In the worst of all this recent sickness, I didn’t know if I would be writing again. I wasn’t sure how I’d come out of it – I’m still not sure, really. Things might be a little irregular here. I’ve been reading The Lord of the Rings. It’s a book to read when you’re sick.

“‘Behind that there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring-maker. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker. In which case you were also meant to have it. And that may be an encouraging thought.’
‘It is not,’ said Frodo.”

I read these books first when I was a child – I can’t say I remember them very well. Being a New Zealander, the Peter Jackson films are the main way I’ve absorbed the series. My love for Lord of the Rings is my love for Elijah Wood and Ian McKellen, for the New Zealand landscape, for that one scene where Viggo Mortensen breaks his foot. Re-reading them now as books, I notice first the ways in which they differ from the movies. In the book version of The Fellowship, Frodo and Sam don’t encounter Merry and Pippin stealing crops from Farmer Maggot: Pippin is already travelling with them, and asks Farmer Maggot to take the three of them to Merry. There are chapters on Tom Bombadil and the barrow-wight, which don’t make it into the film, and there’s generally just much more detail, as you might expect. It really puts into perspective the achievement of the screenplay: there’s a real beauty in reading the book and mentally cataloguing how everything was translated for the film. At every moment, whether kept, cut, or changed, you think – yes, that was probably a good decision.

One theme that doesn’t really come out in the film version of The Fellowship is the role of knowledge. It’s surprising how throughout the book, everyone seems to know much more than in the movie. When Bilbo vanishes at his party, Frodo isn’t surprised: he knew. He knew Bilbo was leaving, and he knew the vanishing was his final trick. Aragorn knew about the Ring before Frodo – he helped Gandalf try and track down Gollum while Frodo was sitting around at home – and when Frodo does start travelling, he encounters a group of High Elves who seem to know who he is:

“‘And how do you know my name?’ asked Frodo in return.
‘We know many things,’ they said. ‘We have seen you often before with Bilbo, though you may not have seen us.'”

In the movie, Merry and Pippin sort of stumble into Frodo’s journey accidentally, but in the book, they know everything up front. They know Frodo is leaving the Shire, and they know about the Ring, despite Frodo’s attempts to keep it secret. “My dear old hobbit, you don’t allow for the inquisitiveness of friends. I have known about the existence of the Ring for years – before Bilbo went away, in fact; but since he obviously regarded it as secret, I kept the knowledge in my head.” Merry even knows the Ring’s specific powers: he saw Bilbo use it once to turn invisible and avoid an encounter with the Sackville-Baggins. Everyone in the book version of The Fellowship knows much more than they do in the film. It creates the sense of a much more interconnected land. There’s more emphasis on the carrying of news, the telling of stories. People spend all their time getting messages from each other. Radaghast the Brown carries a message from Saruman summoning Gandalf to Isengard. Tom Bombadil seems to have heard about Frodo’s travels from the elves (“it seemed that in some fashion, news had reached him from Gildor concerning the flight of Frodo”). Everyone’s just constantly gossiping.

It’s clear as well how these forms of communication and knowledge-sharing arise in response to specific gaps in knowledge, specific problems. People need to spend all their time sending messages or nobody would know anything. The Ringwraiths spend the first half of the book riding around asking people if they know where the Shire is – because Sauron over in Mordor can’t find it on a map. They know that the Ring is with someone called Baggins in a place called the Shire, but they literally don’t know where that is, so they just wander about asking people if they’ve heard of it. And once they do find it, they immediately have the same problem on a different scale: they have to go riding around the Shire asking if anyone knows where the Baggins have gone, or what they look like. Similarly, when Frodo begins his journey, he’s waiting for Gandalf, who doesn’t turn up (having been imprisoned by Saruman at Isengard). Frodo and his gang wait around for a bit, but Gandalf doesn’t show, and they don’t know how to contact him, so they have to just head away. People, places, even the Ring itself – stuff gets lost in Middle Earth, and once it’s lost there’s often no good way of knowing where it is. These are the sorts of gaps that necessitate a special emphasis on knowledge-sharing, on shared communication. People work to keep in touch because they otherwise don’t know where anything is or what anyone’s doing. 

So the book version of The Fellowship has much more of an emphasis on knowledge, and in turn more to say about how knowledge is shared and distributed. It’s not just flung around at random: it’s distributed along lines of kinship, whether that’s friends, family, or townsfolk. The hobbits in the Shire mostly share the same opinion of Bilbo: they think he’s a bit weird for having run off on an adventure. They assume Frodo, his nephew and adopted heir, is just as strange. That’s the shared belief, passed around the community by gossip and little tales. By contrast, the dwarves who sometimes travel through the Shire are described as not sharing much with the hobbits (“as a rule dwarves said little and hobbits asked no more”). There’s no social or familial connection, so both parties keep to themselves. Knowledge is shared based on existing relationships, or, sometimes, deliberately withheld, as when it’s seen to be an inappropriate intrusion into kinship circles. When a Black Rider asks Farmer Maggot where to find Frodo, Maggot refuses to say. He knows Frodo, and he doesn’t know the Nazgul, so he’s not telling the Nazgul about Frodo. The whole book is like that – it’s constantly concerned with things that shouldn’t be shared. The Ring itself is the most obvious example, but there are plenty of other, smaller instances – for example, at the door into Moria there’s reference to dwarf language that is typically not shared with outsiders, and at the Council of Elrond, Elrond declines to explain what the elves are doing with their Rings of Power (“of them it is not permitted to speak”). Knowledge is distributed along lines of kinship according to the relationships between parties.

The Council of Elrond is actually a key example of knowledge-sharing in The Fellowship. It’s the longest chapter in the book, and the most sustained sequence of story-telling. Partly it’s a pooling of knowledge, with different characters sharing their bits of information to build up a complete picture of what’s going on. Gandalf explains that he was kidnapped by Saruman, who’s turned evil; Elrond explains how Sauron lost the Ring in the first place; and Legolas confesses that his dad let Gollum escape. (Bilbo thinks Gandalf was surprised by this last piece of information, and Gandalf corrects him: “You were inattentive. I had already heard of it from Gwaihir.”) At the same time, the Council is about reaffirming the bonds between factions. It’s not just sharing along kinship lines, it’s sharing as a way to confirm kinship lines. It generates and reinforces those relationships just as it draws on them. By sharing, people tell each other – yes, we’re on the same side through all this. We’re looking out for each other, and making plans for our mutual benefit. People tell stories not only to their existing friends and family but as an ongoing invitation to fellowship.

With that shift in focus, there are a couple of scenes in the book that are more overtly built around the difficulties of sharing knowledge. They’re scenes that make it into the film, but in the book they have this specific thematic tilt. For instance, there’s the sequence at the Prancing Pony. Frodo and his friends are trying to travel anonymously, and Frodo has adopted the last name Underhill to avoid being identified as a Baggins. The hobbits are all sitting in the pub telling stories, swapping tales with the people of Bree, and Merry starts the tale of Bilbo’s magical vanishing act. Frodo doesn’t want to talk about Bilbo, in case someone remembers Bilbo is one of the Baggins – he doesn’t want to jog the memory of any unfriendly listeners – and so he jumps up on the table and starts singing a song. The drama of this scene revolves around developing safe relationships. The hobbits want to tell stories to fit in, to feel welcome, but they don’t want to share the wrong stories and give too much away. They’re trying to negotiate a delicate balance between telling stories and telling secrets. As it happens, Frodo gets the balance wrong – with everyone watching him sing, he falls off the table and the Ring slips onto his finger, making him invisible. His dramatic vanishing creates a stir, drawing attention from spies, and then from the Nazgul themselves. Crucially, everyone at the Prancing Pony sees Frodo turn invisible. He messes up the balance between public affability and private secrets, between being sociable while still withholding private information. Obviously everyone has secrets – everyone has their own private inner world that they keep to themselves. Frodo’s mistake is making that inner world visible. By vanishing publicly, he draws attention to his practices of concealment. The stuff that should be kept quiet becomes a spectacle; he becomes publicly invisible. He disappears while everyone is watching. In a sense, his magical disappearance serves as a metaphor for his failure of social performance. Frodo can’t keep the hidden things hidden: he is seen concealing. He shows the spies that he’s hiding something, which is enough for them to summon the Nazgul.

In the movie this whole aspect is sort of glossed over – it’s implied that Frodo simply putting on the Ring is enough to draw in the Nazgul, purely by psychic connection. In the book, it’s more explicitly to do with social habits of knowledge-sharing and storytelling. The action is the same, but the book carries this underlying metaphor that’s not evident in the film. Similarly the themes of knowledge lost, shared, and overshared, while present in the film, are much more pronounced in the book. The book has more space to map out these deep networks of community. Frodo’s disappearance is noticed by a traveller in the inn, who conspires with a local to contact the Nazgul, but Merry listens in on their plan, and so the hobbits hide in Strider’s room for the night. The next day, after the failed attack, the treacherous local jeers and mocks at the hobbits for travelling with Strider, and Sam throws an apple at him and hits him in the face. There’s a much deeper social fabric – appropriate to a medium that has more time to spend fleshing out that sort of material.

The stakes around knowledge-sharing in The Fellowship are obviously quite high. It’s not just fun and games – stories in The Fellowship have power. The hobbits nearly die in the raid on the Prancing Pony, and after leaving Bree, the hobbits are attacked at Weathertop. During the fight, Frodo stabs at the Witch King, shouting “O Elbereth! Gilthoniel!” – which in my edition is set out in italics, the format reserved for lyrics – so it’s not just a war cry, right, it’s a song. It’s something he heard Inglorion and the high elves singing right back at the start.

“O Elbereth! Gilthoniel!
We still remember, we who dwell
In this far land beneath the trees,
Thy starlight on the Western Seas.”

Without getting into all the background on who Elbereth is or why she matters (background not explained in The Fellowship), her name is enough to wound the Witch King. Aragorn tells us in the next chapter: when Frodo shouted and stabbed at the Witch King, “more deadly to him was the name of Elbereth.” The name hurts him. Stories in The Fellowship carry power. Frodo shouts a line from a song and the Witch King screams in pain. It’s all throughout the book. Stories carry history, identity, a sense of people and place. They tell of what’s gone before and make sense of what’s happening now. They create connections, join communities. They are an organising principle, and the fundamental social currency that governs Middle Earth.