Frodo and his companions enter into the Old Forest in the first part of Book I, Chapter 6 of The Lord of the Rings. Merry has been beyond the Hedge before and does his best to guide them, but it’s hard to navigate a forest when the trees won’t stop moving. Something or someone is making a path before them, leading them inexorably into the deepest, strangest part of the forest. We answer more questions about the One Ring from Barliman’s Bag, discuss the Hobbits’ ruthless deforestation campaign, and get schooled by a listener on basic fractions.
Thank you to Jordan Ellis Rannells for sponsoring this week’s episode! Visit his website www.learntolisten.net, contact him on Instagram @jrbassist or email him at JordanEllisRannells (at) Gmail (dot) com for more information.
For the essay “Trees, Chainsaws, and Visions of Paradise” by Tom Shippey, see his Academia.edu page here.
Recommended Reading:
Carpenter, Humphrey, ed. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Mariner Books, paperback)
Shippey, Tom. J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (Mariner Books, paperback)
Rest assured that at least ONE of the two people who would get the “Return of the Giant Hogweed” reference was listening. As soon as Hogweed was mentioned, I knew where it was headed!
My advice: in the future, if you are thinking of opening The Musical Box of such obscurity, please do so For Absent Friends. It expands our Horizons, and After the Ordeal, we will surely Squonk.
Thanks, Ben! That means we have now officially heard from two people who got it. 🙂 But I’m glad to hear it went over well. After all, we want to avoid the Stagnation of making the same pop culture references over and over. I don’t want us to become so predictable that listeners are just Counting Out Time until the episode is over.
I don’t remember where I read it, it may have been on the Tolkien Society’s website or something written by John Garth, or Jeff LaSalle, but I read a discussion about what Tolkien meant by hemlocks. The writer didn’t think he meant giant hogweed, since not only does it smell bad, it can also cause serious injury to your skin if you touch it. It may be that he actually meant Queen Anne’s lace, but couldn’t call it that within the text (since Queen Anne wouldn’t live for a few ages yet). Queen Anne’s lace is related to the carrot, is beautiful and some varieties can be very tall. It also smells a lot nicer than the poisonous hogweed.
I don’t know if you’ve touched on this discussion before because I just started listening to the PPP, but I figured I’d mention it.
Hi Casey – We haven’t touched on it before, but I’ve seen the back-and-forth on it too, and you’re right. Both John Garth and Michael Flowers of the Tolkien Society have identified the plant most commonly found in the famous real-world glade at Roos as cow parsley or Queen Anne’s lace. The authors of Flora of Middle-earth (Walter Judd & Graham Judd) believe that the “wood-parsley” mentioned in this chapter is also cow parsley a.k.a. Queen Anne’s lace, but they also observed that here in the Old Forest, Tolkien has hemlocks growing side by side with “wood parsley”, so they concluded that Tolkien may have been distinguishing between them in his writing at least here. “Hogweed” was just me jumping on an opportunity for a joke. 🙂
Just enjoying a relisten to this excellent episode and a Question of Enormous Importance has just occurred to me. When the hobbits leave Buckland and enter the Old Forest, Merry takes out a key and unlocks the tunnel gate. Does he then keep the key and carry it ‘through fire and water’ all the way to Gondor and back? What if the Brandybucks had needed to nip into the forest for some punitive lumberjacking while he was away? What if he lost it on the Pelennor Field?