The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp 60,61

“What have you decided to do?” Gandalf rouses Frodo from his thoughts because the time has come for choosing. Gandalf has told the long and unhappy story of the Ring from the time of its making to the unlikely and entirely unlooked for manner in which itT came into Frodo’s possession. He has also told Frodo that Sauron is searching for the Ring, searching for the Shire and searching for a hobbit called Baggins.

Frodo announces his decision.

“I cannot keep the Ring and stay here. I ought to leave Bag End, leave the Shire, leave everything and go away.”

Frodo sighs because he has to go into exile and perhaps an exile that will never end. But at the same time he is filled with excitement because there is a true adventure beckoning him. “As he was speaking a great desire to follow Bilbo flamed up in his heart… It was so strong that it overcame his fear.”

Gandalf is amazed!

“Hobbits really are amazing creatures, as I’ve said before. You can learn all that there is to know about their ways in a month, and yet after a hundred years they can still surprise you at a pinch.”

And in saying this Gandalf echoed words that Tolkien himself wrote to his publisher in 1938 in reply to their wish for a sequel to The Hobbit.

“The sequel to The Hobbit has remained where it stopped. It has lost my favour, and I have no idea what to do with it… Nearly all the motives that I can use were packed into the original book, so that a sequel will appear either ‘thinner’ or merely repetitional… I am personally immensely amused by hobbits as such, and can contemplate them eating and making their rather fatuous jokes indefinitely.”

So Tolkien himself has been “amazed” by his own creation which is a rather wonderful thought. Like Gandalf he had thought that he knew all that there was to know about hobbits and that it comprised fatuous jokes and eating. Like Gandalf he rather enjoyed the company of hobbits but he could not see them playing any part in what he termed in the same letter, “the ‘pure’ fairy stories or mythologies of The Silmarillion“. That is until he met Frodo Baggins and I am not using a mere figure of speech here. For there have been few writers who have been more conscious that they are sub-creators than J.R.R Tolkien. Tolkien was not so much an inventor of story as a discoverer. He became a wanderer in his own mythology, learning the languages of Arda and listening to stories as they were told to him in the original tongues. It is not a mere literary device that The Lord of the Rings is a story formed from The Red Book of Westmarch as written by Bilbo and Frodo Baggins and with notes and additions from their literary heirs and executors. It has to be that way.

And all this makes the moment in which Frodo takes Gandalf by surprise all the more wonderful because Tolkien could only have written this scene if he had not been taken by surprise himself. And being taken by surprise he is ready to lead us step by wonderful step all the way through this voyage of discovery right through to the very last page.