and held captive. And Frodo, shocked by this, because he feels that Gandalf is somehow, you know, super human, 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. 08:28 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, 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. 09:00 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. 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. 10:02 Frodo looking at Aragorn and saying, well, 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 and you cannot dismiss someone as only a ranger. 11:25 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. You don't want to have an 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, 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. 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. 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. 13:12 So our third extract is from what may well be the longest chapter in all of Lord of the Rings. I'll have to check that as I go along. It's very much the longest one in Fellowship of the Ring and this is the Council of Elrond, and we're going to have a look here at the tension that is already present between Boromir and the rest of the company. So Elrond mentions that Isildur took the ring and this is an interesting little interjection here from Boromir. Boromir is going to keep breaking in because we have to remember that Boromir is the one who breaks the fellowship in many ways and he's already breaking up the council of Elrond. 13:56 So good character note here. It's consistent. But he says we didn't know that, we didn't know that Isildur took the ring, and it shows how men's knowledge gets lost over time. A little bit later on in the same chapter we'll hear how Gandalf goes to the libraries and finds a record of Isildur looking at the ring. So the information was available but it's just not accessed and not retrieved or not generally known by somebody of Boromir's level of education. Others may have known, but for him it's a surprise. 14:33 And then Elrond comes back in again and completes the story from the moment when Isildur took the ring and it was lost to history, and then he sort of hop hop and skips over the rest of history to the present day. Now there are so many treasures here for Tolkien fans. It's the kind of thing which might put off someone who's reading it for the adventure or for pace, you know sort of action things happening. But I certainly love reading it and always see something new in it when I go back to it. And with that sense of history weighing on us, we then move from that to what brings Boromir here. So we've got the establishment of who and what Gondor is. That's quite important. It's the first time we're hearing about it properly in this book. 15:25 And Boromir then gets his moment to talk about his journey here and why he came as a result of a prophecy. We also get a very brief mention of it came to his brother as well, though we have to wait until two towers until we meet Faramir. There's an element in Boromir of special pleading. So he's just heard how the elves and the dwarves and everybody have been fighting the Dark Lord for a long time. But he sort of wants everyone to know that they've been trying really hard in Minas Tirith and they're basically the ones holding back the sea that's about to come over, the sea of evil that's about to come out of um Mordor. 16:09 And there's a sort of gentle correction given by Aragorn in the next few exchanges, because Aragorn outs himself. He says here I am, here is the sword that was broken, and Frodo is immediately clicks in his head who Aragorn is. So, up to this point, he's had lots of hints given him in the conversations with Tom Bombadil and Bilbo, referring him to the Dunedin, all these kinds of things. But Frodo now realizes oh yes, that is the king of the Northern and the Southern Kingdom, so therefore heir of Isildur, therefore the ring should go to him. And it's always really important how people respond to being offered the ring. So, rather than Aragorn saying, oh yeah, thanks very much, I'll take it. I'll use it much, I'll take it, I'll use it. 17:07 In this point it's not given much time. But Aragorn, very importantly and elegantly, rejects the ring. He says it does not belong to either of us, it being the ring. But it has been ordained that you should hold it for a while. And because Aragorn has that ability to reject unnecessary power, that proves that he is worthy of being the king. That is why he gets rewarded in the end, because he plays his part, supporting others in the destruction of the ring, rather than going the route which Boromir is arguing for is to take it for yourself and use it to fight evil with its own powers. 17:46 Now, at this point we're entering into the political section. As a result of Frodo's speaking up and offering the ring to Aragorn, Gandalf is the one who commands him to bring it out and show everybody. It's not like how it happens in the film. There's no suggestion. He kind of puts it down and says my job done. I think the suggestion is he's holding it out and he's still the one, as Aragorn says, still the one holding it at this point. But what is important to notice here is there is a hint of Boromir's greed and need for it. A hint of Boromir's greed and need for it Very good writers will seed into their story. It's like doing a murder mystery. You want to put in the little hints that then will bear fruit later. And here is one from Boromir, and it got it after Elrond says behold Isildur's bane. We've got this line. 18:43 Boromir's eyes glinted as he gazed on the golden thing. The halfling, he muttered, is then the doom of Minas Tirith come at last. So he's putting it together and you can sort of see the cogs in his brain putting it all as to. You know what does this mean? This is the the end of my city, and he's corrected at this point by you know he's feeling pretty much like the doomsday has come. One of the people he attacks is Aragorn by saying what do we need with a broken blade? Not understanding that it can be reforged, of course. And at this point Bilbo steps forward and defends Aragorn and repeats the all that is gold does not glitter. That the verse that we had back at Bree. And this is where we get Aragorn's gentle correction. So Aragorn is a very good diplomat. He doesn't bristle with offense, but he just says what the rangers have been doing, their ways of defending the north, and sort of basically telling Boromir look, son, we've been working hard too. Look, son, we've been working hard too. And making the argument that it's not just in one place that the tide of evil has been kept back. 20:14 Now for our fourth extract. We are setting out with the ring and in this excerpt I look at the ways in which different members of the company are aware of the bigger picture and how some of the hobbits are delightfully close focused. And there is a theme in this chapter about who sees the bigger picture. There are hints always that Elrond, Aragorn, Gandalf, legolas sees the bigger picture and Sam Pippin and the hobbits bar Frodo are sort of more close focused, living in the moment. But it's also used this chapter, this section in this chapter, to remind us of certain things that um Tolkien wants to foreshadow. So we've got gollum mentioned again. Remember we've not actually met gollum in person yet, but he's been popping up again and again as a character. And we also get an answer to what happened to the black riders, which can be summed up as they're down but not defeated. 21:25 So once the messengers come back, elrond is ready to send everybody out and this is where we get one of the Elrond ceremonial moments. He summons Frodo and gives him the chance, second chance, to say if he wants to go Again. This is important that he's undertaking this of his own free will and this is where he gathers the fellowship and what I like about this section. After we get the sort of courtly roll call of Aragorn saying may I accompany you again and that kind of thing, we get Pippin's protest about being left off the list, and this bathos is bringing it down to the level of ordinary people. I think is what keeps the Lord of the Rings with its feet firmly on the ground, and Pippin has the particularly powerful protest that he will follow anyway, and he has to be sent home tied in a sack if he's left off the list. And this is persuasive enough for Elrond for him to then announce OK, pippin and Merry, you're on the team. Except his words, for this are now the tale of nine is filled. So we're back to the more courtly tone of Elrond after the Pippin protest. 22:45 I think Tolkien is particularly good at this flexibility of rising up and down registers, from the very antiquated, high-flown language of some of the heroic characters down to the absolutely commoner garden language of someone like Sam, and we'll see this all the way through the book. Just a note here for those of you who may have missed it, because it's not given a huge emphasis considering its role in the story. But this is the point in the book where the sword is forged anew. It doesn't come later, as in the film version, and it's a decision taken by Aragorn because he knows he is in a sense going out to fight a battle on the borders of Mordor. As it's described, his ancestry or fails, and in order to mark the moment, because the sword was broken in the battle on the borders of Mordor, it's reforged and given a new name, anduril, flame of the West, and I would say that in this chapter it's full of important swords and artifacts. It's one of those chapters which is delightful to imagine all these things being dusted off and brought out of keeping or polished to go on this journey, and characters are often associated with key artifacts, as we'll see as we go on. 24:20 And it's particularly sweet, I think, at this moment that Bilbo, immediately after Anduril is reforged, gives Sting to Frodo. So Sting is given its own little hobbit style lineage very important artifact in its own right, and it will go on to do great deeds and has already done them. But I think it's important here to reiterate that bilbo is the hobbit who can give things up that he cares for. He gives up sting because he knows that it's no longer something he needs and he gives up the mithril coat this is what he says was given to him by Thorin. He calls it a pretty thing and useful and it later comes into its own in Moria, of course, and its value is mentioned there. I think I'm in the camp that Bilbo knows full well that it's very valuable. He's been spending enough time in the world to know exactly how valuable it is and he is very happy to hand over something that's worth more than the Shire in order to save and protect his beloved nephew. But of course the hobbits are not really comfortable in this world of helms and shields and swords and these things. So the dwarven male is hidden under his clothes and that kind of stands for what hobbits are like, of course, and that is a parallel made later that they are more than meets the eye. 26:06 In our final extract, which is chapter four of book two, we are going to be looking at the connections between the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit. We also get a connection made here in this overview of what's going on in the world from Gandalf back to the Hobbit and the Battle of the Five Armies, another of the points in the story where Tolkien has decided to connect the stories. Gandalf was already a connection, as was Bilbo, but as the Hobbit was written as a story that was sort of separate from this to begin with and was then folded into the Middle Earth story. This is one of the points where Tolkien is kind of making those connections. It's like fusing them together. 26:58 Gimli, of course, is one of Gimli's best chapters from the point of view he's having the time of his life, in a sense because he wants to go there and he offers timely support. He wants to go there and he offers timely support. So it ends this section with Boromir intervening by when he has failed to persuade Gandalf of his own wisdom. He kind of appeals to everybody else. He goes to Legolas, he goes to the hobbits, who all you know they don't want to rush into danger either. So he doesn't't. He gets some support from them for his reluctance. 27:33 But Frodo is the one who realizes well, we can't go back at this point, he has to go on. It's this, I suppose, the steel in the soul of Frodo, is one of his defining characteristics. It's why he chooses to go on alone later, at the end of this particular volume. And he but he also isn't what's the word? He isn't a foolish, reckless hero, he is a very considered one and he actually wants delay because he knows that it's difficult to take the decision. It's similar to the delay that you see in the breaking of the fellowship. He knows, knows he has to make the decision, but he just wants a bit more time. The outcome of this is different from when Boromir intervenes at the end of the book and forces him to go off alone. Here we've got something quite different that forces them to take action, and that change of pace is, of course, the wolves. 28:33 Another thing from an author's point of view I wanted to mention is the number of line breaks in this chapter that aren't scene changes. They're almost used for like rests. In music there's either a pause for thought or a change in pace, and obviously music of creation is Tolkien's thought about how the world became. So perhaps it's not unusual to find him using a similar technique, a pacing pause, in his own writing. And we get a definite change of pace here, and that is reflected in not only the speed of activity that takes over when they're preparing to defend against the wolves, but it's also in the language. Have a look at it. One particular point is Boromir and Aragorn topping each other in rhyming sayings, and Aragorn is the one who tops Boromir's saying. So it's like a battle, in a sense of old sayings that happens and that adds to the rhythm and the change in pace. 29:45 I think here that Pippin might be the person we most sympathize with, because he's just plain terrified. And then we get Sam giving his hobbit sense, which will carry him all the way through the novel and also a dip into his more colloquial language. Perhaps the more colloquial language comes out when he is least guarded, because he says we aren't Etten yet. Whatever may be in store for old Gandalf, our wager, it isn't a wolf's belly, and that little conversation is the first of a bookend. Watch out for when it comes back again. 30:24 So we then get some echoes here and some interesting developments of how the fellowship works. The first echo I think for those of you who have read the Hobbit is that this feels a bit like the attack of the wolves or the wogs after they escape from under the mountains. This is before going under the mountains, but we know if we're Hobbit readers that wolves and orcs and mountains are all come in a bundle. You know three for two. You get them all together. And it starts here with a sort of like a prelim, an initial threat, where Legolas and Gandalf team up to drive off the first of the watching wolves. It's like the first salvo, a probe of how their defences are, and then we get the main attack and we get a beautiful paragraph of the fellowship in action in the middle of. 31:25 Let me just turn to the page, the middle of. Let me just turn to the page, middle of page 312 in my volume, and it's a great way of just summing up a battle scene Now skirmishes, battles are incredibly difficult to write because they're really, they are confusing, and a lot is happening. So Gandalf, so keep calling him Gandalf. That's a Freudian slip, isn't it? Tolkien shows us how to do this, but first of all, he chooses his point of view on this scene. So he's chosen Frodo. Thank you very much for listening to the sidecast. And, come the autumn, we're going to be tackling, of course, the Two Towers. 32:09 - Speaker 2 (None) And come the autumn, we're going to be tackling, of course, the two towers thanks for listening to Mythmakers podcast brought to you by the oxford center for fantasy. Visit oxfordcenterforfantasy.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.