LotR -- Book 6 - Chapter 6 - Many Partings

[Alphaelin]

As Esty says, there is a lot of content in this chapter. Musing about ‘Many Partings’, there are so many points where Tolkien describes loss, which contrasts with all the gains in ‘The Steward and the King’. In a way the previous chapter is more of the ‘happily ever after’ the reader expects, while this chapter really focuses on the theme of ‘loss and sacrifice’ which has been present through LOTR, but is more clear from now to the end of the book.

Eomer returns for Theoden’s body. We see the old king being honored for his sacrifice:

“Then the kings of Gondor and Rohan went to the Hallows and they came to the tombs in Rath Dinen, and they bore away King Theoden upon a golden bier, and passed through the city in silence.”

What a powerful image of Theoden being carried through Minas Tirith by Kings Elessar and Eomer while the populace watches in respect. Then in Rohan Theoden is laid to rest, and the company prepares to separate.

Aragorn and Arwen had their fairy-tale wedding, but now we read

“None saw her last parting with Elrond her father, for they went up into the hills and there spoke long together, and bitter was their parting that should endure beyond the ends of the world.”

Granted, this is a lot sadder after reading the appendices and The Silm, when the reader understands how final their parting is. But that sentence tugged at my heart from my first reading. I suppose then I thought how terrible it would be to lose my own father; now as a parent I imagine Elrond’s agony at losing his daughter. And while I have always believed that the ‘bitterness’ of their parting was because they were losing each other, the phrase is just ambiguous enough to make me wonder if it’s possible they parted in anger. Could they have gone off alone so that no one would hear them arguing? Did they ‘speak long’ because Arwen had lost the gift of Osanwe? Would Elrond, in his grief, have spoken to her in anger because of the choice she had made all those years ago? Surely not...and yet there’s not enough specific information about their conversation to keep me from wondering.

Gimli becomes positively prophetic in this chapter. When he and Eomer are comparing Arwen and Galadriel, and he says

“You have chosen the Evening, but my love is given to the Morning. And my heart forebodes that soon it will pass away forever.”

And in his farewell he predicts

“...and some of us may yet meet at times; but I fear that we shall not all be gathered together ever again.”

As the friends were gathered together in Minas Tirith in the previous chapter, now they scatter across Middle Earth. Aragorn returns to Gondor, Gimli & Legolas head to Erebor and Mirkwood, and the hobbits want to go home to the Shire. All feel the pull of home (and responsiblities?), especially Sam and Frodo.

Of the encounter with Saruman – did he decide to head to the Shire after Gandalf and the hobbits caught up with him, or was he already headed there? I can see reasons for either scenario, but I kind of like the idea of him wandering aimlessly until he sees the Hobbits, then bitterly deciding to go ahead and pay a personal visit to the Shire.

Of course, there is one important meeting here: the hobbits finally return to Bilbo in Imladris. My own thought is that his failing mental and physical faculties are due to the Ring’s destruction. The ring ‘preserved’ him, so to speak, while he possessed it, and he was showing signs of failing even in FOTR, after he had given it up. Its destruction hastened Bilbo’s own fading. Bilbo's health and mental alertness are yet another loss resulting from the completion of the Quest.

Regarding Bilbo’s preference to write only poetry at this point – could that be a reflection of Tolkien’s own admiration for poetry? Perhaps Bilbo, knowing his time was now limited, only wanted to put his efforts into a more noble form of literature (in his & Tolkien’s opinions) than simply writing memoirs or translating lore. (I admire good poetry because I always found it so darn hard to write, lol.) I’m basing this speculation on the fact that Tolkien’s first attempts to write down his mythology were in poems, and he wrote the stories of ‘Luthien and Beren’ and ‘The Children of Hurin’ as epic poems before they were in narrative form in The Silmarillion.