AUTHOR'S NOTES -
CHAPTER 20: A SHADOW OF OLD TROUBLES
Return of the King, The Grey Havens: “Also in the autumn there appeared a shadow of old troubles.”
Merry and Pippin, of course, were frequent visitors, riding into Hobbiton with a clatter of hooves and voices raised in song. Folk called them lordly, meaning nothing but good, although Frodo and Sam teased them about their habit of still wearing mail-shirts and carrying their shields with the devices of Rohan and Gondor.
The Return of the King, The Grey Havens: “Merry and Pippin lived together for some time at Crickhollow, and there was much coming and going between Buckland and Bag End. The two young travellers cut a great dash in the Shire with their songs and their tales and their finery, and their wonderful parties. ‘Lordly’ folk called them, meaning nothing but good; for it warmed all hearts to see them go riding by in with their mail-shirts so bright and their shields so splendid, laughing and singing songs of far away...”
‘Well, Estella was looking as though she’d like to fondle your cuisses,’ said Pippin, with a grin. Merry smirked.
Cuisses: Defences for the thighs. During the 14th century cuisses were at first either leather, splinted leather, cuirboille, or quilted cloth. These defences were often elaborately carved and studded, and probably painted as well.
When fighting on horseback the thighs are quite vulnerable, so I’m speculating that the Rhohirrim had some sort of leather cuisses. I doubt Merry would ride around wearing them (although if they were handsome enough he may have done), but the Travellers would have all understood Pippin’s reference.
‘Do you remember seeing Gandalf with the Lord Elrond and the Lady Galadriel, on our journey home?’ said Frodo, coming to the answer obliquely. ‘When we camped for a while near the gates of Moria? They often sat up together, after we had gone to our beds.’
Merry nodded. ‘They sat around the fire like statues, with only their eyes moving,’ he said. ‘Whenever I woke in the night, I saw them.
The Return of the King, Many Partings: “Often long after the hobbits were wrapped in sleep they would sit together under the stars, recalling the ages that were gone and all their joys and labours in the world, or holding council concerning the days to come. If any wanderer had chanced to pass, little would he have seen or heard, and it would have seemed to him only that he saw grey figures, carved in stone, memorials of forgotten things now lost in unpeopled lands. For they did not move or speak with mouth, looking from mind to mind; and only their shining eyes stirred and kindled as their thoughts went to and fro.”
His own uncle Dodinas, Merry’s great uncle, had been prevented from attending The Party, despite Bilbo’s invitation, because of his tendency to stand up and claim he was hearing voices.
Return of the King, Appendix C does not give a date for Dodinas’s death, but neither is his name underlined, indicating he did not attend The Party, he therefore drew the short straw when I was looking for a relative who might have been no currants short of a fruit cake.
The Bag End apple harvest was in, larger than hoped for from the new orchard, and the hedgerows had yielded blackberries and rose-hips, sloes and bullace.
Bullace and sloes (Blackthorn) are commonplce hedgerow plants in England, as are rose hips from the dogrose and the ubiquitous bramble.
A fortnight after Frodo’s birthday, the weather finally deteriorated to a blustery gale. There was no rain yet, but the wind howled in every crack it could find, and the leaves that had been clinging to the trees were torn away to race across the garden.
Frodo’s birthday is the day before the autumn equinox; storms are more likely around this time (equinoctial storms).
He looked into Frodo’s eyes, even as he felt again for his pulse. Surely there was an intensity there that did not belong with death. Surely the pupils would be wide open if his spirit had flown.
Finally, a film where dead people have their eyes open! Thank you, PJ. Still, he hasn’t got it quite right as Boromir’s and Théoden’s pupils should be widely dilated in their death scenes.
‘His pulse,’ he whispered, as though saying it louder would make it not true, ’it’s speeding up.’ They looked at each other and Sam’s hand flew to the still chest. Merry was right, and the rate was still increasing. Suddenly, the ribs beneath his palm were lifting up and out, and Frodo was gasping air into his body.
Sympathetic drive from the respiratory centre - ie via the sympathetic nervous system and its transmitter adrenaline (epinephrine in the US) - stimulates heart rate and respiration.
Sam eased his hold to see Frodo’s face better. He was very pale and his eyes were unfocused, as though he was seeing things far away from the Shire.... ‘I am wounded,’ Frodo whispered, and now his eyes were full of pain. ‘Wounded; it will never really heal.’
The Return of the King, The Grey Havens: “One evening Sam came into the study and found his master looking very strange. He was very pale and his eyes seemed to see things far away.
‘What’s the matter, Mr. Frodo?’ asked Sam.
‘I am wounded,’ he answered, wounded; it will never really heal.’”
The truth was suddenly there, so obvious that he wondered how he hadn’t realised from the beginning. Win'filth. Yesterday had been the 6th day of Win’filth. Two years before on that day it was dark in the dell under Weathertop.
Return of the King, The Grey Havens: “But then he got up, and the turn seemed to pass, and he was quite himself again the next day. It was not until afterwards that Sam recalled the date was October the 6th. Two years before on that day it was dark in the dell under Weathertop.”
As well as acknowledging Tolkien’s words, there are three things that strike me about this short passage. Firstly, it says “then he got up” but it was only “the next day” that he was “quite himself.” Secondly, it only says the illness “seemed to pass” (my italics), and thirdly the illness is mentioned in an almost off hand way although it obviously made an impression on Sam because he carries on thinking about it and presumably worrying over it, before he suddenly realises the significance of the date.
‘Not really. It’s my shoulder that hurts still; my arm is mostly numb. Just occasionally I get a pain that winds down here.’ He indicated his upper arm and shrugged. ‘It’s not normally too bad.’
The Fellowship of the Ring, Flight to the Ford: “The herb had some power over the wound, for Frodo felt the pain and also the sense of frozen cold lessen in his side; but the life did not return to his arm, and he could not raise or use his hand.”
The knife into the back of his shoulder may have damaged or caused inflammation around the brachial plexus (a large block of nerves deep in the arm pit). What Frodo describes to Pippin in All That I Had is suggestive of radial nerve damage and the pain is likely to be a neuralgia. As usual, Frodo makes very little fuss about it - The Fellowship of the Ring, Flight to the Ford: “Before the first day’s march was over, Frodo’s pain began to grow again, but he did not speak of it for a long time.”
The recurring illness may have a psychosomatic origin.
He carried the baby to Frodo and laid him in his lap. ‘This is my son, Frodo,’ he said. ‘This is Fastred.’
All we are told about Fastred is that he comes from Greenholm, and that he marries Elanor in 1451 on the Far Downs (The Return of the King, Appendix B). He appears to have no surname, so I felt free to speculate that he was an illegitimate son of Pippin. Since writing the story, I have been given a copy of the complete Tolkien Companion by J.E.A. Tyler. In this Fastred is described as a descendent of Holman Greenhanded. This book further says that Greenholm was later founded by the family. I'm not sure what the source for this is, but as Holman Greenhand (grandson of Holman Greenhanded) was gardener at Bag End, I'm not sure when the family “removed from Hobbiton and founded their own settlement of Greenholm.” Anyway, I think my version is more fun.