The Great Tolkien Reread: A Long-Expected Party

"Eleventy-First Birthday" by Nicole Gustafsson

He stepped down and vanished. There was a blinding flash of light, and the guests all blinked. When they opened their eyes Bilbo was nowhere to be seen. One hundred and forty-four flabbergasted hobbits sat back speechless. Old Odo Proudfoot removed his feet from the table and stamped. Then there was a dead silence, until suddenly, after several deep breaths, every Baggins, Boffin, Took, Brandybuck, Grubb, Chubb, Burrows, Bolger, Bracegirdle, Brockhouse, Goodbody, Hornblower, and Proudfoot began to talk at once.

We begin the tale of The Lord of the Rings with a chapter that quite deliberately recalls and reverses the opening events of The Hobbit. Instead of an unexpected party, there is a long-expected one. Instead of Bilbo rushing out of his home towards adventure without even a single handkerchief, there is a minutely-planned and carefully-orchestrated plan of disappearance and departure. And instead of the incursion of weirdness that is the thirteen dwarves crashing into Bilbo's comfortable life, there is an almost painstaking preoccupation with the domestic. At the beginning of this epic tale of good vs. evil, at the outset of a continent-crossing journey, what this chapter wants us to care about is party-planning. Estate management. The protocols and customs of gift exchange.

This is, to be absolutely clear, in no way a complaint. I ended the introduction to this series with a promise to talk about Tolkien's craft, and here he is offering an example of it right at the outset. For a writer who is known for the majestic sweep of his narrative, "A Long-Expected Party" is a masterful example of his grasp of the quotidian. Told in an arch, almost gossipy tone, it not only catches us up to events in the sixty years that have passed since the end of The Hobbit, but does so in a way that remains close to the ground, taking seriously the things that Bilbo's neighbors—if not Bilbo himself—think are important.

With almost breathless excitement, the chapter reports on the preparations for Bilbo's birthday party—"There might have been some grumbling about 'dealing locally', but that very week orders began to pour out of Bag End for every kind of provision, commodity, or luxury that could be obtained in Hobbiton or Bywater or anywhere in the neighborhood." With the unflinching judgement of a busybody neighbor, it comments on the foibles of its characters—"Obstinate silence. They all feared that a song or some poetry was now imminent; and they were getting bored. Why couldn't [Bilbo] stop talking and let them drink his health?" And at every turn, it pokes repeated, sly fun at the self-importance of this whole community: "Then the weather clouded over. That was on Wednesday, the eve of the Party. Anxiety was intense."

There's an English author we tend to bring up where minute, gossipy descriptions of the mundane lives of the landed gentry and their dependents are concerned, and she is not J.R.R. Tolkien. But here, take a look at this passage from early in "A Long-Expected Party":

No one had a more attentive audience than old Ham Gamgee, commonly known as the Gaffer. He held forth at The Ivy Bush, a small inn on the Bywater road; and he spoke with some authority, for he had tended the garden at Bag End for forty years, and had helped old Holman in the same job before that. Now that he was himself growing old and stiff in the joints, the job was mainly carried out by his youngest son, Sam Gamgee. Both father and son were on very friendly terms with Bilbo and Frodo. They lived on the Hill itself, in Number 3 Bagshot Row just below Bag End.

And now compare it to the opening paragraph of Sense and Sensibility:

The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex. Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the centre of their property, where, for many generations, they had lived in so respectable a manner as to engage the general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance. The late owner of this estate was a single man, who lived to a very advanced age, and who for many years of his life, had a constant companion and housekeeper in his sister. But her death, which happened ten years before his own, produced a great alteration in his home; for to supply her loss, he invited and received into his house the family of his nephew Mr. Henry Dashwood, the legal inheritor of the Norland estate, and the person to whom he intended to bequeath it.

Now consider that this similarity—the same sort of fussy detail, the same obsession with family, rank, and home, the same sense of being sat down by an older relative who knows everybody's business to be told a salacious tale—actually makes a great deal of sense. Like Jane Austen, Tolkien's interest in this chapter is in "two inches of ivory". In a small, insular world whose inhabitants regard with suspicion even those who live across the Brandywine River, much less anyone from outside the Shire. These are people to whom the needling bequests in Bilbo's will ("For ADELARD TOOK, for his VERY OWN, from Bilbo; on an umbrella. Adelard had carried off many unlabeled ones") are of utmost importance; and who, when they go in search of his mysteriously-gotten treasure, can take themselves no further than the Bag End cellar. They are people whom Bilbo (and to a lesser extent Frodo) both loves and is exasperated by. And unlike Jane Austen, Tolkien, and his characters, will not stay long among them.

The Lord of the Rings is a novel of opening outward. Of realizing, again and again, that there is a larger world, and a larger story, outside your door that you had only been dimly aware of, and becoming swept up in that story (and then struggling to fit yourself back into your old life when you return to it). In order to achieve this, it first immerses us in the small, ridiculous place that its heroes will have to leave, making us understand that to the people within it—and, for the time being, to Frodo—it is a world entire.

It's for this reason, presumably, that Frodo, our soon-to-be-hero, spends the chapter—when he isn't entirely in the background—seeing to logistics. To once again draw a comparison with The Hobbit, he is neither as settled as Bilbo was in the opening chapter of that book, nor as secretly dissatisfied. He seems content—while also being harried by insensitive neighbors and unpleasant Sackville-Bagginses—to clean up after his uncle, keep his house, and step into his shoes. This more than suits Gandalf, who after a tense, quietly terrifying struggle with Bilbo over leaving the Ring behind, urges Frodo to keep it secret and safe. Once again, we reverse The Hobbit: where in that novel Gandalf wanted Bilbo to set off on an adventure, in this novel he wants Frodo to stay put. At least for now.

Next time: Infodumps galore in "The Shadow of the Past"

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