Welcome to what is effectively a relaunch of my blog, Wisdom from The Lord of the Rings. I first began to write this in the autumn of 2012 and began to publish it on WordPress in October 2013. If this is your first visit then a very warm welcome. If you have been here before or you are a regular reader, welcome back!
The intention of the blog is to offer a weekly reflection on Tolkien’s great work in search of its wisdom. Tolkien was a central member of a group of writers and scholars, known as The Inklings, that used to meet in order to read and discuss their work with each other in Oxford in the mid 20th century. If you would like to know about them then I would warmly recommend a series of talks that you can find on YouTube given by Malcolm Guite. If you type in Malcolm Guite and Inklings when you visit YouTube you will find them easily. I just tried it and it works! The Inklings were regarded as highly unfashionable in their day by the literary establishment but I believe that they will prove to be one of the most important intellectual and literary influences, not just of their own time but of ours too. Tom Shippey’s fine book, J.R.R Tolkien, Writer of the Century, is a good read on this.
Just a note on this week’s blog and a personal connection. I refer to Louis MacNiece’s wonderful poem, Snow, in the post. When I first began to get to know my wife, Laura, back in the early 1990s, I noticed a framed copy of the poem in the hallway of her parents’ home in Edgbaston, Birmingham, England. The reason for this, so I learned, was because MacNiece had written this poem while a guest in the house some years before. It was in the time of a previous owner of the house but the summer house in which he wrote it remained very largely as it was at the time. We knew it mainly because at one time 21 of us used to sit down in it to eat on Christmas Day each year. A big fire used to roar in the fireplace. It was necessary on cold winter days. My mother in law, Bridget Pugh, used to teach English Literature at Birmingham University, and even in her later years also regularly taught a semester in Duluth, Minnesota. I am glad to say that she would teach a class on Tolkien.
Regular readers of the blog will notice two new things. One is that I include a page reference to my Harper Collins edition of The Lord of the Rings. That is to make it easier for readers who are reading the book to see what part of the story I am referring to. The other new thing is that I include an audio file of my reading of the post. This is at the encouragement of my wife who thinks people will like it. I would also like to thank my daughter, Bethan, who has helped me with the technical side of things. Please do let me know what you think of this in the comments section.
So, introduction at an end, I invite you to read or listen or both and most importantly to enjoy another reading of The Lord of the Rings.
Dear Readers,
The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp. 21-24
To know and to love a plot of land is no shame and does not diminish or shrink the soul in or of itself. It was the great Irish poet of the mid-twentieth century, Patrick Kavanagh, who wrote of such knowledge and such love:
“To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields- these are as much as a man can fully experience.”
The Gaffer, Master Hamfast Gamgee, of Number 3 Bagshot Row below Bag End in Hobbiton, the Shire, knows the gardens that he tends for Mr Bilbo Baggins. He knows every furrow and every corner, the right times to plant and the right times to harvest, but perhaps we might say that he has never fully experienced the gardens that he has spent a lifetime looking after.
To fully experience something is to look, not at, but through it. It is to have the vision that George Herbert speaks of when he writes:
“A man who looks on glass, on it may stay his eye; or if he pleaseth through it pass, and then the heaven espy.”
Or William Blake who speaks of seeing “A World in a Grain of Sand. And a Heaven in a Wild Flower”.
This is the poetic experience that Kavanagh speaks of and that the Gaffer has never known or valued and which he fears in watching his son, Sam, grow up. He knows that the world is “suddener than we fancy it” as Louis MacNiece speaks of in his poem, Snow. He speaks of “mountains of gold” in foreign parts, the places to which Bilbo mythologically travelled long ago, but he seeks to protect himself from such experience by reserving it for the gentry, the business of his betters, as he puts it. This allows him to remain within the safety of cabbages and potatoes and to keep his distance from Elves and Dragons.
Poor Master Hamfast! What glory he will never see, even the glory right underneath his very nose. The very cabbages and potatoes that he regards as symbols of safety and security would, in the hands of an elven cook, become a heavenly banquet.
For the Gaffer’s son, Samwise, everything is laden with possibility although at this point in his life the possibility lies elsewhere. One day he will be gardener to the Shire and bring this possibility within the very boundaries that his father thinks to be safe and known. Sam is learning his poetic experience through the “stories of the old days” as the Gaffer puts it and he has learned to read and write. Already he begins to know that the mythic, the world of Elves and Dragons, lies within his grasp, but not here, not in Hobbiton or the Shire. He still believes that he must go elsewhere to experience it. The Gaffer believes this too. Perhaps because he too believes that the mythical cannot lie within his own garden he is afraid. He is afraid of foreign parts and he is afraid of losing Sam to such an experience.
I grew up in the English countryside on farms that my father ran for wealthy people. It was a world of cabbages and potatoes, or pigs and fields of wheat in our case, but beauty and joy kept breaking into my life. A walk with my father through a wood filled with bluebells and sensing the strangeness of the church to which we had gone together. Walking across a room and suddenly standing transfixed in joy as a piece of orchestral string music began to play on our television set. And listening to the wonderful Miss Maher reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to us in my village school as the dusk of an autumn afternoon began to descend and I walked with Lucy Pevensie for the first time through the wardrobe into Narnia. Like Sam my ability to see, to listen, to go beyond the surface of things to the heaven that lies beyond was being formed.
“I hope no harm will come of it,” says the Gaffer. But harm does come. Sam will be be taken into a world that is far too big for him, to dangers that no other hobbit has ever faced, but he will see wonders that no other hobbit has ever seen.
The two go together.
Wisdom from The Lord of the Rings 
I love the audio component to this — fabulous idea! I can hear the reverence in your voice for this material. Makes it even more personal.
Thank you so much! I have been working on this over the last few days and finally got it all together this morning. I really appreciate your encouragement to keep going with this.
Most happy to do so. I came in late the first time around, and there’s no telling what new insights you’ll have this time through, so it’s not the same journey at all.
Congratulations on the launch of the new look blog! This is wonderful. And I too like the addition of the audio file – your reading is very calming to listen to.
Thank you so much. The reading worked with the children when they were young. You encourage me to keep on going with this idea.
I love the Gaffer’s wonder and fear at his son – *GASP* – ‘learning his letters’!
I also think that his name (I’m pretty sure that Hamfast translates to stay-at-home) gives us a thumb-nail sketch both of his strengths and his weaknesses. It’s one thing to be rooted, quite another to refuse to grow…
The great educationalist, the late John Hull, once wrote a book entitled “Why do Christians Stop Learning?” I know that he wanted to provoke debate within churches but he could easily have replaced “Christians” with “People”.
Richard Rohr says that it is either Great Suffering or Great Love that awakens us from sleep. Sam will know both of these in great measure.
Well done, Stephen, and a nice start to the new format. It’s always fascinating to hear a writer read his own work, since the writer puts the emphasis where he hears it, not necessarily where the reader’s silent voice would. Plus hearing your voice makes me feel like I know you a little better. I always enjoy your reflections and look forward to more of them.
Thank you so much for your encouragement, Tom. I hope that we will meet one day.
While, I respect the Gaffers wise deference to his indeed betters as good sense, I would like to point out that in LotR Tolkien uses the words “sudden”, “suddenly”, etc. actually 526 times!! So you’ve hit on some sort of important Tolkienian theme.
Greetings and many thanks for leaving your first comment on this blog. I hope that you will visit many more times.
Fascinating. If I have hit upon something then it is entirely inadvertent. I was looking for a word that would somehow link the poetic quotations that I used. Suddenness seemed to express the unexpectedly close relationship between even the apparently mundane (like cabbages and potatoes) and the heavenly (to use George Herbert’s image). The Gaffer has no idea how close that relationship is and, frankly, he does not want to know. He would rather leave the potential of such a relationship to those he calls “his betters” although I don’t think that he actually regards them as such unless he is defending them against people like Sandyman the Miller.
Just a thought on Tolkien’s use of ‘Sudden’. Can you think of an occasion when he might be using the word in MacNiece’s sense? I would love to know.
This is the one that comes to mind for me:
‘Upon the hearth the fire is red,
Beneath the roof there is a bed;
But not yet weary are our feet,
Still round the corner we may meet
A *sudden* tree or standing stone
That none have seen but we alone.
Tree and flower and leaf and grass,
Let them pass! Let them pass!’
Sounds like a pretty close fit for what you were talking about – the transcendent hidden in the mundane. It’s a dangerous business, stepping out of your door!
David, that is wonderful! As I read this I am just about to take my dog out for his morning walk into the woods. Who knows what “suddenness” I will meet?
I love your new look and how absolutely wonderful to hear your voice! Not only does this Anglophile love British accents, I agree with Lady Emily Rose about how you read what is in your post. Great stuff. Poor Gaffer indeed. He is blind to so much, preferring the mundane to the powers of the imagination. I am glad Sam grew up just as much around the Bagginses as he did with his own family. They give him the wonder and joy he would never had had otherwise. Start looking around for ‘suddenly’ – another blog brought this to my attention some time ago. It’s either the Ring at work – or grace – interesting how both it. Glad to begin this journey again as I didn’t come in the beginning either. This will be fun!
Namarie, God bless, Anne Marie 🙂
Thank you so much for this, Anne Marie. I will keep a look out for “sudden” or “suddenly”. Did you read David Rowe’s wonderful comment with the long quote and “sudden” trees?
As you know I have enjoyed your company in the latter stages of my last read of The Lord of the Rings and I am so glad that you will be a fellow reader on the next one. Do let me know when you are ready to publish your own work.
God bless you, Anne Marie 😊
I’ve been looking through the books, and have got a slightly different ‘sudden’ for you:
‘Suddenly for Faramir [Pippin’s] heart was strangely moved with a feeling he had not known before. Here was one with an air of high nobility… one of the Kings of Men born into a later time, but touched with the wisdom and sadness of the Elder Race. He knew now why Beregond spoke his name with love.”
[The Siege of Gondor]
Similarly, Sam also caught in Faramir ‘an air’ that reminds him of Gandalf and wizards, and which Faramir described as ‘the air of Numenor’ from far away. I think the highness and nobility that the hobbits are perceiving is ultimately the echo of the Valar, albeit (as it were) through a glass darkly.
But the thing that struck me is this: I couldn’t help hearing in that first sentence an echo of John Wesley’s heart feeling ‘strangely warmed’. Could Tolkien have been making a conscious allusion, or was it just an accident? In either case, it’s fitting. With God (and the Valar), the suddenness and the strangeness go together, I think.
The contrast between Pippin (at the point of the story to which you refer) and the Gaffer (at any point of the story!) is striking. The Gaffer has spent a lifetime protecting himself from such possibility of “suddenness” whereas Pippin’s heart has been softened and can be pierced by love. Indeed he is willing to allow this to be happen.
I do not know if the Catholic Tolkien was aware of the Methodist Wesley’s description of his converting encounter with God but I am sure that he would appreciate the language and the experience also.
Absolutely lovely, Stephen. Wonderful insights, and your narration is beautiful. You’ve a great voice for audio.
Many thanks, Jeremiah. As I said in this first piece the decision to introduce it was because of the encouragement of a daughter. Enough said!