Everyone Knows a Sam

 I didn’t know what fairie was.

But, Tolkien did. Somewhere between the Shire and Rivendell, he showed me. The question worth asking is not: What is fairie? It’s: How does Tolkien take you there?

What kind of place is Middle Earth?

-RFB.

Well, it is fantasy. Certainly. It gets us to fairie. But how?

Many readers, many critics, and most editors speak of style as if it were an ingredient of a book, like the sugar in a cake, or something added onto the book, like the frosting on the cake. The style, of course, is the book. If you remove the cake, all you have left is the recipe. If you remove the style, all you have left is a synopsis of the plot.

– Le Guin.

Ah yes, that’s how you get to fairie: the style. That of Elrond and Sam, of prose and poetry? What is that style?

The Fellowship of the Ring’s world-building happens with words. No sh*t. But not just any words. Words that describe the Shire like an English countryside and speeches that make you too feel drunk and bored at Bilbo’s ramblings and songs that make you feel like you understand a tree’s mind.

In these chapters, familiarity buds. I haven’t lived in the English countryside, but I feel like I have. I don’t know a Tom Bombadil, but his skips and quips on flowers and his lady make me feel like I do. In The Fellowship’s early pages, Tolkien invites you into a world that has already existed for you. 

Just as Le Guin said that “the style, of course, is the book,” Tolkien builds this style, adjective by adjective, register by register. Sam speaks sermo humilis (a description he’d not even know how to define). It’s humble speech, the style of the Gospels: the books in the Bible that talk about fisherman and tax collectors, those on par with Sam the gardener.

“I don’t know how to say it, but after last night I feel different. I seem to see ahead, in a kind of way,” says Sam. This style, this humble speech, this low register, is what gets us to fairie. “Everyone knows a Sam,” said RFB, “but what about a Banazir Galabasi?”

Banazir Galabasi is Samwise Gamgee. Yes- that is his actual Westron name, the name he’d’ve had before Tolkien’s translation. In the appendices, Tolkien explains his rewriting of names: “Samwise” means “half-wise” or “simple.” This is an example of how Middle Earth is a world you know, because stylistic choices like these make it accessible. Sam is one of us. Banazir Galbasi would have been just as brave. But, Sam gets you to fairie.

Frodo speaks book language, just like you do.

-RFB.

Frodo, by Bilbo, learned from books– those of Elvish poetry and deep histories that most hobbits waved away. Frodo learned and lived Middle Earth and could therefore speak in both high and low styles. Tolkien needs Frodo because someone has to walk between Rivendell and the Shire without a translator. Tolkien knew this character from somewhere.

Have you been to mass? Have you had the hymnal book at the ready waiting for them to announce the number? Have you ever tried to hit the high notes in Angels We Have Heard on High? Tolkien did– his whole childhood.

Mass, for its majority, happens in front of you. Words being said, rehearsed responses clockwork-ed-ly given back, but when the congregation sings, they are no longer the audience but participants. This too, is style. In mass, the sermo sublimis, the grand speech, the priest declares and the humble style (the congregation) participates. And just as Psalms 100 says to “Shout for joy to the Lord.. come before him with joyful songs,” the way to fairie is to be sung.

Dwarves write beautiful ballads.

Elves write eloquent narratives.

Hobbits write nursery rhymes. 

-RFB.

A ballad is heavier than a nursery rhyme, though not as sculpted as a narrative. A ballad describes what is gone, what is mortal. Far Over the Misty Mountains Cold, is a long, repetitive structured telling of a long walk toward a home that might not exist. If the hobbits are the congregation and the Elves are the priests, the dwarves are the dirge, for they sing slow, mournful songs, hymns, and poems to lament the mortal.

Consider Galadriel’s lament in Lothlórien. Elvish (ancient, sculpted) lets you hear the grief but not feel it. This is a stylistic choice: the Elves are not for you. They have their own chillingly beautiful fairie, but their adjectives, their style, their poetry, remind you that you have yet to step foot into it. The Elvish register mirrors that of the priests Tolkien grew up with. Galadriel does not need you to follow verbatim, but rather to recognize the vastness and timelessness of her words. Then, in contrast…

The hobbits sing when they’re cold and when they’re hungry, when they’re tired and when they’re happy, about a bath and about a beer. The Shire runs on rhymes that don’t need special intellectual capacity to sing intently. This is everyone in the congregation singing Angels We Have Heard on High, maybe not getting to the high note but singing anyway as it is the participating that involves them, not the priest’s sermo sublimis.

Mass is neither the priest nor the congregation, it’s the full liturgy. Middle Earth is not just Rivendell nor the Shire, it’s all the styles Tolkien uses at once. You need Bilbo’s ramblings and Sam’s honesty just as much as Elvish poetry or ballads about Moria.

The Fellowship of the Ring is an invitation. Over the course of it, Tolkien has made you fluent, not just in the lore and history, but the style. You know that Elvish poetry ascends eloquence in a manner incomprehensible to your mere double digits of age. You know that Merry and Pippin’s giggle about the Lembas bread consumption could very much be your younger brothers. You’ve become fluent in Tolkienian style, and as was said in class, “no spell or incantation is more potent than the adjective.” Tolkien gave chartreuse to the Elves and green to the hobbits.

This fluency gives one final thing. You have learned, in one book, that transcendent experiences, a step into fairie, happens through the humble speech. Elrond can convene a council on the fate of Middle Earth, but only Sam can make you cry about it. And by the end of The Fellowship, you have been trained to listen when the prose drops from grand to humble. You too are Frodo, with fluent understanding of all registers.

The Fellowship ends with the Fellowship broken. Sam thrashes in a river after Frodo– no ballad, no narrative. Just a hobbit, recalling his promise to another hobbit in humble speech:

It would be the death of you to come with me, Sam.

I am going to Mordor.

It’s the only way.

-Frodo.

Of course it is, but not alone.

I’m coming too, or neither of us isn’t going.

-Sam.

Tolkien spent 400 pages teaching you to hear the cost of this sentence. 

EGA