Frodo's Dremes

            The road to Faërie is a road through liminal space, one that crosses a critical threshold between the ordinary world and the fantastical. For Tolkien, this passage is often mediated by dreams. In On Fairy-stories, Tolkien writes, “In dreams strange powers of the mind may be unlocked. In some of them a man may for a space wield the power of Faërie, that power which, even as it conceives the story, causes it to take living form and colour before the eyes.” And so it is for Tolkien’s characters. Frodo Baggins, sleeping in the house of Tom Bombadil crosses over the threshold to Faërie. In one dream he traverses time and space to witness the escape of Gandalf, and in another, he has a premonition of his sailing from the Grey Havens. In each of these cases, Frodo is interacting with forces beyond the scope of “natural” phenomenon.

            He develops this motif throughout The Lord of the Rings. Aside from those mentioned above, Frodo experiences more in dreams while with Tom Bombadil, and the other hobbits do as well, with each dream consistently seeming to carry some significance.  Shortly after, when Merry awakes from his enchanted sleep in the barrow, he momentarily remains in his dream, and speaks as though he had been killed in a battle fought hundreds of years before. Boromir, at the Council of Elrond, describes the dream that he had received, warning that the doom of Middle-earth was “near at hand” (LOTR I, 2, 246) This last case is particularly interesting, as it is the first true revelation of Faërie in dreams. Boromir describes that “in the West a pale light lingered, and out of it I heard a voice, remote but clear” (ibid.). The West is of course Valinor, and while the speaker is not named, it can only be one of the Ainur (perhaps Irmo, Vala of dreams). This same dream Aragorn later takes to be a sign a that the hour had come when “the heir of Elendil should come forth and strive with Sauron” (LOTR II, 8, 368). He thus views the dream as a legitimate call from the land of Faërie, the “Undying Lands,” home to the Powers and Eldar, a place not meant for mortals.

            To make this point clearer, the nature Valinor ought to be described in greater detail. By the time of the War of the Ring in the Third Age, Valinor no longer existed in the physical world. In a great act of intervention, Eru removed it from the Circles of the World in the Second Age, bending the seas and setting the realm of the Valar beyond the reach of mortals. The Elves may still sail the straight road to Valinor, but in doing so they pass beyond the physical world. The Elves are thus not truly meant to reside in Middle-earth. They are called back to Valinor, to sail upon their ships to the true West. Thus, the realms of Elves, even upon Middle-earth are lands strange to mortals. “Lothlórien,” for example, means “the Dreamflower,” as Treebeard tells Merry and Pippin (LOTR III, 4, 467). The passage of time is confusing to the hobbits in Lothlórien (which was itself named after Lórien, forest of dreams in Valinor) precisely because they are temporarily inhabiting a dream, a small piece of Faërie upon Middle-earth.

            Once Tolkien’s intentions to associate the Elves and the West with Faërie and dreams are laid more bare in this way, Frodo’s dream in the house of Bombadil takes on meaning more profound than could have been conceived without them. Frodo dreamt of his own passage to Valinor from the Grey Havens, and thus he foresaw his final passage to Faërie. To make this clear beyond doubt, Tolkien reuses his description of Frodo’s dream verbatim at the Grey Havens as the rain-curtain turns to “silver glass,” and Frodo beholds “a far green country under a swift sunrise” (LOTR VI, 9, 1030). But here, some further investigation is required to fully appreciate the magnitude of Frodo’s ultimate journey to Faërie.

            Frodo’s journey ostensibly defies the rules of Faërie. A mortal, as discussed above, is not meant to reside there. Those who enter soon leave it. Tolkien demonstrates this point as alone the hobbits return to the Shire. Merry remarks that they “have left the rest behind” and that their adventure “seems almost like a dream that has slowly faded” (LOTR VI, 7, 997). This is very consistent with Tolkien’s other discussions of Faërie. Merry has crossed the liminal space again, returning to his ordinary life, undeniably changed, but firmly planted in the ordinary. But Frodo disagrees: “To me it feels more like falling asleep again” (ibid.). With this line, still maintaining the dream motif, Tolkien tilts Faërie on its head for Frodo. He has not crossed the threshold into normalcy. In fact, just the opposite: he is now more at home within Faërie than without. His dreams are now of the ordinary world, because he belongs to the fantastical world.

            To complete the reversal, Tolkien reverses the effects of the world upon Frodo. Mortals of the ordinary world who reside too long in Valinor “wither and grow weary the sooner, as moths in a light too strong and steadfast,” while the Elves of Faërie are doomed to fade if they remain in Middle-earth (Silm. 264). But Frodo, who ought to be upon Middle-earth, is in fact pained by his presence there. Frodo takes ill many times while he tries to remain in the Shire, in the ordinary world, and he can find no rest. His only comfort is the white gem given to him by Arwen, which he “wore always […] on a chain” (LOTR VI, 9, 1025). This small piece of Faërie aids him in a way, but it is not enough. Ultimately, his only true respite is to sail to Valinor, to the land of mortals’ dreams that is now his true home.

            Tolkien’s final, heart-wrenching method of driving this message home comes in “The Sea-bell,” a poem included in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and subtitled “Frodos Dreme.” In this work, a speaker travels across the sea to Faërie, but finds that though he can hear the inhabitants, they flee and hide from him, and so he never is able to see or speak to them. Eventually, he grows old and weary and returns to his homeland, but finds that he is wholly alienated from those he once knew, and that no one will even speak to him. Tolkien wrote that this dream was “associated with the dark and despairing dreams which visited [Frodo] in March and October during his last three years” (The Adventures of Tom Bombadil Preface). This is the bleak cousin of Frodo’s dream of the Grey Havens in the house of Bombadil, and it shows how terrible the dreams of the ordinary world had become for him who now belonged to Faërie.

            The dream in the context of The Lord of the Rings is thus shown in a beautiful and terrible light. It visits upon Frodo and other mortals glimpses of and messages from beyond the physical world, while simultaneously functioning as a nightmare, dark counterpart of its true, fair self for Frodo when he returns broken from his ordeal. In either case, dreams are exceptionally powerful, and they are an intrinsic connection to Valinor, the land of Faërie.

   – Andrew