The Fellowship of the Ring: The Long Way Out of the Shire

A review of The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien

By H.R. Zimmerer

Spoiler warning: This review discusses The Lord of the Rings with spoilers, including references to other volumes.

I reread Tolkien at least once a year, sometimes more. Knowing where the road leads has made the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring more affecting, rather than less interesting. The preparations, interruptions and conversations in the Shire now have time to be themselves. I am no longer waiting for the familiar country to end so that the real story can begin.

The familiar country is why the journey matters.

Tolkien gives us birthdays, food, irritating neighbours and an elaborate interest in other people’s relations. Bilbo’s departure is a public occasion; Frodo’s later departure requires a quieter management of possessions, explanations and appearances. The Shire possesses the ordinary untidiness of somewhere people live, rather than the spotless innocence of a place invented only to be threatened.

This is also a novel in which leaving takes time. Readers who prefer an immediately urgent chase may find the early movement slow, particularly when the Old Forest and Tom Bombadil interrupt the route they expect. I understand the impatience. On rereading, those sections give the landscape an independence from the travellers’ immediate purpose.

Bombadil is particularly awkward for any neat account of how power works. The Ring does not interest him in the expected way, yet that freedom does not make him a practical solution to the crisis. Being outside the contest is not the same as being able or willing to protect everyone caught within it.

The other hobbits’ involvement makes a quieter argument about protection. Merry, Pippin and Sam have noticed more than Frodo realises. Their determination to accompany him resists his assumption that keeping them uninformed is the only responsible way to care for them.

He does not have to earn their concern by being easy company or by presenting a reassuring plan. They have decided that his danger concerns them.

Sam’s loyalty is central, but I do not think its strength requires pretending that the relationship begins outside differences of position. He is Frodo’s gardener. Tolkien allows affection and unequal social arrangements to coexist, and the journey steadily asks more of both men than the roles they occupied at home.

Once the Black Riders begin to make the roads unsafe, the novel’s attention to hospitality becomes urgent. A door, a bed or somebody willing to give directions can alter the chances of survival. Trust has to be extended without complete information, and its risks never disappear.

Aragorn’s introduction makes that uncertainty productive. The man who can help them arrives without the appearance that would make help instantly comfortable. His authority develops through knowledge, patience and conduct before it becomes a matter of ancestry.

At the Council of Elrond, the larger history gathers around the practical question of what can be done with the Ring. The competing proposals expose a danger more subtle than a straightforward wish to join Sauron. People imagine using the same power to accomplish purposes they can defend.

Boromir’s desire to protect Gondor is substantial. That is what gives his temptation weight. The Ring does not need to begin by persuading him that his people are worthless; it can work through his conviction that saving them justifies an exceptional instrument.

Galadriel’s refusal offers a different response to a similarly plausible invitation. She recognises that her possession of the Ring would not leave the world free simply because her intentions differ from Sauron’s. Her greatness in that moment includes accepting the loss of the kind of power that might make her purposes irresistible.

These decisions give the journey its moral difficulty. Destroying the Ring requires giving up the hope that there is a sufficiently admirable person who can safely dominate everyone else with it.

The loss of Gandalf in Moria exposes how much the company has depended on a guide who seems to understand a larger design. Afterwards, grief has to exist beside decisions about direction and safety. The next mile does not wait for the travellers to become ready for it.

Lothlórien offers rest without pretending that rest suspends history. Its beauty is inseparable from the possibility of departure and loss. Tolkien’s descriptive patience gives that awareness somewhere tangible to settle: in trees, water, light and the experience of passing through a place that cannot be carried away intact.

The volume’s last movement is painful because the company’s affection cannot make its competing pressures harmless. Boromir’s attempt to take the Ring helps bring Frodo to the decision to leave alone. The book ends with Sam refusing that solitude.

Boromir’s final stand belongs to the opening of The Two Towers. Here, the immediate conclusion is narrower and more uncertain: two hobbits setting out after the larger arrangement has failed to hold.

The songs, histories and changes in pace will not please every reader. Nor does the breadth of the invented world produce equal space for every kind of life within it; the travelling company remains entirely male. Loving the book does not require pretending that its emphases are universal.

What brings me back is the care with which Tolkien establishes particular things worth loving before asking what their defence will cost. By the time Frodo leaves the company, the Ring is no longer an abstract problem of great powers.

It is something a person must carry through the next day. Sam intends to be there.