Day Three: The Ring Revealed

Last night we began chapter two, “The Shadow of the Past.” There’s a temptation, even in these longer chapters, to just gallop right through to the end, but we’ve been trying to have S. get to bed a bit earlier. We ended up looking at Tolkien’s maps for a while even after we stopped reading though. S. is amazed by the way Tolkien built his secondary world. She loves the careful way he compiles details. (He won her heart completely by showing a real understanding of moon phases in The Hobbit.)

Tolkien is good at whatever he does, be it writing dramatic action or describing scenery,  but I think I may like him best when he has one of his characters recounting history, as Gandalf does in this chapter.

A lot of years pass between the end of chapter one and the moment in chapter two when Gandalf and Frodo sit by the fire in Bag End and Gandalf reveals what he has learned about the ring. I forgot how much time passes there! Frodo is thirty-three in chapter one, and nearing fifty (a momentous age, for that is when Bilbo first went adventuring, now about eighty years ago) when Gandalf comes to warn him that the ring in his possession is not just a ring of power, but the ring of power.

S. was suitably surprised and thrilled (and worried) to learn this piece of news. It’s such a dramatic unveiling, with Gandalf throwing the ring in the fire so that it reveals its burning runic secrets, and then proclaiming, in translation, the towering line “One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to rule them all and in the darkness bind them.”

I love that Gandalf won’t even speak the words in the language of Mordor, as though the very utterance of that language would cast an appalling shadow on the brightness and innocence of the Shire. Part of what makes Gandalf so lovable and trustworthy is this desire in him to protect these little people, seemingly so unimportant, on the fringes of a wider world they know so little about.

We’re only partway through the history of the Ring itself, and how it came to be in Frodo’s possession, but S. has enjoyed many echoes already – from the Hobbit (and Bilbo’s exchange with Gollum) and also from the Harry Potter stories, which she recently heard read for the first time. Like her parents, she delights in talking about literary influences, and she picked up on the fact that Tolkien’s fingerprints are all over Rowling’s work. The details that Gandalf reveals about Sauron, and how he lived in Mirkwood as a shadow of evil but has now come out in the open again and is rebuilding his strength, put her in mind of Voldemort. And she’s already made connections between the ring’s corrosive power and horcruxes.

I seem to have settled into my Gandalf voice, and I’m tending to read Frodo a little lighter and higher than Bilbo’s voice, but I’ve not yet figured out how to read Sam. He’s made only brief appearances so far.