This is yet another chapter about endings & departures, but also one that looks forward with some hope - Butterbur & the inhabitants of Bree feel things are getting worse by the day & have effectively lost hope, but Gandalf & the Hobbits arrive with news of the new king & the return of the Rangers. It is another example of Eucatastrophe in a sense. In the midst of darkness & hopelessness an unexpected light shines suddenly.
In this chapter, as in the last one, Frodo is present at the begining & then pretty much disappears till the end - it seems this is to be his fate - he disappears quietly into the background & is hardly noticed. Yet two of the most significant & moving lines of the book are uttered by him:
'There is no real going back. Though I may come to the Shire, it will not seem the same; for I shall not be the same. &
'Well here we are, just the four of us that started out together,' said Merry. 'We have left all the rest behind, one after another. It seems almost like a dream that has slowly faded.'
'Not to me,' said Frodo. 'To me it feels more like falling asleep again.'
‘There is no real going back’ for Frodo not just because he has been wounded, but because he has been
awakened. Going back to the Shire will be going back to ‘sleep’. He tells Merry that it will be ‘like falling asleep again’ but we’re not told
how he says it - is he happy to be falling asleep again, or sad?
A couple of things struck me on reading through the drafts in HoMe: first, where Frodo is telling Gandalf about the continuing pain from his wounds, he says
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‘Its my shoulder, the wound aches. And my finger too, the one that is gone, but I feel pain in it, and the memory of darkness is heavy on me.’
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I couldn’t help wondering whether this was meant to refer to the common experience of ‘phantom limbs’ experienced by amputees, or whether it was meant to have greater significance in terms of symbolising Frodo’s incapability of letting go of the Ring.
Second,(& here I’m jumping ahead to the end of the chapter) when Gandalf tells the Hobbits he is not coming to the Shire with them, Tolkien notes:
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Gandalf should stay at Bree. He should say ‘You may find trouble, but I want you to settle it for yourselves. Wizards should not interfere in such things. Don’t crack nuts with a sledgehammer, or you’ll crack the kernels. And many times over anyway. I’ll be along sometime’.
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Many of us wonder why Gandalf leaves the Hobbits to face the dangers of the Shire alone. His reasons sound good from one perspective - if he doesn’t know that Saruman is in the Shire then its a Hobbit problem, & not one for Wizards to meddle in. Certainly, at the time of writing the above note Saruman was not ‘Sharkey’ (in fact ‘Ruffian Sharkey’ was an orc-man dispatched by Frodo with Sting). But by the final version it
is Saruman who is at the heart of the darkness in the Shire, & Gandalf knows
something is wrong with the Shire (& whatever that ‘something’ is it is more than the rumour that Butterbur tells him. He knows about the Gate that will be locked to the returning Hobbits) - can it be that he has
no idea that Saruman is in the Shire, or is it that he realises that Frodo has grown while Saruman has ‘shrunk’, & that even if Frodo has to confront the Wizard in the end it is the Hobbit who will gain the victory?
Its interesting that in the end Frodo will confront ‘Sharkey’ but that in the early version Frodo will kill Sharkey the orc-man, while in the final one he will attempt to save the life of Sharkey/Saruman. Anyway, that’s the next chapter.
Things get darker, the mood more uneasy for the Hobbits. Its as if, while their news brings relief to Butterbur (its the ‘nicest chat he’s had in a month of Mondays’), his news news brings them new uncertainty & fear. They realise that while there may be a king again he is a long way away. The peaceful, bucolic dream of the Shire & Bree has turned nightmare while they’ve been away ‘saving the world’.
The Hobbits turn for home - once again they leave Bree heading into danger - & say their final Goodbye - to Gandalf. The fantastical ‘dream’ of Wizards, Elves & monsters, & heroes with magic swords is (for most of them) over. They are waking up to ‘real’ life, & its going to prove nasty, cruel, dirty & painful for all of them.
I said the fantastical ‘dream’ was over for most of them. For Frodo it isn’t, because he
hasn’t left behind that world of Wizards & Elves, of magic & mystery. He actually became a
part of it. In a way that none of the others did he became an ‘archetype’, a figure of story. His place is in that world of legend. The waking world of the Shire will be for him from now on a dark dream from which he will struggle impotently for years to awaken himself. When he succeeds in doing so, he will re-enter the mythic world forever.
For now though, he will have to return to the world he was born in & finish his book. That book will be the record of a world gone forever. That, even more than that final chance of repentance (& thus of salvation) he offers Saruman, is why he couldn’t either stay at Rivendell with Bilbo, or go with Gandalf to visit Bombadil.
Oh, & Sam gets his Bill back.
