LotR -- Book 1 - Chapter 05 - A Conspiracy Unmasked

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

Originally Posted by Estelyn Telcontar

Merry tells his companions (and us readers) that Farmer Maggot knows more than he shows; if he really went into the Old Forest, he was more adventurous than we would expect! We do know (from the Tom Bombadil poems) that he kept in contact with Bombadil - I wonder, which of them kept the other in touch with the wide world?!

Both, I believe, each in his own way. What I thought when reading this was that Farmer Maggot is a prototype of a Hobbit who looks far beyond his own Hobbit-hole and fields. I remembered Gandalf's words in the Quest for Erebor, when he explains why he chose Bilbo and started to think about hobbits in the first place:

Originally Posted by UT

They had begun to forget: forget their own beginnings and legends, forget what little they had known about the greatness of the world. It was not yet gone, but it was getting buried: the memory of the high and the perilous. But you cannot teach that sort of thing to a whole people quickly. There was not time. And anyway you must begin at some point, with some one person. I dare say he was "chosen" and I was only chosen to choose him; but I picked out Bilbo.

With all respect to old Mr. Baggins, I believe Farmer Maggot was a case of a Hobbit who did not forget yet. Not that he would know the tale of Gil-Galad or things like that, but as I said, he "saw further and deeper" (to borrow words that don't belong here at all ) that most of the hobbits.

Originally Posted by Esty

We have a brief foreshadowing of things to come here in the account of Fatty Bolger's plans to stay in the cottage and play Frodo to keep up pretences.

This time I caught myself being afraid for Fatty. Completely forgetting all I know about the future (but at the same time having in mind all I know about the Nazgul!), I was immersed in the story and thought "oh my, what if the Riders indeed come, you shouldn't joke about things like that, Pippin - what a horror!" Isn't this also saying something about the spell of Tolkien's work, being capable of taking the reader in even for second, third... (in my case about sixtieth ) time?

Nevertheless, you may notice that during most of the discussion, Fatty remains quiet. He asks about the mushrooms in the beginning and then, as all the conspiracy is being revealed, he is completely silent. One even wonders if he had his part in the conspiracy at all. And then, only at the very end of the chapter, Tolkien "remembers" there is some Fatty sitting silent at the table - or this is the impression it makes - and suddenly floods us with information about him. Not bad for remembering him, but when one already knows him and reads the previous text, he must get the feeling that he's gone invisible for the conversation.

Originally Posted by Esty

The chapter closes with Frodo's dream - an interesting subject for thought and discussion.

Definitely. I caught myself thinking "and what the heck is that"? I am pretty sure, when I read it for the first time, that I thought "bah, some silly dream, give us more Black Riders or Elves". Soon, we are going to have one more dream - in Bombadil's house, and this time indeed visionary. But this sequence of Frodo's dreams begs for a question - why did it happen? And a question about this dream in particular - why do you think it ended the way it ended? I mean, yes (with little foreshadowing), Merry was banging on the door and awakened Frodo. That can even appear in the dream as the thunder, and the light in the sky may be connected with it (as, even though Merry had light with him, he was outside the door, so his light has no connection with the light in Frodo's dream). But still, I always had the feeling that there was also inner reason, inside the dream, why Frodo couldn't reach the tower - it made the impression that some Power stopped Frodo. "You cannot pass!" "Not this time! You cannot see the Sea yet!" Thunder. Clash. Something like that.
As for the "setting" of the dream, this also raises one question. Are we talking the White Towers here; resp. one of them, or something else? The thing is, the tower stood there "all alone", while there were three towers on Emyn Beraid. But maybe this is simply the dream logic - in any case, the appearance of the tower is quite explainable by Frodo's subconscious - earlier, we were told that the Hobbits knew about the Towers, and sometimes in fair weather they could see them, and said that one can look at the Sea from there.

I also consider important that we learn something more about Frodo this way - that he often dreamt about the sea, resp. its sound. This puts him in the line of "many Children of Ilúvatar who hearken still to the voices of the Sea, and yet know not for what they listen" (Ainulindalë). Yet, Frodo never heard the sound itself. Now that is strange. How comes? Did his knowledge of this sound depend only on the visions (erm... hearions? ) in his dreams, or did he, for example, earlier meet an Elf who told him about the sound and with the Elven gift, when he spoke, Frodo indeed heard the sound?