Chapter 1: A Long-Expected Party
Well, here we are at the proper beginning of the journey. I liked posting that painting of Alan Lee’s, last time around, and I think I may try to link to a work of art connected with the reading each time -- this piece by Joe Gilronan, an artist I was not previously familiar with, is not precisely my image of the party scene (or Tolkien’s), although I think despite clearly diverging from several of the details written in this chapter, it captures the feel and tone of the day really well for me. https://joe-gilronan.pixels.com/featured/lord-of-the-rings-inspired-artwork-joe-gilronan.html
This chapter is, as those familiar with The Hobbit will already know, an intentional companion piece to that novel’s opening chapter, which is titled “An Unexpected Party”. The parallels unfold from there, of course -- The Hobbit’s party is indoors and private, this is outdoors and quasi-public; Gandalf is the mastermind of the first party to which Bilbo is a reluctant accessory and the roles reverse here in LOTR; the first party concludes the next morning with all partygoers having departed leaving just Bilbo behind, while this party concludes the next morning with just Bilbo having departed with all partygoers left behind. You can probably unearth more parallels like this on your own (and I encourage you to do so) -- I think it’s a cool device by Tolkien here, designed to provoke us to ask whether this book will simply be an expanded and imitative version of The Hobbit, or whether he’s intentionally inverting things now so that we’ll be prepared for a very different message and story in the long run.
And I’m crediting it to him as a device, but it’s worth acknowledging that this chapter has arrived to us in strange fashion -- some of the least consequential things in it were present from the very beginning, and the really crucial elements of this chapter were late to develop. As is detailed with great care in The Return of the Shadow (the first volume in Christopher Tolkien’s The History of the Lord of the Rings books -- a magisterial and revealing exploration of his father’s many drafts and revisions over the years he was writing this story, and one I expect to refer to again down the line), J.R.R. Tolkien began his first draft of this first chapter of LOTR within months of The Hobbit’s initial publication -- and the story at that time was that Bilbo, on his 71st birthday, held a huge party, told everyone he liked them all half as well as they deserved, and then left behind him gifts labeled in pointed, joking ways for his many distant relations. So, very much like what we have here….except that his announcement at the party is that he’s leaving and he’s going to go get married. Weird, eh? Tolkien was clearly not really happy with this chapter (despite much of it surviving in what we get in the published LOTR), and tinkers with it incessantly -- one of my favorite discarded versions envisions Bilbo marrying Primula Brandybuck before mysteriously and silently disappearing with her, leaving his son Bingo to hold the big party in this chapter and then go off on a marvelous adventure. I expect that “The Hobbit II: Bingo’s Tale” would probably have had less cultural impact than The Lord of the Rings, but it’s hard not to think about it, isn’t it?
But enough of my fiddling with minutiae -- what about the story you actually read here, James? I love the ways in which the chapter holds me at arm’s length from the characters I expect to be closest to: you’ll notice that by the time we get to the party we have had only a handful of sentences from Bilbo, and Frodo hasn’t appeared on stage at all (having only been referenced a little in passing). Instead, what we get is a lengthy conversation in a cozy hobbit inn between the Gaffer Gamgee and Old Noakes and Daddy Twofoot, three of the finest-named characters in Western literature, who unpack at length for us in the audience what’s generally known locally about Bilbo and Frodo Baggins. I love this approach because, unlike The Hobbit (which places us in Bilbo’s head from basically the beginning), LOTR presents us with The Shire as essentially a character -- The Shire’s assumptions and attitudes and preferences are made very visible to us by these three geezers, and truthfully most of this chapter outside of Gandalf’s big conversations with the Baggins boys consists of Tolkien using the narration to give us insight into the thoughts and reactions of regular hobbits in the Shire. I think this is crucial, along with some of the other work Tolkien’s about to do in Chapters 3 and 4, to establishing the Shire in such a way that we can continue to understand Frodo’s connection to it fully enough to get its emotional power for him.
Another thing I love in this chapter is how fully Tolkien can make us feel the Ring’s ominous power without us knowing anything at all about it, or about the Rings of Power in general. We see its bewitching power over Bilbo, which any reader of the Hobbit will find especially unsettling when we get to the mumbled “my precious” lines. We see how the Ring intimidates Gandalf, who in this chapter manages to be bowed and bent by contending with Bilbo over it, uneasy to take it into his possession for even an evening, and scared, really, as evidenced by his repeated instructions to Frodo. This is a side of the wizard that’s pretty much unexplored in The Hobbit, and it’s a good move by Tolkien to use that as leverage with us, his audience -- we know this isn’t how Gandalf handles a crisis. We can even see it work on Frodo, who’s held the Ring for less than a day when he finds himself already fumbling with it in his pocket and yearning to disappear -- we don’t know yet how unsettling that ought to make us feel, but I think it’s conveyed in a way that would make even folks unfamiliar with this story more than a little concerned about this Ring and what it does to people’s minds.
I could keep talking about Bilbo and Gandalf, of course, but I think the character I’m most struck by on this read-through is Frodo, who will be the central character of this narrative (to the extent that a single character has that designation) anyway, so let’s talk Frodo Baggins. There’s a little melancholy around Frodo from the beginning: he’s barely arrived in the story when we learn of the tragic drowning deaths of his two parents, and when we finally see him actually “on stage”, so to speak, it’s right after Bilbo’s disappearance. The text informs us that he wanted to laugh at Bilbo’s antics, but it also calls him “deeply troubled” by his cousin/adopted father’s departure, and the image of him draining a glass silently to Bilbo’s health and then departing the party in silence sure doesn’t strike me as a guy who thinks it’s a hoot that Bilbo made Otho Sackville-Baggins’s monocle pop off his face. Frodo is going to have to pull off a remarkable collection of character traits in order to “work” in this story -- resilient, naïve, loyal, merciful, determined, and plenty more -- and I wonder how much of it I can see in him already at the tender age of 33. I think there’s more than a little of it on display in handling the chaos of “The Day After The Party” -- about which, hey, thanks Bilbo for leaving the mess to others to clean up -- but he’s also got some growing up to do. It’s kind of fun to see that the friendship established here on the page is between him and Merry Brandybuck -- we’ll have to wait for our first glimpse of Sam Gamgee in the flesh -- since my recollection as a book reader is that I always thought of Merry as a lot more substantial and less silly than the various film adaptations have made him seem (as for Peregrin Took, well, Pippin, you’re the life of the party), and I’m curious if I can actually see that on the page this time around.
One last thing -- we don’t know it at the time, since we don’t really know about the Ring yet, but this chapter depicts one of the most miraculous and significant events in the entire story, since in it we see Bilbo Baggins give up the One Ring and walk out his front door. Sure, it takes some serious arguments with a powerful wizard (along with the siren call of some good dwarf buddies and the idea of a Road that will lead all the way to Erebor, maybe) to get there, but he does. As we will come to see, that kind of willpower is unavailable even to much more seemingly heroic and brave individuals, and it’s a shame that it comes so early that we can hardly remember to give Bilbo the credit he deserves. He carried an incredibly powerful and corrupting magical artifact for six decades, and in the end he left it on the mantelpiece. Props to you, Bilbo Baggins. And now, on to The Shadow of the Past.