📖👀 Fog on the Barrow Downs

[m4r35n357]

Not much First Agey stuff in here, but I did find this in Tom's "Song of banishment" to the Wight:

"Where gates stand forever shut, till the world is mended"

which sounds like it might be referring to the Second Prophecy of Mandos, maybe?

 

[ZehnWaters]

Not much First Agey stuff in here, but I did find this in Tom's "Song of banishment" to the Wight:

which sounds like it might be referring to the Second Prophecy of Mandos, maybe?

Well, I think the world being mended isn't necessarily about the Second Prophecy. It's mentioned in the Athrabeth.

 

[m4r35n357]

OK, but do you think it could be, or are you disagreeing? As I hope I have mentioned in my related threads, I am currently examining references to the First Age in LotR, with a view to seeing what "a Silmarillion" needs to do to fit as a back story to LotR. This is a much less stringent requirement than "being the best/longest/most up to date/most accurate Silmarillion possible".

My two initial candidates are the published Silmarillion, and the 1937 incarnation that JRRT sent away to try to get it published. So far the 1937 version is looking the better as a back-story. I suppose I should not be surprised by this as it is what the author had to hand when he wrote LotR!

Other documents, like the Athrabeth, are not valid candidates for this, unless presented as part of an "alternative" Silmarillion (something I have considered, although recently less so because of the "Fingolfin issue").

As I have also said, feel free to discuss this amongst yourselves if you want, but I am moving onwards apace with LotR! There is a fair bit in of First Age in "A knife in the dark" . . .

 

[ZehnWaters]

OK, but do you think it could be, or are you disagreeing? As I hope I have mentioned in my related threads, I am currently examining references to the First Age in LotR, with a view to seeing what "a Silmarillion" needs to do to fit as a back story to LotR. This is a much less stringent requirement than "being the best/longest/most up to date/most accurate Silmarillion possible".

It COULD, yes.

My two initial candidates are the published Silmarillion, and the 1937 incarnation that JRRT sent away to try to get it published. So far the 1937 version is looking the better as a back-story. I suppose I should not be surprised by this as it is what the author had to hand when he wrote LotR!

I've always preferred the Second Prophecy but it seems Tolkien largely abandoned it later on, though that does seem to be after writing LotR.

Other documents, like the Athrabeth, are not valid candidates for this, unless presented as part of an "alternative" Silmarillion (something I have considered, although recently less so because of the "Fingolfin issue").

As I have also said, feel free to discuss this amongst yourselves if you want, but I am moving onwards apace with LotR! There is a fair bit in of First Age in "A knife in the dark" . . .

No worries.

 

[Rivendell_librarian]

A great chapter: exciting, atmospheric, more mystery about Tom Bombadil and Goldberry and the use of dreams or visions in the narrative. Frodo shows his courage by not using the Ring to escape and leave his companions to die. Rather he uses the magic song "Ho Tom Bombadil" which works almost immediately as if Tom had the power of a genie. Goldberry's prophetic warning and beautiful farewell adds to her mystery. The descent of the fog is so well described. I wonder if Tolkien had experienced this phenomenon.

Hammond and Scull see a parallel between Tom's more powerful song that banishes the barrow Wight with a character in the Finnish Kalevala (the wizard Väinämöinen). At the beginning of the chapter Frodo apparently has a dream of the undying lands

Frodo heard a sweet singing running in his mind: a song that seemed to come like a pale light behind a grey rain-curtain, and growing stronger to turn the veil all to glass and silver, until at last it was rolled back, and a far green country opened before him under a swift sunrise​

When Merry wakes up after the spell is broken he seems to repeat words spoken by an ancient Dunedain, a prince of Cardolan. Was this person buried in the barrow? Tom places most of the barrow treasure on top of it for anyone to pick up, only taking a brooch for Goldberry and giving the hobbits some knives which will serve as swords for them. In a supreme irony Merry will later use his knife from a Dunedain defeated by the witch king of Angmar to help Eowyn defeat and kill him.

The hobbits' more sensible ponies had fled the barrow but Tom rounded them up and on his own pony accompanied the hobbits as far as the East Road and advises them to make straight for The Prancing Pony at Bree.

 

[Muskrat]

Vignettes: The morning walk, strange birds, Tom’s talk about the old days. Every other author would have explained his references, but the book is so much better as it is..

 

[TrackerOrc]

'There is a seed of courage hidden (often deeply, it is true) in the heart of the fattest and most timid hobbit, waiting for some final and desperate danger to make it grow' I think it's really important that Tolkien makes points like this from time to time, as otherwise we could see the hobbits as too 'light-weight' for the things they actually have to do in the story.

'Out east my knowledge fails. Tom is not master of Riders from the Black Land far beyond his country.' This seems to point to Bombadil living almost in a bubble; he is master in his own realm as it were (whatever that actually amounts to), but he has defined limits that he doesn't seem to physically want to cross. And yet he knows about the Prancing Pony and Butterbur, which again is a real head scratcher.

 

[Eljorahir]

I find it interesting and delightful that Frodo’s dream in the opening paragraph is not only a portent of his future but quite similar to a view he saw looking westward out the window in Tom’s house on a previous rainy morning. Note the common elements: grey rain curtain, veil, and singing.

The dream:

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

Six pages earlier in the story, on a rainy morning the hobbits were in the dining room for breakfast and…

“The room looked westward over the mist-clouded valley, and the window was open. Water dripped down from the thatched eaves above. Before they had finished breakfast the clouds had joined into an unbroken roof, and a straight grey rain came softly and steadily down. Behind its deep curtain the Forest was completely veiled.

As they looked out of the window there came falling gently as if it was flowing down the rain out of the sky, the clear voice of Goldberry singing up above them…”