Books this year: a book diary

One of the great pleasures of reading, despite what Kenneth might say, is re-reading books you have read before. You notice things you didn’t notice before; you catch allusions that had previously eluded you; you are able to plumb further into the book’s depths of meaning. Or you find, sometimes, that it probably wasn’t worth reading in the first place. So far, this trilogy has been well worth the re-reading.

The first thing that struck me was how English the first part of the book is; the hobbits’ journey across the Shire, and even as far as Bree, is very reminiscent of Joseph Andrews, and probably every other English “road novel” of the 18th century. It’s very episodic, and there is eating and drinking and talking to folk all the way to Bree; even the Nazgul aren’t as threatening in the Shire as they are in the wild between Bree and Rivendell. The Shire and the countryside as far as Bree are also very English; rolling hills and farms and hedges and inns and whatnot.

Tom Bombadil always mystified me, and continues to do so, though now in a different way. Tolkien’s cosmology (at least so far as I understand it, never having read the Silmarillion) is different from the medieval one that Lewis describes in The Discarded Image, but it is similar insofar as it is ordered and categorized; and as the medieval world had figures that existed outside the cosmic order, so Middle Earth has Bombadil.

The pastoral quality of those first chapters quickly gives way to darker tones, of course, once the hobbits arrive in Bree. I used to think, when I was much younger, that this first book was interminably slow until after the Fellowship leaves Rivendell, and didn’t really get interesting until they arrived in Moria. It is, I suppose, slow in terms of action, but richly painted, even if the pallette Tolkien uses is composed of drab, wintry colors. I had forgotten, or had not noticed before, the profound sadness that lies just below the surfage throughout much of the book, bubbling to the surface at the oddest moments, in Rivendell and Lothlorien.

Aragorn, too, is more sorrowful than I remember. He is not, for most of the book, exactly kingly. He reminds me more of an Old Testament prophet; wise, but with a wisdom that comes from long years of wandering in exile. After Gandalf falls in Moria and he becomes leader of the Fellowship, he is often unsure, and delays the question of the Fellowship’s path - to Gondor or Mordor - as long as possible (and, indeed, Frodo decides the matter for him). But, almost at the end of this book, a change comes over him, as they pass the ancient northern border of Gondor, on the Anduin just above the falls of Rauros, and he finally returns to the land of his fathers, an exile no longer. Indeed, this is the point at which Tolkien ceases to refer to him as Strider, and he calls himself by the name Galadriel had recently given him: Elessar, the Elfstone. It’s a beautiful moment, and one of the few moments of hope in the entire book.

I can’t wait to start the next one.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 at 8:16 pm and is filed under Books Chris has read, 2009. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.