Book II, Chapter 9: The Great River
We are almost done with The Fellowship of the Ring portion of this journey, and so it’s time for me to talk about the copy of Fellowship I first read, which I no longer possess. (For the record, for this chapter I read the second volume in the Millennium Edition series, so the book actually in my hands is titled Book II: The Ring Goes South.) I want to tell a little of the story of the book I first read -- and nod in the direction of two important women in the story of how Tolkien reached an American audience, both of whom passed away very recently, Betty Ballantine at the age of 99(!) last year, and Barbara Remington at the age of 90 just this January.
Tolkien’s initial hardback editions of The Lord of the Rings had slowly gathered buzz with a niche in the reading market, and as it happens his books had arrived at the right time for the publishing phenomenon they would become -- paperback bindings were becoming easier to turn out at sufficient quality to warrant selling larger (and more appealing) books in that format, and in the United States there was a move from the “trade paperback” format into what we generally call the “mass market paperback” format. One legally adventurous publisher, Ace Books, decided in 1965 that the copyright situation for The Lord of the Rings was unclear in the USA, arguing that Houghton Mifflin, who published the first American edition, hadn’t secured an American copyright. They went ahead and published their own fly-by-night mass market edition of The Fellowship of the Ring, which sold well to the college crowd, but the edition was pretty lousy (since they weren’t actually working with the author or with much care, it seems) and certainly no royalties were going to Tolkien. Houghton Mifflin scrambled a response -- the issuing of the Second American Edition (which I just read, of course, in hardback form) which they made sure had a very clear copyright status, and the selling of the paperback rights, legally, to Ian and Betty Ballantine over at Ballantine Books. The Ballantines wanted to revolutionize the paperback industry -- they had launched the Bantam Books imprint to great success (Betty used her dad’s wedding gift of $500 to get themselves started), and had struck out on their own with Ballantine Books in the early 1950s, publishing folks like Ray Bradbury. They badly wanted to publish The Lord of the Rings, and secured the rights from Houghton Mifflin for $2,500 per title. They needed to rush a book into print, and so they contacted cover artist Barbara Remington, who had done the original American paperback cover for The Hobbit some years prior.
Remington had never read The Lord of the Rings, unfortunately, and the Ballantines told her there was no time for her to do so before producing covers for them, since they needed to rush to print and drive the unauthorized Ace copies off the shelves. She produced a set of three iconic and completely bonkers covers, as a result, with imagery that really boggles the mind of any reader familiar with the books -- just have a gander at the image, with the frog in the tree and emus (I think?) grazing in the distance, etc., shared here on Brian Sibley's blog: https://briansibleysblog.blogspot.com/2017/04/hobbits-and-lions-and-emus-oh-my.html Remington was a skilled artist and a fantasy fan, who later said that, after she’d read the books, she was glad she’d drawn without any knowledge of them, since they were so great an achievement that she would have felt inadequate to illustrating them with actual scenes from the text. I think she undersells herself there, but in the end, what matters is that she got a set of covers to the Ballantines and they got the books out -- Tolkien fans of a certain age will definitely remember those books, since for at least a decade the Ballantine paperbacks bore a statement on the back directly from Tolkien that said “This paperback edition, and no other, has been published with my consent and co-operation. Those who approve of courtesy (at least) to living authors will purchase it and no other.” Tolkien fans of a certain age might also remember the poster, which is just Remington’s Fellowship cover with the caption “Come to Middle Earth”. In the late 1960s, when Lord of the Rings fandom was truly indie and for the most part the only people who knew Tolkien were counterculture college kids writing “Frodo Lives!” on subway station walls and listening to Leonard Nimoy’s "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins" while high as a kite (yes, both of those things are real), one of the markers of a really hip college kid was that poster being tacked up in their dorm room. Remington may have drawn a scene that has nothing, really, to do with the text of The Lord of the Rings, but it became so iconic that it was forever linked to the story for a generation of readers (me included). Alas, my original copy fell apart decades ago, and without knowing that it was one of the “cool” original Ballantine copies, I discarded it, thinking that I had (as I obviously do have) more than enough other copies lying around. :-) Anyway, peace to you, Betty Ballantine and Barbara Remington, and thanks for bringing Tolkien to the masses, including one beat-up copy that somehow landed on the bookshelves at my house when I was a kid (I don’t think we know for sure who put it there -- I don’t remember buying it myself, though I may well have gotten it at a thrift store somewhere for a quarter).
I know, that was a long detour, but this chapter isn’t full of a lot of material I wanted to comment on, in any case -- I’m enjoying the reading experience, but I don’t have much to say about the Brown Lands, or about Aragorn and Legolas finding a portage route around the Sarn Gebir. This stretch of the journey does, at least, cement the incredible danger of traveling with a Ringbearer -- it seems obvious that Gollum will be nearly unshakeable, if somehow they could stay in Lothlorien for a full month and yet have him pick up their trail the moment they leave that land. The ominous appearance of a Nazgul riding some horrible winged creature -- unseen by the Company since it arrives at night, and fortunately, as Gimli tells his friend, Legolas was able to fire a “mighty shot in the dark” to drop it from the sky with one arrow -- reinforces the idea that somehow Frodo draws these evil creatures to himself. How will he manage to travel all the way into Mordor without drawing their attention? He’s got a long road ahead.
It’s clear that this is weighing on Aragorn even more in this chapter than it did previously in Lothlorien. I doubt he anticipated how much his soul would be stirred by the pillars of the Argonath and the sight of Isildur (and Anorien, of course) carved in stone. The chance to right the wrongs of the past, and to restore the city his bloodline had failed and fled long ago, is so compelling to Aragorn that even without some really bad decision-making by Boromir and/or the arrival of Saruman’s shock troops, it’s hard for me to envision him agreeing to turn away from Gondor and follow Frodo into the Emyn Muil. Of course, it’s also hard to imagine him sending Frodo across the water with no one but Sam to aid him -- the counterfactual is impossible to be sure of, but I think almost certainly Legolas and Gimli would have had to be convinced to aid Frodo in that direction, and the story would have been very, very different.
Frodo is still learning how to manage himself and his impulses, which is about to be a real challenge, given how lonely his leadership obligations will be after crossing the Anduin. He does a good job holding back from a description of the Nazgul when Boromir asks -- I got a glimmer there of Gildor Inglorion when Frodo realizes that all he needs to do is call them evil, as Gildor did. But then later on that same page, when Sam is musing about the passage of time in Lothlorien, Frodo babbles about Galadriel’s secret status as a Ringbearer, forcing Aragorn to halt him and ask him to shut up about it. I’m not crazy about his decision to keep Gollum’s approach to the Fellowship secret -- but then, of course, when Aragorn wakes and Frodo lets him in on it, he learns that Aragorn has known all along and kept it secret from HIM. The Company could do with a bit more truth-telling, I think.
I raised an eyebrow at the final sentence of the chapter -- “The last stage of the Quest was before them.” -- thinking to myself “last stage? You guys have a long ways to go yet!” But then I considered that, given what’s about to happen, this is actually surprisingly far into the Ring’s journey. Frodo has taken about 350 pages to travel from Bag End to Amon Hen -- he’s only got about another 200-250 pages (depending on how we count) to get from here to Orodruin and the Cracks of Doom. It’s just that there’s a lot of other business to deal with here -- the fracturing of the Fellowship into four different storylines, by the time we reach the opening chapters of The Return of the King. So, in a sense, is the Quest about to enter its last stages? Frodo has carried the Ring slightly over 1,300 miles, and only has about 500 miles left to go (want to know how I know that? Thank the good visualization folks at The LOTR Project: http://lotrproject.com/timedistance/ ), so, yes. These 500 miles will feel like 5,000, but in terms of distance covered, he’s done most of the work already -- and he’s dodged all nine Ringwraiths, a Balrog of Moria, and the guy his adopted uncle stole the Ring from in the first place (well, “stole”). As much as I still have a good six weeks of reading still ahead of me, I’ve got to doff my cap to Frodo and congratulate him on getting this close to the finish line.
Well, all that’s left of FOTR is for us to watch in sadness at The Breaking of the Fellowship in Book II, Chapter 10, and that’s exactly what we’ll do tomorrow. Thanks for journeying with me this far!