LotR -- Book 1 - Chapter 04 – A Short Cut to Mushrooms

[Carorëiel]

I'm reading Fellowship now for the fifth or sixth time, and every time I'm struck by different things as I go along. In this read of "A Short Cut to Mushrooms," two things stood out that I don't think ever really occurred to me before.

I think the first may tie in with what davem was asking about prejudice:

Originally Posted by davem

One thing did strike me, though, & that's Sam's attitude to Elves on the one hand & to Bucklanders on the other. The elves he is in awe of, even though they are strangers, & one would expect him to be at least suspicious of them. The Bucklanders, on the other hand, he is suspicious of. What's Tolkien saying here about the nature of predudice?

In addition to Sam's acceptance (and awe) of the Elves and suspicion of the Bucklanders, we have the display of the Bucklanders' attitude toward those who live in Hobbiton. Farmer Maggot says, "'You should never have gone mixing yourself up with Hobbiton folk, Mr. Frodo. Folk are queer up there.'" This is, of course, the inverse of what the Gaffer says in "A Long Expected Party" when he's telling the story of how Frodo was orphaned: "'Anyway: there was this Mr. Frodo left an orphan and stranded, as you might say, among those queer Bucklanders.'" This bit with Farmer Maggot had always seemed to be nicely amusing in the same sort of at-home-with-the-hobbits vein as much of the opening chapters, but this time through I got to thinking about just how good Tolkien is at subtly weaving social commentary through the narrative. (This certainly isn't the first time he does it in Fellowship; I just hadn't picked up on this instance of it before.) Of course, everyone is queer to someone else, and no one, really, is queer at all.

The second thing that jumped out at me has to do with Merry's appearance at the end of the chapter and the brief suspicion that he is a Black Rider. My father read LotR to me for the first time when I was very young, so I can't remember not knowing what was going to happen at any particular juncture. I can't remember experiencing this scene for the first time and not knowing that the rider was really Merry and that Frodo, Sam, Pippin, and Farmer Maggot were in no danger at that point. So, as I was reading the chapter this time, I tried to imagine reading it for the first time. And what struck me was just how much of a relief it would be to expect the horrible and unknown but get a friend. Of course, this is something Tolkien does so many times throughout LotR (in "The Shadow of the Past," Frodo and Gandalf suspect a spy outside the window, but it turns out to be Sam; in "At the Sign of the Prancing Pony" and "Strider," Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin suspect the ranger of being a potential foe, but he turns out to be a friend and a guide; in "The White Rider," Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas fear they have encountered Saruman, but it turns out to be Gandalf; and so on) that one might even refer to it as a recurring theme. Is there a connection with Tolkien's theory of the eucatastrophe here?