The Fellowship is fully formed, and all farewells are said, and then they take off at nightfall, and it’s freezing. This is life as a hiker sees it: when you get up in the morning, there’s no avoiding shivering and being hungry; you can’t set room temperature, and you can’t reach into the refrigerator. That’s another thing that Tolkien does that most other authors don’t – he never takes that for granted. At every stage, you must think of where’s the food? And, if necessary, where’s the warmth? But that’s a relatively minor virtue; I just personally like the fact that Tolkien doesn’t manipulate the plot that way – oh, food is just magically produced as you travel, and you never think about the cold unless I want to stick it in as part of the plot.
And then we skulk along the foothills of the Misty Mountains, always heading south, until we reach Eregion, where we are detected, and then it’s action all the way. The attack by Wargs. The failed assault on Caradhas, where the snow is the weapon of the adversary, like having a one-sided snowball fight. The chase by wolves. The cornering under the cliff-entrance to Moria, and the last-minute escape into the Mines.
And now I want to go right back to the beginning and call your attention to Boromir’s sounding his horn as they set out.
Now, there are other fascinating parts of that scene for the Tolkien addict. The exchange between Elrond and Gimli, for those who know the backstory, is like a transition into Tolkien’s world after the Third Age. Oaths, in the first three Ages, have a magical, deadly serious effect –witness the tragic effects of a flawed oath on Feanor’s sons in the Silmarillion. Elrond, from his vast experience, is, I think, telling the Fellowship that it’s time to be mature, to not depend on dangerous oaths and the male urge to keep a promise no matter what as a point of honor.
And the farewell scene is a nice example of how Tolkien is creating proto-sayings in his supposed English mythology. All that is gold does not glitter. A stitch in time saves nine. Let him not swear to brave the dark, who has never seen the nightfall. But no, I am not going to talk here about either of these things.
Instead, I want you to think about this section of Book II from the viewpoint of Frodo’s Adversary.
You send out scouts to see if the Ring is coming this way. You prepare the killing field, Caradhras to the East, Saruman to the South, the Watcher in the Water to the southeast, all to hem in and trap your prey, and the wolves and Wargs to harry it within the killing field or if it breaks out to the North or West. And then, when the herd that is the Fellowship triggers your sensors, you herd them eventually towards the entrance to Moria, where you will deliver the killing blow.
What we are talking about here is a hunt. Not a hunt purely in the modern sense, in the sense of the hunt for Gollum by Aragorn and Gandalf or the Three Hunters in Rohan, where the object is not prey but knowledge or rescue. No, the hunt here is more like the English fox hunt as portrayed in the movie Tom Jones; there is an almost ritualistic quality to it.
Moreover, this Hunt has Godlike figures taking part in it – Sauron, maybe Caradhras (remember, in Tolkien’s world, the stones of Eregion are alive and can lament the passing of their makers), maybe Saruman. It is more like the Wild Hunt of Celtic mythology.
And so here you are, the Fellowship, hikers on the Frodo Trail, with at least four hunters (Aragorn, Gimli, Legolas, Boromir with his hunting horn) in the group. And suddenly, like the city folks in Deliverance, you find that you are not hikers, you are not even hunters, you are the hunted herd animals. And then you experience the other side of the story: the terror when you are first detected, the frantic rush to a way out, the check, the increasingly desperate search for another way out, then the final scene, at bay, the Watcher alerted, the wolves and Wargs coming, no way out, trapped, trapped, about to be savaged and maimed and then killed.
Let me editorialize for just a minute here and say that I think this should warn us against too easy writer sexual stereotyping. It is Tolkien, the man, who tells us the story mainly from the point of view of Frodo, the doe in the herd, the one who must be protected at all costs if the herd is to survive. Whereas, imho, it is Dorothy Dunnett, the woman, who in Ringed Castle best captures the viewpoint of the male hunter that the hunt is really about the pride, the beauty, the freedom of the hunting animal, dog or eagle, in the midst of Nature’s necessary slaughter.
And now we see, I think, another reason why Boromir is sounding his horn at send-off. Iirc, the first thing that the hunters do in Tom Jones the movie is sound their hunting horns. It’s functional; but it’s also a ritual. Tolkien is shifting our mindset from that of a hiker or a high counselor to that of the hunter or hunted in a ritual Wild Hunt.
And there’s even more to it than that. There’s the horn itself.
When I was a teenager, I went to Fontainebleau in France and experienced a concert of hunting horns. What they were playing was the various hunting calls of a Royal Hunt of Louis XIV or Francois I. Functionally, they were intended to be used by different hunting parties scattered through the park in a carefully planned hunt, signaling no sighting yet! Or, dogs have picked up a trail! And yet, I was in a Tolkienesque mood, and I turned off my internal music critic, and just listened as if I were in a yoga trance.
The echoing, the haunting, the yearning quality of those horn calls has stayed with me from that day to this. It is the closest sound to what I believe Tolkien wants us to hear, of anything I know of in this world of ours.
And by the way, as long as I am editorializing, I very much yearn for a Tolkien LOTR-related movie that uses Brahms’ Horn Trio as its theme. The first movement, for the overall theme of memory and the fading into time of wonderful things. The second and fourth movements, for the Ride to the Ford and the Ride of the Rohirrim with its horns. The third movement, written on the death of Brahms’ mother, for unutterable tragedy and mourning for an extraordinary ordinary individual, for the trance-like torture of Frodo on the way to the Ford, for Gandalf’s death in Moria and Lothlorien, for Frodo on the pass to Mordor, stung by Shelob, for Frodo and Sam outside the Cracks of Doom when the Ring is destroyed, facing nothing but each other’s death with no touch or comfort from anyone or anything else in the world. Chamber music that signals the importance of a few individuals, not an orchestra that signifies mass, de-individualized warfare. Brahms really knew hunting horns, and Nature. But only if the movie is a great one, fully worthy of those themes in Tolkien.
And so, finally, Tolkien gives us, if we take it, this gift. The Wild Hunt, for our myth. The horn, for memory. The horns of Elfland or Orome in the Wild Hunt, blowing, blowing. As for me, thanks to Tolkien, I’ll always have Fontainebleau. I’ll always have Brahms. I’ll always have Paris.
Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings Like You’ve Never Heard It:
- The First of a Series of Ramblings About JRR Tolkien
- Part II. Pre-Psychology Writing, Poetry, and a New Hero
- Part III. Torture, Enlightenment
- Part IV. Weather, Mushrooms, Leaders
- Part V. In the Moment, Sam the Obscure
- Part VI. Folk Songs, Master, First, Fair
- Part VII. Hiking, Curses, Noble Language
- Part VIII. The Hiker’s Extrasensory Writing
- Part IX. Torture, Elves, Endings
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