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Nick: hatster (Registered User)
Date/Time: Wed, 10/15/2003 at 22:56 EDT
Browser/OS: Netscape Navigator V5.0 Custom using ax
Subject:
Mount Doom #10 -- Answering the call
Message:

Two moments for your consideration:

A.

As Frodo clung upon his back, arms loosely about his neck, legs clasped firmly under his arms, Sam staggered to his feet; and then to his amazement he felt the burden light. He had feared that he would have barely strength to lift his master alone, and beyond that he had expected to share in the dreadful dragging weight of the Ring. But it was not so. Whether because Frodo was so worn by his long pains, wound of knife, and venomous sting, and sorrow, fear, and homeless wandering, or because some gift of final strength was given to him, Sam lifted Frodo with no more difficulty than if he were carrying a hobbit-child pig-a-back in some romp on the lawns or hayfields of the Shire.

B.
Sam drew a deep breath. There was a path, but how he was to get up the slope to it he did not know. First he must ease his aching back. He lay flat beside Frodo for a while. Neither spoke. Slowly the light grew. Suddenly a sense of urgency which he did not understand came to Sam. It was almost as if he had been called: ‘Now, now, or it will be too late!’ He braced himself and got up. Frodo also seemed to have felt the call. He struggled to his knees.

Two moments when something seems to be aiding our friends. In the first instance Tolkien does offer two competing answers side by side--it could just be that a starving, dying Frodo "fortunately" weighs almost nothing or it could be that something, either earthly or not, is giving Sam strength.

While Tolkien is feeds ambiguity in this first instance, he leaves much less room for interpretation in the second. It is "as if" the hobbits are called, but the "as if" fades more than just a bit when both hobbits respond to the same call.

It seems I keep asking you to humor me. I'll ask again. Let us just assume for a moment that our boys don't just hear a call for second breakfast or feel urgency merely because they are afraid their strength is about to give out entirely. Let us assume for one, brief, shining moment, that something or some one is calling them.

1) Who or what do you think calls them. Is it the ring trying to reach its gollum or its master? Is it some premonition about the activities at the Black Gate? Is it one or many of the various beings who may or may not look over them? If it is this last, then which one?

2) For those more inclined to the artsy fartsy, what does the imagery--the long list of Frodo's agonies followed by the image of a child at a hobbit party--in the first moment do to (or for) you? 

--------------
'I was afraid they were all sailing away, Sam-dad. Then soon there would be none here; and then everywhere would be just places, and'

'And what, Elanorellė?'

'And the light would have faded.'

'I know,' said Sam. 'The light is fading, Elanorellė. But it won't go out yet. It won't ever go quite out, I think now, since I have had you to talk to. For it seems to me now that people can remember it who have never seen it. And yet,' he sighed, 'even that is not the same as really seeing it, like I did.'  (the epilogue from HoME IX, emphasis mine)

email plainhat at yahoo dot com (do the translation!)

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