Unlikely Heroes: Annotating the horses in Lord of The Rings
The author wants to preface this entry by saying that he makes no claim to originality in the observations he makes. In such a fertile field as Tolkien studies is, it can be surmised that somebody has already said it already (published or unpublished). Views expressed here are of course only a burden to the present writer, and no other can be blamed for his facile words. Any mistakes or obscurity in the language used is only excused with the poor mea culpa that English is not his native language.
At the moment, we who are currently annotating in Rimbë are working with placing the characters in book 1 and 2. All the characters. This does not only include the main cast: Frodo, Sam, Gandalf. It really does include all the characters. For example (and it is really an extremely tiny selection) the Squint-Eyed Southerner, all hobbits that we know (either mentioned in the main text or in secondary sources) that are present in Bilbo’s birthday pavilion, Nazgûl G (yes, that is a real character) or as this entry will be discussing: the horses.
The horses of The Lord of The Rings are in my opinion a good subject to showcase the strength of Rimbë as an annotation tool and they help to illustrate what the annotation process looks like in practice in all its complexity.
Now it may not be uncontroversial to include horses in the general category of Character, what is after all a character, and is an animal really a character? The question of definition (however heuristic) – its merits and limits – are of course a fine stone to hone one’s thought on and essential for any scholarly endeavour. And in the conversations that the annotators have had on the subject, it has been a point of discussion what separates a horse ridden by a character and say a bird flying in the air.
The horses and their names – or lack thereof – is the next topic that I want to discuss. This is not prompted by the evergreen philosophic pondering of Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, but by the practical task of annotation.
While Asfaloth, Shadowfax or Snowmane (to name but a few) may have clear roles and names, others fly under the radar.
How many have pondered the fact that Gandalf has at least one unnamed horse before Shadowfax, a horse that never actually textually appears (he has a horse that draws his cart and that can be inferred as present in LR 1.01.028) in the narrative mainline, and its existence can last be inferred from chunk LR 2.02.147 (it is just noted explicitly that Gandalf travels by horse in the previous chunk) when Gandalf narrates his journey to Isengard, and is locked up in Orthanc. Its fate is uncommented on, if (horse)meat was back on the menu in the orc-canteen is not mentioned in the book.
It has been a common occurrence that the annotators have tracked a horse, and only much later learned its name. The first case is Merry’s ponies that are mentioned in LR 1.04.110, only to be given a name by Tom Bombadil in LR 1.08.058. To hold a tight rigour in our annotating we do not say what pony Merry initially rides, which is why it bears the prosaic name of “Merry’s Pony” the first time we encounter it (the work on this section was not done by me but by Lisa Trischter, and all credit of course goes to her).
The clearest example of this for my own part was when I was annotating LR 6 in a first rough pass. The homeward journey is about to start and in LR 6.06.018 it is noted that Frodo is given a horse (as he is riding beside Aragon). But it is only many chunks later in LR 6.09.065 (the book ends on LR 6.09.095) that it is mentioned that the pony has a name: Strider. We have gone from Minas Thrith, said goodbye to Rohan, Treebeard, Galadriel, Elrond, Barliman, Scoured the Shire and about to say hello to Elrond and Galadriel again, before we get this name. Once. The tedious task of adding the pony to almost every single chunk left me with a long time to ponder how much a name can mean for our perception of a character – and the importance of the fact that we have a tool like Rimbë, that notes that a character are present in a certain scene or not. Even though it for the moment (or forever) has no name.
Frodo is of course riding on Strider (Pony) the whole way, something that the text does not bother to point out, but the horse is still there. The presence of a certain character in a particular paragraph is the next, and last topic, that I want to turn to.
At the time of writing, we mark characters in Rimbë as either present, proximate, focus, speaks or arriving/ departing. There are a lot of horses present in The Lord of the Rings, though not many are given a name. It has been a recurring theme in the process of annotation that one of the annotators in conversations (increasingly exasperated) will exclaim: I have found another horse, and it has been there awhile (to paraphrase). And it will be an ongoing task of determining when they are not in a scene, on the periphery, or there (even if not directly mentioned). It is stimulating thought and makes for a totally different reading and understanding of the text then every other reading of The Lord of the Rings I ever engaged in. Sometimes it is – to use a well-worn and slightly modified truism – the journey that counts and not only the destination.
It is because of these stimulating ponderings that I want to say that for me the horses may not be the unlikely heroes of the Lord of the Rings, but they sure are the unlikely heroes of annotating the Lord of the Rings.