Angela Korra'ti

It is a testament to the power of Peter Jackson’s movies that, when I dig into the very first chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring, I cannot help but imagine how it played out in the movie. The music kicks in in my head, and of course, there are the beautiful visuals involved with Gandalf’s fireworks. Although the movie didn’t lay everything out exactly as the book did–and, see my previous post for why I don’t consider that a problem–it’s still very close to it in spirit.

Because yeah. After the Prologue reminds us of what went down in The Hobbit, this chapter also blatantly ties into those events. The very title of the chapter is a callback. And the first few paragraphs tell us about the reputation Bilbo’s had in the Shire ever since his adventure. Right out of the gate, though, we get something that the movie had not really called out: i.e., that the grand party Bilbo’s throwing is in fact a celebration of his birthday and Frodo’s. Bilbo is turning 111, but Frodo is turning 33, the year a hobbit is considered to come of age.

(And that little tidbit, combined with how Frodo doesn’t actually set out on his adventure until he’s pushing fifty, has contributed to why I’ve never really fretted much about heading into my forties and closing in on fifty myself. By hobbit standards, I’m barely adult! Never mind elf standards!)

It’s kind of hysterical, too, that hobbits call the twenties tweens, since that term means something different to a modern eye: i.e., a pre-teen. But then, it’s kind of the same idea, since the hobbits are still giving the word the connotation of “this is somebody too young and irresponsible to be a grownup”.

It’s fun to see the Gaffer on camera, since we don’t get to see him in the movies, and the conversation he has with other hobbits is a nice way to cover the community gossip about the Bagginses, as well as a bit of Frodo’s backstory (the drowning of his parents) and the ill repute of the Sackville-Bagginses. And I do have to giggle at the miller’s assertion that, quote, “Bag End’s a queer place, and its folk are queerer,” unquote.

(Insert obligatory mental picture of a rainbow flag flying over Bilbo’s door here.)

Something else we don’t see in the movies: a note that the dwarves visit Bilbo. In fact, it’s called out in this chapter that dwarves are in fact on hand for the party, even though they do not actually appear in any of the action! And since I have just recently re-watched the tail end of The Battle of the Five Armies, including Bilbo’s sentimental farewell to the surviving dwarves, I cannot help but wonder which dwarves were the ones that visited him here.

I’m sure Bombur would have been VERY apparent indulging in the party supplies, and I like to think that Bofur would have leapt up to sing and play something for the party attendees. We know from the actual book version of The Hobbit, as well, that many of the dwarves did in fact play instruments. I’m a little sad that Tolkien didn’t think to at least include them more obviously in the merrymaking and music-making here!

Doublechecking the Third Age timeline, it’s at least certain that Balin would not have been among the visiting dwarves–he died in Moria before this party was held. Sniff. But I can totally imagine Balin sharing a companionable table with Bilbo. Is there fan art of that? There should be fan art of that.

I also like that among the party presents being handed out, there’s description of wonderful toys that came from the Lonely Mountain and from Dale, toys that are specifically of dwarf-make. Another reason I’m a little sad that the dwarves don’t actually get to participate more obviously in the action! And according to Bofur’s page on the LotR wiki, he was in fact a toymaker. One therefore presumes a lot of the toys being handed out were his work!

Tolkien’s description of the fireworks is magic all on its own, even if I do rather miss the mischief from movie!Pippin and movie!Merry, stealing fireworks to launch themselves.

It’s interesting to me that Bilbo’s speech is given in italics rather than in quoted dialogue lines. I didn’t remember this, and I’m wondering if it was because Tolkien intended to have the speech be more from the point of view of the party attendees in general, rather than Bilbo himself.

And in the middle of the speech, we get more references to shinies from Dale: the crackers that contain musical instruments, “small, but of perfect make and enchanting tones.” I must wonder how small! Pretty tiny, if they were in crackers meant to be pulled apart, and yet they couldn’t have been too tiny, if hobbit-sized hands were still able to get music out of them.

Gandalf is shown here to be in active collusion with Bilbo, another thing that wasn’t quite as apparent in the movie–since here, Gandalf throws in a bit of a magical “boom” to obscure Bilbo disappearing before their eyes. Which leads nicely into Bilbo’s conversation with Gandalf, which is of course one of my other favorite things about the very beginning of this story. “Two eyes, as often as I can spare them,” indeed. Yep, I won’t ever be able to read a word of Gandalf’s without hearing Sir Ian in my head, and this is entirely as it should be. <3

I do love Bilbo’s parting gifts for a lot of different hobbits, and the snarky subtext on the labels. Which I am totally reading in Martin Freeman’s voice, which is also entirely as it should be. And we see yet more of the Sackville-Bagginses, being generally odious, as well as a passle of other hobbits that need to be bodily thrown out of Bag-End after the party is over.

And, of course, we get Gandalf’s final word of warning to Frodo about the Ring–less urgent than it plays out in the film, but still, enough here to leave a frisson of worry. Something’s off about that ring, and Gandalf urges our little hero to keep it secret, and keep it safe.

Raise your hand if you’re now hearing the Ring theme playing in the back of your head.

So I’ve started re-reading The Lord of the Rings. I’m not going to do a multi-lingual read of it, not quite yet–mostly because I’m still doing Harry Potter and I’m not going to do two multi-lingual rereads at once. But I think I will document thoughts as I have them. Mostly because I always did love the LoTR reread posts on Tor.com, and because as y’all know, I am a massive Tolkien geek. And my thoughts on Tolkien, they are plentiful!

And I’ve got quite a few thoughts right out of the gate, already. For purposes of this read, I’m using a single-volume ebook edition–basically, the ebook release of the single-volume print edition I have. Because that thing is a great big honking brick of a book, far too large for me to comfortably carry on my regular work commutes. It’s therefore much more amenable to me to do this read-through in electronic form.

Also notably, for anyone who might be considering grabbing digital versions of the trilogy: buying the single-volume ebook edition is significantly cheaper than buying the three individual ebooks. On Kobo’s site, that amounted to paying sixteen bucks for the single omnibus edition, vs. paying twelve each for Fellowship, Two Towers, and Return of the King. I normally don’t care for omnibus ebooks, and would in fact prefer to have the individual books as separate files. But in this case, the price difference was significant enough that it actually mattered.

And now, into the prologue itself. Right out of the gate, my first thought is: wow, modern authors would have this prologue totally shot down by their editors. I say this as an author who in fact had the original prologue for what later became Valor of the Healer shot down (and which interested parties can read here)–a prologue which in fact was a pretty decent amount of action, as opposed to what Tolkien gives us here. I.e., a ginormous infodump of the history of the hobbits, and a recap of how Bilbo got the Ring.

If you’re the sort of reader who expects instant action in the very first paragraph, you won’t like this prologue. But for me, as a lifelong Tolkien geek, it starts setting the stage by introducing us to the hobbits and stressing the importance of the Ring.

Modern writers would, I feel, be encouraged to work this data into the actual flow of the action, seamlessly. There’s a strong argument to be made for that, since certainly, modern tastes slant away from hitting your readers in the face with an infodump first thing. Which is in fact the important point here. There’s a difference between hitting your readers in the face with your infodump, and presenting it to them in such a way that it feels like a natural way to set the stage. For me, Tolkien pulls this off. It’d take a writer in solid command of his or her craft to do something similar in today’s publishing environment, and achieving that level of mastery is not easy. So I can’t exactly fault modern editors from encouraging their writers to not do this.

All that said, there’s such a wealth of detail here that as long as you know what to expect, it’s still delightful. I’d forgotten the description of the original three strains of Hobbits, and how they migrated into what eventually became the Shire. I’d also forgotten that they were in fact the inventors of smoking pipeweed, and that Merry’s on record as documenting a lot of that.

But what really just made me LOL as I re-read this prologue is this description of the discrepancy between the original release of The Hobbit, and later editions that Tolkien retconned to tie in better to The Lord of the Rings:

Now it is a curious fact that this is not the story as Bilbo first told it to his companions. […] This account Bilbo set down in his memoirs, and he seems never to have altered it himself, not even after the Council of Elrond. Evidently it still appeared in the original Red Book, as it did in several of the copies and abstracts. But many copies contain the true account (as an alternative), derived no doubt from notes by Frodo or Samwise, both of whom learned the truth, though they seem to have been unwilling to delete anything actually written by the old hobbit himself.

That, right there, is Tolkien himself handing Peter Jackson, on a silver platter, an in-universe excuse for why the Hobbit movies tell so much more than what the actual book does. Dara and I had decided ages ago that the book was very clearly Bilbo’s version of the story, and that the movies were aiming more for “what actually happened”. But I’d honestly forgotten that Tolkien himself laid this down in his own words.

It’s also highly interesting to me that this prologue calls out how Gandalf was having none of Bilbo’s bullshit in this regard:

Gandalf, however, disbelieved Bilbo’s first story, as soon as he heard it, and he continued to be very curious about the ring. Eventually he got the true tale out of Bilbo after much questioning, which for a while strained their friendship; but the wizard seemed to think the truth important.

Speaking as someone who has just re-watched the end of The Battle of the Five Armies, I think it’s very clear that we see Gandalf not buying Bilbo’s bullshit right there on camera.

If I were to change anything at all about this Prologue, it would be to move the final section, “Note on the Shire Records”, somewhere earlier. The final sentence of the “Of the Finding of the Ring” section is this: “At this point this History begins.”

Which would have been an awesome segue right into Chapter 1. And I think I’ll let that be the segue to my next post!