[SPEAKER_01]: Welcome to the Lord of the Rings lorecast.
[SPEAKER_01]: The show that explores the background of tokens amazing world from the very beginning.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it begins.
[SPEAKER_00]: The close reading of the Lord of the Ring, starting with, of course, the fellowship of the ring, begins here in this episode.
[SPEAKER_00]: And although most of you have been with me since we've discussed the Soma Rillian and a number of other topics and eventually we did, and just wrapped up our close reading of the Hobbit after a year and a half to go through that one novel, we are beginning a new journey.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just like Bilbo, we're going back out into the wilderness in order to have one more adventure.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you might be new to the show, this might be your first episode that you've tuned into because you found the Lord of the Rings lore cast and you wanted to see what I might have to say about the Lord of the Rings.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, allow me a moment to explain exactly what the show is and why it's different from every other Lord of the Rings podcast or video that you might find.
[SPEAKER_00]: And why this show has sustained for several years now and people seem to keep tuning in.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm your host Tom or robots and I not only do this show but I do a number of other lore cast shows including fallout and elder scrolls and I also run the robots radio podcast network.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now if you didn't check out the Hobbit yet, I recommend you go back and check that out and if you haven't listened through the Silmarillion and some of the other content that I've done, I also recommend you go check that out as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: But
[SPEAKER_00]: you might just want to check this out and see what's going on here and what exactly a close read is or an extremely close read.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well it took us a year and a half to get through the Hobbit and in today's episode we are covering the first five pages of the fellowship of the ring and you might be wondering why why would you take the content so slowly?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well there's a reason for this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tolkien was a master of not only the English language, but multiple languages.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was notoriously picky about every single word.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the jokes is that you just don't edit Tolkien, because the editors would say, hey, you should probably use dwarfs with an F instead of a V, and Tolkien would respond with an already thought-out reason why he changed the spelling.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that reason was multilayered and very, very clearly defined.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a reason why when he chooses words, he chooses specific words.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he's also not just somebody who has a greater grasp of language than probably 99.9% of the population.
[SPEAKER_00]: But he was also a Master Storyteller.
[SPEAKER_00]: He drew inspiration from ancient works, from mythology, from religious texts, and fairy tales.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there is no end to the references that we can find in his works that pull from ideas that were seated in his mind from other works.
[SPEAKER_00]: And sometimes those things were placed intentionally, like the names of the dwarves or Gandalf, which were borrowed from Norse mythology,
[SPEAKER_00]: bring up all throughout literature throughout history, like the heroes journey, and so there's so much to dig into in every single word and every single paragraph and every single story arc.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so if you're expecting to tune into the Lord of the Rings lorecast and get an explanation of the lore, then yes, absolutely you're going to get that.
[SPEAKER_00]: but you're going to get more as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: I will break down character motivations and story arcs and why he chose specific language and specific words and how this story compares to the Hobbit and how this story compares to the Silmarillion and the greater legendaryum and all of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And sometimes I'll have to just point back at something that I covered previously and say, hey, go back and listen to that episode because it would completely derail the topic that we're discussing right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's part of why I recommend if you haven't gone through the Silmarillion, I make it super easy to digest.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then if you haven't been through the close reading of the Hobbit then I recommend you check that out as well because there will be so many things that refer back to the concepts and the topics and the lore that I've already discussed on the podcast.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'll try to remind people as we go that this might be a reference to something we've already discussed and give you kind of a short version of it, but if you want the full depth of everything we've covered, then of course you have to go back and listen to the rest of the content.
[SPEAKER_00]: So with that in mind, welcome to the Lord of the Rings lorecast.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's begin the Fellowship of the Ring Chapter 1, the long-expected party.
[SPEAKER_00]: Normally I'd quote the very first sentence or something and discuss something in that very first sentence.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it turns out before we even get to the first sentence of the story, we already have to discuss the title of the chapter, because there's a double meaning here, the long expected party.
[SPEAKER_00]: The long-expected party is long-expected because Bilbo is turning 111 or as it's more interestingly described in the story, it's his 111st birthday.
[SPEAKER_00]: But outside of the universe, fans of Tolkien have long been expecting that he follow up the Hobbit with a sequel.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now this took considerably longer than Tolkien or his publishers had wanted because the Hobbit did well.
[SPEAKER_00]: and Tolkien originally thought that he was going to follow up the Hobbit with a version of the Soma Rilian.
[SPEAKER_00]: They look back at the entire history of everything, but the publishers were right that that wouldn't really meet the expectations of the audience.
[SPEAKER_00]: They would find that to be a very different kind of book.
[SPEAKER_00]: It wouldn't be a single story based around a lead character.
[SPEAKER_00]: It would be a collection of stories.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the extremely short version of this is that eventually he pivoted and decided to write more about Hobbits and expand some of the things that he put in the Hobbit and the ways that the Hobbit interacted with the greater world that he had been writing since his late teens.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that's why the fellowship of the ring starts with Bilbo and an update on what's going on in his life 60 years later and very specifically details about the ring because the role of the ring
[SPEAKER_00]: During the time that he was writing the Hobbit, he hadn't yet conceived of the ring as being a creation by Sauron, the Dark Lord, that had mysterious and dark powers and all of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: The ring was simply a magical item, it was probably made by somebody in the past.
[SPEAKER_00]: And somehow, it made its way to go, and at the bottom of a cave.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there was no greater explanation for this in the Hobbit, but later on, that became the focal point, the foundation of the events of the Lord of the Rings, thus the name of the story.
[SPEAKER_00]: So yes, this is a long-expected party, also for the fans of the Hobbit, but let's get into the text.
[SPEAKER_00]: When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bagend announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy first birthday with a party of special magnificance, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now the very first paragraph here for sentences a paragraph.
[SPEAKER_00]: He does some very basic things.
[SPEAKER_00]: He lays out who the story is about.
[SPEAKER_00]: Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bagend, why of Bagend?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, it puts us not just in a place, but it also defines Mr. Bilbo Baggins as being a landowner with a named property, which was something very common for landowners in British society at the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we already know that he is an individual of a certain level of status.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now the word
[SPEAKER_00]: Now notice he doesn't use significance.
[SPEAKER_00]: He uses magnificance.
[SPEAKER_00]: Magnificance is, again, if this is a very specific thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's using words for very specific reasons.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what does magnificance mean?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, it means impressively beautiful, elaborate, or extravagant, or striking.
[SPEAKER_00]: Notice that last part of that definition, striking.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's something that's going to happen that is already being hinted at that will strike people.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not only will it be a beautiful, fantastic, elaborate, extravagant party, but there's an implied something else there by the use of this word specifically.
[SPEAKER_00]: Also, Magnificence is generally used in reference and relation to royalty, signifying that Bilbo is a very important person.
[SPEAKER_00]: actually fills this out a little bit for us.
[SPEAKER_00]: It says Bilba was very rich and very peculiar.
[SPEAKER_00]: So now we have confirmation he is a rich land owner, but he's odd.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's a little bit different.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're told that it's been 60 years from the time of his disappearance and unexpected return.
[SPEAKER_00]: He went on some adventure and you have to remember everybody, just like this episode, everybody who's reading this book didn't necessarily read the Hobbit yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: So...
[SPEAKER_00]: Tolkien has to kind of fill in the details here, but there's something interesting going on.
[SPEAKER_00]: Already, if you were somebody who had read through the Hobbit, or you've gone through the Hobbit with me, you'll notice that the tone here at the beginning of the story is very different from the Hobbit.
[SPEAKER_00]: This feels very formal.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whereas the Hobbit feels like a fairy tale.
[SPEAKER_00]: It feels like it's written with shorter sentences and
[SPEAKER_00]: fun and funny language as if it's being written for children because that is part of how he conceived of the Hobbit initially.
[SPEAKER_00]: These were stories that he was making up for his children.
[SPEAKER_00]: But when he gets to the fellowship of the ring, the tone matches the end of the Hobbit, which becomes much more like historic epic fantasy than fairy tale.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're beginning with that tone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now one of the things I do on this show is I always have a bonus episode for every main episode that goes out for everyone.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you would like to support the show you can on the Patreon and you can get access to all the existing bonus episodes, there's almost 200 of them, but you can also get the bonus episode of this where I will go into very specific detail, breaking down the differences in tone and in some of the other details between the beginning of the fellowship of the ring and the beginning of the Hobbit.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, Tolkien doesn't take this part of the story to kind of fill us in on all the backstory, in fact he leaves a lot of it as a mystery.
[SPEAKER_00]: He has characters coming up in a moment debating the events and what's actually going on with Bilbo, why he might be so wealthy, why he's so odd, does he have mountains of treasure hidden that he doesn't tell anyone about any of that kind of stuff, but we'll get into that in a little bit.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Tolkien uses the society around Bilbo and
[SPEAKER_00]: their murmurings and, uh, I guess curiosity about him to create curiosity in us, especially for somebody who didn't read the Hobbit.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're all of a sudden interested in the beginning here as to, well, who is this billbow baggons?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why is he so strange?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is he wealthy?
[SPEAKER_00]: What did he do on his adventures?
[SPEAKER_00]: We immediately have dozens of questions that need answers.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it pulls us into the text
[SPEAKER_00]: immediately.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it also posits something particularly odd, not just his personality or his wealth or his wanting to go on adventures among a society of other hobbits who find that to be extremely odd.
[SPEAKER_00]: But his prolonged vigor is pointed out right at the beginning of the story.
[SPEAKER_00]: At 90, he was much the same as at 50.
[SPEAKER_00]: and 99 they began to call him well preserved, but unchanged would have been nearer the mark.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would imagine if you were to go back in time and you were somebody who read the Hobbit and you were super excited for the fellowship of the ring, and you picked this up that this would not have been the introduction to the story or the details that you would have expected.
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, we didn't know that the ring was sinister and we don't know that yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there's something odd going on.
[SPEAKER_00]: How can Bilbo look the same at 90 that he did at 50?
[SPEAKER_00]: We're presented with another puzzle, and we're going to get the answer to this fairly soon.
[SPEAKER_00]: But even more than that, Tolkien does an amazing job of writing and describing the way that people typically respond to certain types of things.
[SPEAKER_00]: When someone has too much of a good thing, people respond
[SPEAKER_00]: kind of negatively about that.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're jealous and they feel like it's not fair.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why would somebody like Bilbo have all of this wealth and also seemingly unending life or at least unaging life?
[SPEAKER_00]: and so they start to murmur they say it's unnatural and trouble will come of it and i find this interesting because at first we are set at odds with this group because if you have read the hobbit and you are somebody even just who typically leans into okay this is the protagonist of the story they're going to be the good guy then you're going to push back against everyone else in this scenario even though we've only begun to
[SPEAKER_00]: find out that this is what's actually happening.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we start to take the side of the protagonist.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yes, we might be correct in our assumptions that they are jumping to conclusions, that they're unfairly judging Bilbo.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if we've read the Hobbit, then we've come to love Bilbo.
[SPEAKER_00]: We know that he is genuinely a very good person.
[SPEAKER_00]: But they're also not wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: This isn't natural, and trouble will come of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not because Bilbo's a bad person, but because he doesn't fully understand what the ring is and that's the cause of these things, and sometimes those things are not good.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this establishes not just foreshadowing that there's something bad that's going to happen, but also it helps us to understand the rings in context of each other.
[SPEAKER_00]: And maybe I'm jumping ahead a little bit here, but we all are coming to the story knowing that this is Sauron's The One Ring and that there are other rings.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the reason why this ring has this effect on Bilbo is because the other rings have a very similar effect.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you look at the rings that the elves have, the reason why places like La Florian and Rivendell are
[SPEAKER_00]: Apparently timeless and can work to keep the realm around the people living there in a sort of stasis that feels much more like the earlier ages of the world is due to the power of those rings being wielded by Galadriel and Elrond.
[SPEAKER_00]: And much in that same kind of way, Bilbo has a ring of power, which is doing something very similar to him.
[SPEAKER_00]: But he doesn't know it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now one of the things I like to do when I read through a text, especially when it's something that's very familiar to me, is to try to put my mind in the mindset of somebody who has never read this before.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or somebody who was a fan of the Hobbit who was picking this up for the first time.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as somebody who has never read this before, you might then be suspicious about Bilbo.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe you'd start to think that some of these mutterings that the society around him are saying, some of the things that the rumor mill, I guess you could say, are correct.
[SPEAKER_00]: But Tolkien does a thing here where he helps us to understand who Bilba really is.
[SPEAKER_00]: He says, but so far, trouble had not come.
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, foreshadowing something's coming.
[SPEAKER_00]: But Mr. Baggins was generous with his money.
[SPEAKER_00]: Most people were willing to forgiv him his oddities and his good fortune.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, in this sentence, he uses the word forgiv with a dash after the fore and before the give.
[SPEAKER_00]: and why would he do that?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why not just write for give as one word and it's not because this used to be a hyphenated word and it no longer is today.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's because Tolkien wanted to point out the fact that four give includes the word give and as we'll see in the gaffers
[SPEAKER_00]: Defense of Bilbo, there is a lot of giving that happens between Bilbo and the people who are close to him.
[SPEAKER_00]: He is a good person.
[SPEAKER_00]: He is not miserly with his wealth.
[SPEAKER_00]: He is considerate of others.
[SPEAKER_00]: He just is a little bit odd.
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course I have to wonder if that is something that Tolkien found common or in common with Bilbo, this idea that he was somebody who spent a lot of time focused on language and his academics and things that most other people in his world around him didn't even understand the same way that he did, even the academics that he would regularly get together with.
[SPEAKER_00]: He would have come across as odd
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I have to think that maybe he and Bilbo have something in common here.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, one of the other things that Tolkien points out here is that he was on visiting terms with all of his relatives, except for the Sackville Bagginses, which is a reference back to the end of the Hobbit, where they were the ones who most wanted him to actually be dead in order to take his property and a lot of his things that he owned.
[SPEAKER_00]: and they even after he returned, claimed that that wasn't actually him, it was an imposter, and all of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, he's never really been on good terms since then with the Sackville Bagginses.
[SPEAKER_00]: But he had many devoted admirers among the Hobbits of poor and unimportant families.
[SPEAKER_00]: Another sign that he was generous with his wealth and that he was giving and he cared for people, even though he was a wealthy land owner.
[SPEAKER_00]: He didn't
[SPEAKER_00]: use that as a barrier between him and other families who were of a different social cast.
[SPEAKER_00]: And even due to all of that, he didn't have any close friends until some of his younger cousins began to grow up.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, we know from the Hobbit that Bilbo's personality was always split between the Baggins personality, which was the respectable social side of him, and the took part of his personality.
[SPEAKER_00]: and that was the more adventurous part.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Hobbit Society probably much like Bridges Society at the time that Tolkien wrote this could be very insular.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, most societies are.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you don't fit whatever is considered to be the norm, you tend to be treated like an outcast.
[SPEAKER_00]: No matter how generous and kind you are, people would keep you at a distance.
[SPEAKER_00]: But some of these younger cousins were more similar to him than many of the people who were around before them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Bilbo picked a favorite.
[SPEAKER_00]: Frodo Baggins, and Tolkien does a lot here to help us to understand that Frodo is basically Bilbo 2.0.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, they are different characters.
[SPEAKER_00]: Frodo's personality is not exactly the same as Bilbo, but they are definitely more similar than any of the other Hobbits, and family members that Bilbo has.
[SPEAKER_00]: And here we learn a few things not just about Hobbits' society, but about Bilbo and Frodo in their connections.
[SPEAKER_00]: First of all, they have the same birthday, September 22nd.
[SPEAKER_00]: And although Bilbo was in his tweens, his 20s, he was still considered an our society would see as a teenager.
[SPEAKER_00]: Somebody who wasn't quite a child, but also wasn't fully grown up yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: and somebody who could be adopted and defined as an heir.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, Bilbo didn't have children.
[SPEAKER_00]: He never really settled down and got married.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, taking on Frodo, an orphan in his family as his heir, would have been seen as something very kind to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: Except, of course, to the Sacville Bagginses, who now had all of their hopes dashed that they would ever inherit his land and his wealth and stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the story jumps ahead another 12 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're given another coincidence between these two characters.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's Bilbo's 11th first birthday, which is considered to be a very respectable age.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's kind of implied here that when Hobbits lived to 111 years, that this is another milestone in their lives.
[SPEAKER_00]: and that they do live longer than say the average human does today, but only by so much.
[SPEAKER_00]: The old took live 230, which is longer than any human that we are aware of has lived.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they have slightly longer life spans.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what that means for Frodo is that at the age of 33, this was his coming of age.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's similar to something like somebody turning 18 or 21 or whatever, depending on your society and the laws around where you live.
[SPEAKER_00]: So again, they have the same birthday, but they also are celebrating in the same year to absolutely important milestones in their lives.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of them is reaching an extendedly old age, and people would assume that at that age you would be nearing death, or at least retired or something like that, from a society standpoint, and at 33, you're beginning your adult life.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of them is sunsetting, while the other
[SPEAKER_00]: is finally becoming an adult.
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course in Hobbit Society there and always talking about Bilbo, they have lots of other things going on, but because of his party, which is being advertised and he's planning to invite everybody to this big celebration, this becomes the talk of the town.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then we get introduced to Ham Gamjee, the old Gaffer.
[SPEAKER_00]: And through the Gaffer, we get a glimpse at Hobbit Society, this idea that these people worked in an agrarian society, Ham Gamjee being a gardener, and
[SPEAKER_00]: In a small town, they would all get together at a local inn or pub and they would have conversations and that's how rumors and news would spread.
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the things that Tolkien does a lot is he gives detail to the details that many people would skip over in these kinds of stories.
[SPEAKER_00]: He names the inn that they're going to the ivy bush and not only gives us a name but tells us that it's on the bywater road.
[SPEAKER_00]: You get the sense that he has the entire town just mapped out in his mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: which he does.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tolkien establishes the gaffer as somebody who knows Bilbo extremely well, somebody who's lived and worked on the property from a young age 40 years ago working for Old Homein, and now as he's getting older, the responsibility falls on his son, Sam.
[SPEAKER_00]: They even live on the property in number three bagshot row, so we have a real sense of who these people are and how closely they relate to each other.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sam and the Gaffer know Bilbo extremely well.
[SPEAKER_00]: They see him almost on a daily basis.
[SPEAKER_00]: They are neighbors and they also work his gardens and tend his property for him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now this section of the beginning of the story is basically a conversation between people who don't know Bilbo so well, who represent the general
[SPEAKER_00]: questions of the greater society.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the gaffer who knows him very well, who attests to Bilbo being a very good person even if he comes across as a little bit odd.
[SPEAKER_00]: He says, a very nice, well-spoken gentle hobbit is Mr. Bilbo, as I've always said.
[SPEAKER_00]: And talking backs up his credibility by saying that he was well regarded as an expert in his field, growing vegetables and roots and things like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But was also commonly held in high regard as a trustworthy and good person.
[SPEAKER_00]: Old nooks of by-water, questions Frodo, he says Baggins is his name, but he's more than half a brandy buck, they say.
[SPEAKER_00]: It beats me why any Baggins of Hobbitons should go looking for a wife away there in Buckland, where folks are so queer.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what we're getting here is an understanding of Frodo, that is very similar to our understanding of Bilbo.
[SPEAKER_00]: Bilbo was half took.
[SPEAKER_00]: Frodo is half brandy buck.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in both cases, jokes and brandy books are considered odd in this part of the Shire.
[SPEAKER_00]: They live in another part of the Shire.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're not understood.
[SPEAKER_00]: They are part of an out-group to this specific in-group.
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the reasons is that they live so close to the river, which we find out is near the old forest.
[SPEAKER_00]: And both the river and the forest are...
[SPEAKER_00]: unsettling to Hobbits in this part of the Shire.
[SPEAKER_00]: Firstly, Hobbits don't swim very well, in fact most of them can't.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Frodo's parents died in the river, and this leads to questions in this part of the town as to why you would want to live so close to the river and go on boats when it was so dangerous.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's part of what makes the brandy books so odd to these Hobbits specifically, but also that they live near the old forest.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the old forest was a dark, bad place if half the tails be true.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as we know, eventually, the journey goes through the old forest.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is foreshadowing as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's also a reason why some of these people would think the Brandy Books were so odd.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's in this part of the story that we get the description about how Frodo lost his family and how he was originally taken in by his father-in-law, master, Gorbidok.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's not just the only funny name among these.
[SPEAKER_00]: We also get names of his father, Drogo, and his mother, Primula, Randy Buck, such wonderful names, and the conversation is being had between daddy, two-foot,
[SPEAKER_00]: and the gaffer, the gaffer just calls him dad for short, which is pretty funny to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I find this particularly interesting for all the conversation as it goes between the gaffer and these other individuals and the gaffer defending Bilbo as being a good person and not just being odd.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Gaffer still considers the Brandy Bucks too weird, too strange, and that he says at the end of this whole explanation about Frodo, Mr. Bilbo never did a kinder deed than when he brought the lad back to live among decent folk.
[SPEAKER_00]: So even the Gaffer who is defending Bilbo as not being as odd and bad as some of these people might think he is,
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, he's got his limitations.
[SPEAKER_00]: He is still part of an in-group and an out-group.
[SPEAKER_00]: And isn't that true?
[SPEAKER_00]: Isn't that how society works?
[SPEAKER_00]: So we get this discussion about Frodo and about Bilbo, about him going on adventures, and so this section feels very much here to remind us if we've read the Hobbit about what happened in that story, but also to bring new readers into what's going on here.
[SPEAKER_00]: And to clear up some things, his tunnels aren't completely full of gold, he only came back with so many chests of treasures from his adventures, and on top of that, we get a little bit of a description about Sam, which will be important, of course, because Sam becomes an absolutely important member of the fellowship and very important part of the story.
[SPEAKER_00]: But from the beginning, we are assuming that Sam is going to be much like his father, like the Gaffer, but it turns out that Sam is actually a little bit odd as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: He is in and out of baggand all the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: And quote, crazy about stories of the old days he is, as he listens to all Mr. Bilbo's tales.
[SPEAKER_00]: Mr. Bilbo has learned him his letters, meaning no harm mark you, and I hope no harm will come of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now notice, the gaffers a little bit defensive, he's like, yeah, okay, Sam's into some of this weird stuff too, but it's really not a problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's kind of like, I don't know, a parent in the 80s or 90s explaining to her friends why her kids are okay playing Dungeons and Dragons when they think it's going to open up a portal to hell or sell their souls to the devil or something.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then the Gaffer says, Elves and Dragons, I say to him, cabbages and potatoes are better for me and you, don't go getting mixed up in the business of your betters, or you'll land in trouble too big for you.
[SPEAKER_00]: I says to him, and I might say it to others.
[SPEAKER_00]: He added with a look at the stranger in the Miller.
[SPEAKER_00]: So notice that he's kind of defending himself as being somebody trying to keep
[SPEAKER_00]: Sam on the straight narrow, but there's also something else going on here.
[SPEAKER_00]: You may have noticed that the dialogue sounds different, depending on who's speaking.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Tolkien is doing this on purpose.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's using language that makes it sound more like rural people are discussing what's going on.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the gaffer being somebody who was a rural person, it shows that he is of a different cast.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's a different class than Bilbo is.
[SPEAKER_00]: His speech.
[SPEAKER_00]: is different.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is something that goes way back.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean you can find this in literature all over the place.
[SPEAKER_00]: People like Mark Twain were very famous for doing this very well.
[SPEAKER_00]: But from a lore perspective, this is interesting because right right at the beginning we have established that Bilbo likes adventures or he went on an adventure at least and he came back and he's odd for that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Frodo is equally odd because he likes to hear about that stuff as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's very similar to Bilbo and he comes from a side or at least half of his family comes from a side of Hobbiton that people consider to be a little bit strange.
[SPEAKER_00]: And even Sam, who is the son of the Gaffer, who is a well-regarded individual who has been around forever and everybody trusts him and he's an expert at gardening and all of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: is a little bit odd.
[SPEAKER_00]: These three characters right at the beginning of the story have been tethered together in their interest about elves and dragons and adventure and some of the unsavory things that Hobbits shouldn't be thinking about.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now you mix that in with a lot of foreshadowing about that events that are coming and how
[SPEAKER_00]: these interests could lead to bad things for the Shire, and even then you have to admit that in the short term, that's true, bad things will come to the Shire.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the long term, some bad things will come to the Shire before things get better.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now at the end of this conversation, it pivots back to Bilbo.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're told that the Gaffer did not convince his audience, they're still not sure about Bilbo and Frodo and even Sam.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the conversation comes back around to Bilbo.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Miller says he's often away from home and look at the outlandish folk that visit him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dwarves coming at night and that old wandering conjurer Gandalf and all.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's pause here.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dwarves coming at night.
[SPEAKER_00]: We know of one visit of Balon and Gandalf after the events of the Hobbit right at the end of the Hobbit story.
[SPEAKER_00]: But this implies that some of the other dwarves that he
[SPEAKER_00]: befriended during the adventures of the Hobbit, might actually come visit him from time to time, or maybe their descendants, but we aren't given specific names here.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it also references Gandalf as the old wandering conjurer.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's important.
[SPEAKER_00]: We might know Gandalf at this point if we've read the Hobbit as being more than just a conjurer.
[SPEAKER_00]: But for the people of the Shire for the Hobbits around Bilbo, they saw him as somebody who would come and do fireworks.
[SPEAKER_00]: But of course, there's more to Gandalf than just that.
[SPEAKER_00]: This introduction section ends with the Gaffer having the final word.
[SPEAKER_00]: The final point to really establish in our minds who we're talking about and what's going on.
[SPEAKER_00]: He says, and you can say what you like about what you know no more of than you do of boating, Mr. Sandiman, retorted the Gaffer, and I'll pause there.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a common thing where we often have the strongest opinions about the things that we don't actually have any real experience with ourselves,
[SPEAKER_00]: And those opinions tend to be negative.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is another very human trait.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you talk to anybody about something that they fear the most, it's usually something that they don't actually have any real experience of.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it continues.
[SPEAKER_00]: Retorted to the Gaffer, disliking the Miller even more than usual.
[SPEAKER_00]: If that's being queer, and he's using queer here in the old sense of odd or weird, then we could do with a bit more queerness in these parts.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's some not far away that wouldn't offer a pint of beer to a friend if they lived in a hole with golden walls, but they do things proper at Bagend.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our Sam says that everyone's going to be invited to the party, and there's going to be presence, mark you presence, for all, this very month as is.
[SPEAKER_00]: Normally, I'll just leave the end of the episode with the final quote and let you kind of draw your final conclusions here.
[SPEAKER_00]: But this time I'm going to wrap it up.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are things that this introduction does so well.
[SPEAKER_00]: It establishes a very significant place and time.
[SPEAKER_00]: It gives us a sense of the culture, not by just telling us about the culture, but by experiencing it ourselves through conversations.
[SPEAKER_00]: From characters who won't be super important in the future, but allow us to get to know the more important characters, Bilbo and Frodo and Sam, and even Gandalf, through their eyes.
[SPEAKER_00]: and we come to like the gaffer.
[SPEAKER_00]: We come to see him as a real person.
[SPEAKER_00]: Somebody who has his own biases against the brandy books, but also has a lot of really good arguments for why Bilbo is a good person.
[SPEAKER_00]: But at the same time, the others have good concerns going off into the wild, bringing strangers into their land, could lead to bad things, and they're also not wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's such a well-crafted situation that is true from basically every side while still seeing the biases of the individuals as they argue their points and it absolutely matches the way that the real world works.
[SPEAKER_00]: From the very first five pages of the fellowship of the ring, we're not given a fantasy story written for children, we're given an analysis of our own reality, the way human beings interact, and how that crafts expectations for characters, and their interests, and what they do, and do they fit into society or not.
[SPEAKER_00]: It also establishes this as a firm foundation
[SPEAKER_00]: a parallel to our own world.
[SPEAKER_00]: By the time we move from the Shire to other places, much like in the Hobbit, we're moving from the familiar to the unknown.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now we're not going to do that for a while, this chapter goes on for a bit, we've got a big birthday party to celebrate, but it's already set up right from the beginning in this perfectly crafted way that absolutely pulls us into this world through the familiar while tempting us with questions about the unknown.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's these subtleties that make Tolkien's writings so effective.
[UNKNOWN]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks again for tuning in, and if this is your first episode, thank you for being here.
[SPEAKER_00]: I hope you enjoyed the show, and you come back for the next episode, or you go back and check out some of the other content while waiting for the next episode to drop next week.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So it's been a few weeks.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had just set up a few episodes ahead of time.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm going to just catch up on thanking all of the patrons who signed up over December in order to make sure that I don't miss anybody.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Gearing, I don't know that that's a regular name, I think that's a pseudonym, Kira-C, and Lawrence J.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Also, if you'd like to help out in other ways, please leave a 5 star review wherever you're listening to this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you leave a 5 star review on Apple Podcasts, I'll read it out like this one, which came in just three days ago, of me recording this currently, from just another Loki variant, who says, finally, now I can finally understand the silver really in.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I'm glad you tuned in.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for taking the time to leave that review.
[SPEAKER_00]: Also, it's really easy to help me out by just sharing the show with your friends or family, people who are fans of Tolkien, the Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit, any of that kind of stuff.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So thank you all for being here.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm so excited to get even further into the fellowship of the ring over the next year and half, probably.
[SPEAKER_00]: And have a wonderful rest of your week.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll see you next time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Stay safe out there.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for listening to the Lord of the Rings lorecast.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you'd like to learn more about other fantasy worlds, check out my other podcasts.
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