"A Wide World"

Bilbo is “presumed dead” by the hobbits of the Shire, but it was only the journey of life, which took him to places his friends and neighbors could not imagine. 

When Gandalf returns to visit Bilbo, much later, he has some words of wisdom: “Surely you don’t disbelieve the prophecies, because you had a hand in bringing them about yourself?  You don’t really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit?  You are a very fine person, Mr Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!” 

 

Truly, the world is large (however much our technology seems to shrink it), and we may find – even if our purposes do not always master the unfolding of events – that our journeys take us to astonishing places, and that the daunting scale of the world merely allows for great adventures, the likes of which we had never imagined.

Image: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/earth-from-space.html

 

[This concludes my coverage of The Hobbit.  I plan to explore The Two Towers next.]

A Silmarillion Valentine

Though all to ruin fell the world

and were dissolved and backward hurled

unmade into the old abyss,

yet were its making good, for this –

the dusk, the dawn, the earth, the sea –

that Lúthien for a time should be. 

- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

Beauty at a Distance

“The stars are in blossom, the moon is in flower…”


After the adventure at the Mountain is concluded, and Bilbo returns to Rivendell, the elves wake him from sleep with their singing – and their words are intriguing.  In truth, the burning stars could be flaming hells if the elves could see them up close – and the moon would be a dusty stone, rather than a flower.  Yet seen from a distance, the stars will not burn those who look upon them, and the moon is bright and smooth and luxurious.  So it may be with tales of adventure; to come near to such peril could be overwhelming and frightening, but to hear the tales, from the distance of someone’s imagination, or after the passing of years – that could be a joy and a wonder. 

Yet we may also hope that there are some sights, and some adventures, that are as beautiful and delightful in intimacy and nearness as when seen across some vast and unbridgeable distance.

“But our back is to legends and we are coming home…”  The story of The Hobbit is coming to a close.

Image: AnnaLee Pauls

Clouds of Life

When the goblins approach the Lonely Mountain towards the end of The Hobbit, Gandalf warns “the bats are above his army like a sea of locusts.”  This “bat-cloud” even blocked the light of the sun.  Early observers in North America likewise noted a super-abundance of animals.  In their famous journals, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark noted “innumerable herds of living anamals” and “miriads of the feathered tribes”  Particularly in the past, and still in some places today, we see examples of life in reckless abundance.

No one wants to fight an army of goblins heralded by swarms of bats, but there is something marvelous about a world so suffused with life that even the solemn, stony mountains – the dark abodes of fluttering bats – are brimming and bursting with life.  Perhaps Henry David Thoreau put it most provocatively in Walden, writing, “I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey upon one another; that tender organizations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp – tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood! … The impression made on a wise man is that of universal innocence.” 

 

 

Image: Edmund Dulac, “The Entomologist’s Dream”

http://www.vam.ac.uk/users/node/2448