Friday, Dec 5
read: At the Sign of the Prancing Pony; Strider; A Knife in the Dark; a few pages of Flight to the Ford
It’s occurring to me that unless I spend my weekends reading around the clock, I’m unlikely to finish all of LotR by the 17th. C’est la vie, I suppose, but I’ll definitely have it done by New Year’s. This annual re-reading streak will die very hard, I can promise you that!
* “At the Sign of the Prancing Pony”: A very strong chapter, I think, simply because of how well Tolkien draws the Bree milieu. Though Peter Jackson did as good a job with this as he always does, this is one section where you could feel how truncated things were. I actually found myself thinking of Ralph Bakshi’s animated version of these scenes more often than Jackson’s live-action one, and not simply because Bakshi filmed more of them. Seeing old Barliman Butterbur cowering behind his front desk as the Ringwraiths glided into the Prancing Pony in Jackson’s Fellowship was the one part that managed to awake the irritated purist in me. The innkeeper as Tolkien (and to an extent, Bakshi) depicted him is a funny, doughty, extremely endearing character, moreso even than Bombadil, perhaps. Also memorable here are the squinty Southerner–a very early glimpse of some bad things to come–and, of course, Frodo’s sudden disappearance, a moment that elicits a healthy “oh, shit!” from the reader if ever there was one.
* “Strider”: Tons of great lines in this chapter, mainly from or about Strider. He gets off a great zinger against old Barliman (“a fat inkeeper who only remembers his own name because people shout it at him all day”); has his own personal official poem (“all that is gold does not glitter; not all those who wander are lost”); and is a walking illustration of how evil seems fair and feels foul, while good can look foul and feel fair. Barliman, meanwhile, shows that he may be forgetful, but he’s not about to let any of his customers come to harm if he can help it at all. Finally, we meet humans whose greed, or sadism, or both, enables them to quash the innate fear all living things seem to have of the Ringwraiths well enough to actually make deals with them. Would that such people only existed in fantastic fiction! Finally, the “G” rune Gandalf uses to sign his mislaid letter to Frodo is currently a high-ranking candidate for my next tattoo.
* “A Knife in the Dark”: This chapter, particularly its conclusion, is something I’ve actually had nightmares about. I think that the image of the four hobbits and Strider circling their proverbial wagons around the fire while the evil, void-like Ringwraiths creep toward them is one of the most indelible images in the book; again, I found myself *just* a little disappointed with Jackson’s version, mainly because the version my subconscious treated me to was a tough act to follow. It’s interesting to note how human Aragorn appears in this chapter. Clearly he’s not 100% certain of the route he should take; clearly he makes mistakes, and kicks himself for them; clearly he is afraid, and wishes that Gandalf were with them. That, coupled with his dawning respect for the innate toughness of the hobbits, makes his relationship with them a lot less one-sided leader-and-followers than it might seem. By the end of the books many people have this kind of appreciation for the hobbits–as well they should, since those four guys have done stuff that only a handful of beings have successfully pulled off since the dawn of time–which I think is part of what makes it so appealing to readers: Even the high and mighty in Tolkien’s world are willing to acknowledge a bunch of nobodies who stepped up. But we’re a long way from all that at the end of this chapter, that’s for sure.
I’ll talk about “Flight to the Ford” next time, if you don’t mind. With all this snow I should have plenty of time to do so, right?