LotR -- Book 1 - Chapter 04 – A Short Cut to Mushrooms

[Aiwendil]

This chapter is very similar in both form and content to the previous one.

Form - the first part consists of a journey, with two appearances of the Black Riders (well, one actual appearance plus the screech) to develop tension. The second part is a "safe-place" scene where the Hobbits rest and are fed. Notice that, just as with the scene with Gildor, the Farmer Maggot scene begins with the threat of danger - though here it is only Frodo's imagined fear of Maggot's dogs.

Content - as with the previous chapter, we are still in the Shire and the goal is to reach the house at Crickhollow. Also, in functional terms, both chapters have the basic task of slowly building up suspense via the Black Riders. We have so far had one overheard conversation with a Black rider, three actual visual encounters, one screech, one reported conversation, and one trick encounter (with Merry). It is no easy thing to do what Tolkien is doing. On the one hand, you want to delay the actual confrontation with the Black Riders as long as possible, for that is how you increase the suspense. On the other hand, if the Black Riders don't make enough appearances, the reader will not be reminded of their threat. So every little incident is worthwhile - even the trick at the end of the chapter with Merry serves to remind us of the danger.

Incidentally, cutting across by Maggot's fields is, by my count, the first of three shortcuts that the Hobbits will take on their way to Rivendell (the others being through the Old Forest and across the Midgewater Marshes). The first was rather a success; they evaded the Black Riders and met up with Maggot. It's interesting to compare this with the other two.

[davem]

I have to advise anyone who can to read the early drafts of this chapter to see Tolkien's achievement here in context. In short, the early drafts are among the worst things he ever set down on paper, & he got stuck for 6 months at the end of it. Farmer Maggot as a complete psychopath, an interminable dialogue between the hobbits on the disadvantages of living in a two storey house (what if you found you had left your handkerchief upstairs & had to go all the way up there to get it, etc, etc). The final descent into farce - an invisible Bingo wandering round Maggot's parlour, drinking his beer & running off with hat - is truly awful, & one can only dread where the story might have ended up if Tolkien's writers block hadn't intervened to save us.

Comparing that to what we have brings home Tolkien's skill as an artist. The final version is perfect, as has been pointed out so well. One thing did strike me, though, & that's Sam's attitude to Elves on the one hand & to Bucklanders on the other. The elves he is in awe of, even though they are strangers, & one would expect him to be at least suspicious of them. The Bucklanders, on the other hand, he is suspicious of. What's Tolkien saying here about the nature of predudice?

[Hilde Bracegirdle]

Where does one find these early drafts?

[HerenIstarion]

Books V-IX of HoME series

[Aiwendil]

Davem wrote:

In short, the early drafts are among the worst things he ever set down on paper

I'm not sure I agree. Certainly they are not quite as good as the final version, and certainly if one inserted them into the finished version of LotR, one would have far inferior product. But in their own way I think they are not so bad. If LotR had turned out to be simply a sequel to The Hobbit, in more or less its style and on its scale, they might not have worked too badly. What I think these early drafts really show is how long it took Tolkien to figure out what sort of a book it was he was writing.

[Firefoot]

"They seem above my likes and dislikes, so to speak," answered Sam slowly. "It don't seem to matter what I think about them. Thye are quite different from what I expected - so old and young, and so gay and sad, as it were."
Frodo looked at Sam rather startled, half expecting to see some outward sign of the odd change that seemed to have come over him. It did not sound like the voice of the old Sam Gamgee that he thought he knew. But it looked like the old Sam Gamgee sitting there, except that his face was unusually thoughtful.

I think that this is an interesting insight into Sam's true character - the whole conversation is, really. Like Frodo, this is a side of Sam's personality that we have not really seen. He shows great perception of the Elves, and we see that he is a 'deeper' character than we had been led to believe. (He had been saying farewell to the beer barrel...)

Another thing that struck me was how young and inexperienced Pippin seemed, both in this chapter and the last one, though I did not really notice it until this one. He speaks very lightly of the Black Riders, he goes out singing on the grass while Frodo eats, and is on the whole a very jovial and light-hearted character. Even though he is a part of the 'Conspiracy' as we later find out, he still does not understand the danger of the Black Riders (even less than Frodo) and the seriousness of Frodo's plight.

One final trivial thing: I don't think I ever really understood that it was raining as they cut cross-country from Woodhall to Farmer Maggot's property. It sets a much different tone than if it was, say, sunny.

[mark12_30]

davem wrote:

the early drafts are among the worst things he ever set down on paper

I'm with Aiwendiil on this one. I agree they are in a completely different tone; they are more in the spirit of Tom Bombadil than Sauron vs The West.

Lord of the Rings is an epic at the same time that it is a fairy tale. "It feels different near the Shire, " says littlemanpoet, and I agree with him.

Tolkien later wrote a poem about (Bombadil) called "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil," published in Oxford Magazine in 1934, long before the writing of the Lord of the Rings began.

Bombadiil went boating, and Bombadil and Maggot were old friends laughing about practical jokes, long before Bingo came into being.

I think of Bingo and Frodo as two different hobbits, just as I think of Strider and Trotter as two different characters. Would Arwen have been disappointed if she had to settle for Trotter? Probably. But that doesn't make Trotter uninteresting to me.

[davem]

Originally Posted by Aiwendil

I'm not sure I agree. Certainly they are not quite as good as the final version, and certainly if one inserted them into the finished version of LotR, one would have far inferior product. But in their own way I think they are not so bad. If LotR had turned out to be simply a sequel to The Hobbit, in more or less its style and on its scale, they might not have worked too badly. What I think these early drafts really show is how long it took Tolkien to figure out what sort of a book it was he was writing.

Ok then, I'll give some of the hobbit's conversation, & we can vote on the quality, & whether we would have had a bestseller on our hands:

'Fancy climbing upstairs to bed!' said Odo. 'That seems to me most inconvenient. Hobbits aren't birds.'

'I don't know.' said Bingo. 'It isn't as bad as it sounds; though personally I never like looking out of upstairs windows, it makes me a bit giddy. There are some houses that have three stages, bedrooms above bedrooms. I slept in one once long ago on a holiday; the wind kept me awake all night.'

'What a nuisance, if you want a handkerchief or something when you are downstairs, & find it is upstairs,' said Odo.

'You could keep handkerchiefs downstairs, if you wished', said Frodo.

'You could, but I don't believe anybody does.'

'That is not the houses' fault,' said Bingo, 'it is just the silliness of the hobbits that live in them.

(Long paragraph on the Elf Towers)

'If I ever live in a house, I shall keep everything I want downstairs, & only go up when I don't want anything' or perhaps I shall have a cold supper upstairs in the dark on a starry night.'

'And have to carry plates & things downstairs, if you don't fall all the way down,' laughed Odo.

'No!' said Bingo. 'I shall have wooden plates & bowls, & throw them out of the window. There will be thick grass all round my house.'

But you would still have to carry your supper upstairs.' said Odo.

'O well then, perhaps I should not have supper upstairs,' said Bingo. 'It was only just an idea.'

The 'farce' as Christopher calls it, of the events in Maggot's house, have to be read in full to be truly appreciated.

Sorry, but to me this rubbish is infinitely inferior to even the most twee stuff in the Hobbit.

[Carorëiel]

I'm reading Fellowship now for the fifth or sixth time, and every time I'm struck by different things as I go along. In this read of "A Short Cut to Mushrooms," two things stood out that I don't think ever really occurred to me before.

I think the first may tie in with what davem was asking about prejudice:

Originally Posted by davem

One thing did strike me, though, & that's Sam's attitude to Elves on the one hand & to Bucklanders on the other. The elves he is in awe of, even though they are strangers, & one would expect him to be at least suspicious of them. The Bucklanders, on the other hand, he is suspicious of. What's Tolkien saying here about the nature of predudice?

In addition to Sam's acceptance (and awe) of the Elves and suspicion of the Bucklanders, we have the display of the Bucklanders' attitude toward those who live in Hobbiton. Farmer Maggot says, "'You should never have gone mixing yourself up with Hobbiton folk, Mr. Frodo. Folk are queer up there.'" This is, of course, the inverse of what the Gaffer says in "A Long Expected Party" when he's telling the story of how Frodo was orphaned: "'Anyway: there was this Mr. Frodo left an orphan and stranded, as you might say, among those queer Bucklanders.'" This bit with Farmer Maggot had always seemed to be nicely amusing in the same sort of at-home-with-the-hobbits vein as much of the opening chapters, but this time through I got to thinking about just how good Tolkien is at subtly weaving social commentary through the narrative. (This certainly isn't the first time he does it in Fellowship; I just hadn't picked up on this instance of it before.) Of course, everyone is queer to someone else, and no one, really, is queer at all.

The second thing that jumped out at me has to do with Merry's appearance at the end of the chapter and the brief suspicion that he is a Black Rider. My father read LotR to me for the first time when I was very young, so I can't remember not knowing what was going to happen at any particular juncture. I can't remember experiencing this scene for the first time and not knowing that the rider was really Merry and that Frodo, Sam, Pippin, and Farmer Maggot were in no danger at that point. So, as I was reading the chapter this time, I tried to imagine reading it for the first time. And what struck me was just how much of a relief it would be to expect the horrible and unknown but get a friend. Of course, this is something Tolkien does so many times throughout LotR (in "The Shadow of the Past," Frodo and Gandalf suspect a spy outside the window, but it turns out to be Sam; in "At the Sign of the Prancing Pony" and "Strider," Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin suspect the ranger of being a potential foe, but he turns out to be a friend and a guide; in "The White Rider," Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas fear they have encountered Saruman, but it turns out to be Gandalf; and so on) that one might even refer to it as a recurring theme. Is there a connection with Tolkien's theory of the eucatastrophe here?