Still round the corner we may meet
A sudden tree or standing stone
That none have seen but we alone.
Later, in his letters, Tolkien admitted the Tom Bombadil segment wasn’t necessary to The Fellowship of the Ring’s actual narrative. Some readers wish he’d left it out altogether. Do they also include the Old Forest in their wish-he-wouldn’t-haves? I hope not. Here’s what happens: In the very beginning of the quest, the sometimes-adventuresome hobbit with a big heart for home (“I feel that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable”) can put a name to the dangers, but not yet a face. So the idea of the Dark Lord, of evil Mordor, of his fell servants searching even now to find the Shire-dwelling hobbit who’s got ahold of the One Ring – these ideas may make Frodo quake in his, well, in his bare, hairy feet. But they are only concepts, and they don’t keep him hiding, terrified, in the hiddenest corner of his beer cellar. They should; the reality is that bad. But Frodo hasn’t yet seen the danger with his own two eyes. He, albeit reluctantly, sets out on his journey into unknown adventure.
First, he walks across the Shire with his friends, saying quiet goodbyes to beloved apple trees, thorns, nuts, and sloes along the way. Along that way, the three walking fellows stop for breaks and rests, meals and more meals. They lie down in the crooks of trees and nap for the night, with no ill outcome save a fox’s momentary surprise and root-made holes in their backs upon waking the next morning. After the first black rider has made his presence known (though not yet understood), the three trip along more carefully off-road, hindered somewhat by tussocky grass and uneven ground (“the trees began to draw together in thickets”), but that is only to be expected a stone’s throw into the woods from a seldom-used lane. They sup and rest inside the hollowed-out center of a still-living tree (“it was hollow, and could be entered by a great crack on the side away from the road”). At one point, Gildor and his elves appear and urge the traveling hobbits on a walk farther than they think their tired feet can carry them, but the wakeful prods of the elves are all helpfulness and mercy, bringing the friends along to safe place. Later, the companions three cut across Shire country to avoid the black riders again, and the going gets harder; a steep stream-bed blocks their way; they climb down a ridge and through bushes and brambles and end up off-course. They continue on. The journey’s dangers appear early and increase with each passing day. The black riders are so bold (so blasphemous!) as to darken doors as close to home as Bagshot Row. Still, none of these ills touch the hobbits. Not yet. Not in the Shire.
But the home side of the journey must end; the real flight from danger, drawing it after them and away from home in a bold, blind heroism, must begin. The friends, now four, soon pass through the Old Forest gate that the alarmist lore of many generations has kept shut tight. From the very doorstep of Bag End, home was behind and the world ahead, but now home is left behind for good, and the friends are out in the world. Here in these not-Shire woods, the hobbits get off track, and the hindering hillocks become deep ruts and gullies, sinister ones, that do worse than merely slow them down for a while; the furrows in the Old Forest head the friends off and determine their course for them – always from the path they mean to take. Naps in the notches of tree roots become danger-making moments of suffocation, near-drowning, and entrapment on the inside of a very living tree.
Tom Bombadil comes next, and sure, he’s an odd addition to the tale. But before his strange and beautiful chapter, from the Shire to the Old Forest, Tolkien tells us through narrative what the difference is between home and not-home: one is safe – wild, perhaps, but safe – and the other, well. If you’ve read the books, you know what’s coming. It is out here, out in the wickeder wild of not-home, that the dark riders bodily attack Frodo, rather than merely track and frighten him. It is on the exiled journey that the sojourners can really be hurt, and indeed they are. Old Man Willow scares the socks off those of us who wear shoes; trees are not supposed to act like that . . . if they act at all. No wonder the hobbits always pine for home, through every book from The Hobbit on: home is the place where even wildness is safe and good.
This is story-crafting at its tidiest and tellingest; It is all very neat, what Tolkien does as his hobbits set out. It’s one-for-one: the tufted grass off-road in the Shire slows the hobbits down; the thick bracken off-track in the Old Forest takes them down to a more dangerous place. The tree roots in the Shire are beds, safe if not cozy; the tree roots outside the Shire are tricksters, lulling sleepy hobbits toward death. The inside of Old Man Willow is so terrifying a place (“He’ll squeeze me in two!”) that, upon reread, it is difficult to let the hobbits enjoy the earlier warm, dry spot inside the ancient oak just off the lane to Woodhall, still in the Shire. Many chapters later, things get even worse: orcs force Merry and Pippin on a cross-country journey that is nothing like so gentle or kind as the elves’ wearying twilight trek, back in the Woody End.
If we hadn’t already read the story, if we didn’t already know all the near-death that would ultimately befall the hobbits (and the actual death of some of their companions), this shift from brackeny streambed to sinister ditch, from trusted root to evil tree, from sheltering tree to suffocating one, would still tell us something. Pretend you don’t know what’s coming. Pretend there is no Bombadil in between to distract from what happens next, because Tolkien has been preparing us all along for what is going to happen. Is it any surprise that the hills on the Barrow Downs actually encase the hobbits? That the riders soon close in and do much more harm than mere sniffing? Nope. Walking through the gate from inside the Shire to out is as risky a transition as passing a standing stone on the downs, or in any medieval tale, where the Stonehenges of fiction are always causeways to an alternate and dangerous place. “‘There!’ said Merry. ‘You have left the Shire, and are now outside, and on the edge of the Old Forest.’” Indeed. On one side of the gate, of the stone, all is known and relatively safe; on the other, everything is changed. And the stream of events flows steadily on from there.
Earlier, the elf Gildor warns Frodo that the Shire isn’t as safe from the outside world as the hobbits think: “The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.” I’m inclined to disagree, at least at this early point in the narrative. Granted, the hobbits ultimately return to the Shire, and one of the most disturbing moments in the whole long story is the moment we realize that evil from Out There has infiltrated Home. Saruman himself lives in Bag End. But something important is going on here, at the beginning. It could merely be good story crafting: if the safety of trees and the friendliness of wayfarers close to home were nothing more than parallel happenstance between the initial Shire-side segment of the journey and the darker roads afterward, they make a strong way to begin an adventure tale, and I tip my own story-telling cap to Tolkien. (Don’t we all?) Indeed, this is storytelling that is very neat and fine, crafted consistently enough to stop mid-adventure and take a second look before continuing on our way with the fellowship – stopping in the manner, perhaps, of a forest fox pausing to wonder over hobbits sleeping outdoors at night. Or in the manner of one Frodo Baggins, lingering for a last, fond look at Hobbiton before bravely heading on into the dangerous unknown.
But I think it is something more. Over and over, from The Hobbit through to the end of The Return of the King, the hobbits long for home. They fight for it, they hold home before them as the reason for toiling on against all hope, and, for a moment, home seems the final vision they may ever have after completing the impossible task of destroying evil’s power over the world. Home gives Frodo the bravery to begin his frightening journey in the first place. Home is, itself, an ultimate good, and a place not only to rest in comfortably or to fight bravely to protect. Home is also the place the hobbits long for; it is a place, paradoxically, to leave in order to preserve. Home is the place, Tolkien shows us from the beginning, if we have eyes to see the tidiness of his safety-danger parallels, that the hobbits will return to at the end of their long adventures. And even if the dark touches it, the Shire - home - will ultimately prove better, more secure and beautiful, than the four companions ever understood it to be in the beginning, before setting out. At least, that is the logical end of a story crafted as intentionally as The Lord of the Rings is written from the beginning.
And Tolkien does see it through. That would be awe-inspiring enough, even if we didn’t know a Greater Storyteller, who is the builder of our homes and the guide along our wandering ways, who we can trust will return us in the end, through the parting of a silver rain curtain composed of glorious, sweet home-going song, to a peace and safe harbor that is more beautiful than we can yet see, this side of the standing stone. We long for it already.
All our best songs and stories say so.
A version of this essay appeared as “This Side of the Standing Stone” in Mallorn: The Journal of the Tolkien Society, Issue 56, December 2015.