Day Two: The Road Goes Ever On and On

When you get to share a book you already love with someone who has never journeyed through it, you  enjoy it on a whole new level. You read not only with your own previous experience of the book thrumming along underneath, but with the added enjoyment of hearing someone else exclaim, wonder, worry, and put things together as they go. Not to mention you get the benefits of their new insights!

That was how I felt last night when we opened Fellowship back up to finish chapter one. I offered a brief one or two line recap of the first half, then prepared to settle in with the words “the second half of chapter one, 'A Long-Expected Party.'

“Hey,” piped up my daughter. “It was the Unexpected Party in The Hobbit.”

Momentarily distracted, I paused to ponder her words. She was right – The Hobbit starts with an unexpected, unplanned party of dwarves, arriving at Bag End with Gandalf to surprise Bilbo. Fellowship also begins at Bag End, sixty years later, with Bilbo throwing a party for the neighborhood, a party he has long planned as his own surprise send-off. Somehow I had never made the connection.

After exchanging delighted looks with my husband (who hadn’t made the connection either) and commending my daughter on the observation, we dove into the story once more.

Bilbo has slipped off from the party, following his exciting and unexplained exit. We find him next at Bag End, gathering up his things in prelude for what looks to be a long journey. Gandalf joins him there and they have an important conversation. We learn several things in the course of this conversation, most of them centered on the remarkable ring that Bilbo brought back from his wanderings decades ago.

Bilbo is none too pleased that Gandalf spoiled his joke, or so he thinks, by making a flash appear when he suddenly disappeared. Gandalf, of course, has his reasons – he wants the hobbits to think that he helped Bilbo with a bit of magic because he doesn’t want anyone, in the Shire or its environs, to begin to focus too much attention on Bilbo’s ring and its odd magical properties. Gandalf seems very serious about this – warning Bilbo to keep the ring safe and secret.

Bilbo leaves the ring behind for Frodo as a parting gift. It’s the nature of hobbits to give gifts on their own birthdays (most of them mathom, Tolkien’s hobbit-word for things that get re-gifted among hobbits) but this turns out to be a rather big gift, and one that Bilbo has a harder time letting go of than he expected. Somehow that ring doesn’t want to leave his pocket! Bilbo gets positively possessive of it in a very un-Bilbo like way. He calls it “my precious,” words we have hitherto heard before from the lips of the ring’s previous possessor, Gollum.

“He doesn’t sound like Bilbo,” S. interjected more than once. She’s curious to know why he got so angry and greedy about the ring, which is exactly what she should be curious about at this point in the narrative. All the reader knows at this point is that Gandalf is beginning to wonder good and hard about that ring, and that Bilbo has had the ring in his possession for too long a time. No wonder he is feeling “stretched…like butter that has been scraped over too much bread.”

Bilbo’s parting from the Shire is lovely and sweet, tinged with nostalgia and also a hint of adventure. I love that he girds himself in his former adventurous traveling clothes and that he sings “The road goes ever on and on…” as he leaves.

Our time with Frodo is relatively short at chapter’s end. He comes across as mild-mannered, a little melancholy over the loss of his dear cousin Bilbo’s company. He’s inherited Bag End, much to the Sackville-Bagginses’ disgust, but while he’s grateful, he’d still rather just have Bilbo back (Frodo always seems to care more for people than things). He’s surprised that Bilbo left him his ring, and seems gently bewildered by Gandalf’s repeated warning “keep it secret, and keep it safe!” I tried to read this in my best grave and gravely wizard tone.