[Child of the 7th Age]

There is another angle on this poem which no one has mentioned. The poem was originally written in 1931-2 and published in 1934 under the title "Looney". As such, initially, it could not have referred to Frodo. (There is no doubt that later JRRT made that connection.) But the question remains: initially, what was Tolkien referring to with this bleak poem?

First, the Sea Bell itself is a type of sea shell. As such it is intended to represent Faerie, the sound of the Sea that drives us on to the unknown (the sound you can hear in a large shell if you hold it up to your ear.) It represents the longing to go beyond our hum-drum world to reach the land of Faerie.

Unfortunately I do not have a copy of Looney as it is slightly different than the later Sea-bell. However, Shippey analyzed the two poems in his book "The Road to Middle-earth."
According to Shippey, the two poems are similar in tone but Sea-bell is slightly more despairing than the first. In Looney, for example, the person coming back can at least still hear the sound of the Sea coming from the shell, which is no longer true in Frodo's Dreme.

In understanding the origins of Sea-bell, there are two things to remember. First, there was Tolkien's personality. As Carpenter makes clear, JRRT could swing wildly from joy to sadness. His mother's early death had a profound impact on how he viewed life. There is even one place in the Letters where, in discussing God to his son, JRRT uses the term if God exists, which is very different than his usual tone. Perhaps one reason that JRRT so emphasized the worthlessness of despair in LotR is that he himself was subject to it.

There is a theme running through some of Tolkien's writings that Faerie is a difficult place to break into and a difficult place to come back from and especially to comunicate your experiences to others. This is from "On Fairy-Stories" where Tolkien, in describing Faerie, says there are:

pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold

Again, in this essay, Tolkien says:

its (i.e faerie's) very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveller who would report them. And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates should be shut and the keys be lost.

He was obviously speaking about his own feelings--and these are the same themes as in Sea-bell, although stated in a less drastic way.

I believe there's another tale --is it Smith?--where the principal character is shut out of Faerie and passes along the key to a younger child. All of this clearly ties in to the same themes as Sea-bell.

At base, then, Sea-bell is about Frodo and Tolkien and all of us--the difficulty of entering into that magical realm and especially of communicating our experience when we do so.

I have more to say about Frodo, but must run! Will post later.

[ January 19, 2003: Message edited by: Child of the 7th Age ]