Well, and Your Humble Blogger wasn’t sure, really, about logging The Fellowship of the Ring as a separate entry. I mean, yes, it’s a book, but it’s also a volume of a bigger thing. On the other hand, who knows when I’ll actually finish the whole thing. It’s pretty long.
Also, there’s a sense in which Fellowship—Books One and Two, if you like—are significantly different and worth logging separately. I mean, they are all different, aren’t they, but I think that the first two books are different in tone and content in a way that, well, is what I’m going to talk about in this note.
Book One (between the Shire and Rivendell) is very nearly a children’s book in tone. It’s significantly different in tone than The Hobbit, but there isn’t much in there that would terrify or mystify a kid. More importantly, I don’t think there’s much in there that a kid would find boring. We meet Frodo and the other hobbits, have some backstory (which is a little mystical but not mystifying) and then start in with a road trip. I suspect that Old Man Willow is the scariest thing in that part; the Barrow-Wight is too distant and strange to be really scary. And the Black Riders are scary, of course, but in their first appearance they are not formidable, with the sniffing and so on, and they are easily eluded, so their scariness is held in abeyance. I don’t know about Weathertop—I don’t find the scene really works when I read it now, although when I read it at the age of, oh, ten? Something like ten, anyway, when I read it at around ten years old I found the idea that Frodo could see the Black Riders more clearly when he was wearing the Ring, and that even more impressively the Black Riders could see him more clearly when he was wearing the Ring to be the real shift in the importance and power of the Ring, the bit where the Ring went from being a McGuffin, that is, a pitty fing that gets everybody moving but is otherwise just a pitty fing, to being scary in itself. And somehow I forget that things do seem dire between Weathertop and Rivendell, that there’s a week or more in there before the Flight at the Ford.
Anyway, I think I could read Book One to my Perfect Non-Reader without too much distress. She would love Bree, and probably enjoy Tom Bombadil. And she would certainly enjoy all the connections back to The Hobbit: Bilbo, and the Sackville-Bagginses, and the trolls, and Rivendell itself.
Book Two (between Rivendell and Rauros Falls) also has quite a few connections to The Hobbit, although different in tone, as is the whole book. Gloin shows up, although he is old and sad. Bilbo is back, too, and is also old and if not sad, at least diminished. Rivendell is different as well, or rather, we are seeing different parts of it. We hear of Balin, and that’s really scary. The connections are not comforting (as they are in Book One, mostly) but discomfiting, and my Perfect Non-Reader likes her comfits. I mean, comforts. Not so much comfits, although I’m not sure she’s ever had any. But my point (bet you didn’t think I had one) is that the difference in those connections is connected to an overall difference in tone that makes Book Two not only scarier but in places less interesting and comprehensible to a little girl who is sophisticated and well-read for a seven-year-old, but is still, you know, seven. I think it would be OK, but more difficult.
And then there’s Books Three and Four, The Two Towers, and I think that although there are chunks of Book Three that should be great fun for kids (the Ents, of course, but also March of the Three, and the expulsion of Wormtongue), there are other bits that have a lot to do with maps and armies and strategy, and there is also an expansion of the serious fright that we were introduced to in Moria. And with the death of Gandalf the Grey in Moria, and the death of Boromir at Rauros Falls, I think the death of Merry or Pippin becomes much more possible, and so the scary bits where they are captured by orcs are even more scary. And Book Four is just scary from beginning to end. I can’t imagine my Best Reader lasting through all of Book Four at this point. Maybe in a couple of years.
As for me, I figure I’ll rest a bit and start The Two Towers after all this snow has melted.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
Would you read the poems and songs, or skip them, when reading Fellowship aloud to a child?
I was thinking about that, a bit. I think for my particular child, I would read the poems and songs. She loved the songs in The Hobbit (even asking for a repeat of we leave before the break of day a couple of days later), and she generally likes poetry and lyrics. Probably I would take them individually–of course I would read the Man in the Moon and the Troll Song, which can’t be properly skipped and are besides short and funny. I think Tom Bombadil’s song, as well, although it’s a bit long. Really, there are two or three Elvish-style songs that might be a bit long and difficult in reading. Bilbo’s in Rivendell, and one in Lothlorien, and maybe another one of Elven-lore. I suppose I could do some sort of edited version. I certainly never read them carefully when I first read the thing, and I still often skip over them, or rather, scan them and think oh, yes, this poem.
Thanks,
-V.