View Single Post
Old 09-30-2004, 07:43 AM   #21
Fordim Hedgethistle
Gibbering Gibbet
 
Fordim Hedgethistle's Avatar
 
Join Date: Feb 2004
Location: Beyond cloud nine
Posts: 1,851
Fordim Hedgethistle has been trapped in the Barrow!
Esty, you wrote:

Quote:
As I see it, Bilbo got his happy ending
Perhaps I am jaded by my own experience of life but I really don't see Middle-Earth as being a place where anyone has a "happy ending". There are joyful endings, but there is also a profound melancholy at these moments of change. Endings are time of upheaval and movement and continuing action for Tolkien -- this is one of the things that really distinguishes his art. Aragorn and Arwen are married, that is sure, but they do so under the knowledge that Aragorn will die, and now Arwen will die as well, and they will both be parted from Elrond forever. The brief moment (really looking ahead!) in which we hear of how Elrond and Arwen spend a day walking in the White Mountains before he departs is heart rending. Even Bilbo's passing into the West is not what I would call a "happy" ending -- he is still thinking about the Ring, still hoping that the story can be finished by those who come after, when we know that the story will never end.

Who among us finds the final line of the book "happy"? Joyful, yes, but there is a sense that as fulfilling as Sam's life will be now, it is somehow lesser and smaller. The whole story "winds down" rather than ends, and there are more stories to be told (the Appendices) not all of them entirely happy.

That's why I hold to my opinion that Bilbo, much as I love the old fellow, is naive -- perhaps even dangerously naive, since the only other people in the book who share his belief in endings, that it can all wrap up and 'stop' just the way one wants it -- are figures like Sauron or Saruman!
__________________
Scribbling scrabbling.
Fordim Hedgethistle is offline   Reply With Quote