#HOW DID WE JUST SKATE OVER GOLLUM EATING BABIES????

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Re-reading The Fellowship of the Ring for the First Time in Fifteen Years

Hi, Hello, Welcome! The conceit of these posts is pretty self-explanatory. I read the Lord of the Rings for the first time at age 17, in the middle of my parent's divorce (it was messy, we're not going into any details). Needless to say, I remember pretty much nothing about that read, and I would like to give the books a fair shake of a re-read. That's what this is, and there will be spoilers throughout!

I usually do full-book reviews, but if ever I was going to do a chapter-by-chapter re-read, it would be for LotR. The rules are that I'm going in as blind as I possibly can (I have watched the movies and have absorbed like...a reasonable amount of lore from existing on the internet as a millennial) and I'm not doing any research beyond like, defining words for myself as I read. So here we go, and I hope you enjoy rereading with me! Let's talk "The Shadow of the Past."

Good LORD JRR Tolkien can lore dump when he wants to. This chapter was mainly lore dump, which is fine because it was at least interesting lore dump. I'm not a lore girly though, I'm a character girly, so let's go with "we got the One Ring's backstory, now let me talk about other characters because the Ring isn't one just yet."

This is going to sound initially harsh, but it is said with affection: Gandalf is 1000% the pedantic asshole professor who is way too into the Socratic method who you absolutely detest in undergrad but somehow his classes still end up sticking with you more than any other. You then get to understand this prof better as a master's student, and deeply love this prof as a PhD. That's literally the vibe I'm getting from his lecture to Frodo about finding some goddamn pity and compassion for the tragedy that is Smeagol and Gollum. Because it is VERY easy to judge and be critical in the abstract, which Frodo very much is, having never encountered Gollum, and Gandalf has spent time and effort tracking down Gollum with way more background knowledge with which to contextualize the layers of tragedy that Gollum personifies and affects. It's a big ask, to get people to abstract compassion (and do not come in here and argue with me about this, I live in 20-goddam-24, I know what I'm talking about), but Gandalf kind of doesn't let it go with Frodo until Frodo at least softens his position and is open to, if not at, compassion. I've been a student and I've been a teacher, and these conversations are hard from both directions, so kudos to Gandalf for sticking with it, and to Frodo for getting to a place where he was truly listening.

Especially after Gandalf just CASUALLY DROPS that Gollum literally ATE BABIES. I'm not even kidding, he just casually, in the midst of an infodump on Gollum's time tracking Bilbo after losing the Ring, says,

The woodsmen said that there was some new terror abroad, a ghost that drank blood. It climbed trees to find nests, it crept into holes to find young, it slipped through windows to find cradles.

AND THEN WE JUST CASUALLY MOVE ON LIKE BABY EATING ISN'T SOMETHING WE NEED TO ADDRESS HERE. I would like to address the baby eating, Gandalf!!!

Despite not addressing the baby eating though, there was some interesting new information in the Gollum infodump that I understand why it got cut from the movies, but I was low-key fascinated. Smeagol was specifically noted to be interested in roots. Gandalf framed that like literal tree and mountain roots, but this is Tolkien we're talking about. Roots have a metric ton of metaphorical meanings too, and the fact that Smeagol was interested in the origins of things, in where they came from, in what made them as they are, is both deeply ironic and deeply interesting. I kind of hope we do more with that, since becoming Gollum is like ouroborosing roots; Smeagol's interest in Gollum is deeply self-reflexive, which might also be how we end up with that bifurcated personality thing. I dunno, but that would be really cool to follow up on.

I also deeply appreciated Frodo's "WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK" reaction to realizing that Gandalf had let him keep the One Ring for so long. Notably, Gandalf kind of doesn't explicitly apologize for putting Frodo at risk, but he does acknowledge that yes, yes he made a choice, took a risk, and put Frodo in some level of danger. I suppose we'll take it, even as we acknowledge that yes, Gandalf was working with imperfect, incomplete information. We do the best we can with what we know at the time, or something. And if it took 20-odd years to figure all of this out (which makes sense for the kind of field and archival work required here), then y'know what, better late than never.

That said, Gandalf also kind of...LIGHTLY SKATES OVER the fact that even just possessing the Ring and doing nothing with it for 20 years has affected Frodo. He's not aging. He can't cast it away. He's already caught. Right at the beginning, in CHAPTER TWO of this massive trilogy, it's not a matter of preventing Frodo from being caught by the ring. It's a matter of how long Frodo can resist. He was doomed before anyone knew, concretely, that there was a problem. And jaysus, if that isn't how you tee up a tragedy, I don't even know how you do that. Maybe there wasn't a good reason for Gandalf to say that to Frodo, maybe it would have hurt more than it helped, but I do kind of think PERHAPS YOU MIGHT POINT THIS OUT???

I get the sense that I'm going to be very back-and-forth on book Gandalf...this is going to be an interesting thing to watch develop as I keep reading.

In addition to Gandalf's "Backstory Via The Socratic Method 101" course, we also get some additional Samwise Gamgee in this chapter. Saying "I adore this hobbit and he should be protected at all costs" is not new or even interesting, so let's take a different tack. In the films, Sam's excitement for going to see the elves is...ungrounded. It's a thing about him that we just accept. I deeply relate to and adore the sense we get of why and how the elves thing comes about in the book:

He believed he had once seen and Elf in the woods, and still hoped to see more one day. Of all the legends that he had heard in his early years such fragments of tales and half-remembered stories about the Elves as the hobbits knew, had always moved him most deeply.

This might seem ungrounded, but it's deeply aware of how stories work. Sam knows that the hobbits don't have the extent of Elven lore that exists, but he knows that there is a magic and a power in even the fragments they have, and that captured his imagination to such an extent that a yearning to see, to understand, to know that magic, was born in his heart. That grounds Sam in stories just as much as Frodo is grounded in stories, and more than that, Sam WANTS the magic to be real in a way that Frodo, primed on all the tragedy by Gandalf, I don't actually think does. Frodo is "I wish it need not have happened in my time," but Sam is "Me go and see the Elves and all."

That "and all" at the end is particularly poignant, because if Sam knows some of the stories of the elves, I have to imagine a few tragic tales survived along with the magical ones, so Sam isn't going starry-eyed into this as a bumblefuck gardener from nowhere. There's an acceptance there of the magic that encompasses all that magic offers, both good and bad. Yeah, I'm probably over-reading into this, but I support it at least a little with the fact that at the beginning of the chapter, we're with Sam when the hobbits down the pub are talking about strange beings and creatures and *foreshadowing the ents*. Sam knows that the stories tell of more than just elves, but for him, that wonder is enough to warrant everything else. No, I am not taking criticism (constructive or otherwise) at this time.

Other than a wee shoutout to the legendary "Mad Baggins"--and let's be real, if history must become myth and myth must become legend, I want Mad Baggins to stay alive and not be forgotten--that's about all I have for this chapter. Professor Gandalf shows up to school Frodo and kick his ass out the door, and Sam gets to go see the elves. We'll pick up again next time with chapter 3.