LotR -- Book 1 - Chapter 03 - Three Is Company

[Bêthberry]

I think it is Fordim who has cottoned on to what was bothering me about Servant Sam and Flip Pip--Fordim with his literary eye. I shall have to work harder to reach you literalists who love to quote the Letters! Sauce and Aiwendil and Silmiel, it is how the Edwardian structures were presented by Tolkien which drew my questions, not simply the purported historical references to the social organisation of the time. Remember, in On Fairey Stories Tolkien suggested that stuff gets into the Cauldron of Story not because it is historicallly true and verifiable(which it may be), but because the story demands it.

As the book goes on, of course, we move into an older and more fuller and richer form of the master-servant relationship: lord and vassal; leige and thane; King and subject. Tolkien wishes in the book to recover (and I'm using this word in his sense of it) that older form of bonds between socially differentiated people. These bonds were (ideally, at least) based on love and respect, mutual regard and a two-way recognition of the duty each owed the other (the King owes the subject protection and guidance, the subject owes the King obedience). It's precisely this kind of relationship that Aragorn forges with the people who come to love him.

So perhaps we are meant to be disturbed by Sam's fawning and Pippin's callow mindedness, for these are things that are going to be transformed by a better and fuller form of relationship by the end of the book?

Exactly! It is the reciprocity of the relationships among all the orders which I think is missing here. In, as you say, its ideal form. This was Tolkien's point about overmod in Beorhtnoth's folly at Maldon. He acted out of personal challenge--chivalry--and forgot the heroic ideal, what he owed his people. As did Beowulf. Squatter has made this point so much better than I. I shall return later to add the link to his very fine essay.

Seen from this perspective, I think it is quite right that we are made uneasy (or at least I am) by all this 'sirring'. It 'sirs' the pot for later...

But about this evolution of evil, Fordim, well, I don't want to get mixed up with your Monster thread. But Frodo's first 'meeting' with the Black Rider, when he overhears the Gaffer's conversation, well, we don't really get the full significance of that until later when Sam repeats the Gaffer's story to Frodo, after the two other near meetings the Rider, do we? To me, that is one of the finest parts of this chapter: only at the end does the reader begin to understand that overheard scene. Or upon rereading. Tolkien, a brilliant bit of story structuring!