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I say this is beautiful, I think you are strange
I really hope someone has written some good papers on the theme of outsiderness in Middle-Earth. For all his meticulous classification of Stoors and Fallohides and Vanyar and Teleri and cetrer, more often than not Tolkien's protagonists are outliers in their own cultures. "Still it is probable that Bilbo . . . although he looked and behaved exactly like a second edition of his solid and comfortable father, got something a bit queer in his make-up from the Took side, something that only waited for a chance to come out"—which is the entire emotional arc of The Hobbit, as Bilbo realizes this unsuspected flair for riddles and adventures and all sorts of heroic, disreputable πολυτροπία (The Annotated Hobbit: look at these Norse and Germanic inspirations! My brain: look at these Odyssean motifs! I fail critical study forever) that will characterize him for the rest of his days.1 Frodo never even passes for ordinary; upon coming of age, "he at once began to carry on Bilbo's reputation for oddity," studying maps and visiting Elves and dreaming of far-off mountains, "and to the amazement of sensible folk he was sometimes seen far from home walking in the hills and woods under the starlight." A king's niece of Rohan, Éowyn would die in battle before she would consent "to stay behind bars, until use or old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire"; so it is appropriate that the man she marries is "gentle in bearing . . . a lover of lore and of music" whose heart is not in warfare, the reluctant Captain of Gondor, Faramir. Arwen relinquishes not only immortality, but all her kindred and their world in choosing Aragorn over Valinor.2 And Sam, the steadfast gardener? "Crazy about stories of the old days he is"—and a storyteller himself: "I wonder what sort of a tale we've fallen into?" There's not a farmboy with a destiny in the lot. The vaguely closest we get is Aragorn, as Elrond's fosterling and Isildur's heir, but he's frankly too complex for a die-stamped Campbellian archetype. And somehow out of this model we get David Eddings' Belgariad and Terry Brooks' The Sword of Shannara, whose character development I can barely contemplate without bleeding from the ears? It's very strange. Tolkien's imitators seem to have taken his maps, but very little of his atmosphere.
1. And beyond, immortalized by his eccentricity and his disappearance as "a fireside-story for young hobbits . . . Mad Baggins, who used to vanish with a bang and a flash and reappear with bags of jewels and gold."
2. And not even their spirits will meet in the afterlife, something that did not quite register the first time I read the books: "None saw her last meeting 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." There is familial precedent in the choices of Lúthien and Elros, but that does not make Arwen's decision any less grave.
1. And beyond, immortalized by his eccentricity and his disappearance as "a fireside-story for young hobbits . . . Mad Baggins, who used to vanish with a bang and a flash and reappear with bags of jewels and gold."
2. And not even their spirits will meet in the afterlife, something that did not quite register the first time I read the books: "None saw her last meeting 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." There is familial precedent in the choices of Lúthien and Elros, but that does not make Arwen's decision any less grave.
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This. This is something on which I need to meditate as I work on Hare Water and the next bits of Autumn War. It's a distinction that I've overlooked, but, now, encountering it, it seems extremely important.
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I'm reminded too of Nathaniel in Lud-in-the-Mist: isn't he somewhat given to un-Luddish flights of morbid fancy, before ever the fairy fruit inveigles its way over the border?
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Absolutely. Bilbo and Nathaniel Chanticleer are both people who are weirder than they realize or allow themselves to think—a gift for thievery and riddle-games, the Note that can sound at any minute of the commonplace—and that weirdness rises them to the occasion, as little as they or anyone else would have believed it.* More generally, both books are about the transition beyond the fields we know, taking as their thesis that the fey and faraway is really much closer at hand than common belief is comfortable with: fairy influence is underneath even the off-the-cuff oaths of Dorimare; the Shire is so small a fragment of its world that it's only when Bilbo returns (even more so the case with Frodo) that the reader realizes the hobbits' cozy comfort is the exception, not the rule, of daily life in Middle-Earth. And there is both humor and insight to be mined from the clashes in registers of language, although I think Lud-in-the-Mist is more numinous and The Hobbit more what the hell? I will have to re-read the former to be sure, but having just finished the latter, it's a tonal crazy quilt, full of mythic motifs alongside snips and snaps of fairy tale and deadpan modern understatement to point up the heroism of its characters and undercut it at the same time: "Victory after all, I suppose! . . . Well, it seems a very gloomy business." The fact that it all holds together in the first place is nearly as much of a feat as its enduring classic-of-children's-lit status.
* Bilbo has a harder time of it than Nathaniel, of course. I haven't looked into Guillermo del Toro's thoughts on the matter, but any adaptation worth its mushrooms should be able to spin a setpiece of social comedy out of the five-dwarf pileup on the doormat while Bilbo is juggling too many plates in the air of flustered manners and temper and dashing about and, well, plates: culminating with our hero melting down spectacularly in the drawing room and being stashed somewhere dark with a glass of brandy while the dwarves figure out what to do next. To be able to move from that sort of Ealing Studios silliness to the genuine suspense of "Riddles in the Dark"—and then the Battle of Five Armies, which changes gears again into the epic—is not and should not be impossible, because Tolkien achieved it, so I'll just pray it's a balance del Toro gets right.
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Yes, that's exactly right, I think. Yet these juxtapositions, initially startling, also reveal some continuities. Understatement and resigned heroism are Anglo-Saxon qualities too, which Tolkien allows us to hear and appreciate in Bilbo's apparent superficiality.