Book II, Chapter 1: Many Meetings
Well, here we are -- we cross the threshold of Book II by Frodo waking up in the House of Elrond and asking what day it is, and being greeted kindly (if a little grouchily) by Gandalf, a moment that is nearly perfect in the books and which Jackson emulates really excellently in the films. I like the peace of that moment, the sense that somehow so much has gone right without our being aware of it. We’re veterans of this story now, of course, but it’s fun to think back to what it must have been like the first time I read this, when it was a complete surprise that Gandalf was there somehow.
This is, by the way, another book change for me -- I’ve hopped to another Fellowship of the Ring copy. This is a Canadian edition, a Collins Modern Classic, which we own in a four volume boxed set (The Hobbit is included). My girlfriend -- who I had read the entire Lord of the Rings aloud to during our first year of dating (what a catch I was, eh?) because I insisted that, if she was coming with me to that opening day Fellowship of the Ring movie premiere, I wanted her to experience the book first -- had bought herself the set after loving the books enough that she needed her own copy while we were still at different universities (mine was in Canada and this edition must have been purchased on one of her visits, probably at a Chapters somewhere in Vancouver or Burnaby). She was an excellent girlfriend, but she makes an even more delightful spouse - hence my now co-owning these books. :-) The set is weird to me for a couple of reasons -- for one, the cover image just seems wrong. It’s John Howe, who’s generally a wonderful Tolkien illustrator, but I don’t understand the layout at all -- we see Gandalf and Frodo (I think, anyway -- who else could it be?) walking down the hill into Rivendell, but when would they have done that? Frodo arrived unconscious, and will leave with Gandalf and the rest of the Fellowship. And is your image of Rivendell really some castle on the Rhine? A faux Burg Eltz look from Howe is just all wrong, to me -- Imladris isn’t a castle, and even if it was, elves wouldn’t build castles that look like that. Anyway, then you flip to the back cover, and I just don’t understand how Collins hired someone to write the blurb who didn’t really know the story -- this is one of the most widely-read novels in the English language, and yet somehow it’s blurbed by someone who thinks it’s “the Crack of Doom” when it’s certainly “the Cracks of Doom” (okay, minor enough), who thinks Frodo is “a young hobbit” (even for long-lived hobbits, 50 is certainly middle-aged), who thinks the One Ring is called “the Ruling Ring of Power” (whaaaaaat are you doing, Collins?), and who manages to structure the sentence in such a way that it sort of reads as though the Ring is “the only thing that prevents the Dark Lord’s evil dominion”. Basically it’s like someone wrote a description of a bad knock-off of The Lord of the Rings, and it’s weird to me that you would do that with a famous story. Really anyone at all who had read it could at least have gotten the terminology right. Anyway, the books are kept because they’re a nice memory of a moment in time, and I’m sure you’ll see the copies of TTT and ROTK in time (I haven’t refreshed my memory about them, so we’ll see if I have covers and blurbs to complain about when we get there).
I don’t have a lot to relate about the “many meetings” that take place in this chapter by that name -- most if not all of these people will be more central in the next chapter, although it’s fun to see our first glimpses of Elrond and Gloin, two old friends to readers coming to this from The Hobbit. The reunion with Bilbo is sweet, especially since we haven’t actually seen the two of them interact -- we know Frodo and Bilbo care about each other from what each of them has said, but it’s nice to see them in conversation. Bilbo’s curiosity about the Shire is maybe a natural indicator of his getting older and more nostalgic, but I think it’s also a tie he and Frodo have to each other. The Ring wore Bilbo down and is wearing Frodo down, but their love of the simplicity of the Shire serves as a sort of protection, I think, for them both. The moment in which the Ring is shown to Bilbo worked as a sort of horror film moment in Jackson’s movie, but I like the way it’s played here -- it’s not completely clear whether it’s Bilbo whose form is warped by the Ring or if it’s Frodo’s jealousy and the hold the Ring is developing on him that leads him to see Bilbo in that way, and that ambiguity works, I think. It lets me read Bilbo’s lament immediately afterwards in two ways -- is he saying “don’t adventures ever have an end” because it makes him weary to think about how much his aged heart still desires the Ring, despite knowing that he has to let it go? Or is he saying it because he realizes now how dangerous it is for Frodo to be possessed by the love of the Ring, and that the dangers that Bilbo escaped are now Frodo’s to dare? Probably it’s a little of both.
The big set piece here, of course, is Bilbo’s poem/song about Earendil, which Frodo, having been made drowsy by the sweetness of the elvensong in the firelit hall, only slowly wakes to as it is performed. As a guy who’s already criticized Tolkien’s poetry (I dodged completely the troll doggerel that Sam apparently invents and sings, back in the last chapter -- it amused me more as a kid than it does today), I have to give him this -- the Earendil poem works for me. In part, it’s because I know more about this story than I used to. Remember Glorfindel? When he sacrificed his life in that high pass, one of the lives he saved was a seven year old boy named Earendil, the son of Tuor and Idril. Isn’t that wild? And then Earendil marries Elwing, the granddaughter of Beren and Luthien -- remember Luthien, from Strider’s song at Weathertop? And who are Earendil and Elwing’s children? The half-elven Elrond and Elros, who are each given the choice to live the lives of Men or of Elves. Elrond made the Elven choice, as we know. Elros chose the path of Men, and if we follow the line of sons and sons’ sons down from Elros, his living heir is Aragorn, son of Arathorn. So in this one poem, we are grabbing hold of a crucially important pairing that connects most of the prominent figures in Frodo’s journey right now -- that’s really lovely.
But Earendil’s story is also just incredible -- I mean, he’s a mortal who managed miraculously to sail his boat effectively into Heaven (Valinor). As Bilbo tells us, “he came unto the timeless halls / where shining fall the countless years” -- Earendil stepped into eternity. He got there thanks to the shining light of the Silmaril, which his wife, Elwing, got from her grandparents (who literally pried it from Morgoth’s Iron Crown) -- and though the Valar grant their request for aid against Morgoth, Earendil (for his trouble) earns the “undying doom”, to use Bilbo’s words, of sailing a flying boat along with the Sun, to act as the morning star. Earendil isn’t totally cut off from Middle-earth, as far as I can tell -- though Bilbo omits it, he kills a dragon….actually, he kills THE dragon, Ancalagon, whom Gandalf alluded to in Chapter 2 as basically the toughest dragon who ever lived….from the air in his flying ship during the War of Wrath. Earendil’s pretty awesome -- he’s responsible for launching Tolkien’s fictional world, since in 1914 Tolkien encounters the Old English word “earendel”, likes it a LOT in the way that only linguists can, and decides to write a poem called “The Voyage of Earendel the Evening Star” (“Eala Earendel Engla Beorhtast”), and then a mythology slowly crops up around him. This is yet another advertisement for The Silmarillion, I guess. :-)
Well, the last chapter I ran long on, and the chapter ahead is The Council of Elrond which for all I know will take two days to really cover -- it’s a hugely important conversation, and full of a lot of detail we haven’t gotten yet about what’s happening in the world of Middle-earth. So I’ll let this one be a little briefer than usual, and I’ll see you in Book II, Chapter 2!