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#19 | |
Cryptic Aura
Join Date: May 2002
Posts: 6,003
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Here I arrive (fashionably ?) late and find you all have taken up so many of the interesting ideas in this chapter! I shall simply have to try harder to find something not considered and hope for the best.
I would agree very much with Squatter about the centrality of the humour in this chapter. Tolkien had a dry wit and was cleverly able to skewer where he felt bubbles of petty foibles could be burst without cruel damage. Imagine Bilbo's delight of being able to write those gift cards without being around to face the consequences! It would appear that I belong to the smaller party here in that I do not deeply long to live in The Shire. This chapter has for me the kindly fond but wittily distanced memories of a quasi-comfortable past. Those memories to me suggest something incomplete, not wholly knowing. Although delightful, these memories of childhood, nonetheless represent something limited, maybe even naive, certainly not wise, as Gandalf is. This is the effect of the social humour for me: the wit distances the fondness. The conversation at the Ivy Bush is spot on concerning the memories and preferences of many an elder I have known: the gossipy kind of small minded concerns and petty interests. Perhaps this is because, at the age of 10, I moved across a continent and left behind a polyglot, multi-cultural culture for one decided slow and back-looking. I have pained memories of sitting listening to elders speak as the Gaffer and Daddy Twofoot (two foot tall?) do, being politely trained to be seen and not heard. Contented, complacent ignorance frustrated me no end. Indeed, this chapter brings me back to my early adolescent frustration with what I, in my teenage wisdom, felt was the stifling complacency of a community which rarely looked beyond its own gardens. I still do not like people who try to know what is going on in everybody else's life and correct it; I would rather they look at their own. (myself included!) davem raises an interesting point that The Shire reflects Tolkien's sense of 'home' from his childhood in Sarehood. Where I would differ is in thinking that World War II gave Tolkien this sense that such a world was always under threat. It seems to me that for Europe World War I was more traumatic culturally. I think of all the war poets writing bitterly about the betrayal of the heroic ideal--Anthem for a Doomed Youth springs to mind most immediately. Owen and Sassoon in particular I guess. And when I recall how many of Tolkien's friends were killed at the Somme and elsewhere in the Great War, I would tend to think that the sense of nostalgic loss accrued not to WWII but to the WWI. There's that scene, too, in the move [i]Chariots of Fire[/b] where the giddy university lads are off to France at the train station and they see the crippled war veterans eeking out a meagrely living doing menial labour at the station. (of course, my memory of the movie could be faulty!) One small point which intrigues me is that dwarves are around The Shire, for they help unload Gandalf's fireworks. Well, quite enough rambling I should say. A summary of all this and a quick other point. It seems to me--and this was I think noted early on here by others--that the chapter begins not in the middle of bang 'em up action but just as that action begins to roll. Perhaps this, too, is the storyteller coming out in Tolkien. He chose here in the first chapter to begin to develop that inexorable sense of a world passing away. He did it by focussing attention upon a rural pastoral. But here we have Frodo wanting to give Bag End to Otho and Lobelia and run off with Bilbo. Oh, those very ominous words of Gandalf-- "Expect me when you see me" and "Look out for me, especially at unlikely times." Foreshadowing indeed. The other point I shall quickly make refers to the reliability or authority of narrative. Frodo speaks with Gandalf about the ring: Quote:
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I’ll sing his roots off. I’ll sing a wind up and blow leaf and branch away. |
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