Tales of that sort

[The_Singing_Fox]

This is a little bit ahead of class (I guess we'll get there in the next year or so), but upon reading the passage in the Trollshaws it occurred to me that this makes way more sense than I ever recognized. Well, here comes the passage:

'No!' said Strider. 'Trolls do not build. No one lives in this land. [...Lore-talk about Angmar and evil men...] though a shadow still lies on the land.'
'Where did you learn such tales, if all the land is empty and forgetful?' asked Peregrin. 'The birds and beasts do not tell tales of that sort.'

Pippins remark at the end sounds as if he knew what kind of tales birds and beasts usually tell, but as far as we know he is, unlike Bard, unable to speak to birds or beasts, and so I always understood that as a joke or a stylistic device on Pippins part, to emphasize the strangeness of Striders learnedness. But considering what we learned, or better, what the hobbits learned from Tom Bombadil, he does know what kind of tales the birds and beasts tell, because Tom has told them! So this is not just Pippin asking, 'Hey, where did you get that knowledge?' or even 'Who are you and why do you know so much?', but more like 'I see that you are no normal kind of person and that you can probably speak to anything we might meet on our journey, but that does not include the kind of lore that you know. So where did you learn this?'.

 

[amysrevenge]

And even further ahead, all this business about the trees' perspective is surely priming Merry and Pippin for their eventual close, quick (hasty?) friendships with Treebeard and Quickbeam.