Hi guys, I love The Sea-Bell, and all the answers I’ve read here. Even though it’s been a while since 2003, I will write my take on it, because I have found a different angle that doesn’t seem to appear in any other answer. I am going with the Frodo angle as a basis for my interpretation, but that doesn’t mean I dismiss the relevance to Tolkien’s experiences of alienation, etc. I think it all works together that way - but I also find there is much more to Tolkien’s abilities to enter Faërie than just a recounting of his war experiences (or indeed any autobiographical detail) in a fantasy setting. I actually accept that he did these travels through his Dreams, and that he used his life experiences as keys to other worlds - or others’ worlds. Of these, the legend of Atlantis in England is especially important... because of what it mysteriously stands for: “a mythology for England.”
The sense of guilt in the dream is quite obvious so I will not be insisting on it, other than to say that Frodo’s subconscious indeed works with this inner guilt to project the isolation as the only possible reality, far into the future. This has nothing to do with prophetic abilities, in the sense of imparting any type of “higher truth” (as in him “deserving” to feel that way).... we know that his future was different, but not yet why that was.
I will link a beautiful article about the poem, which describes it as Frodo’s wish to be seen and acknowledged, for someone to reach for him and for him to feel that he’s been reached.
https://vorpalizer.tumblr.com/post/5...-or-frodos/amp
The fact that the title involves “roots and beginnings” is significant here, because the moment in which the reaching happens in LotR is when Frodo and Gollum can see each other’s minds. If you check the last lines of the poem, it is as though they have exchanged places or roles, with Frodo talking to himself and living in isolation, a kind of social death. His connection to Gollum is revealed as deeper and more significant than expected.
This is difficult to accept for many, who see this connection as a sort of moral failure. Apart from Sam’s perspective, they often identify with Frodo’s personality in the book, which due to hinging on perfectionism, ends up making him feel that his efforts go unnoticed. Gollum therefore proves unworthy of such trust, someone who just “betrays” Frodo as expected all along. But the efforts don’t go unnoticed. Remember Gandalf telling Frodo that his treatment of Gollum will ultimately decide his own fate not just the fate of Middle-earth? Never truer words spoken... Frodo has been resisting the connection Gollum-hobbits and he has also been terrified of Sauron for a long time - these things inform his perspective of events. Yet by living the nightmare they represent for him, he is the one who gives them back their humanity - and begins to accept his own.
In traditional tribal cultures, the figures of Sorcerer and Healer are viewed as totally akin, and equally lonely and vulnerable. That’s possibly why Gollum gave no answer to Sam’s question of which role he preferred. The Sorcerer is there to keep people in line when they infringe on the moral rules of reciprocity that govern life. So while there are periodic “purges” of the sorcery and ritual destruction of the power artifacts - much like in LotR - it is accepted that a Sorcerer’s power could grow again at any time. It all depends on humans; but human morality is limited by focusing on everyday practical matters. In other words, the social conditioning - especially as regards gender - ultimately gives rise to the unwanted, rejected situation.
Likewise, the poem opens up an unexpected vista of Númenor’s downfall reaching into Middle-earth’s present day. Their unique knowledge of the “bent road” (as in tilted axis vs the primordial upright axis) is suppressed in Frodo’s time - except for the Path of Dreams he is destined to reveal.
I suggest that Frodo’s strange dreams, trances and delirium are following Sauron’s journey in relation to Númenor just as Frodo’s main transformations are mirroring Sauron’s deaths and “resurrections.” This type of reciprocity follows the mandates of traditional healing cults (aka of the Serpent).
What is remarkable here is that in doing so, this poem shows us that Gollum and Sauron are actually the same person torturing himself, divided into several aspects by the loss of Númenor, where the Secrets (of unity) were once taught by him in the earlier stories. He never stopped teaching “creatures in their holes” while looking for that elusive true connection himself. The connection in the book is made through the suggestion that if one could see Gollum in a dream he would be an old weary hobbit - carrying a burden that makes him unreachable, but re-awakened by the sound of Frodo laughing from something Sam has said. “Such a sound had not been heard in those places since Sauron came to Middle-earth” - i.e. following the downfall of Númenor, the return to Middle-earth that happens to the Dream-Frodo, now weary and old.
I remember back in 2003 it was a very different world and people were reluctant to even conceive of queer hobbits, for feat that it might “ruin the meaning of friendship”... I think that fear is unfounded, and I hope everyone can see why. It is through trusting Gollum that Frodo can then finally be reached in his own inner “dark secret” that made him unreachable, prior to the re-eroticization of his relationship with Sam as it is openly portrayed in the book.
I leave you with a quote from another article on Howl’s Moving Castle, which I think applies beautifully:
The residents of the Castle all seem to have committed to something they don’t fully understand. They don’t get each other’s motives, they don’t even get their own. Yet it is through the genuine caring they develop for one another that they are saved. Not through power, knowledge or any other transaction. The magic existing around Howl is ambiguous: to his enemies, it is a sinister curse in need of purging by the righteous; to his friends, it can heal a broken heart, or give flight to the grounded.