Fellowship of the Ring out loud - names, layers, fleeting faces
I have a little bit of a longer essay with fewer images this week, I’ve been reading Lord of the Rings out loud and I wanted to share some observations of a literary sort.
I’ve had the opportunity over the first weeks of this year to read Fellowship of the Ring out loud to my father. It is now mid-February, and we have made it through much peril to the safety of Rivendell. We are as far as Chapter 2 of the second book of Fellowship: ‘The Council of Elrond.’ We made it this far in about four weeks, roughly as fast, perhaps, as Frodo makes it from the Shire to Rivendell with stays at Farmer Maggot’s, with Tom Bombadil and Goldberry, at the infamous Prancing Pony Inn in Bree, and camping in the wild for the whole journey after that. We’ve seen a lot of faces on the road, haven’t we? One of my first thoughts, so far, with a nod to Joseph Campbell, is that this book is faceted, it is a collective tale of the thousand faces of the hero. Joseph Campbell’s well known book, Hero of a Thousand faces documents the various journeys that heroes undertake throughout world literature, mythology, and scripture. One can see how quickly these terms intertwine among those faces on the road. I also think of my own experience on my ‘Perpetual Bicycle Tour’; all the faces I have seen in the last ten years from the back of a bicycle. I am probably just one of those background faces laughing at Frodo as he falls off the table and disappears after his silly little song at the Inn in Bree. I might be a face that makes people nervous – having worked as a messenger and courier. I might be the face of incompetence, of inconvenience, all these different faces I’ve been on the road to others.
At the same time as all these faces pass by in Fellowship of the Ring, the novel starts on a rumor. We immediately hear a rumor of Bilbo Baggins’ party discussed by two disagreeing older hobbits down at the Green Dragon Inn in Bywater: The Miller and the Old Gaffer – Sam Gamgee’s father and Bilbo Baggin’s gardener, respectively. It struck me on this read, because I am doing it out loud, that this entire novel could just be rumors and stories of all these faceted hero faces going outside on the road as told by two old men and discussed by their impromptu audience down at a pub some pleasant evening in spring or in autumn. It might be nothing more than this!
After the party in Chapter 1 and Bilbo’s disappearance we hear even more discussion and rumor. Further along in years in Chapter 2 we hear The Miller’s son and Sam Gamgee discussing similar rumor from ‘up at Bag End.’ Sam’s the gardener up there now for Frodo Baggins. The old Gaffer retired. Generations have moved, faces and many parties and rumors have come and gone. The hero, it seems, is elsewhere, for the moment. Gandalf hasn’t been seen for many years. The rumors layer up, we’ve had plenty of discussion over the first two chapters of strange things beyond the borders of the known. Giants up north, strange men wandering in. The elves are on the move. There’s also the daily gardening to do and the potato crop was exceedingly good and Old Winyards annual stock is in, just like annual French Beaujolais. It was a good year for peaches last year, here in Utah. Every year is a good year for peaches when they come along. And so the rumor and discussion press forward on the back of seasonal circumstance and which fruits are having their time.
Once we get to chapter 3, we meet someone truly curious. A standout, but seemingly insignificant face because he is so fleeting. We are finally out in the field, but we are not even out of the Shire, just to the other end of it – where things are wild, different from the comforts we got used to in the first two chapters. The hobbits have passed their own, usual area of daily travel. They are out of their reckoning and their own daily ken. They are out where the rumors come from. Once into the South Farthing, still in the Shire, they meet the elf Gildor Inglorion in Chapter 3 -- the aptly named Three is Company. There seems to be some hidden luck in the number three for the hobbits have escaped their first encounter also with a Black Rider and are saved by an encounter with a group of elves on their way to the shores in the West. Gildor is no minor character. He is a fleeting one, as I said. The hobbits’ brief encounter with him tells us almost everything about the history of the elves in Middle Earth, though. He is a face on the road, a stranger, just past the borders of our own little, common county built up for the reader on rumors and stories in the first two chapters. Gildor is presented as insignificant but it is not a mistake that he is the first of Tolkien’s fleeting characters. He is an elf and as an elf he makes such profound statements. These statements are what raise The Lord of the Rings from mere escapist fantasy to a profound philosophical novel, because it reflects the faces, we ourselves see in life, going by. He is a mystery to others and he provides us with a sense of something bigger, deeper, more profound than our little journey to the other end of the Shire.
Gildor states the following:
“We are Exiles, and most of our kindred have long departed and we too are only tarrying here a while, ere we return over the Great Sea.”
he also states that:
‘The Elves have their own labors and their own sorrows, and they are little concerned with the ways of hobbits, or of any other creatures upon earth. Our paths cross theirs seldom, by chance or purpose. In this meeting there may be more than chance; but the purpose is not clear to me, and I fear to say too much.’
Chapter 3 – Fellowship of the Ring
He is speaking in a prophetic way, here. But given Tolkien’s own biography it may as well speak to the linguistic and lived history of Britain or that “Western Experience” itself. This quest and question of the West is ever present in cultural and literary discussions. We ponder the ‘character’ of The West. Much of our art and literature ‘looks to the West.’ Indeed, as I will explore, here, this is a primordial concept from ancient scripture itself. There’s a moral, way-of-life component to what we discuss as The West and here in Tolkien’s prophetic elfspeak, we hear tones of the same deep discussion we have about the West. An elf represents a time before, an ancestral time, a time of different natives and nativities on the landscape.
Consider that we meet Gildor while still within the borders of the Shire. He is ‘going back West,’ back to his homeland across the waters. We have already gotten hints from the rumors we hear in Hobbiton that the Elves are going back over the sea. They are departing from the Gray Havens west of the Shire to sail back to their homeland over the sea. This reminds me always of Psalm 107, one of my favorites. It has the famous lines: “some went off to the sea in ships, plied their trade on the deep waters. They saw the works of the Lord, the wonders of G-d in the deep.” This is the fifth stanza of Psalm 107 and the three preceding stanzas detail people afflicted and who are redeemed and called home healed and redeemed. What is significant in this stanza is that people choose to go off to the sea in ships, they are not afflicted or diseased. They do this to themselves. These people – the afflicted and the wandering -- all build a great city together and when greed or corruption again creep in, it is implied in the final stanza, people are put to wandering again. This seems a natural cycle to me without any implicit need of sin or redemption. This is the natural state of affairs when one is on a perpetual bicycle tour, like I am. There’s a time for staying and a time for wandering. When weather permits, when difficulties become too great, when the place inevitably gets boring, commonplace, then it is time to move on or it is time to stay longer. ‘All who wander are not lost’ as the verse from Tolkien goes in reference to Aragorn and his ancient inheritance. This statement has become a bumper sticker and a badge for many people. It is taken as generally true. If it is generally true, and after all of my own wandering, I take it to be, then those who are wandering and not lost have a learned sense of wanderlust. There is a ‘natural’ time for getting on the road, a ‘natural’ time to go somewhere else for a while, just as there is a natural time for sitting and telling rumors or having a council.
This idea of the thousand fleeting faces one sees is very pertinent to my own experience as I read the novel out loud to my father. I spend so much time touring and traveling by bicycle that this fleeting-face phenomenon happens to me all the time. I had the opportunity this past autumn to travel among in the Great Basin in Utah and Nevada. It could be a trackless waste or it could be a land filled with verdant springs. I then spent the month of November in Dundee, Scotland – one cannot have more of a different experience biking and traveling one week to the next than this! I have a bicycle stashed at a friend’s house there in Dundee and I had a chance to explore Dundee’s surroundings by bicycle. It was no ‘grand tour’ and I was really there to celebrate my friend’s birthday, but it’s funny how birthdays or events bring about a need to wander. We start a walk, a hike, a little jaunt and we never know where it might lead us, who we might meet. I’ve traveled so much that people I meet feel as fleeting as Gildor Inglorion the elf in the novel. People I might have had drinks with once or twice, we had a really interesting discussion, shared some small rumor we heard or discussed a story we read, perhaps exchanged advice. The advice of people who you’ve just met while traveling is sometimes the most honest. They’ve just met you, there’s low expectations between people and so they just state the picture you give them having just shown up that hour or that day. I might never see this person I shared a drink or a meal with ever again. The words we exchanged might have been profound, but they were as fleeting as Gildor’s face. I wonder years later what became of such people that I’ve met. We don’t have specifics, just a chance conversation on a plane, a game of chess in a park, a night over a beer when two strangers meet – one’s on a bicycle tour, the other is walking to Denmark, both presume the other made it. But there’s a chance they didn’t. The walker to Denmark might have gotten lost and then fallen. The bicyclist got hit by a cement mixer looking the other way crossing some rail construction in central Stuttgart. (The ‘rail pit’ in Stuttgart is a storied case of German infrastructure projects.) When one is on any tour, as opposed to being a tourist, it’s not at all carousing, it’s not a party, but we are there to enjoy each other’s presence. We’d rather not be alone in our little journeying or undertaking. And so you meet many interesting faces for a day, for a season. Some you keep in touch with for longer, exchange messages with – little digital postcards and reminders. Calling cards hat we are way out here doing stuff. What would elves have done with smartphones I wonder? Would they have felt the need to wander all the way over the sea if they had been in communication with the people out there already?
In Fellowship of the Ring, for the Elves, there is a larger movement of their entire people going on while there’s some problem with a ring going on in the world of mortals. These paths merely intersect, but the reasons for the intersection are related. Gildor knows more than he lets on, as he openly admits. We will find out more about elves, this is a foreshadow of that stream of people that will eventually lead us to Lothlorien where the fair lady Galadriel has her realm. Likewise, in my own traveling life, I notice people out walking around. I try to go to mass in the places I travel. I love seeing and hearing different ‘styles’ of the mass, even in the same area. Each celebrant is a little different, has some personal flare or charm they bring to the saying of the mass.
Faces appear at mass, they sit in the same pews, but I like to switch it up. Go at different times. You see more faces. Who are all these faces on the journey to the communion line? They’re all like us after all. There is a face of the Almighty in it, in that it’s an image of something divine. All these who wandered in here on any given day to receive something holy. Fleeting faces you might smile at or give the sign of peace. They wandered in here, they can’t be the lost ones, can they? These travelers, Sunday commuters, after-church brunchers like good hobbits on a Sunday afternoon.
Sunday brunch after church is a time for discussing the week’s events, the events of life. Who’s wandering into town? Who’s going away? What should be done in the garden this spring? How should we prepare it for winter? There’s a big discussion of wandering peoples. We all have our opinions and beliefs on all these things, and often at brunch after church on Sundays we can lay these concerns on the table. We hear the rumor and the truth and evaluate it and how if at all it might play in our own life. Afterward, on a Sunday ride-about on a bicycle I sift this information and the week’s intake. This is the good of going out on a Sunday. We put our bicycle out on a Sunday afternoon to see a few wonders in the Almighty’s depths (Psalm 107) – we should be careful – we might be caught in a rainstorm, there might be a cold wind, if it’s thorn season, we might get a flat tire. If we aren’t careful, this might be mere practice for a larger journey we will be on, perhaps not by choice, if the rumors of all the wandering people be true. We might find ourselves in a similar predicament. Such is life!
How like a prophetic book of scripture Fellowship of the Ring is, too. Like the Prophets or the Psalms, Tolkien will often drop a name or a location and then use different names without explaining them in the narration. This gives us a layering picture, like scripture. Again, this is an aspect of the thousand fleeting faces of all the common heroes in Tolkien’s novel. Like any prophetic work, it is a book worth returning to for more facts and facets of those thousand hero faces. We have to evaluate the information Tolkien is giving us as clues, as correlations with other things he’s told us before and after. We get a vague picture that builds its focus as we draw closer to a many-named character or location. Like the experience of these strange people known as Elves, and our supposedly chance meeting with Gildor Inglorion, Tolkien writes us a hobbit’s perspective. So when humans or Elves encounter ‘halflings’ the surprise is just as great as when Boromir sees Frodo for the first time at the council of Elrond. There’s a parallel here to my own traveling life where people are surprised to see me here, they expected me over there. “Oh you’re here?” they ask “I thought you were in Scotland!” “Weren’t you in Germany?” Female friends of mine have told me that several months or even a year or more after a pregnancy and birth, people will ask them: “I thought you were pregnant.” “I was, but now I am not now!” they respond. People develop a fixed position and state for us depending on their last encounter with us. Tolkien gives us a feeling of all this movement, metamorphosis, and evolution. The elves are leaving, who, or what will take their place? Large metaphysical themes of shadow and light play here which, again, raise this novel above mere escapist fantasy.
As I have been reading out loud this time, I have more thoughts on the names and naming that take place. Certainly, this is in line with the very old naming traditions of the pre-modern world and its literature that Tolkien is attempting to have us ‘live’ in as the reader throughout the novel. Some of the names Tolkien gives us are referents to elder, more ancient legends and stories, some are red herrings in the sense that they are faces we see in a song or a side discussion of history that don’t really ‘advance’ the plot. Again, because this novel was never written to be a pot boiler or a crime drama that holds us in suspense like Game of Thrones, because it is not told from a high and noble perspective the way most escapist fantasy it, it is arguable whether there is a plot advancing or, more like lived, common life whether it is just a confluence of events. Tolkien is writing not as a master plot writer, but as a master of synchronicity in the Carl Jung sense of the term.
‘Plot advancement’ is the wrong way to see the Lord of the Rings’ successive chapters in all three of its volumes. This is a branching and layering not an advancing tale. Again if its style is branching and layering, then it would stand to reason that our heroes all appear fleeting and that there are common heroes cluttering up all these branches. The American reader expects a nice, packaged work where all threads are taken care of and everything is sown up and weeded and clean. Evil appears, evil threatens, evil is punished in a big explosion – that is the usual course for works like Game of Drones or that one about Wizard School. In such tales, we never see the emergency workers lives after. The ones traumatized cleaning up the collateral bodies from Superman or James Bond’s antics. In some ways, the Fellowship taking this relic, this trinket off to the furnace is like these supposed emergency workers. They go unnoticed and are cleaning up a little piece of evil. They’re janitors for the good – which is the virtue of all janitorial work, isn’t it?
‘Plot advancement’ is one of the reasons that film directors like Peter Jackson or other interpreters of Tolkien’s work give for leaving out Old Man Willow, the Withywindle River, and Tom Bombadil. They feel this section doesn’t “advance” the plot. I would argue that these persons and places in Fellowship are not about advancing the plot, but about layering it. It is about giving us that sense of the depth of the languages surrounding us – in the novel and in ‘real’ life.
As I began to say, there are a lot of names and multiple names for the same person or place in Tolkien. With a reader solely interested in plot advancement, the ‘extra’ names seem meaningless. We don’t really need to know the specifics of who Earandil is to appreciate that the poem is about a mythological character in a later chapter when Strider (usually known as Aragorn, or the Dunedain) sings of him. I realize reading the book out loud that it is only the slow layering of names that one gains a full picture of the landscape Tolkien is setting out. And it is a simple mirror of our own complex landscape of names, experiences, tragedies, comedies, and the rumors of those. This could be viewed as a kind of linguistic ultra-realism which mirrors our own experiences with names, nicknames, changing place names, and altering symbols such as flags, crests, and road signs.
This layering of the plot that Tolkien gives us is not merely fictive. It is indicative of Tolkien’s own experience. This outline of various nations and people intersecting is representative of Tolkien’s Britain and of his own experience of British literature as layered into that landscape, inseparable from it. We see fleeting faces in the landscape too when we read the literature, as deep as it is. It all seems to have come, then gone. The Elves are a shadow nation that goes back into the depths of Middle Earth’s history. It was they who forged the rings, they who built ancient fastnesses and towers of learning. This fictional view certainly reflects Tolkien’s British landscape, biographically. This resembles the towers built to house scripture against marauding pagans who are soon subdued and brought into the light of Christendom as the common knowledge of events goes. But it is much more real, much more lived in fleeting faces when we actually read some of the old poets, the goliards, the Anglo Saxon chroniclers, the minstrels and troubadours tell the tale from the ‘hobbit’s eye’ perspective. There’s a shadow, perhaps, still on Britain, of ‘a Time before’, even now in its tales. This is not necessarily so in America where Christianity has come and flourished and the culture does not have the same crowded association with the past that was there before. I resist the terms ‘indigenous’ or ‘native’ given the themes of landlessness and wandering that I am discussing as they relate to Fellowship of the Ring. We’d have to recognize our own landlessness in the end if we truly wanted to identify with ‘the native’ or the ‘indigenous.’ We’d have to go out and walk around and we have to experience the life as a stranger, feel the sense of being ‘somewhere else.’ And it is that somewhere else we want literature to take us. We often imagine the time before or the time after. It is sometimes difficult to tell if Tolkien is writing in a possible future or a possible past.
In the literary history of Tolkien’s Britain, there was a time before the Anglo Normans when the English of Beowulf was so different from the language we call English today. Indeed, some reading of Old English tells already of a Celtic ‘Time Before.’ There was a time before Beowulf, too, when the Celtic languages were spoken widely there, and songs were sung out loud late into the night of heroes perhaps with a memory of Roman Britain. Certainly, there is some literary discussion that sees the Dragon in the second part of Beowulf as representative of the Roman military and Grendel and his mother in the first have as primitive monsters representative of an older people who inhabited the land. It does make sense to condense such things into a massive monster, like a dragon or some other primordial beast lying on a pile of coinage like the dragon Smaug or a pile of bones of things it has eaten like Grendel or Gollum. Grendel and the Dragon are yet more fleeting faces. The faces of occupiers, of obsessive hunters, of imperial forces, of materialist forces hoarding of objects. Through all these troves and hoards and out on the land wander a thousand fleeting hero faces.
The remnants of older names of that ‘Time Before’ are all over the linguistic landscape of Britain. The remnants are in the shifts of place names and of spellings and pronunciations and regional variations one hears across the land. ‘Berwick’ is hardly spelled how it is pronounced and there are regional variations, near and far, to those pronunciations. I’ve had opportunity twice in the last year to visit the North of the island of Britain. The accents and place names have stayed the same while English wandered into my own spoken language and became ‘American’ a different set of dialects entirely with influences on it from beyond the history of Britain or of England. English wandered, it became American. Where will it go now? That is the story we continue in speculative areas of literature. Are languages dying out or are new ones springing from the dialects of a technological future?
The Elves wandering off West might resemble the way ‘the West,’ where I now sit in Salt Lake City and read Fellowship out loud to my father, was ‘felt’ by Tolkien in his own biographical experience, in his own era. His pre-war years (pre First World War) were an era of Roosevelt and of Progress. The West out here was open to expansion. Cunning, industrial elves were on the move with their families to plant orchards, build mines, raise grand towers, to forge unimaginable new machines from the resources of the far West. The area was open to people feeling tired of the circumstances of their world over there to pack up and go elsewhere – to the Far West, beyond the Rocky Mountains – there’s freedom out there and a landscape in need of ordering. One can have a little farm, raise a family. One can build a mine and find precious metals to make into wondrous machines or jewelry. This was the progressive sense of the late nineteenth century.
I’ve been reading Tolkien and the War, by about his early experiences and formative years much of his early poetry already has that interest of ‘the depth.’ This sense mixes with the pre-war feeling of progressivism and of unfettered freedom of industry and of work. This seems to be a thing that keeps the Elves in Tolkien’s telling wandering. This unfettered idea of progress is in some ways the reason for their constant wandering. In the depth of literary tellings, there are stories passing other stories. The chronicler might be telling one thing, but if he's any good at his art, he is catching other things in his net as the story expands across a landscape. I don’t think one can quite grasp that sense until one takes the time to read Tolkien’s work out loud. You have to read names you don’t know and you don’t have time to ask “who was that?” “are they important?” We don’t have an omniscient perspective that’s present in lots of popular escapist fantasy. This is not the product of an uncontrolled, wishful imagination. Mere escapist fiction gives us dictionary entries as it lists out characters. We often are only involved with the very high, the very important, as in Wizard School or Game of Drones jumping from one hive to the next. We actually hear little from nobles and wizards and we see little overt magic in Lord of the Rings. We are given a noble’s eye view in much fantasy fiction that is merely imaginative escapism. Tolkien has touch of something deeper precisely because he's dipped his net into deeper waters and he’s been on a hobbit level walk across a landscape. this is the virtue, also, of a bicycle tour. You wee the thing’s knee-caps, not its head. The names are vague way up there. You know him as Strider not as Aragorn, son of Arathorn, or the Dunedain. We have the most vague reckoning of Numenor.
By the time we get to the Council of Elrond, where we have just gotten so far in my out loud reading, we know Strider the wanderer, Strider the wilderness first responder. Strider the wildland guide. He’s just led the hobbits through the perilous wasteland his homeland now is. It wasn’t wrecked in his lifetime, either. Wars and greed and deceits ruined it, and the people wandered away. Aragorn, known as Strider to common hobbits, is an heir to this territory, emptied out and infested with trolls. He possesses an ancient sword in Imladris – which we learn by implication is another name for Rivendell. This inheritance of Aragorn’s was once the great northern kingdom of men to match the southern kingdom in Gondor still existent but with a placeholder chancellor and not a king. Gondor has awaited a king’s return since the days of Isildur and the first war with Sauron over the Ring. And it was Isildur’s grave mistake not to destroy the thing for good. That mistake seems to have turned the land inside out over the Ring. Here again, this rises above mere escapist pulp to something more profound. The Lord of the Rings is a second Act! It’s a post-script! There were the big days of Isildur when the Ring was taken from Sauron and lost. The tale we are in now is a follow on from that time, long ago. This tale is squarely in the age of a thousand post-modern Middle Earth faces. Great things, great deeds, great technologies and machines have gone before, now we have a remnant, hints of the histories in all these faces telling on the road and at councils.
So, in just the first half of the first volume we already have so many fleeting faces, we have already seen so many intersecting layers of Tolkien’s art that this isn’t simply one tale, but a compendium of intersecting and synchronous tales. We swim through them like a diver might in a coral reef. We can’t see everything in a great big reef, but we get examples, clues, little facets and gems of all these fleeting common heroes we see before us. Of course, as the story goes on, the more familiar among these faces will be thrown together in a Fellowship then jumbled up and tossed about again on the landscape to synchronize with other fleeting faces – good or bad. I cannot wait to read further. I know what happens, of course, but it’s in re-examining this text in its ‘natural state,’ being read out loud where there are more things to discover.