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garden-ghoul · 7 years

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fellowship of the bloggening, part 1

I’m reading it here. I look at the table of contents and go “oh for fuck’s sake” because the prologue is “concerning hobbits... concerning pipeweed.” I’m. not reading the prologue. No I’m reading “concerning hobbits” because I really want to know how and when they happened.

This is really cute, hobbits are basically like... brownies, according to Johnald. And some of them are only two feet tall??? LITTLE

The beginning of Hobbits lies far back in the Elder Days that are now lost and forgotten. Only the Elves still preserve any records of that vanished time, and their traditions are concerned almost entirely with their own history, in which Men appear seldom and Hobbits are not mentioned at all. Yet it is clear that Hobbits had, in fact, lived quietly in Middle-earth for many long years before other folk became even aware of them.

nooooooo why must elves be so

like that

Anyway, we also learn that there are still Dunedain settlements in Eriador, including one notable one that’s actually at Bree! I love the. weird mismatch of naming seriousness here. You have your very olde Numenorean and elvish names like Eriador, and then most of the settlements in Eriador have names like Hobbiton and Bree and Brandywine. It’s very charming, like a hermit crab that has moved into an extremely fancy looking conch shell. An adorable transplant. It is here mentioned that the first hobbits appearing in historical record politely asked the high king of Arnor if they could move in, in exchange for road maintenance. Too cute!

To the last battle at Fornost with the Witch-lord of Angmar they sent some bowmen to the aid of the king, or so they maintained, though no tales of Men record it.

::3

And with that it’s time for

A LONG-EXPECTED PARTY

We begin with an accounting of what everyone thinks about Bilbo Baggins! Everyone is kind of dubious about him because of his eternal youth thing, but he’s very free with his riches and consequently the less well-off hobbits love him. It says he didn’t have many friends until some of his young cousins grew up. He and Frodo share a birthday, so on Frodo’s coming of age birthday Bilbo will be 111 and they’re having a huge party!

Holy shit. Sam’s dad is named Ham Gamgee. I’m so tickled. This next bit is a bunch of gossip and baseless speculation on Frodo’s family history by Gaffer & co. They keep calling everything and everyone queer, which is great, because it confirms Frodo is 100% not straight. I think he might be a bit old for Sam but I suppose we shall see.

Dwarves and a fire wizard have showed up a bit early for the party, and Hobbiton is getting stoked. Bilbo mails out invitations to everybody individually instead of just saying “everyone can come to the party,” and with that plus their replies (also by post) the post office is completely swamped for a week. He’s having fun with everyone. I do have to wonder how he got word to the dwarves, though. What kind of mail is there between Eriador and Erebor?

Oh here’s a cute tidbit about hobbit culture: at a party, both the hosts and guests give gifts, and so:

Actually in Hobbiton and Bywater every day in the year it was somebody’s birthday, so that every hobbit in those parts had a fair chance of at least one present at least once a week. But they never got tired of them.

I also like to imagine that Gandalf had a lot of fun designing firecrackers. Like, he does have serious wizard business to do. But also he has the firegays from his ring, and so. Anyway there is a Special Dinner that only 144 people are invited to. Good grief, how can Bilbo possibly still be rich enough to put on a party for like 1000 people? Bilbo makes a speech, with which everyone quickly gets very bored because they are all drunk, but the real point was to be an asshole and vanish mysteriously to make a point (Gandalf adds some pyrotechnics for effect, bless him). Frodo appreciates his joke, but is sad that he’s going to be leaving, and just can’t party any more.

Bilbo and Gandalf argue over leaving the ring to Frodo, Bilbo runs off with some dwarves (we never find out who!) and then people show up at Bag End to get presents Bilbo has left them with passive-aggressive notes on. Then everyone thinks it’s just a free-for-all take-Bilbo’s-stuff party and they swarm the house and poor Frodo has to lie down, leaving Merry in charge. The Sackville-Bagginses come to insult him by saying he’s a Brandybuck, not a Baggins!!

‘Did you hear that, Merry? That was an insult, if you like,’ said Frodo as he shut the door on her.

‘It was a compliment,’ said Merry Brandybuck, ‘and so, of course, not true.’

Cute. I like Merry’s sass. Frodo kicks out a bunch of people who are trying to dig up his cellar and collapses, just in time for Gandalf to come and say he is fleeing like a

SHADOW OF THE PAST

Do you like my transitions? I’m polishing them.

Frodo continues to throw Bilbo a birthday party every year, instead of mourning as would be proper. I think he’s too embarrassed to throw a birthday party for himself but still wants to have a party, bless his heart.

he was sometimes seen far from home walking in the hills and woods under the starlight. Merry and Pippin suspected that he visited the Elves at times, as Bilbo had done.

Where are these elves? There are elves in the Shire? What?

WELL. Around Frodo’s 50th birthday, a lot of elves start passing through on the way to the Gray Havens, as well as the usual dwarves going to and from the Blue Mountains. Elves are leaving Middle Earth in rapidly increasing numbers because of some very troubling rumors about Sauron. Gandalf turns up to discuss this with Frodo, and during an awkward silence they hear “the sound of Sam Gamgee cutting the lawn.” Sorry, what?? This poor boy is cutting Frodo’s lawn by hand?? With like, a scythe?? WHY? Does Frodo really seem like the type of person who cares how well-shorn his lawn is? I fucking hate lawn culture.

Leaving that aside there’s some ring history I guess. Here’s a very interesting thing, though: Gandalf says the inscription on the ring is in “the language of Mordor.” Why does Sauron have his own language? ...what language did they speak before, in Angband? I can’t believe Mr Jolkien has been SO REMISS as to let us stay ignorant of an entire language and its cultural origins!! Anyway if I had to guess I would say the old language of Morgoth’s holdings would end up being some kind of odd Sindarin-Beorian-Quenya creole, given who lived and worked (in slavery) there. But the higher-ups would surely speak whatever language they were already speaking... Quenya? Is Quenya a language invented by the Ainur and then handed down to the Eldar? No it’s not, it has common roots with Sindarin. I have to assume there’s an Ainur language that Morgoth and Sauron knew, but they probably wouldn’t use it with their orc lieutenants and such... and thus I feel better saying that Angband Creole is the historical basis for the language of Mordor, although obviously it will have evolved a lot and mixed with the languages of goblins and such that Sauron ended up recruiting.

Listen. If there’s not an actual note in the appendix about this I’m going to be pisséd. Oh, I’m sure someone’s written a paper on it, though.

Oh! We also get to know about the seven rings--he managed to recover three of them, but the other four were eaten by dragons. Just the way they would have wanted to go. Gandalf also gives a... troublingly detailed account of how Smeagol came to possess the one ring? He adds that Smeagol’s friend came up from the river with weeds and mud in his hair. Which like, I guess you can extrapolate that from him being in a river but why add it?? He even comes up with specific terms of endearment... Smeagol calls Deagol ‘my love,’ which I can ONLY take to mean they were dating. This makes Smeagol’s imminent murder of Deagol all the more tragic.

Also we learn that Gandalf hunted down Smeagol and questioned him to find a lot of this out! Smeagol had been sneaking around basically everywhere, eating people’s children and the like (!!), and only failed to actually get into the shire because wood-elves were protecting the borders. Eventually years later when Aragon helped find him again, they realized he had been to Mordor and been tortured for information there.

Frodo is very frightened at this point, and almost makes himself try to destroy the ring, but instead realizes he has put it back in his pocket. This is terrifying!! Holy shit I would lose my mind with fear if this happened to me. Also I enjoy the ridiculously high specific heat of magic rings. So Frodo decides to keep the ring safe for now, and to go away from the Shire:

‘I should like to save the Shire, if I could - though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them. But I don’t feel like that now. I feel that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable: I shall know that somewhere there is a firm foothold, even if my feet cannot stand there again.’

It’s That Feel, back once again. This was something I was thinking a lot about wrt to the Lay of Leithian and Children of Hurin; how different Beren and Luthien’s outlooks are based on “feeling that you have a homeland” or not; how profoundly affected Turin is by feeling he has no place to go back to. I wonder if this is something Johnald thought a lot about during the war. It’s terrible here, so terrible, but there is somewhere peaceful to come home to. I haven’t felt that in so long, and I very much wish to again some day.

#I'm already getting a case of the feels from this book. RUDE Mr Jolkien #blog of the rings

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