Comments | eykar: Second Round of Notes on FoTR: A Short Cut to Mushrooms

eykar

Second Round of Notes on FoTR: A Short Cut to Mushrooms

Jul 17, 2006 11:30

Frodo considers Gildor's hard-won advice to 'Take such friends as are trusty and willing' but immediately reacts 'No! I could not!...I don't think I ought even to take Sam.' He offers Sam several graceful exits and finds out that Sam had his own converse with the Elves (quite likely after Frodo was led to a bed beside Pippin) and, added to his ( Read more... )

Comments 4

dagmarjung July 24 2006, 21:45:00 UTC

Hi Eykar ( ... )

Re: Black Riders eykar July 25 2006, 04:32:26 UTC

Nice to hear from you ( ... )

Re: Black Riders dagmarjung July 25 2006, 08:39:30 UTC

Wow, thank you! I will copy your post and put it into my piture research folder as a reference, you summed up all the relevant quotes to nicely for me! Reading this, I think they might well have used a kind of concealment charm to make them look more ordinary in hobbit's eyes. It didn't fool the dog, though, and it didn't cover their voices.

As for the 'funny customer' remark, this is close to the beginning of the story, and Tolkien hadn't yet fully found his new voice. There are still some remnants of the children's book style he used in The Hobbit. This may be one of them. Also it goes along with the hobbit tendency of adressing things too grand and overwhelming in a very down-to-earth way.

Re: Black Riders eykar July 25 2006, 14:44:11 UTC

Glad I could help.
Good point about 'funny customer' being a way to 'use light words ... and say less than they mean' as Merry later puts it. The light words undoubtedly communicated more to other hobbits than they do to us in print, backed up as they were by tone of voice and expression of face.