Galloping from the East

[Lincoln Alpern]

To start, I apologize for getting tetchy in the comments during last Tuesday's session recording.

I actually reread the dream section a day or two before the class to prepare myself for the recording, and was struck by the ending of Frodo's dream.

Suddenly a shadow, like the shape of great wings, passed across the moon. The figure lifted his arms and a light flashed from the staff that he wielded. A mighty eagle swept down and bore him away. The voices wailed and the wolves yammered. There was a noise like a strong wind blowing, and on it was borne the sound of hoofs, galloping, galloping, galloping from the East.

It's been a while since I read the book, and generally when I do it's the Inglis audio version rather than actual printout. This time, I was immediately struck by how, in hindsight, this clearly seemed to be a reference to Gandalf riding Shadowfax - first we see his escape from Orthanc, which we're specifically told during the Council of Elrond happened before the Hobbits encountered Bombadil, and then we get his present mad dash to catch up with Frodo and company. Frodo's assumption that this is the sound of Black Riders is understandable, given how the fear of them weighs on his mind, and he has no reason to expect Gandalf on the way by horse. But structurally, the clear implication is that the sound of hoofs refers to Gandalf's coming.

Then I flipped to the map at the front of the book and my interpretation fell apart. Both Isengard and Rohan are vaguely East of the Old Forest, but mostly, they're South (I think there's an optical illusion involving the Old South road which makes them look even closer on the East-West axis). Besides, I would expect Gandalf to travel mostly West first from Rohan, then North to the Shire. (If he'd traveled North and then West, he would've gone through Bree first.) Either way, he ought to be more South than East.

I skimmed Gandalf's summary of his post-escape travels from the Council of Elrond, but nothing seemed to fit. It didn't seem likely to be the Nazghul, either, since as you pointed out in class, they would be in the Shire, to the West of the Forest - then again, given all the Riders' splitting up and reforming around this time, I wasn't 100% sure.

I thought perhaps the hoofs belonged to some other character's horse, and I intended to ask who you thought that might be. As we learned in class, of course, Corey independently reached the same conclusion as I, except he quickly dismissed the geographical conundrum which convinced me it couldn't be Gandalf.

That being the case, my question for Corey is this: do you have any idea why the narrator describes Shadowfax's galloping, galloping, galloping hoofbeats as coming from the East instead of the South or Southeast? What, if anything, do we think is the special significance of the hoofbeats being in the East?

 

[Tungol]

That being the case, my question for Corey is this: do you have any idea why the narrator describes Shadowfax's galloping, galloping, galloping hoofbeats as coming from the East instead of the South or Southeast? What, if anything, do we think is the special significance of the hoofbeats being in the East?

East is capitalized too, which isn't always the case. I think Tolkien chose East because it's associated with the enemy. It equivocates between Gandalf and the black riders, as the rest of the dream equivocates between Saruman and Gandalf. South is also associated with the enemy, but not too the degree that East is.

 

[Lincoln Alpern]

Good point, and it raises an interesting question (setting aside for the moment the unfortunate colonialist implications in such geographical classifications). You give the metatextual reason why the author of the story might have said "East," but what's the in-story narrator's reason for doing so?

I can only think of two possible reasons why "East" would be emphasize in the text to play up the ominous implications thereof, and neither of them seem particularly persuasive to me. The first is that whichever Vala sent Frodo this dream is deliberately misleading him, which would be wildly uncharacteristic and seems quite pointless. The second is that Frodo's anxieties are coloring his perception to such an extent that he not only misinterprets the dream, but actively distorts an element from it (the direction of the hoofbeats). This suggests a whole other level of misunderstanding on Frodo's part than I previously thought, and it doesn't seem particularly congruent with my understanding of how the dream works, but it's certainly more plausible than the first interpretation.

 

[Matt DeForrest]

According to the timeline found at http://lotrproject.com/timeline/#zoom=4&lat=-1235.07969&lon=1173.73908&layers=BTT, Gandalf is riding somewhere north of the Greyflood and two of the Nazgul have arrived in Bree from the south. That places both much closer than one might think and both could be eastish.

That they could both qualify opens a third possibility — that the sound of the horses is meant to be ambiguous and capture both the good and the bad, thus warning Frodo but telling him that aid is at hand as well.

 

[Lincoln Alpern]

Thanks for the link! And that's a fascinating thought. I think I kind of like that idea of the hoofbeats being both a warning, and a reassurance.

Mind you, if I'm reading the timeline right, Gandalf is still south of the Greyflood at this point, as he only crosses it the next day, and the Nazgul are presumably riding north on the south road. So yes, they're both eastish, but I think my original point stands that it would make a lot more sense to describe their direction as south, rather than east.

 

[Lincoln Alpern]

I've been listening to Episode 33 (for some reason, couldn't download it earlier), and I think it's too bad Corey didn't touch upon your points, Tungol and Matt.

I also just wanted to clarify that just because I resisted the "it's Gandalf" interpretation, that doesn't mean I assumed 'Then it must be the Ring Wraiths, after all.' By my reading of the passage, neither the "it's Gandalf" or "it's the Black Riders" interpretation fit, and I was left scratching my head about whose horse the hoofbeats belonged to. Not Strider, as he was on foot. The best I could come up with was Glorfindel, which seemed just barely possible. I was quite flummoxed.

I have to say that, while I get the East = Mordor association, I don't particularly like Corey's explanation. Frodo having a dream whose meaning he misinterprets after the fact strikes me as deliciously elegant. Frodo having a dream whose meaning he misinterprets in the course of the dream itself seems needlessly muddled and confusing to me.

 

[Kyle Winiecki]

Another reason to believe that this is Gandalf is in the description of the wind. As stated from the dream passage "There was a noise like a strong wind blowing, and on it was Bourne the sound of hoofs, galloping, galloping, galloping from the East."

From later descriptions of Shadowfax running they are often if not always associated with a strong wind. I will give three examples:
1) The Council of Elrond - When Gandalf is recounting his story he retell when he makes his way to Weathertop. "I galloped to Weathertop like a gale," not to mention the same verb of gallop is used, but also the fact that as he was being bourne on Shadowfax he made his way "like a gale" implying moving swiftly as with the speed on wind (much like the "noise of a strong wind blowing").
2) Flight in the Night - During the events after Isengard the company of Rohirrim and those from the Fellowship encounter a Black Rider on wings. When Gandalf takes off on Shadowfax with Pippin his is the following description, "Then he (Shadowfax) leapt forward, spurning the earth, and was gone like a north wind from the mountains." Again we see the connection of Shadowfax's speed associated with strong winds, this time coming from mountains. And just a few short paragraphs later Pipping asks how fast Shadowfax is traveling and makes the comment "Fast by the wind."
3) To Mina's Tirith - Lastly we find ourselves in the last sentence of Book 3, "seated upon the statue of a running horse, while the world rolled away beneath his feet with a great noise of wind."

This connection between Shadowfax's speed and the wind is very strongly emphasized throughout the Lord of the Rings. It is ny belief that in Frodo's dream in the house of Bombaril we are in fact seeing Gandalf and are foreshadowing not just Shadowfax himself, but future descriptions of his speed.

 

[Zephen12]

Ah, Kyle picked up what I had particularly noticed, the bit about the wind and Shadowfax. I would like to additionally point out that we are not given a point of perspective in the dream. Is Frodo/the reader experiencing the dream as if he/we were on the Horse (i.e. Gandalf's perspective) and galloping, galloping, galloping from the "East" (quotation marks placed given above thread)? Is Frodo/the reader experiencing the dream as if Tom Bombadil's house is the center point and that the hooves are coming from the "East" (perhaps Gandalf or Black Riders)? OR, and this is a thought that I think satisfies the "East" debate, is Frodo/the reader experiencing the dream from Gandalf's perspective in which Gandalf has left the Eagle and is now standing, listening to the sound of a rushing wind COMING FROM the East as Shadowfax surely would be coming from the East out of Rohan to aide Gandalf? If this is a "recent event" dream and not a "current events" dream, then surely we could see the extent of Gandalf's escape - Tower, Eagle, Horse like the Wind - which would convey how Gandalf got from Orthanc to Frodo.

More speculatively, if we were to stick with the interpretation of Gandalf speeding to Frodo on Shadowfax (the popular interpretation from class), couldn't it be that Gandalf himself is thinking of Black Riders as he desperately tries to catch up with Frodo? I could see an interpretation in which the "sounds of hoofs galloping, galloping, galloping" from the East" does in fact depict Gandalf riding Shadowfax, but the linking connection between that and Frodo's interpretation is that Gandalf is thinking of the danger he is himself acutely aware of and Frodo has a pseudo "mind link" with him via dream. If Frodo/the reader/the dreamer is sharing Gandalf's perspective (riding upon Shadowfax), couldn't he/we also share his mental perspective (fearing Black Riders and the need for haste)? Perhaps...