A Close Reading of LotR – Episode 2 – A Very Efficient Conspiracy
Sep. 18th, 2025 09:41 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
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The next section of our close reading takes us through Chapter III – Three is Company, Chapter IV – A Short Cut to Mushrooms and Chapter V – A Conspiracy Unmasked, a total of 44 pages in my edition. We decided that a pot of tea was the more hobbity approach to provisioning ourselves through the discussion, and were joined by the third resident of the flat to enjoy it.
The major themes of this section were, in no particular order:
- Playing with (and undercutting) the increasing tension and supernatural threat
- Walking through very real landscapes with very real company
- Cultural texture through the medium of songs
- Elves and mythology
- Foreshadowing and Knowing
- Pippin is baby
- What does the fox say?
This section sees Frodo – after a gap of 17 years since Bilbo’s birthday party – finally leave his house and set out to take the ring to Rivendell. I had forgotten quite how long of a gap the story waits before the journey begins, but the thing it made me think of while reading, and which I kept coming back to, was how Tolkien uses that slowness to increase the weight and the tension of the story. The overarching plot is kicked off by events that began thousands of years earlier; it makes sense that the activity of the story isn’t kicked into motion in a moment. It is far more befitting of the import of those events that it not, in fact. So knowing that 17 years have elapsed helps that tension feel all the more real.
Early in the section, as Frodo and Sam are leaving Hobbiton, they have their first encounter with one of the Black Riders, where Frodo overhears a conversation with the Gaffer. At first, the Rider is just a reported figure, a man in a black cloak. He is subsequently spotted from a hiding spot just off the road, where the only unusual thing about him is his animalistic sniffing, questing out his prey. Over the progression of their experience with the Rider from this point on, each time shifts him a step further away from humanity, from the mundane. He crawls, he screams, he becomes more shadowy and less substantial, but the effectiveness of that supernatural creep is in both the slowness, and the fact that it is constantly undercut by the prosaic realities of their journey. This is not a sharp rush into a world of mystery beyond the Shire, but a gentle descent into something intruding into this seemingly familiar and safe world, and is all the better for it.
That safe world – those prosaic realities – come through most strongly in the walking sections, of which there are plenty. This isn’t a complaint! I know the fact that we apparently all know that Tolkien was himself a big rambler about England, and it comes through gorgeously in those sections. Not only does he delight in his descriptions of the natural world, but he finds beauty in the practicalities of it all too. The Shire is a peopled place – this is a landscape that, like England, has been shaped by the people living and working it for hundreds of years. There are fields and roads to be traversed. But, equally, even in this peopled place, there are sections of mild wilderness that present significant travel difficulties for those attempting to cross them. Not only are those sections a delight to read – I did DofE, I know what an absolute bastard trying to get through thorny or swampy ground can be and I enjoy seeing that reflected on the page – but they also give a great canvas upon which to paint the easy camaraderie of the hobbits. It is through their (mostly minor) walking travails that we begin to understand Frodo, Sam and Pippin as people who relate to one another, and to feel their relationships. They remark on the weather, the sleeping conditions, the food. They wake at different times and respond to morning and hardship in different ways. And they laugh, eat and sing together, in a way that slips those pieces of poetry into the main prose extremely naturally – of course three people walking through the woods together would sing a song. Why would you not.
It’s easy, while reading, to contrast the book with the LotR films, and I’ve accepted that that is going to be a losing battle. But for this section, it was just as tempting to compare it to the fantasy fiction that has come since it, and necessarily exists in conversation with it. Those two pieces – the landscape and the songs – are where this was most unavoidable for me.
I have read a number of fantasy books in which journeys are undertaken, a number of which on foot and through landscapes. Very few of them present a landscape that feels so real. Obviously some of this is that Tolkien draws on a place with which I am myself extremely familiar, but some of it also a failing of what has come later. I can think of stories with journeys where the hardship of the walking is simply the act of walking, and it seems as though the characters just tromp across wide stretches of short grass, an empty, barren place cut through only with conveniently placed sources of fresh water or the odd rock and tree for hiding behind. The landscape isn’t a living, variable thing, something that presents a challenge even when it’s as safe and mundane as the Shire is, it’s just a space to be crossed, or a backdrop upon which to hang other parts of the story. Here, instead, the landscape is a participant in the journey, and its shape dictates how the characters act and react, to both it and each other.
And then the songs. I know the song haters are out there. They are simply incorrect. I found myself reading them out, wanting the mouthfeel of each as I arrived at it. They’re wonderful. The ones that the hobbits share while walking have the shape of exactly the sort of thing a small group might sing on a journey (though, as Pippin remarks, some of them are a little bleak, just as many real folk songs are). I’ve done very similar things (DofE really pulling its weight for contributions to this reading session). They fit, and they give cultural texture to the hobbits as a group, as well as an angle into their relationships with Bilbo (and Bilbo’s contribution to hobbit poetic culture).
But it’s not just hobbit songs. Not only is there one partly inspired by/drawn from dwarvish stuff (hello The Hobbit callback), but in this section, we meet some elves! In fact, one of the first things we see of elves is their own song, which is immediately different on the page to the hobbit ones we’ve seen before. Did I scan every song we read today? I don’t think I need to answer that. But the elf song, unlike the hobbit ones, is not the same obvious iambic1. The structure looks different. This is a piece of culture from a whole other group of people, and Tolkien puts that difference right up at the front for us to see from the off.
Which is great, because the elves are also pretty different right from the off.
Obviously as a modern fantasy reader, the elves who live in my imagination are extremely sub-Tolkien stuff. There were decades of development, rehashing and cheap knock-offs before I picked up my first piece of fantasy literature, and so I have a lot of default assumptions about elves that contrast wildly with pre-Tolkienian folkloric elves. So the interesting and fun thing about this section is how much of a middle ground this first group of elves occupy between those two poles. They are not the po-faced, solemn and plot-driven-portentous beings of the Peter Jackson films. They are not a mundane group of people with pointy ears like D&D. They’re not purple-eyed, ripped, sexy men like bad romantasy. The thing this group mostly reminded me of was, in fact, traditional representations of fairies. Not entirely, not a copy of that, but they are merry, aloof, slightly cruel (in a laughing sort of way, without actual malice) and utterly alien, when held in comparison to the hobbits. The way they move through the world, even in the brief bit of story in which we encounter them, is wholly different, smoother and less troubled than the hobbits who have, just previously, been struggling their way through thorn bushes.
And, even beyond that, they are known to speak and relate differently to hobbits, to the point that Frodo remarks on it – elves don’t give straight answers to questions, and Gildor Inglorion is not disproving the point. But that slipperiness is one of the key things that made me think fey, alongside the ethereal sparkly glow, the makeshift but entirely civilised party in the woods, and the bowers of trees in which the hobbits fall asleep while the elves themselves sit about chatting unsleepingly. That and the fact that they have no interest in helping the hobbits until the Riders are mentioned – these are altruistic, benevolent helpers. They call the hobbits dull. But they are interested in some of the greater problems of the world, and knowledgeable about them in a way that Frodo isn’t yet, and so they bend their aid against those powers starting to move behind the scenes.
Their knowledge is also… interesting. They immediately know things about Frodo, about the party, that seem outside of their grasp, and this intuitive access to the world comes through in a lot of their speech. They feel a part of the world, with a relationship to it mostly unlike the other characters we’ve met so far.
And yet, that intuitive foresight isn’t only their province. Both Frodo and Sam, at various points throughout this section (matching up to the ramping tension of the Riders) are seized by the knowledge that this journey is something More, and that they may not be coming back from it, at least not as they currently are. There’s no sense that this is a strike of prophecy from an outside force, however. They just tap into some sense of the story itself, and articulate that shape of its weight on the page for the reader, to add into the foreshadowing.
It is again interesting in contrast to a lot of more modern fantasy (thinking here a lot of things I read as a teen), where this sort of intuition does likewise strike, but with less subtlety and more overt pattern. Where Frodo might have a vaguely ominous dream at the end of A Conspiracy Unmasked, someone in one of those novels will have one that comes with a handbook, or at least a set of symbolic features which can be decoded with sufficient knowledge (and even possibly by the reader). Knowledge becomes something more direct and classifiable, where here it is either intuitive or formless, far more the stuff of mythic portents in older literature, where the meaning is, at best, opaque (if not downright treacherous). Which of course speaks to the different uses of it as a trope. Here, those moments of Knowing are a signifier of the rising danger, the seriousness of it, and its intrusion into the safety of the lives they’ve known before, rather than intended to give actionable information to characters or readers. It is “this is going to be epic (derogatory)” rather than a handbook to the specific events.
But it’s not all serious business. I said above that the tension is often undercut, and while the walking sections are one portion of that – contrasting the rising supernatural with the mundanity of travel through the world – there are other ways Tolkien does it as well. One of those is Peregrin Took, who is, in my opinion, baby.
I’m not entirely joking. I like the way he is cast as the little brother of the group – he’s the one who mostly pokes fun, who runs around a field singing, who splashes people with bathwater and has to clean it up before he can have dinner. But he’s not a substanceless joker either. He has his moments of capability, and is just as comfortable speaking to the elves as Frodo is, as well as defusing the situation with Farmer Maggot, making him a rather more complex figure than his film counterpart before we even hit 100 pages. But Tolkien deploys him carefully, and he is often the voice of counter-tone, that runs against drama when it rises too high, without overdoing it and spilling into silliness. Your honour, I love him.
In other silly things, I had entirely memory-holed the random fox that appears for a single paragraph to remark upon the doings of hobbits, and then departs. It’s entirely irrelevant and entirely delightful and again, varies up the tone rather than letting us wallow in the increasing shadow of the danger to come.
All of which to say – our talk of the homeliness of the Shire, the hereness of it as a place from which to leave safety and go out into danger, all that is steadily being called into question throughout these three chapters. Not only is danger visibly intruding – in the shape of the Riders, and also of talk of giants and the doing of Big Folk – but that sense of safety and inviolability is being disrupted right at the source. As Gildor says to Frodo:
‘But it is not your own Shire,’ said Gildor. ‘Others dwelt here before hobbits were; and others will dwell here again when hobbits are no more. The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.’
As we reach the end of the chapter, we see how this has always been the case, even if not acknowledged. The Old Forest is to Fatty Bolger a place no one ever dares go, but Merry has, in fact been there, as has Frodo. To Sam, people from Buckland are strange and cannot be trusted, and then Farmer Maggot turns that attitude straight back on him. If hobbits talk about hobbits in that distrusting way – and then we see both of them are just as true and helpful as each other – what does that say both for the world outside and the one within the borders? The High Hay is an impenetrable border… but it has a gate through which people may well come seeking Frodo. The inviolability of the Shire has always been an illusion – foreshadowing things to come a long way in the future – but Tolkien took us through the long route to get there.
I’ve already wittered a lot and I’ve not even really dug into the portrayals of male friendship and camaraderie in the face of danger (I think I just need a whole “war vibes” tag), the undercutting of the centrality of Frodo to the narrative (I love them all going “mate, you ain’t subtle, you were literally declaring it to the valleys and we’re not idiots” before making damn sure he knows they’ve got plenty of their own knowledge and expertise) or my increasing conviction that Tolkien is less interested in class than he is simply unable to escape from it. But this was a pretty dense section, and I think the things that will really stick in my memory about it are those walks through the landscape, and the mastery of tonal variation that let the chapters really flow, letting us look ahead to the grimness that is to come just as we say both our own hello and a goodbye shared with the characters to this perfect stretch of home ground that is the thing being left behind, and the thing worth saving.
Next time, we’ll be covering four shorter chapters, The Old Forest, In the House of Tom Bombadil, Fog on the Barrow Downs and At the Sign of the Prancing Pony. Not only will this get us all the way to Bree and Strider, but it will put to the true test whether I have grown as a reader and a person, as I discover if I still find Tom Bombadil annoying as all fuck. An adventure!
- I scanned it, and then immediately got all stuck in my brain and overthought it, and have now convinced myself I’m an idiot who has forgotten how scansion. If it is, in fact, iambic, I can only apologise and ritually burn my verse comp uni notes.
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