![]() (There is an actual Buckland just up the road from me.) The excitement of the impending party, the clearing up afterwards, the giving away of Frodo’s belongings when he sells Bag End, all these details of village life form the soil in which the greater, more mythic story takes root. Whitfurrows, Stock, Pincup, Tuckborough, Michel Delving on the White Downs there are no names on the map of the Shire which would be remotely out of place here in Devon. It’s an idealised rural England, frozen at some imaginary point in the Olden Days, and Tolkien delights in creating very plausible English names for it. anybody from further away than the next village). Much affectionate fun is had at the expense of the Shire folks’ provincialism, their tendency to gossip, their love of gardening and good food, their suspicion of 'foreigners' (e.g. The Black Riders (not yet identified as Ringwraiths) have a very sinister-agents-of-a-foreign-power-menacing-plucky-chaps-in-the-leafy-lanes-of-dear-old-England vibe. Perhaps Tom Bombadil and Goldberry are part of that too - elements of some earlier myth-cycle lingering on in Middle-earth the way strange pre-Christian symbols turn up in folk tales and Arthurian legend.īut for the most part the opening section feels much more as if an English comic novel has been blended with a thriller by John Buchan or Eric Ambler. Tolkien's main influence, clearly, is Norse and Celtic legends, and in the central part of the book he is trying to create something which feels like a myth or legend but is told using the techniques of modern fiction. (I’ve seen the sort of people who use the word 'tropes' assume that Tolkien just didn’t know what he was doing - they are the same people who think ‘BuT WhY cOuLdN’T tHeY jUsT GeT TeH EagLeS to FLY tHeM tO MoRDor?’ is a killer argument.) But The Lord of the Rings is not a fantasy novel, it's something much stranger and more personal. If that seems strange, it's probably because we’ve become used to thinking of The Lord of the Rings as a fantasy novel, and imagine that it should play by the rules of fantasy novels. ![]() ![]() None of these figures returns later in the book. In the Old Forest they fall foul of an evil old tree, Old Man Willow: on the Barrow Downs they are captured by Barrow Wights, and from both these perils they are rescued by the intervention of Tom Bombadil, who is - what, exactly? A sort of genius loci of the countryside, I think, speaking in poetry and riddles and shacked up with Goldberry, a kind of junior river-goddess. ![]() They are shadowed by the sinister Black Riders, but the other adventures they meet with are completely unconnected to the larger story which lies ahead. And when he and his companions Sam and Pippin do finally get going, they amble slowly through the fields and woods of the Shire, stopping to chat to some Elves, stopping for mushrooms with Farmer Maggot, pausing at Crickhollow for hot baths and to collect Merry before heading on through the Old Forest. But instead of setting out next morning, he spends a further six months making arrangements to leave. Frodo agrees to take it to Rivendell so decisions can be made there about what to do with it. Then Gandalf shows up again and tells Frodo how important and dangerous the Ring is, and how it must be destroyed. ![]() It starts with Bilbo’s birthday party: he disappears, heads off to Rivendell, and leaves the Ring with his heir, Frodo. It takes up two hundred pages, the length of a short novel, and slightly more half of The Fellowship… What makes it interesting, I think, is that a modern editor, anyone penning an adaptation, or any of those wise souls who write bestselling books about how to write bestselling books would recommend cutting almost all of it.Ĭertainly, as the opening of a story, its pace is surprisingly slow. Confronted by a female authority figure as powerful as Galadriel, 9-year-old me imagined someone rather matronly, like my school headmistress, and although Tolkien quite clearly describes someone much more Pre-Raphaelite, I can never quite get that first impression out of my head.)Īnyway, this post isn’t going to be about Galadriel or any of the events and characters from the later parts of the story, because I want to concentrate on the first portion of The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, which is one of my favourite parts of The Lord of the Rings (and by extension, I suppose, of any book). I didn’t always picture it very accurately, of course. Being asked to picture a world of such detail and complexity in my head was brilliant training for a would-be writer and/or artist. Coming to it again, I realise how lucky I was to read it before there were any screen adaptations, or even many illustrations. My mum read it to me when I was eight or nine, I read it again to myself a few times between the ages of 10 and 15, and now I seem to return to it roughly once every ten years. ![]()
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