OK, now we’re at the part everyone loves; a chase scene leading to: mushrooms! We have already made the point that Frodo’s viewpoint being enlarged is what is really going on here, so this part is really not as important as the last Chapter – although it feels more so. And by the way, when I first read this I had already been to France, so I knew just how good mushrooms could be (try Julia Child’s recipe). For everyone else, this chapter means a cool new food; for me, it means that Prof. Tolkien knew how to pause and appreciate the taste of good food, not just gobble down fish and chips or confuse ornate and superb.
[btw, there is much say to about Tolkien’s use of food to deepen the sense of depth and aliveness in his world, but a lot of that has already been discussed elsewhere. Don’t’ expect much discussion of lembas vs. cram vs. honeycakes in these diaries, but please feel free to discuss among yourselves]
However, this is a good place to point out something else: we are now describing things day by day. In fact, Tolkien will go on doing so, day by day, for most days between now and the end of March. Moreover, we are now outdoors. For most of the time between now and March, we will be outdoors, and usually not on paved streets. Finally, in case you haven’t noticed already, this is real weather. Tolkien actually took a real year’s weather, day by day, and more or less followed it.
I firmly believe that Tolkien is a Great Writer, by the standards of whomever you like – Hemingway, Hardy, or Proust – and the reason is not because he wrote a “cracking good story.” I will talk about some of the reasons soon. What you should understand now is that this approach to telling the story – day by day, weather-oriented, “in the moment” -- is the foundation of much of that great writing. Unlike what I have been talking about up to now, this approach is not only new and different: it forms the basis of writing that fundamentally stretches the writer’s palette of language, and therefore makes us readers think in a fundamentally different, profoundly useful way.
OK, enough about this Chapter. The next is more important, and not for the reason you think.
Leaders Unmasked
Yes, this is about the importance of friendship, and not underestimating these plucky little hobbits, and the seriousness of what is to come, yada. And it has one of the great bath songs of all time – I put music to it, and occasionally sing it myself in the bath (please don’t imagine that; the horror, the horror). But for a moment, I want you to think about the actual characteristics of Merry and Pippin.
The clues are there, both in The Hobbit (Bilbo’s Dad marries Belladonna Took, and Tooks are adventurous), and in the previous Chapters (Merry is related to the Master of Buckland, and Buckland is a place of its own, with “dealings with outside”). The Bagginses we can place firmly in English squirearchy, with its social strata. The Tooks and Brandybucks are different: they are not so much social superiors as they are leaders. When they were younger, they would be the type of people who would be constantly organizing a baseball or soccer game or an outing to the next town.
And Merry and Pippin are not so immature as you might think. Think about what they have just been doing. Pippin has been organizing a conspiracy – and doing quite well at it. Merry has competently been arranging a new place for Frodo at Buckland, getting it furnished, and squaring it with the neighbors.
What Tolkien is doing, just before casting Merry and Pippin out into the world beyond The Shire, where anyone except Frodo is going to look completely clueless, is saying that what welds this part of the Fellowship together is not social class, nor simple friendship, but also that together they are better than apart. On Frodo’s part, Merry and Pippin bring him out of his books and his solo hiking, and connect him firmly, not to polite society (he doesn’t need that), but to action and Bilbo’s adventures. On Merry and Pippin’s side, they don’t need his help in leadership; it’s so practiced and accepted that it comes naturally, as we will see when both become separated from everyone else. They sense that they need him to inform them about how to lead well: how to consider all the factors that because of The Shire’s insularity they wouldn’t think about by themselves.
Just imagine, for a second, that there was no Ring to deal with, and Frodo was less interested in actually traveling. In fifteen years, Frodo would have been unusual, but effectively the squire of Hobbiton. Pippin would have been the Took, and a competent and charismatic one. Merry would be getting close to being the Master of Buckland, and would be as flexible as the present Master at dealing with the unpredictability of life on the edge of The Shire. The Shire would have been a pretty happy and pretty well-functioning place, with those three in charge – because Merry and Pippin had that “let’s do a musical!” quality.
And so, one of the key things that is going on in this Chapter is that Tolkien is reminding you that these people are more adult and more like you than you might think. And therefore, this novel is more adult and more relevant to you than you thought.
Let’s save Sam for later. It is only in the next Chapter that he begins to do things that you would not expect him to do.
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