[davem]

Any significance in the fact that this chapter begins with Frodo waking up? On his return to the Shire he tells Merry that its 'like falling asleep again'. The last chapter ended with Frodo falling into a dreamless sleep. Its like a threshold has been crossed by Frodo's falling asleep, yet in a sense he's actually 'waking up'. His life in the Shire is the 'dream' from which he awakens into the wide world, & at the end he falls asleep again.

I find it strange in a way - the Shire is our mundane world, the world we live our lives in. Middle earth is a fantastical realm of Elves & wizards & monsters. Yet through Frodo Tolkien seems almost to be saying that the Shire is the dreamworld & Faerie is true waking reality. The hobbits who go off & have adventures are the ones who 'wake up' from the collective dream of the Shire. And its a wizard, in Bilbo & Frodo's case (& as Bilbo mentions at the beginning of the Hobbit its also Gandalf who inspires other hobbits to run off & have adventures) who begins it all. Gandalf is the 'awakener', the one who arouses people to go & live life & have adventures, & do important things, meaningful things. He seems to spend a lot of his time waking people up - Theoden springs to mind - or trying to - Denethor.

Perhaps this chapter & the last are where it all begins, the 'transition phase' - the last one had Black riders & Elves, but the Black Riders were almost like nightmares, & the Elves like a waking dream, like images which float through the mind just before we fall asleep, or fully wake up - which is what Frodo does at the end of the last chapter. Now he is waking up, & the things which previously were dreams (good & bad) become increasingly real. In the first chapter Frodo had dreamed (though its not mentioned that he had these dreams while asleep (because he was always asleep in the Shire?)) of 'crossing the River one day'. At the end of this chapter he's at the edge of that river, about to cross it & 'wake up' fully on the other side.

H-I Thanks for those links. I think Child's reference to Tolkien's original conception of Maggot as being not a hobbit, but a creature like Tom ties in well with Estelyn's comparison of Mrs Maggot/Goldberry. So, we'd have Farmer & Mrs Maggot symbolising the ordered, 'domesticated' life, & Tom Goldberry the more natural life in the wild wood, but both couples would in a sense be 'archetypes' - well, in the early drafts Tom does call himself an 'aborigine'. I can't help feeling that there is some underlying symbolism of these 'archetypal' couples running beneath the surface of LotR.