The Lord Of The Rings, Chapter By Chapter: A Long Expected Party

(Updated on 12/07/2022)

“A Long Expected Party” opens Book One, with Tolkien immediately tying The Lord of the Rings to The Hobbit, in that the opening chapter of his children’s story was called “An Unexpected Party”. Both books start in the same fashion – exploring the idyllic, serene, peaceful world of the Shire and its inhabitants before veering into what we would recognise better today as fantasy adventure territory. We’ll be going to far off places, looking at obscene vistas and contemplating fantastical constructions, but we will begin in a landscape that many of us could claim to be familiar with. Tolkien shows us what we might describe as his version of an agrarian paradise: a place worth saving, worth trying to get back to. It is a comfortable, relaxing lead-in to the epic story of war and clashes of civilisations that The Lord of the Rings will turn into.

But where The Hobbit saw its protagonist begin his quest in a comical fashion, late for the starting line and carrying no supplies of any worth, The Lord of the Rings rapidly goes off into a far darker story. The main purpose of this chapter, apart from re-introducing the characters of Bilbo and Gandalf, and giving us our first glimpse of Frodo (and, I suppose, briefly, Merry) is to set that tone for the book and separate The Lord of the Rings from its child orientated precursor.

We get that feeling right from the first paragraph, where we discover that Bilbo has become the source of much gossip and “talk” from his neighbours, due to his wealth and his apparently overly good health for a hobbit his age. The words “well-preserved” are used in a somewhat sinister fashion here, and the gossip is described as turning from good-natured to ill-felt: “It isn’t natural and trouble will come of it!”. “Well-preserved” is a strange enough way of describing a person who looks young beyond their years, indicating not luck but a sort of artificial stability in appearance: the words stand out almost immediately as not positive. It’s a basic writing tool, presenting characters in the story as reacting to something that the reader knows more about, giving us the feeling that we are more involved with what is taking place than the characters themselves.

Only old Hamfast Gamgee seems to stand in defence of Bilbo’s reputation at one point, unable to convince his fellow hobbits that the resident of Bag End is not simply “queer”. For him, Bilbo is entitled to the benefit of the doubt owing to his generosity, which he puts brilliantly: “There’s some not far away that wouldn’t offer a pint of beer to a friend, if they lived in a hole with golden walls. But they do things proper at Bag End“. Tolkien will get more into it in “The Shadow Of The Past“, but there is enough of a debate on Bilbo to cause some concern here: darkly noted “strangers” causing disquiet, bickering families and the general atmosphere at the conclusion.

If there is one thing I love about the Shire chapters, more so those at the beginning rather than the end of the book, is that though its characters are all, essentially, little people with hairy feet, Tolkien creates a very viable and believable countryside environment. Anyone from, or who has spent time in, a rural area, will recognise the common traits here: a seemingly peaceful, easy-going populace, tightly interconnected by family and marriage with their own deeply held opinions of specific branches and nearby locations, no government of any consequence, literacy not even being all that required (Hamfast Gamgee notes that his son being “learned his letters” – which, in itself indicates the difficulty some in this society have with grammar –  as an exceptional thing, though there are plenty of mentions of writing later). Magic and creatures from outside the borders are the subject of scepticism and suspicion. It is a populace who mark their lives by simple social gatherings and the like, and where the local pub is the usual place for discussion and debate of everything going on in the world. The Shire is both an agrarian anarchy and a libertarian fantasy, where people get by without much in the way of top down control, work hard and seem happy with their lot, with nary a sign of any serious social problems. Tolkien will keep this up in a lot of other locations: homelessness, serious poverty or class differences will never be a large part of the make-up in places like Bree, Edoras or Minis Tirith. There will be a stratification in those societies, but it’ll be rare that it is outlined in a really negative fashion: when the Gaffer tells his son “Don’t go getting mixed up in the business of your betters, or you’ll land in trouble too big for you”, it doesn’t seem as if he is putting a derogatory meaning behind “betters”.

I’ve mentioned it already, but I’ll do it again (sort of): the gossipy scenes in the pub (more in the next chapter) are a really good representation of country life, at least from my experience (my Mother’s family being from North Clare) where family history (a term often used to disguise basic gossip, which hobbits “have a passion for“) is a crucial topic, the oldest are treated as experts on nearly all things (namely Hamfast Gamgee here, holding forth), rumour and intrigue are rife, and outsiders are frequently despised and ignored (Tolkien, in a sign that he recognised the flaws in this kind of environment could sometimes write harshly of such things, describing the hobbits’ mindset as “a mental myopia that is proud of itself”). Even in the text here, Tolkien writes like a bystander instead of a unattached viewer, dropping references to people and characters, like “old Holman” for example, whenever he can. Places that would be considered down the road in other parts, like Buckland, are far away here, living next to rivers is “unnatural”, actually taking a boat onto one of them is asking for trouble and “decent folk“, like those in Hobbiton, would never dream of doing something so out of the ordinary.

I really like those scenes, and also for other reasons: in the pub scene of the first chapter we get introduced to Hamfast, the aging father of what will turn out to be one of the main characters, who is having a conversation that includes Sandyman, identified very deliberately by his job as “the miller“, which seems an immediate method of explaining his unpopularity (millers, who controlled the ability of communities to make bread and could set extortionate prices, often were). The two men don’t like each other (the author even going so far as to say that in this instance Hamfast disliked the miller “more than usual“) and as the next chapter shows, neither do their sons. I think that was an important addition by Tolkien, backed up by some later bits with the Sackville-Bagginses: the Shire isn’t all peace and light and the hobbits don’t all get along like a house on fire (and shows that feuds and dislike continue on through generations). In fact, as the final few pages of this chapter show vividly, hobbits can demonstrate a very nasty streak, as a number of them collude in ransacking Bag End. This is important, for plot reasons that won’t become apparent until the last few chapters of the whole book. Hamfast is also great as just an introduction to the larger hobbit world in general. Bilbo was more or less the only hobbit character in The Hobbit, so it’s here that we get to see more of them talk. And a direct connection is drawn, as the Gaffer outlines his remembrance of witnessing Bilbo’s return from his adventure all those years ago, evoking memories of the end of The Hobbit, and foreshadowing a similar situation in Bag End that will occur at the end of this chapter.

The main centrepiece of the chapter is Bilbo’s 111th birthday party, in which the reader is dazzled with an amazing outline of a gigantic feast with many entertainments: the effect is to make Bilbo out to be as extravagant and over-the-top as possible and it’s done well, culminating in a spectacular description of a fireworks display and visual recreation of The Hobbit’s “Fire And Water”, dragon and all:

“There were rockets like a flight of scintillating birds singing with sweet voices. There were green trees with trunks of dark smoke: their leaves opened like a whole spring unfolding in a moment, and their shining branches dropped glowing flowers down upon the astonished hobbits, disappearing with a sweet scent just before they touched their upturned faces. There were fountains of butterflies that flew glittering into the trees; there were pillars of coloured fires that rose and turned into eagles, or sailing ships, or a phalanx of flying swans; there was a red thunderstorm and a shower of yellow rain; there was a forest of silver spears that sprang suddenly into the air with a yell like an embattled army, and came down again into the Water with a hiss like a hundred hot snakes…The lights went out. A great smoke went up. It shaped itself like a mountain seen in the distance, and began to glow at the summit. It spouted green and scarlet flames. Out flew a red-golden dragon – not life-size, but terribly life-like: fire came from his jaws, his eyes glared down; there was a roar, and he whizzed three times over the heads of the crowd. They all ducked, and many fell flat on their faces. The dragon passed like an express train, turned a somersault, and burst over Bywater with a deafening explosion.”

Gandalf returns here, and at first he remains simply the marvellous wizard of The Hobbit, entertaining children with his fireworks. While “A Long-Expected Party” has its dark moments of inferred calamity approaching, Tolkien is content to let some light shine out for the majority. Gandalf is just a figure of fun and uniqueness for the people of the Shire, and I could argue that “An Unexpected Party” actually painted him in darker tones. Though he’s certainly introduced in a similar fashion. From The Hobbit:

“He had a tall pointed blue hat, a long grey cloak, a silver scarf over which a white beard hung
down below his waist, and immense black boots.”

And from The Lord Of The Rings:

“He wore a tall pointed blue hat, a long grey cloak, and a silver scarf. He had a long white beard and bushy eyebrows that stuck out beyond the brim of his hat.”

The party of course is all build-up for the big moment where Bilbo gives his amazing speech, listing the attendees of the party, insulting them by the comparison to a “gross” (I love the descriptions of “Obstinate silence”) to parts of the speech) before building to his big finale: “He stepped down and vanished. There was a blinding flash of light, and the guests all blinked. When they opened their eyes Bilbo was nowhere to be seen“. The reader, of course, knows what’s happened, but tension is created by the clever foreshadowing of something that will happen at the event (“Who will laugh I wonder?”,) the reaction of the party goers (“…after several deep breaths, every Baggins, Boffin, Took, Brandybuck, Grubb, Chubb, Burrows, Bolger, Bracegirdle, Brockhouse, Goodbody, Hornblower, and Proudfoot began to talk at once“) and how Frodo looks on at what occurred, knowledgeable but filled with a certain regret (“…he felt deeply troubled“). And it’s at this point that The Lord of the Rings starts heading into dark territory big time.

It’s all about the Ring of course. In The Hobbit, it was just a useful tool, but now we’re going to see it as it really is: a corrupting and addictive force. I never agreed with those who thought the Ring was an allegory for nuclear power or some other weapon. In my eyes, a better comparison was always with a drug, an intoxicant something that the user can’t let go of easily, and gets angry if people try to make him.

The scene where Bilbo and Gandalf talk privately in Bag End is the real beginning of our introduction to the Ring and its evil, as the wizard tries to get his friend to go through with his plan to leave the thing behind:

“Bilbo flushed, and there was an angry light in his eyes. His kindly face grew hard. ‘Why not?’ he cried. ‘And what business is it of yours, anyway, to know what I do with my own things? It is my own. I found it. It came to me.’…‘Well, if you want my ring yourself, say so!’ cried Bilbo. ‘But you won’t get it. I won’t give my precious away, I tell you.’ His hand strayed to the hilt of his small sword.”

The next chapter will flesh it out properly, but here we get everything we need to know: the Ring, and Bilbo’s possession of it, turns him from a lovable old hobbit, into an angry, suspicious, paranoid monster, who is two steps away from attacking Gandalf, like a Jack Russell terrier squaring up to a horse, not realising how big he actually is. Bilbo dubs the Ring “my precious” in these moments and that is bad enough for raising the alarm bells, but along with that, Bilbo demonstrates some concerning signs of depression, regretfully describing the lavish event he just threw as less a celebration, and more as an easy avenue of giving away his possessions. At one point, during his party speech, he was revelling in the attention and enjoying it, but here, confronted by Gandalf, he has to admit the pain he is in, “…like butter that has been scraped over too much bread.” Worse perhaps, he muses about how the Ring is taking on a form in his mind that should ring some additional alarm bells, though only with hindsight: “Sometimes I have felt it was like an eye looking at me.”

The reader’s view of Bilbo will surely have been coloured by The Hobbit. To see him act in such a profoundly “un-Bilbo” like way is a fantastic method for demonstrating just how evil the Ring can be and a sure way of making the reader realise the direction the story will be taking. The Ring has given Bilbo long life, but it’s also done something to him beyond that, something bad. Gandalf has clearly worried about this for a while, and in the run-up warned Bilbo to go through with “the whole plan“, presumably because he wondered if Bilbo would only settle for vanishing with the Ring in tow. The set-piece of the chapter feeds into this feeling as well: the entire “joke” of the party is really quite mean-spirited when you think about it, a means for Bilbo to hoodwink his neighbours one last time, and in that we might also see a little bit of the Ring’s influence. There was a reason Gandalf asked “Who will laugh?” I think: he could see the kernel of malevolence in the whole affair. Later, he certainly seems to have a scolding tone when he tells Bilbo “You have had your joke, and alarmed or offended most of your relations, and given the whole Shire something to talk about for nine days, or ninety-nine more likely“.

Bilbo does gives up the Ring, with some help from the wizard, a nice scene demonstrating the power of friendship (as compared with the solitary Gollum who gets eaten alive by the Ring’s evil influence, bereft of anyone who could have helped him). It’s still a trial though, as Bilbo drops the envelope the Ring is in, with Gandalf sweeping it out of his reach: “A spasm of anger passed swiftly over the hobbit’s face again.” But the very act of getting the Ring out of his possession is enough to effect an almost immediate change: “Suddenly it gave way to a look of relief and a laugh. ‘Well, that’s that,’ he said.” After this bit of darkness, we end on a happier note for Bilbo who is “…as happy now as I have ever been, and that is saying a great deal“. The baton, and the Ring, now passes to Frodo.

The chapter could end there, but instead we get a lengthy, and interesting, postscript. Frodo begins the process of executing Bilbo’s last will and testament, which means dealing with his inquisitive neighbours. There is some fairly light-hearted stuff here, as Bilbo gives away items in his position  – you have to love Bilbo’s combination of gifts and veiled insults, like the pen, “hoping it will be useful“, for the guy who never returns letters – and demonstrates his genuine generosity: “The poorer hobbits, and especially those of Bagshot Row, did very well“. In the midst of it all though we also have a bit of a crazed reaction that showcases a more negative side of the hobbit character, and calls back to the events of “The Last Stage” in The Hobbit, as people not invited turn up, and something approximating a hobbit riot breaks out in the hallways, to the point of violence: “Labels got torn off and mixed, and quarrels broke out. Some people tried to do swaps and deals in the hall; and others tried to make off with minor items not addressed to them, or with anything that seemed unwanted or unwatched. The road to the gate was blocked with barrows and handcarts…Frodo also had a tussle with young Sancho Proudfoot…who had begun an excavation in the larger pantry“.

Things turn more serious with the Sackville-Bagginses arriving. Every rural community has a family like this, though Tolkien milks it with lines like “Foiled again!” and “You’ll live to regret it!”. It is all set-up for much, much later of course, but one cannot help but roll their eyes at the supervillainish way that the “SB’s” talk . Apart from being an irritant to Frodo, their conversation with the new Mr Baggins of Bag End is much more important for a short, almost throwaway line. As Frodo meets with them he is described as “fidgeting with something in his pocket”. Frodo has had possession of the thing for little less than a day, and it’s already influencing him, something that he turns to in a moment of stress. Even worse maybe, Gandalf informs Frodo that his neighbours are openly gossiping about how the two of them must be colluding in trying to steal all of Bilbo’s wealth, an uncomfortable thing to have to hear. A masterful sense of foreboding and dread is thus created by the author. Gandalf takes off in a hurry, which we might take as meaning that the Shire, and Frodo, seem to suddenly have been caught up in some great events that remain unexplained. Something has spooked the wizard, and we can easily guess what.

It’ll be up to the next chapter to do some elaboration. We end on a sombre and somewhat troubling paragraph, one that leaves us with a great sense of foreboding: “Frodo saw him to the door. He gave a final wave of his hand, and walked off at a surprising pace; but Frodo thought the old wizard looked unusually bent, almost as if he was carrying a great weight. The evening was closing in, and his cloaked figure quickly vanished into the twilight. Frodo did not see him again for a long time.” It won’t be the last time that Tolkien comes up with an ace of a closing line for a chapter.

On Frodo, we really don’t see much of him here really. He’s little more than “Bilbo’s nephew” in terms of actual character building, though the last few pages set him up in a way where he is as quick-witted and likeable as his Uncle. The pub conversations give some local knowledge on his circumstances, particularly the deaths of his parents, the sort of tragedy that is so easily turned into a piece of salacious gossip for wagging tongues to spout (“And I heard she pushed him in, and he pulled her in after him“) But it doesn’t really tell us anything about Frodo. If this chapter is about a Baggins, it’s Bilbo. We’ll learn more about Frodo over the next 50 pages or so. Same for Merry, who gets a great line towards the end of the first chapter when Lobelia uses “Brandybuck” as an insult towards Frodo: “It was a compliment…and so, of course, not true.” Sam also gets a brief mention, even if we are told that he is just a young gardener with dreams of grander things.

Generally speaking, the prose of “A Long Expected Party” is also really good. It’s full of nice little writing tricks, like the formation of the following sentence: “…it seemed unfair that anyone should possess (apparently) perpetual youth as well as (reputedly) inexhaustible wealth.” We read little of internal thought processes, with the point of view that of a third person, with a voice that often seems to represent the consciousness of the Shire itself, seeing many things but little understanding their significance. Bilbo and Gandalf fall back into friendly chatter easily in early conversations, making their verbal sparring later on even more notable, Tolkien’s descriptive flair is at its height (check out that paragraph on Gandalf’s fireworks, just a wonderful example of how to suck a reader into a moment) and in keeping with the Shire, he has time to introduce some brief, but badly needed levity which has an air of Terry Pratchett:“He gave away presents to all and sundry — the latter were those who went out again by a back way and came in again by the gate.”  and, of course, that famous compliment/insult which perhaps also calls to a certain meanness in Bilbo’s character propelled by the Ring: “I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve”.

And what characters get time to speak, from Hamfast to Bilbo, sound unique and real, Bilbo’s meandering birthday speech – “…if I may be allowed to refer to ancient history…” – being a special treat, especially after the roll call of hobbit family names that preceded it. We also are treated to an updated version of the legendary “The Road Goes Ever On”, that formed part of The Hobbit’s conclusion, and whose presence here helps to bridge the gap even more between that work and The Lord of the Rings:

“The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.”

“A Long Expected Party” needs to both introduce this world to newcomers, and re-introduce it to veterans of Tolkien’s previous outing in Middle-Earth. It needs to establish the darker tone, the changed circumstances and personality of Bilbo, and it needs to make the audience understand that the Ring is no longer just a useful magical item, but a thing of far greater darkness and potential trouble. It needs to introduce us to Frodo, and allow Bilbo his chance to leave the stage to his nephew in a notable manner.  I believe that this opening chapter achieves all of that, and does in an entertaining and attention-capturing way. There are some issues with tonal changes in these pages, as we go from very light-hearted stuff to very serious drama and then back again, but the quality of the material in each respect is good enough to obviate any feelings of discrepancy.

Tradition dictates that you need to open a book, especially a fantasy book, with some sort of bang to try and get the hook into the reader. Tolkien, with the exception of the flash as Bilbo vanishes perhaps, eschews that, starting slow, and that feeling will continue for a few chapters. It’s something that is commonly seen as a weakness by many. But there are exciting incidents if you care to see them. The Lord of the Rings might not open with a battle, but I think it is unfair to describe it as not opening with a flourish. Bilbo’s unsteady status in his own community, his lashing out at Gandalf and the larger mystery about the Ring are all that’s required to keep the audience engaged (and entertained), even if we might well be as lost as Frodo. Luckily, Gandalf will be along with some explanations, next time.

Next entry: The Shadow Of The Past

For more Chapter by Chapter reviews of The Lord of the Rings, check out the index here.

For my scene-by-scene analysis of the film trilogy, please click here.