Episode 84 Summary

[Tony Meade]

SESSION 84

A crack in the grimness:

• Strider has loosened up since leaving Bree. Whereas before he had put a damper on the hobbits’ exuberance and humor, he now joins in, though the circumstances have also changed.
• Since the attack of the Ringwraiths, Strider has become more concerned with keeping the hobbits’ spirits up as a tactic to preserve Frodo’s condition and resist the Ringwraiths.
• Note: Strider is often described as grim, and grimness is often associated with kingship. One of the other notable examples is Bard the Bowman in The Hobbit. This description has to do with a sense of gravitas that is necessary for kingship. Not every king is described as grim, such as Théoden, but it seems to be expected for someone of experience and lore.

Get up, old stone:

• The narrator seems to be going along with Strider’s joke, right up until just before the reveal when he describes the full sun outdoors.
• The hobbits’ reaction of looking in from the tree line with held breath is a callback to the way Bilbo and the Dwarves behaved in the scene in The Hobbit but reversed it with bright sunlight.
• Pippin tried to impress Strider with hiding from the trolls, but Strider is gently humoring him.
• The spell of anxiety about the trolls has already been broken by bright day, but Strider moving forward completes the breaking of the spell for the readers, too.
• Strider’s breaking his stick on the stone troll is the punchline to the joke he has set up.
• The phrase, “Get up, old stone!” sounds like a common expression, but for what is unclear. It may be for mocking the trolls for their weakness to sunlight.
• Note: This might now be called “fan service” for the readers of The Hobbit, but Frodo is going to express its importance for the hobbits who have grown up hearing these stories from Bilbo. However, a lot of the joke might be lost on those who have never read The Hobbit.
• There’s an echo of the battle of Tom Bombadil and Old Man Willow, though less familiar.
• This is also a reminder for the readers and the hobbits that they are not in the world of the story of The Hobbit now. These hobbits have already been through more and are in greater danger.
• There may be a note of relief in Strider’s comments, knowing that this problem is something that he can handled and transformed into laughs. It’s a respite from the dangers they’re facing.
• They all laugh, including Frodo, and this acts as a kind of medicine for Frodo’s spiritual injuries.

Remembering family history:

• Frodo’s assertion that this is “our family history”, and not just his own, includes the other three hobbits, even Sam. Merry and Pippin are related to him, but Sam is not excluded from “family”.
• This seems to be a memory of where they came from and how they began this experience, having grown up with Bilbo’s stories and their spirit of adventure, which also includes Sam.
• Note: Sam will also hand these experiences down as part of his own family history.
• There is another parallel in that Gandalf is also missing here, as he was before he came back and tricked the trolls. Frodo emphasizes both Gandalf’s absence and involvement in that adventure.
• Pippin doesn’t doubt the existence of trolls or the other creatures in Bilbo’s stories, but rather he thinks that Bilbo might have been exaggerating and it didn’t happen exactly as he told it.
• This may be because Bilbo played this as slapstick humor in his story, so it didn’t seem realistic.
• Note: Bilbo may have invented parts of his version of the story to make it more palatable for hobbit children, such as the talking purse, much like Tolkien did as he wrote it for his kids.
• The narrator may be having a joke at Pippin’s expense with his wondering the trolls might come back to life. This could point to Frodo, due to the tone and his relation to Pippin as a cousin.
• Strider has to remember them that this is more than just Bilbo’s story, but basic troll lore.
• This is one of the few moments of which Frodo will have a genuinely happy memory. This is a description of Pippin’s outward expressions, not his internal thoughts.
• Though Frodo has had a desire to follow Bilbo’s adventures, but he has been aware all along that his adventure will not be like Bilbo’s. That may make this incident melancholier later.
• There may be a small tease of the idea that Gandalf might show up here as he did before.
• Does Frodo suspect that this might be a suicide mission? The best-case scenario, as far as he sees it, is to live in exile and on the run, but he may not have reconciled himself to death yet.
• Frodo still doesn’t know if he will continue his adventure beyond Rivendell, but he doesn’t think that he can ever go home again, lest he endanger the Shire.
• Now, with his wounding, he may be reconsidering the idea of what pursuit of the Enemy means.

On schools in the Shire:

• Are there schools in the Shire, as referenced in Sam’s posture? It could be that there are, and it’s a word that hobbits actually use, or it is the modern translator speaking to modern readers.
• This happens a lot more in The Hobbit, where Christmas is referenced twice; once, where the trees where the dwarves are trapped are called “Christmas trees”, and once to describe Elrond.
• This has happened in this book, in the comparison of the firework dragon with an express train.
• By the time the story has moved past the first few chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring, these kinds of references that were done in The Hobbit have largely disappeared.
• We are aware that Sam has learned things like the Gil-galad poem, and the relatively high literacy rates in the Shire point to the possibility of something like a school.
• The scribes in Gondor have definitely gone to schools, so the reference may come from there.
• Sam learned his letters from Bilbo, and Bilbo seems to think in terms of education of the younger generation. It may be that many kids came together to learn from Mr. Bilbo.

A call for a song:

• They have had a really hard time, especially the previous day, but this day as been better and presents the opportunity for a song to add to it.
• The recollection of the song on Weathertop, and the medicinal and tactical value of songs that we’ve seen, seems important here, too.
• Frodo is working to keep everyone else’s spirits up as well, much like he’s seen Strider do, too.
• It’s Frodo that suggests that Sam sing the song, as he knows that there’s more to Sam than meets the eye. The others recognize this too, especially since the Gil-galad song on Weathertop.
• Sam defers in his usual humble manner, but he does have a song ready for the occasion.

The background of the troll song:

• Tolkien had a lot of affection for this song, as evidenced by his continuous revisions.
• Tolkien first wrote this poem around 1920 for Songs for the Philologists, while he was in Leeds, which was a collection of original poems and translations of the philology professors there.
• Other works included Gothic translations of poems like “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”.
• Tolkien continued to revise the troll song even after the publication of The Lord of the Rings, as shown by the new words that he uses on the 1950’s recording of him singing it.
• In this later version, he changes even the characters’ names from Tom and Tim to John and Jim.
• The structure of all of the versions of poem is of a four line “verse”, and a three line “chorus”, which is supposed to be sung by the listeners, such as at a pub.
• Tolkien’s recorded version is set to the traditional song, “The Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night”. In his performance, he sings it much slower than he was known to do his elvish poetry.

The structure of the Stone Troll poem:

• The feel of the first two lines of each stanza is basically iambic tetrameter, or hobbit meter.
• Occasionally, the rhythm deviates from straight iambs, but this is sung as a syncopation.
• The indentations in the text version account for the missing beats in the tetrameter.
• The fifth line is trochaic and the deviation in length and rhythm is an invitation to sing along.
• The anapestic deviations allow for a variation of the stress without shifting from iambic meter.

Songs vs Poems:

• What is distinction between songwriting and poetry? The less a poem is intended to be read aloud, the greater the gap between the two, while the opposite is also true.
• Most modern poetry is written in free verse and isn’t intended to be read aloud.
• This is not how Tolkien wrote poetry. In Tolkien, the two terms are nearly synonymous, and nearly every poem in The Lord of the Rings is sung aloud by the characters in the text.
• Like we’re told about Sam and the other hobbits, Tolkien often sets his poems to older tunes.
• In songwriting, the lyrics are often there to serve the melody, and this means that it is harder to separate the lyrics out and recite them as poems, which is another distinction.

END OF SESSION