Days Eleven and Twelve: Barrow-Wights and Bree-Folk

Yesterday ended up so busy that I didn't manage my daily post for Day Eleven, so I thought I'd catch up two days in one today.

First of all, mea culpa for my comment in Day Ten that no one ever put Tom Bombadil or Beorn in a movie. As far as I know, that's still true of Tom Bombadil, but having just watched the beginning of Peter Jackson's Hobbit (part 2), I realize that Beorn did make it to the screen. He's not quite like I imagined, but then everything in Jackson's Hobbit always looks and feels more savage than anything I imagine. But he is there!

Day Eleven found us with Frodo and company on the Barrow-Downs. This is a strange, other-wordly place where it's easy to get lost, and easy to get ensnared in what feels like a hidden dimension.  The hobbits don't mean to go there, but they find themselves somehow pulled there, and in the end it's once again Frodo's willingness to ask for help (with the rhyme Tom gave them) that saves the day. It's hard not to see providence at work even in some of these most difficult and sticky situations the hobbits get into. While it's not good that they're trapped in the barrows, it turns out to be a good thing that they're given weapons. When Tom sets them on the path again, and rides with them to the borders of his country, he also gives them advice about where to go next, which is how they end up at the Prancing Pony in Bree.

There's something about this inn the crossroads that always puts me in mind a bit of the cantina in Mos Eisley -- or rather the cantina puts me in mind of the inn, since it got invented many years later. Perhaps adventure/quest stories need this kind of place, a place where information can be learned or given, a place where our heroes begin to see just how big a world they're traveling in. (Sam is amazed by houses that are three stories tall!) We readers get to see a mix of Middle-Earth folks, Big and Little, at the Prancing Pony. Some of them seem ominous, others harmless, most somewhere in between, but it's all a rich conglomeration of culture. Incidentally, this is one of the few places where I think that Bakshi's creative but highly uneven Lord of the Rings is very effective...his mix of rotoscoped live action and animation in the Prancing Pony scene gives us an interesting sense of very different worlds coming together in a cross-cultural mix.

Frodo tries to do a good job remembering that he's Mr. Underhill, not Mr. Baggins, but hobbits don't wear deception or disguise very well. Give them good beer and some homelike food, and they're into telling stories with the Outsiders before you know it. Pippin almost gives away the show with his story of Bilbo's birthday disappearance, and Frodo steps in to intervene at the last moment, at the urging of a dark and scraggly looking stranger, a Ranger named Strider who is lurking in a shadowy corner of the room, his long legs in their tall leather boots stretched before him. Alas, somehow the Ring finds its way onto Frodo's finger (it does seem to have a mind of its own!) right in the midst of his second performance of a delightfully funny song inspired by the nursery rhyme "Hey Diddle Diddle." His abrupt disappearance, which he tries unsuccessfully to cover up, scandalizes the decent folks and quickens the interest of the sinister ones.