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Sidecast - LOTR: An Author's Journey, Book 1 Chapter 6 · Mythmakers

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  Hello and welcome to a lookmaker's sidecast, the Lord of the Rings, a writer's journey.
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  And we have reached today, Chapter 6.
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  Now I'm needing you through this, and my name is Julia Golding.
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  I run the Oxford Centre for Fantasy, but I'm also an author.
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  So when I approach Lord of the Rings, which is my favourite book, I'm always doing it
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  from the point of view of being a fellow author and admiring and envying in many cases
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  the skill that Tolkien's put into writing his novel.
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  And I'm hoping that by showing you some of the things I see as an author that you'll
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  enjoy Lord of the Rings even more on your next read through.
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  And today we have reached Chapter 6, which is called the Old Forest.
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  That's in the first book of the Fellowship of the Ring.
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  Now the headline here is we're finally getting out of the shire.
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  Hooray, it's taken a while to get to this point.
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  And I think some of the really interesting things about this chapter is that it's a transition
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  really into a, we're shaking off some of the last of the younger tone that Tolkien started
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  with.
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  If you remember, he thinks his writing a continuation of the Hobbit.
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  So there are times where it seems more in a nursery than in a sort of adult world.
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  It sort of fluctuates between those tones, but also we do get the deepening shadows,
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  which I think is more indicative of what is to come.
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  Anyway, you can think about it in four sections.
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  The first one is the short passage of actually getting up and leaving.
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  The second part is the frustration of trying to pass through the Old Forest.
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  The third section is the episode where they get trapped by Old Man Willow.
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  And then the final section is when Tom Bombardill comes to the rescue and they finally escape
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  the forest.
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  But first of all, let's look at them getting up and getting ready to go.
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  A couple of things here, which I think are worth pointing out, is that we've now got
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  Mary as joined us as part of the first stage of this fellowship.
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  And we get to see their roles.
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  What jobs they take before they add to their number are gone and the other characters.
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  So basically it's, Mary is the organiser.
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  He's the one who provides the ponies and has packed things up.
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  He also has the money, the purse, and he has the local knowledge in this section.
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  He's the one who knows how to get out of the shire.
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  He's the one who knows the most about the Old Forest.
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  Sam is shown as the practical one because he's making breakfast.
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  Pippin, we don't hear much about, which is kind of typical, wonderfully typical, Pippin.
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  And then we get Frodo as the last to be roused as like the senior officer.
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  So if you're putting them in their sort of military roles, you've got Mary as like the
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  quartermaster.
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  Sam as the servant, the Batman, that means the valet or the servant to an officer.
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  Pippin is just a junior officer, maybe, because he's quite posh, isn't he, being a tuk.
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  And Frodo is the commander of this little group.
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  I think it's particularly fine.
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  The opening of this chapter with his evocation of autumn.
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  I'm always struck by how accurate the descriptions are.
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  That's why I feel reading Lord the Rings is almost as good as going for a walk,
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  particularly in this case, how sound travels in a mist.
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  I remember making a mistake in my very first book that I ever wrote,
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  where I had a fog.
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  And I thought about it then, because I hadn't tested it, that fog muffle sound in the same way
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  as your eyesight is muffled and a friend who was more clued in on nature told me,
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  none of no, it's the opposite, because the particles mean that sound travels.
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  Talking knows more or that I do about nature, because he makes that point,
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  that the one thing that comes to the fore in a mist is sound.
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  And also he's very good at just the dampness of everything.
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  He talks about every tweak dripping for those of you who live in the UK or have been here,
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  you know how accurate that is at this September time of year,
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  when things are literally just heavy with dew and dripping.
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  And there's another pattern that's set up here in this chapter.
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  I'd say it's a pattern of opening and closing.
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  It keeps being repeated.
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  And I'll refer to it again.
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  But in this case, even whilst they're still in the shire,
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  the mist is described as opening and closing behind them.
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  And then there's the lovely detail of the silver cobwebs on the hedge.
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  So lovely stuff.
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  One thing I would like to point out here is there is nothing generic about Tolkien's descriptions.
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  You always feel as though he has a very specific place in mind,
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  you know, it's exactly what he's talking about in a clear sense of place.
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  So for example, it's the little detail here that it's not paused on very long,
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  but this gate going into the forest.
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  He's thought about how this works.
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  It goes down and under a wall.
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  And then there's a gate at the other end with a key.
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  It's all you can walk every step with him in your imagination.
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  And here we've got another theme that comes up again and again in this chapter,
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  which is the foreshadowing of disaster.
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  So Fatty Bulger, who's the hobbit who doesn't go with them, Fredigar,
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  he says, as a sort of rather sad farewell,
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  I hope you don't need rescuing before the end of the day.
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  And we know if someone puts that in, it's like, yes, of course, they're going to need
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  rescuing and that happens again and again.
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  Right.
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  So imagine we're going under the hedge and we're finally in the old forest out of the shire.
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  And the first thing we get is a very hobbit discussion about stories.
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  And Pippin asks, are the stories about the wood true?
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  This is a very frequent way that Tolkien has of giving us basically background information.
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  And I felt that way in your, put that away in your locker to be used if you're thinking of writing
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  yourself because the answer to that question gives you what you need to know.
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  It introduces the history of the forest.
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  It gives you a sense of the long traditions that read to this, you know, this moment in time.
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  And it also sort of sets up where we're going to travel.
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  So Mary talks about the battle between the hobbits at war with the trees,
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  which was when the trees moved to overhang the hedge as if they wanted to invade the shire or
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  buckland. And the hobbits fought them back and build a big bonfire in bonfire glade.
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  I don't think they mentioned that to Treebeard later on, which is just as well,
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  because it sounds like he wouldn't have been impressed. He might well have thought hobbits were
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  like the lorxes at that time. But anyway, we've got the sense of there's been a history of enmity
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  between the hobbits and the trees. And that gives us that niggling feeling.
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  The prickles at the back of our neck that things are not going to go well.
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  We also have here another thing which we're going to see again in this chapter, but also it comes
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  very much to the fore in Fangorn, where there's mention of the unintelligible language of trees that
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  they move. There's also a moment when a ranch is dropped in response to Frodo singing a song to
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  cheer them up. So we have here maybe already the seeds of the ants are glanted in Tolkien's mind,
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  and it's where he wants to go. He doesn't go there fully in this chapter. The old banwillo is more
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  like a horn, which is the semi-awake trees that we seem later, or even his own kind of thing.
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  But Tolkien's clearly playing with this idea of trees as a kind of threat and as a danger.
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  We also get the idea there is a hint of paths, something making the paths that are leading the
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  hobbits on. This is where we're beginning to have that pattern of things opening and closing,
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  hurting them in a direction they don't necessarily want to go. It means that when things happen
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  that they get lost that they get up the hill, it feels earned, not just a coincidence that they
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  want into danger, things are set against them. And here we have a very Tolkien theme which comes up
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  again and again, which is the tricksy path, the path that doesn't take you where you want to go.
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  And that's a very concrete example of the need and also has to put obstacles in the path of
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  the main characters. It's very literal in this case. You can't get where you want to go,
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  but you need to make your heroes suffer to get where they want to go. They can't just walk straight
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  to breathe. That's not a very good story. In that case you would do the cinematic cut, which is what
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  Peter Jackson chose to do. So the other thing that Tolkien does, he measures out this feeling of
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  frustration and then lightens it with a feeling of relief. Otherwise the hobbits would just turn
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  around and go back even so early on. So here we have this growing sense of their feet they feel
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  watched, they're unnerved. Pipin of course is the first to crack. He lets out a cry, but it's
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  described as if it's muffled by a heavy curtain. Again, that idea of woods being muffling and
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  suffocating comes up again later in Fangorn. And Frodo, whose head we are in most of the time,
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  is having misgivings this early on that he's taken this path. And just at the point where he might
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  be saying, okay, let's go back home, try a different route. They find the bonfire glade. Things open
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  out. So it's been closed, it opens out. And I love the detail here of the fire weed, which echoes
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  the bonfire, the fire that was. So there's a memory of what the trees would have been a massacre
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  in the weeds that are growing in this bonfire. So you get a sense that it's not forgotten.
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  So the hobbits are encouraged by reaching this opening, but as readers we have that kind of
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  fairy tale story knowledge, don't we, that it's a bad idea to follow what seems to be the easy road.
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  So we have a sense that they are going to walk straight into danger, as Freddy Garts said.
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  So after the muffling, we now get the hot and stuffy. So we get the ill will of the trees pressing
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  against them. And in this section, Frodo's song, which he tries to sing to cheer them up,
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  fails. And I think this is quite interesting because if you remember in the previous chapters,
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  when they go walking, they've done quite a lot of singing, which does sort of cheer them up. It's
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  funny, delightful. The elves hear it and are attracted to them. It's a positive, but it fails in
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  the old forest. It's as almost as if it says, the hobbit power no longer rules here because they
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  are outside their home country. And Mary here voices caution. He's saying, you mustn't sing about
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  trees failing. Wait till we've cleared the forest. And again, in this opening and closing,
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  they're about to give up, but they are tempted on. Now, one of the problems is a writer about
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  describing a forest is, of course, it seems to be all but trees. And I want to point out here,
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  something that Tolkien does to help us chart our way through. First of all, he's given us one
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  landmark, which is the Bonfire Glade. We now have a second landmark, which we feel we're making
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  towards. And it's a green hilltop, which he describes as being like a bald head writing out of the
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  encircling wood. So we feel we're going somewhere. We're not escaping the forest, but we're going
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  further. We know a landmark that we can imagine. And indeed, the Hobbits in Hobbits fashion have
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  their picnic at the top of this feeling a little bit out of the forest. They're, of course,
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  they've not escaped because they're still surrounded by it. And it's from the top of that landmark,
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  the shaving crown one. They get to see the third landmark, which is the Valley of the Withie
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  Windle. And as soon as Mary says, that's the curious part of the whole forest,
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  from their vantage point up on this island in a sea of trees, we know, sure as eggs are eggs,
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  they are going to have to end up there, aren't they? And at this point, another
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  discussion could have been, well, I'm really not sure about this. If we want to go back, back
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  that discussion. But again, they're tempted on by seeing just enough to give them heart.
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  So they see the barrow, barrow down in the distance. And so they think, okay, we're encouraged
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  enough to go on. So we, this is another time around this same course, which we as a reader,
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  we're getting the idea that the Hobbits are being played with, being controlled by the outside
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  force that is probably, well, it's the force of the forest. But those of you who are keen on the
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  the Hobbit, this will also have shades of the Merkwood experience where Bilbo and the
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  Dwarves are bamboozled by the vanishing paths of Merkwood. But I think in a, not in a fantasy sense,
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  but just in an ordinary person sense, you get the strong impression that Tolkien is an experienced
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  walker, because this is the experience of anybody who goes off a footpath through a wood, it's
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  that feeling of frustration that you get in walking in nature in the English countryside. So those
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  both the fantastical is present, but it's also very grounded and very practical. It doesn't have to
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  be any magic involved to get lost in a wood. There's some wonderful descriptions in this part,
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  in this part, about as they come off this hill. And I just wanted to read a couple of them because
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  they seem to show just what a brilliant wordsmith Tolkien was. As they come off, he talks about
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  the ground grew soft and in place is boggy. Springs appeared in the banks and soon they found
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  themselves following a brook that trickled and babbled through a weedy bed. So that sentence
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  soft and springy and slow. In contrast, the next sentence, then the ground began to fall rapidly,
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  and the brook growing strong and noisy, flowed and leaped swiftly downwards. The pace is up,
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  and it firms up like the land that's being described. Love all of that, it's just wonderful
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  descriptions. And then we get the absolute piester resistance, which is the
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  description of the valley of the withy window, and it starts with the line. It was a golden afternoon.
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  And you feel as you read this, almost like you are going to sleep with them. A golden afternoon
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  of late sunshine lay warm and drowsy upon the hidden land between. In the midst of it,
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  they're wound lazily a dark river of brown water, bordered with ancient willows, arched over
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  with willows blocked with fallen willows and flecked with thousands of faded willow leaves.
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  Now that repetition of willow is totally intentional. It's weaving a spell around us,
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  as a sense almost of like an incantation. And early on here, there is a hint that the
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  spell we're about to stumble into is already being woven. Wonderful stuff. Just as a little
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  by the by, not far from Tolkien's house in Northmore Road, which is where he was when he was writing
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  this, is a river in Oxford called the char well. And the char well, as it winds its way,
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  well, if you go upstream from the char well, you find it is lined by willow trees. A lot of them
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  are very old with these cracked trunks that you can get inside. So he didn't have to go far to
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  find the kind of trees he is describing. I mean, really not far. It's a 10 minute walk from his
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  house and he could be in the char well valley, which particularly in those days before the development
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  of Oxford would have felt a very sleepy place indeed. So you can find inspiration on your doorstep.
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  So we again have this little discussion between Mary and Pippin about whether or not the path
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  that is that Mary has found is going to lead them anywhere. And because we've been trained now,
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  not to trust paths, we don't trust this one either. Though it turns out that this is one we
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  can trust because it leads us to Tom Bombardill. But at this point, before we know that,
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  there is those sense of security about that path. And the next section in the story, because there's
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  a little line break, is we stumble into the spell. And one of the signals for that is after having
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  described the buzzing of the pesky flies, suddenly everything goes silent. It's very creepy,
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  except for the creaking of old man Willow. I don't know if we've ever heard a tree creak.
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  I was once had the privilege of seeing those very great big fur trees in barring country,
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  and the biggest trees in the world. And one of the extraordinary things about those trees is
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  they creak as they sway. I don't know if Willow trees creak, but this one does. I haven't been out
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  to listen to a Willow tree recently, but I imagine Tolkien had. And we are swept up in the spell.
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  The language here is sombulent. The characters are having hard time stringing words together.
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  And it sort of drags you down the way to this. It is because spells are often language, we are
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  finding the spell of the language that is used to describe this, having an effect on us as a reader.
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  If you listen to the audio version of that, it's even clearer. And it leads us to this moment,
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  which has one of the most brilliant, unusual descriptions that Tolkien has for the
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  natural world, where Frodo is sitting on a bough that is leaning over the water. And he talks
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  about seeing the roots straining down to drink. But he described them as nild dragonets.
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  We're in the world where smoug the dragon lives. Those little dragons roots straining down to
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  drink at the water, which perfectly sums up that kind of knotted appearance, sorry, the knotted
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  appearance of tree roots trying to reach the river. And of course, he falls asleep suddenly.
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  Now's a moment to switch from Frodo to Sam. If you will remember that the idea about the point
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  of view in this story is Frodo is compiling the history of the War of the Ring by the accounts
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  of his friends. So this is Sam's account now that he's folding in here of what happened next.
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  And we get the sense of the stubbornness of Sam if we haven't already got that idea in our head.
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  And also his practicality. So when he drags Frodo is thrown into the river, when he drags him out,
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  Frodo says the tree threw him in. Sam's first instinct is to say you just dropped off the sleep. He
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  gives the, you know, the most straightforward answer you can imagine. But then of course we see
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  that actually probably Frodo was correct because Mary and Pippin have been taken captive by the tree.
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  Pippin's been swallowed up and Mary is half in half out. And here we might have a nod to Shakespeare
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  potentially because those of you who know your tempest, Ariel is freed from a tree by
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  Prospero. That's beginning of his service to the Wizard Prospero. He's being freed from a tree
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  where he was trapped by which his curse. Anyway, not having Prospero on hand, Frodo and Sam are left
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  to try and work out how to free their friends. They talk about axes. They decide they couldn't
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  do enough damage to with their little hatchet that they have with them. And Sam comes up the idea
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  of actually setting fire to the tree on the far side from where the friends are. And this is an echo
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  of course of how the Hobbits fought the trees in the bonfire glade. And here we get the warning from
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  Mary who's the tree is obviously communicating to him in some way. We're not sure it's like a
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  whispery voice or he just knows what the tree is saying. The tree is saying don't do it. And
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  because he will squeeze him in half. It's a horrible claustrophobic image there.
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  This is quite scary stuff if he thought he was still writing for children. I find all this quite
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  disturbing. I'd love to give you a nightmare. This is I think the Nadir, the lowest point for the Hobbits
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  in the Old Forest. And of course it's at this point where things shift. And we get the arrival
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  of Tom Bombadil. And it's interesting to see that one of the first things that happens as he
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  approaches is the Willow Wind, this unnatural wind which is called the Willow Wind by talking
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  stops. Things are about to reverse. Okay I think it's now time to stop and consider Tom Bombadil.
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  Now Tolkien was a writer who wrote by Discovery. He hadn't planned. So in some ways what he's
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  doing here is throwing in elements of things he knows. And one element he had in his stories that
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  he told his children was this character Tom Bombadil. He had written poems about him that preexists
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  the poetry in this section. And it's based on a toy that was given to the Tolkien children which
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  was like a little figurine of a guy with a yellow hat and a feather and a blue coat. I mean it's
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  what's described here. So he's folding in a familiar thing from the Tolkien nursery stories.
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  But yet he's also growing him into a different role because this isn't a nursery story. He's
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  coming to the realization that this isn't that kind of Hobbit Mark II story. And so he takes on
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  shades of being like the mythological figure of the Green Man or the God Pan, a forest man,
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  not quite a man, a forest entity who is powerful and at one with the wood that he is in.
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  Though the poetry and the appearance are comic and lighthearted, he laughs, he talks in
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  rhyming couplets with lots of nonsense, ringeting, dillow type, little tags which are actually
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  the sort of thing you find in medieval folk songs. So again it's a sense where an older language
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  but it's also odd. It doesn't feel necessarily organic to this world because I think it is a
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  character transported in. I think he succeeds. The oddest thing for me actually is the clothing
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  that these strong colours of blue and yellow stand out, push him out, foreground him.
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  So he doesn't fit the value he's in. I know that Tom Bombardieu is one of some people's favourite
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  character. I think it's partly because he's like the adult who comes in the room when you're
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  having a night terror as a child and he can dispel the fears quickly and easily. It's a relief
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  and he's also in a way a voice of nature, representing nature. But there is something
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  challenging, shall we say, maybe that's as far as I'll go, challenging about
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  making him folding him into middle earth. He never white fits, which is understandable
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  because he's been brought in from the outside and also talking sort of, I think, recognises
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  that by saying he's not part of this story, if you're projecting forward to the council of Elron,
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  they don't use him because his concerns are so different from the concerns of the characters
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  in this story that he wouldn't see the importance of what they're trying to achieve.
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  Yeah, so anyway, let's carry on with Tom. He comes in like the adult who dispels the night fears,
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  even his speech has poetic rhythms, so he's always in a way singing. And the next little bit,
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  so he is able to, like, quickly and easily release the Hobbits, tell off, oh, Bam Willow,
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  and says come home for tea with me. Again, that feels a bit nursery, that solution, doesn't it?
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  This is where I think we still got the echo of the Tolkien nursery tale still clinging on here.
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  And the Hobbits follow on after him, and they are chased to the haven of Tom's home
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  through basically the scary things of the night, the whispering things that seem to be following them.
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  And what's interesting here is that these dark things are nothing to do with Saron. This is not
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  anything that Saron has touched or got any influence on. It's something older and
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  deeper than Saron, who of course is only a relative newcomer being a servant of Morgoth.
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  These things who have existed way beyond all of that, which is a bit like Tom.
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  And one of the things this gives is the sense of the depth of Middle Earth, that even this massive
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  story that we're part of is but a small part happening on top of a much older and deeper,
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  longer history. And finally, at the end of the chapter, we escape the old forest. And this is
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  signaled by the fact that the eaves of the forest are trimmed and clipped and everything is under
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  control. There's a stable, there's a house with golden light coming out the door. And we get
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  another character who's an oddity in Middle Earth, which is Goldbury. She's introduced again with
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  poetry. She also uses like her partner, husband, spouse and not quite sure what her forever person.
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  Anyway, she sings in couplets like him. And she's another, she is equal to Tom in both being a part
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  and of this story. We never really understand how river daughters fit into the wider picture.
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  Are they like the sort of demigods in some ways? It's never really followed through. Probably
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  somebody has written an article on it somewhere, but I always felt that who is, if she's the river
• 29:54
  daughter, then who's the river father? There's a sort of, it was almost like a Greek sense of
• 30:05
  spirits and rising out of the natural world, which I can't remember a rising anywhere else
• 30:11
  in Middle Earth. So again, she's of Middle Earth, but also seems to be a part. And really is not
• 30:19
  mentioned again. So both Tom and Goldbury are just confined to this one little section,
• 30:26
  and except for Gandalf right at the end saying he's going to go and have a long talk with
• 30:33
  Tom Bombadil after all the the world, the ring is complete. They are living in their small
• 30:39
  little kingdom and they are not involved. So it's quite a bold move in terms of a book because this
• 30:45
  section forms the, it serves the function of being a haven, a relief, something that gives you
• 30:54
  respite from the first darkness because we're moving to a place of golden light, but it's not
• 30:59
  absolutely necessary. It's delightful, but it's not necessary. So that's what we're going to look
• 31:07
  at next in the next chapter.