LotR -- Book 1 - Chapter 08 - Fog on the Barrow-Downs

[davem]

I think that this chapter marks a transition, a crossing over from one world to another. We have so far been in the ‘Pagan’/Faerie tale world, the world of good & bad, where good is what benefits us, what is pleasant, & bad is what harms or threatens us. With this chapter we leave that world & enter the world of ‘Christian’ epic, the world of ‘Good’ & ‘Evil’, where the Good can require us to suffer & sacrifice ourselves, & Evil can be the easy, pleasant option - at least seemingly so at first.

And the transition seems to take place within the earth itself. Frodo goes through a death & rebirth initiation within the barrow. There is evidence that barrows & tumuli were used in this way - New Grange in Ireland was used as a place of religious gathering at dawn in mid summer, when the sun would shine through the entrance & illuminate the inside of the mound.

Frodo faces the ‘Guardian’ of the mound, in the darkness, faces his own fear & desire to escape, overcomes it, & then calls on the other, higher, Guardian for aid. The Guardian comes & liberates him. He is taken from within the earth, born again into a new world. He is one of the ‘twice born’, an initiate.

But the world he has been reborn into is not the world he had known. Even Tom, Jolly Tom, shows a different face:

There he stood, with his hat in his hand & the wind in his hair, & looked down upon the three hobbits, that had been laid on their backs upon the grass at the west(!) side of the mound. Raising his right hand he said in a clear & commanding voice:
Wake now my merry lads! Wake & hear me calling!
Warm now be heart & limb! The cold stone is fallen;
Dark door is standing wide; dead hand is broken.
Night under Night is flown, & the Gate is open!

It doesn’t require an intimate knowledge of Christian symbolism to see this figure, standing with his right hand raised, commanding the sleeping hobbits to awake, as a ‘Christ’ figure - or perhaps a ‘Merlin’ figure - as he then shows the hobbits a vision of the King to come.

Now the fairy story world will be left behind & a more ancient, a greater world will open up before them. this seems to be foreshadowed in Frodo’s ‘dream’ - yet is it a ‘dream’?

That night he heard no noises. But either in his dreams or out of them, he could not tell which , Frodo heard a sweet singing running through his mind: a song that seemed to come like a pale light behind a grey rain-curtain, & growing stronger to turn the veil all to glass & silver, until at last it was rolled back, & a far green country opened before him under a swift sunrise.

Now what’s interesting is that what happens is that Frodo, whether dreaming or not, only hears a ‘sweet singing’: the visions are his own creation, inspired by the song. He ‘dreams’ the music, & interprets it, gives it form. This is too much like the Ainulindale for coincidence. Like his last two dreams, of the elf-tower, & of Gandalf at Orthanc, this ‘dream’ is both an omen & a reflection of his psychological & spiritual state. And as the dreams move from psychological (looking down on a dark forest, hearing sniffling, then seeing the elf tower & hearing the sea - a confused mish mash of hopes/fears/desires grown out of his own confused mental state at eh time of dreaming), to ‘psychic’ (perceiving an actual event - though one that took place some days earlier in real time) to ‘spiritual’ vision, so the actual dangers he faces intensify:

The wight is a dark presence out of a dream lost on waking, a vague, ominous , faceless memory on the edge of awareness, sensation without shape or substance. Deeper, darker sleep than that sent by Willow Man, a sleep bordering on true unconsciousness, is the central concept in this far more frightening sequence, & here, as in the Old Forest, dreaming & waking are interwoven. (Flieger: A Question of Time.

his last dream confirms to him & to us that Frodo is not an ordinary hobbit, & his quest is not an ordinary quest. This dream confirms his coming rebirth. It is a confirmation to him (& to us) that he has a great task before him. He will pass through darkness, be ‘swallowed’ up, like Jonah (& Christ) & be reborn to perform his great task. The womb/tomb symbolism is blatant. He will pass through death to new life.

This episode - Old Forest-House of TB-Barrow Downs - is so similar to what happens to Smith in SoWM. We can see an echo of the King & Queen of Faery in Tom & Goldberry, & a twisted reflection of Smith’s star, which allows passage into Faerie, with the One Ring, which does the same for Frodo. Both are allowed to pass into the Otherworld - or perhaps we should say are ‘drawn into’ it. Yet Frodo’s task is to ‘save’ the otherworld he enters from an evil which would destroy it, while Smith simply wanders there, at times welcome, at other times unwelcome, but never seen as its saviour - indeed it seems the purpose behind the giving of the star is to save the inhabitants of this world from becoming lost in materialism.

Ironically, though, in the very act of ‘saving’ the Otherworld he is summoned into, Frodo brings about its destruction, for if he succeeds in his task he will destroy the magic that holds it in being, & it will pass from a self contained mythic world to the world we know, the world of history, of science - ultimately of materialism. Yet Smith seems to imply that the fairy world will not be entirely swept away, & that its inhabitants will remain.

Is Tolkien contradicting himself? LotR is about the loss of magic, the passing away of legends & the coming of history, while Smith seems to say it never went away at all, & that we still need it, & that it is constantly attempting to communicate with us. Or perhaps the magic went away for Tolkien himself after completing LotR - he never seemed to be able to properly return to Middle earth again - his stories after LotR are half hearted, unfinished (unfinishable?) attempts to get back there, culminating in a failed attempt to ‘rationalise’ the legends, to make them scientifically ‘valid’. Perhaps its simply the case that once he’d cast the Ring into the fire & watched the Last Ship pass into the West, taking the magic with it, he couldn’t ever really get it back. So, Smith is a story of hope - Tolkien’s own hope that. like Smith, even though he himself had renounced the magic star, his passport to faery, that star was not lost, & had been passed onto another.

So we have Frodo, passing through ‘death’ in the heart of the earth, awakening & leaving the fairytale world behind for the ‘Christian’ world of high deeds & true sacrifice, & finding that ‘there is no real going back’ once the magic has been given up - given up by him so that others may keep it. And we have Smith doing the same thing. Here in this chapter we see Frodo first giving up the magic, in favour of something ‘greater’ - whether he realises it at the time is another question. In his ‘dream’ he is shown his own renunciation, what it entails, & what lies beyond it. I wonder if Tolkien himself ever had a dream like that.