There are several points that Shippey brought up in chapter 2 that I thought were interesting.
Tolkien didn’t know exactly where he was going when he was writing his drafts for LOTR. The one example given is that it was Treebeard, not Saruman that had imprisoned Gandalf. At this point, Saruman had not yet appeared in LOTR. I really thought that this was interesting because it changes the role of the character of Treebeard. In Tolkien’s drafts, Treebeard would be on the side of evil, working against the ultimate goal of destroying Sauron. In the actual story, Treebeard works toward the goal of destroying Sauron. Another example is that by the time the fellowship reached Moria, there still had been no mention of Lothlorien and Rohan. Both of these places are introduced much earlier in the final version of LOTR. These examples that Shippey points out shows what Tolkien originally had in mind when writing LOTR, and it can be seen that Tolkien made many changes in his drafts when writing LOTR.
Tolkien was very interested in the names of places, with there being two main reasons for this. People usually don’t think much about names and just accept them for what they are. Also, people aren’t likely to change the names “except by the slow and natural processes of language change of which they are unconscious; which means that names may well contain unusually authentic testimony to history or old tradition.” Tolkien used many names, names of people, creatures, and places in LOTR. This is how Tolkien started with writing LOTR: by looking at names and their meanings. Tolkien used names and their meanings to create the Shire. These names that he used show that the hobbits are English people.
Shippey goes into detail on discussing Tom Bombadil. Tom Bombadil is described as “a spirit of the place.” Elves call him the “oldest and fatherless.” What I thought was a particular interesting fact is that the ring has no power over Tom Bombadil. The ring can’t even make him invisible. This seems to add to mysteriousness of Tom Bombadil. When reading LOTR, I didn’t know that the ring had no power over Tom Bombadil, but always felt that he was a mysterious character, in that he seemed to always come to the rescue when the hobbits were in trouble and were trying to battle some sort of evil force that was present.
There is a lot of discussion about the council of Elrond in chapter 2 of Shippey’s book. Shippey notes that in the council of Elrond chapter in LOTR, there are 15,000 words of speech that don’t seem to take us anywhere too quickly. Shippey states that readers could have easily become too bored to follow through with this entire chapter. However, the reason that readers don’t become bored with it is because of “Tolkien’s extremely firm grasp of the history of Middle-earth” and “his unusual ability to suggest cultural variation by differences in mode of speech.”In this chapter, Elrond’s manner of speaking distinguishes his speech from the speech of the others present at the council. An example of this is when Elrond says “From the ruin of the Gladden Fields…three men only came ever back.” It is noted that it would be more normal to say “only three men ever came back.” There are other examples of how Elrond speaks, but all of them seem to show that there is an inversion between subjects and verbs in his spoken sentences. I don’t remember noticing this when reading LOTR, but found it interesting to find out that Tolkien chose to use this style of speech for the character of Elrond and that it was used to distinguish him from other characters that spoke at the council.
I also found it interesting to read about how the plot of the council of Elrond was organized. Shippey makes several points, but I will just list the ones that I thought were interesting or of importance. At the beginning of the council, Elrond asks what should be done with the ring. More than 20 pages later, Gandalf states that they still haven’t made a decision on the ring, which is the reason that there was a council in the first place. A lot of time is spent on trying to prove that the ring is indeed the one ring of Sauron. Gandalf had strong evidence to prove the identity of the ring. After Aragorn speaks of the capture of Gollum at the council, Gandalf knows that Frodo’s ring is the one ring because Gandalf saw the inscription in it in the “Black Speech,” which he then speaks at the council. Another point made about the council is that Frodo deciding to take the ring is a decision that is “absolutely vital for the plot, the theme, and everything else.” Essentially, it is this decision that leads to everything else that happens in LOTR.
