A Hobbit's Guide to Stairs

[Chrysophylax Dives]

A Hobbit’s Guide to Stairs is a weekly serial for those who would themselves navigate a flight of stairs, in their dreams or out of them.

It began with an escape from immortality, when Lúthien enchanted her hair and spun an Elvish staircase to descend from the top of a tree. From Lúthien descend the line of ancient sea-kings of the island in the West, who built tall towers. But they tried to take what was only permitted them to see, and Sauron the Necromancer made the Ring, which is not a tower but a bridge…


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No going upstairs for the hobbit… (The Hobbit, p.1)

These posts are taken from a modern adaptation of the Fourth-Age Hobbit Guide to Stairs, composed in Undertowers. The original Guide was designed to make a tower. Each post was a 'step' and by two or three turns, a series of steps took the reader from the ground to the first floor, from the first floor to the second, and up to the high chamber on the seventh floor - whereupon they could turn round, look down, and see the point of stairs.

This thread gives the Ground Floor (introductory matter) and staircase to the First Floor. Unfortunately, having dropped the photocopies on the floor back around May, some are posted below in the wrong order! Readers who wish to read in (more or less) correct order, or to read about the ancient Bag-end tragedy that compelled composition of the original Guide, are directed to my blog.

Plaza credits
Drifa: (1) front cover, (ii) back cover, (iii) on burrowing the barrow
Silky Gooseness: (i) ladders, (ii) Lúthien
Narv: hosting

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Wednesday 1: Some Hobbits Have Stairs

Hobbits do not like heights, and do not sleep upstairs, even when they have any stairs. (LotR II, vi)

Facing a night in an Elvish treehouse (flet), four Hobbits are naturally unhappy. Yet the narrator suggests that some Hobbits do have stairs. Which Hobbits have stairs?

There is no mention of stairs in the Shire. The noun first appears in the house of Tom Bombadil, who is heard going up and down his own. The last usage is ‘Many Partings,’ when Celeborn and Galadriel head off home via the Dimrill Stair.

We read of stairs aplenty outside the Shire. The Dimrill Stair is first encountered as the path over the Mountains, while the Mines of Moria under the Mountains are full of “endlessly branching stairs” and a lost (and destroyed) Endless Stair. In Lothlórien, it is the wish of Galadriel that the Company ascend many stairs so that she can read their minds high up in a tree. Rohan has its stairs, Minas Tirith has even more, and Orthanc is all stairs: Gandalf is imprisoned on the pinnacle of the tower, the only descent “a narrow stair of many thousand steps”; to master the voice of Saruman, Théoden first ascends 27 black stone steps from the foot of the tower – stairs that crack and splinter when Wormtongue hurls down a Palantír. And of course, the way into Mordor requires two heroic Hobbits to follow their treacherous guide up the Stairs of Cirith Ungol.

‘Yes, yess, longer,’ said Gollum. ‘But not so difficult. Hobbits have climbed the Straight Stair. Next comes the Winding Stair.’ (LotR VI, viii)

The wide world beyond the Shire is full of stairs, and Hobbits who adventure within it will sooner or later confront a staircase. The ideal that we have of the Hobbits in their native Shire is of peace and plenty and well-tilled land - and no stairs. Yet the narrator of the story suggests that some Hobbits have some stairs.

Who are these Hobbits?

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Wednesday 2: Dwarvish Devices

The original travel memoir of Bilbo Baggins suggests that no Hobbits have stairs, but the illustration of The Hill by the author reveals that this is the perspective of one who dwells at the very top of The Hill. When we see the whole picture of Hobbiton we recognize that Hobbits who live on flat land build walls and may then employ what Mr. Baggins seems to consider the Dwarvish device of stairs.

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Stairs are mentioned in The Hobbit (1937) on precisely seven occasions, the first in the second paragraph:

No going upstairs for the hobbit… (p.1)

We must cross the Wild and then the Hall of Thrain before an actual stair is glimpsed, though they then come thick and fast:

They climbed long stairs and turned and went down wide echoing ways, and turned again and climbed yet more stairs, and yet more stairs again. (p. 247)

More stairs on the way to and from Ravenhill. The seventh and final is a homesick Hobbit (intending to sneak out with the Arkenstone):

I am tired of stairs and stone passages. I would give a good deal for the feel of grass at my toes. (p. 2474)

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Nothing about a hole forbids stairs, and Bag-end has a door-step, a sort of external singular stair, alone, itself, and nameless. Do not forget this humble door-step, which may prove an internal stair just waiting for the chance to come out. But the bottom line is that the difference between Dwarves and Hobbits concerns more than just beards - Dwarves know how to do stairs in a hole. Hobbit holes under a Hill are as stairless as Goblin holes under the Mountains. But Goblins tunnel at an incline, and so move up and down underground without the Dwarvish device of stairs, while Hobbits simply do not go up and down within their holes, which are all on one level. Let’s return to the second paragraph.

The door opened on to a tube-shaped hall like a tunnel… The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill… No going upstairs for the hobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining-rooms, all were on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage. The best rooms were all on the lefthand side (going in), for these were the only ones to have windows, deep-set round windows looking over his garden, and meadows beyond, sloping down to the river.

This long corridor is the backbone of Hobbit architecture, the art of making a horizontal hole in the side of a Hill. Unfortunately, this art was lost in the celebrated reconstruction of Bag-end in the movies, which has no tunnel. It is the corridor into the Hill that makes the magic of a horizontal hole in which a cellar door leads into a room that is at once deeper underground and on the same level as the living room.

The inside of a Hobbit-hole was drawn by Tolkien in words, but the outside he pictured in the top part of The Hill, the frontispiece of The Hobbit. The lower part of the illustration explains why some Hobbits do have stairs.



Question: How many flights of stairs are suggested in The Hill?


A Hobbit-hole requires a hill, so those who dwell on the flat ground under the hill build, and some have built more than one floor – which we must presume are connected by (externally hidden) stairs.

My answer:
The Hill suggests three flights of stairs: the Old Grange, the granary on the left going up the Hill, which includes second-floor windows, and the Mill, the three stories of which almost make it a Hobbit Tower. (But I keep thinking I am counting wrong.)

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Hey Chrys: Nice see you back on the Plaza! Good idea to open this. I never thought of Hobbits and their problems with stairs. What would you think of scaling? Their stairs would be adapted to their size, not the bigger folk. I don't feel they would be hating multiple steps. But compare it to little children when they climb, trying, stairs how much problems they have with it. I guess the Big Folk would curse hobbitsized stairs as their steps would be difficult to take for longshaped legs. That is all I can add to this. I am missing the scaling idea in your approach. But if you live in flowing hill country, where a gentle slope will do for a good home. What would stairs really add? The hobbits in the granary or the mills won't have problems to run the stairs up and down.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

What would you think of scaling? Their stairs would be adapted to their size, not the bigger folk. I don't feel they would be hating multiple steps.

Hello Aikári, :)
My gut feeling is that scaling is a 'diminutive' rendering of Hobbit life, akin to the imagination of Elves as little fairies dwelling in the petals of a buttercup. My suggestion, hard as it is, is that you are looking at stairs as *natural* and not appreciating that stairs are far from natural, to Hobbit eyes. However, that is not to say that they don't try their hand at stairs. When they do, though, they tend to make a mess of things, as we will see down some further Wednesdays. But the whole issue is delicate and invokes all the bogies of nature and nurture that so divide real life today. In my next post, which I will put up now, I broach the thorny issue of racism in the Shire, or rather, suspicion of foreign customs that don't hold for Hobbits - I am talking, of course, of stairs, which to Hobbits are peculiarly Dwarvish, but on closer inspection Elvish, and also a mark of the Sea-kings of old, who built towers as the Elves taught them to do. A tower, it is helpful to bear in mind in all this, is an architectural device that at once hides and suggests a staircase. In any case, no Hobbit has ever been known to climb the stairs of any one of the three Elf-towers beyond the west marches.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Wednesday 3: Stairs and Prejudice

This is a tricky post because it opens the door on sensitive issues of Hobbit prejudice.

'The Hill' (above) – Tolkien’s picture of Bag-end and the land down to the Water – is an image of Hobbit social stratification. The Shire is hierarchical, and only the gentry live in luxurious top-of-the-hill holes, like Bag-end. But these are heads of families, not aristocrats, and Hobbit reproduction along with the relative scarcity of hills long ago prompted Hobbits to learn the art of building. To live in a house is common, and no sign of poverty nor delinquency.

Many Hobbits have houses. Some Hobbit houses have stairs. Not all, to be sure – the house at Crickhollow does not, and I recall none at the Maggots. Yet some do, and more than one might care to mention, at least on the outside. Consider the reunion of Sam and Rosie.

Sam hurried to the house. By the large round door at the top of the steps from the wide yard stood Mrs. Cotton and Rosie, and Nibs in front of them grasping a hay-fork. (LotR VI, viii)

A Hobbit romance on stairs: Sam goes up them, Rosie sends him down them back to Frodo, only to run down herself and tell Sam to come straight back. Yet the Hobbit scribe situates the romance on 'steps.' A critical reader of the Red Book suspects retrospective gentrification.

The Cottons and the Gamgees will be the great families of 4th Age Hobbiton, but at the end of the 3rd Age the Cottons live in a house and the Gamgees had lived in a hole below Bag-end at the top of the Hill (see the illustration last Wednesday) - a modest yet respectable hole with two windows, lending nuance to the social binary of hole-dwelling as described in the Prologue.

Actually in the Shire in Bilbo’s days it was, as a rule, only the richest and the poorest Hobbits that maintained the old custom. The poorest went on living in burrows of the most primitive kind, mere holes indeed, with only one window or none…

The situation is more nuanced than the hole versus house contrast might suggest, and properly speaking one must distinguish between the steps outside a hobbit house and the 'stairs' that - one presumes - connect the two levels of a multi-story house (one must presume because internal staircases are discretely hidden by walls).

So far as I can see, it is the internal stairs - not the house nor even the extended door-steps - that are beyond the pale. The house of the Cottons is above the level of the yard, which is only sensible in a farm. But what are other Hobbits doing adding second floors? Yet some do, as The Hill illustrates - though there is no hint that the Cotton house has an internal staircase!

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Within Hobbit society this use and misuse is apprehended - that is to say, first borrowed from another people and then registered in their own words - in terms not of class but the outside world.

Population pressure long ago pushed Hobbits out of the desirable hilly regions of the Shire and into flatlands like the Marish – where a horizontal home requires walls and a roof. The Hobbits, it is said in the Prologue, learned this art of building either from Elves or from Men, yet it is also noted that over long years their building had been “improved by devices, learned from Dwarves, or discovered by themselves.”

A people who improve a foreign art with their own devices domesticate the art: houses no longer appear foreign in the eyes of the Hobbits. But a careful reader of The Hobbit (or the last post) will recognize ‘Dwarvish devices’ as a euphemism for stairs, which - it appears - have never been domesticated, properly speaking.

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All Hobbits know that some Hobbits have stairs, and all Hobbits hold internal stairs as foreign. Polite Hobbits do not mentions the stairs of other Hobbits.

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Chrys: Thanks for sharing your ideas.

I never read real negative prejudices among all of the peoples of Middle Earth. They all have their ideas, morals and convictions, and I always just settled with how they were, and not question them if they were either right or wrong. Hierachical or patriarchal isn't wrong if a society is that way. Or matriarchal. It sets boundaries to how society rules are shaped and how people's life are adapted to that. Tolkien's set-up of ideas are most Old World stuff, and that is precise what I feel at best around. They don't bother me.

All artifacts hobbits are using are scaled to their height. You see it portraited in the movies, when Mithrandir comes in Bilbo's home he constantly got to watch not to bumb his head against the ceiling beams, because he is way too tall for the home the antagonist lives in. Bilbo is comfortable there, it is Home. Mithrandir is just a visitor. Scaling is what we humans see in this. My niece of five got their own scaled chairs and desks at school, because it is is adjusted to how tall they are. Wrong? Not at all. Nothing diminitive for me about it. For ergonomic reasons it is good. So is the ergonomic scaling of all artifacts hobbits use as well (way I see it).

Sorry, I don't remember Dwarvish devices in the Hobbit.

I am little curious. What is with the Wednesday theme? Are you writing them on this day in the week?

[Androthelm]

Chrys I am back on the Plaza after a long hiatus and loving this thread. A question — if you had to speculate, would you predict any difference in stair-laying habits for Hobbits outside of the Shire (i.e., the Bree-hobbits?). Do we hear anything about stairs in Bree? Do the big-folk get stairs from the dwarves as well, or is there a separate origin? Could we anticipate similar anti-stair prejudice directed at Big Folk by the Bree-hobbits, as opposed to the scapegoating of dwarves by certain hobbits of the Shire?

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Aiks, excellent Wednesday question. my reasoning is that days of the week are better than numbers, because if you miss the day you are at most only 6 off, while a date may be ever more late and overdue. given that, i would not myself go for the day of the week named after Odin. However, it is the day - if i recall correctly - that The Hobbit begins and also the day of the week that Tolkien gave his 1936 November lecture 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics.' So i followed on the Wednesday.


Androthelm
Due to difficult personal circumstances I am today in deep need of distraction, and your line of thought makes my day. Thank you. The view from Bree is precisely what looms in the horizon as one considers these questions in Hobbiton and the Shire, and - naturally, when you think on it - the first person we find asking about these things is our author.

I'm still working on these issues, though -

Bree-folk are not to be hobbits. Bring in bit about the upstairs windows. As a result of the hobbits not liking it, landlord gives them rooms on side of the house where second floor is level with ground owing to hill-slope. (Shadow 223)

A future post 'The View from Bree' might include this from an early draft. The bit about the upstairs windows was originally told on the way to Farmer Maggot's house, which are to feature in some Wednesday posts quite soon. It includes the account of Hobbit building and the 3 Elf-towers found in the published prologue - and one sees already that Tolkien is not quite sure where and how to write about Hobbits and stairs. And just this same bit about the upstairs windows is then raised in the notes and queries raised once the narrative reaches Rivendell, which prove overall problematic enough to send Tolkien back to Bag-end to revise key elements of the story (and not for the last time). The first setting out gets only to the Old Forest. Only on the third setting out from Bag-end - still in writings of 1938 - does Bree appear a mixed population.*

* Return of Shadow Bree = Big folk, with some Hobbits living in surrounding countryside (132); almost immediately changed to Bree = Hobbits (133), the population of Bree is queried in Rivendell 223, and the mixed population established on first return (331).

I originally wrote that Bree is 'The Hill' as it appears if Big Folk rather than Hobbits live on the flatlands, which I suppose that it is. But Bree only becomes this because of more subtle issues at work, which really turn on the identity of the fifth Hobbit who turns up in Bree - the mixed population of Bree is the first step of Bree into a very complicated relationship with the history of Middle-earth! And one needs to come out the other side of that history before one can really offer a view from Bree - which is why there is unlikely to be a post on Bree-stairs for some while.

For a simple Hobbit who seeks a simple guide to stairs, the view from Bree is too sophisticated to taste without some ancient history - a goal to aim for and one day arrive at. It is an old world perspective, as if the Shire is the Americas (only all the rest of that old world has long since vanished and Bree is surrounded by a wasteland of ghosts). The Bree Hobbits must know a thing or two about stairs that the Shire folk long forgot they ever knew. To me the view from Bree conjures up lost usages of stairs in Byzantium or even Carthage. Curious possibilities of mixed houses and holes on gently terraced slopes with the most unexpected of up and down passageways sparkle into view as we walk out of Bree:

At last they left the village [of Bree] behind. ... they kept on along the Road for some miles. It bent to the left, curving back into its eastward line as it rounded the feet of Bree-hill, and then it began to run swiftly downwards into wooded country. To their left they could see some of the houses and hobbit-holes of Staddle on the gentler south-eastern slopes of the hill; down in a deep hollow away north of the Road there were wisps of rising smoke that showed where Combe lay; Archet was hidden in the trees beyond. (LotR, I, xi)

Edited!

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Wednesday 4: Stairless Hobbits - Gollum

This guide does not turn away from a staircase, yet neither does it contribute to baseless prejudice. Three stairless Hobbits will establish a sober perspective on stairs. Today, Gollum.



Gollum is the original fallen Hobbit. No stair is mentioned in the story of his fall, and this because his is a stairless story. Gollum's fall involves a birthday, a best friend (deceased), water and a boat, a fish, kicking, biting, burrowing like a maggot, and countless years living in a nasty wet hole at the end of a sloping but stairless goblin tunnel.

Conclusion: The One Ring has nothing to do with Stairs.

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Aiks, excellent Wednesday question. my reasoning is that days of the week are better than numbers, because if you miss the day you are at most only 6 off, while a date may be ever more late and overdue. given that, I would not myself go for the day of the week named after Odin. However, it is the day - if I recall correctly - that The Hobbit begins and also the day of the week that Tolkien gave his 1936 November lecture 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics.' So I followed on the Wednesday.

Chrys: *hugs* I get what you mean. But is there something with a day named after a fact from the Germanic mythology that is uncomfortable for you? I rarely think myself of that or associate with it in the normal sense of life, using days and dates together. I have no idea about Tolkien's lecture of Beowulf and calenders. But the lecture itself was given on Wednesday 25 November 1936. Nice thought of you to have chosen that. I think it was a midweek day off he had from teaching classes and reserved for lectures in at other universities occasionally.

Here is the Hobbit week explained. But better explained it is about the Hobbit Calender on Gateway. The weeks starts with the Saturday and ends on Friday, and comes from the Dúnedain. The elven weeks were indeed six days, not seven.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Aiks, thank you very much for those links. Because I am so caught up in the original story of The Hobbit I forget how far Hobbits evolved. In the first chapter of the story of Bilbo Baggins we just have the usual English name days for the week.

Reading up on the Hobbit calendar I see that the whole business is analogous to that of stairs - we begin with a native Hobbit practice (moon-months and horizontal holes) but then new arts are learned, either from Elves or Men, it is said. Unlike building, however, we have with the days of the week no hint of Dwarvish devices.

Have to say, I don't get the wider calendrical history invoked here. Why do the Dúnedain wish to add a seventh day to the 6-day weeks of the Elves? Why do the Elves have a 6-day week? Or am I getting the wrong end of the stick?

On my own attitude to Germanic gods residing in the names of the days of the week - I think it is amazing and wonderful and part of my heritage as a native English speaker (who does not speak much else). But I have learned from Tolkien to treat Odin with some suspicion. He is named in 'On Fairy-stories' as "Odin the Necromancer, glutter of crows, lord of the slain" - and contrasted with golden Frey of the Vanir, who is Ing and part of the original northern deities. Odin was a southern god who came north with other tidings of the Goths.

Most people would agree that Friday - Frey's Day - is superior to Wednesday, the day of Odin. But all that bad stuff said above about Odin, there is surely some Odin in Gandalf. I associate Wednesdays with Gandalf - Wednesdays are the kind of days he might show up, in Hobbiton at least.

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Chrys: Here is the link to the history behind the King's Reckoning and why they have seven days instead of six. They made also alterations in the long loa into shorter time periods as astar. For the humans it was more convenient than the elven calender. This might have to do with the sense around a human lifespan or how they organised daily life itself. That is limited compared to the eternal elves, due the Gift of Mortality. You are not getting it wrongly. It is just what you know and have slightly forgotten about. The same is with me. From the Steward Times they have the Steward Reckoning. And with King Aragorn they got the New Reckoning. And here is more for you upon the elves and their feeling about calenders. It names also the calenders of the humans and the hobbits.

Yeah, I figured out that via Frey and his older name Ing, the people of the sea existed long time ago, about Ingvaeones in Europe of the Romans and Germanic tribes, around AD1. But aside it was a nice detail about ancient Northwest Europe (mainland). And yes, I remember something of that in the Fairy-stories, I have read it, and used the lecture for a small tale myself, about a year ago. But for me I have no associations for Mithrandir or one of the other Tolkien characters with RL deities. Odin partly knowing in the mighty character he is from Germanic mythology, I don't see a Mithrandir in him, or visa versa.

[Saranna]

As an aside, I liked this from @Chrysophylax Dives (Hi) 'you are looking at stairs as *natural* and not appreciating that stairs are far from natural, to Hobbit eyes.'
Stairs were unnatural both in Tolkien's cosmology and in ours, and many centuries or maybe millennia elapsed before humanity (down from the trees in the Darwinian mode) started to build, then started to build high constructions and later add outside stairs, then inside stairs later still (if I am right about that sequence) What was the sequence for The Followers once awoken? Like the Eldar they roamed and wandered west for generations. Was building an inevitable consequence of settling and were stairs an inevitable consequence of building?

That's all definitely aside so feel free to ignore it.

Even more so with this, even further aside: many older humans choose to retire and buy a one-storey dwelling. But in terms of keeping healthy many medics will say it's BETTER to stay with the stairs for the exercise value. Which is what I'm doing. This is an excellent thread and I look forward to more.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

What was the sequence for The Followers once awoken? Like the Eldar they roamed and wandered west for generations. Was building an inevitable consequence of settling and were stairs an inevitable consequence of building?

Everything is taking me longer than originally intended, but I keep meaning to get to a Hobbit discussion on stairs in Return of the Shadow in which Bingo explains the Elvish usage of stairs - presented as the model that Hobbits should follow but don't (because they don't really 'get' stairs). The model of Elvish-stair use that Bingo will present is a tower, the point of which, he will explain, is that every now again you climb the stairs to look out on the view - the stars or the sea - or to sing. On the origin of Elvish building I cannot say, but I think that stairs in Elvish buildings are precisely things that have no Darwinian or evolutionary use, but demonstrate a purely aesthetic side of Elvish nature.

All of that said, please let me underline that all this discussion concerns stairs in a *building* and as such has no bearing on the use of stairs in a *hole*, which is what Dwarves do with stairs. The Elvish and the Dwarvish variations on stairs are utterly different - but I think that this distinction was perhaps lost on most Hobbits. At any rate, the trajectory of these early Wednesday posts is intended to establish that while Bilbo associates stairs with the Dwarves, the new story at an early point of composition took a new road by turning to the Elvish usage of stairs. After that we will have to consider the fact that the heir of Bilbo Baggins, be he Bingo or Frodo, has a keener eye for stairs than the other Hobbits of the Shire, and so the 'Red Book' may have been read by later Shire generations as an illumination of proper stair-use.

[Saranna]

@Chrysophylax Dives 'The model of Elvish-stair use that Bingo will present is a tower, the point of which, he will explain, is that every now again you climb the stairs to look out on the view - the stars or the sea - or to sing.' Excellent, I had completely lost any knowledge of that. Will continue to follow this with interest and refrain from asides in future.

[Silky Gooseness]

A really interesting read - and something I hadn’t really thought about before! I would have presumed, on the strength of Hobbits preferring rounded and gentle shapes (such as in their doors), that they might have been inclined (lol) to go for slopes and ramps, rather than stairs; but presumably ladders will be required for fruiting etc, and stairs are a not-so-unnatural progression from there.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Thank you very much for that @Silky Gooseness. Posting this series here is wonderful because people have such a deep feel for the stories. Both the slopes and the ladders bear thinking about - more than I have yet done.

'The Hill' shows a sloping road from the Water up to Bag-end. Because us Big Folk would also make a road and not a staircase up the Hill, we don't think about that. But I'm putting together a Wednesday post on Pippin in Minas Tirith going from the top of the white tower, with Denethor and Faramir, down to Gandalf at the gate, and back again, in which only one stair - a doorstep! - is mentioned. Possibly this absence of stairs in the narrative reflects some anti-stair bias of the Hobbit author, but I am more inclined (!) to see Minas Tirith as a Hobbit-friendly city, built primarily with slopes - and maybe even ramps - and with minimal stair use (though the white tower, of course, must have had a staircase).

Ladders are really interesting! I had not thought about them at all before, but now you mention them they are a sort of ultimate - and portable - staircase. I did a search through my pdf version of LotR and the result certainly gives food for thought. Aside from some occasional usages (interesting in themselves) ladders appear once in each of the 3 volumes.

1. Fellowship: ladders are big in Lothlórien (good ladders)
2. Two Towers: ladders are big at Helms Deep (bad ladders)
3. Return of the King: a ladder is the hidden staircase that Sam needs to discover to rescue Frodo

This last blows my mind because - even before noticing the ladder - I was aware that Cirith Ungol provides the ultimate staircase of the story. Indeed, it is here and I think only here that Tolkien describes the actual climbing of a spiral staircase within a tower - passing a window looking west, up some more stairs and a window looking east. This is the staircase that Sam must take on his own, it is his defining moment. And of course, he reaches the end of the staircase and discovers only two locked doors. Eventually - following despondency and a song on the step of the spiral staircase - Sam spies an orc with a ladder.

Suddenly the answer dawned on Sam: the topmost chamber was reached by a trap-door in the roof of the passage.

This is just so definitively Tolkien, and suggests that 'A Hobbit's Guide to Stairs' must consider ladders more carefully! Thank you.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Wow. From ladders we get to rope - the ultimate portable staircase, at least for descending.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

.. presumably ladders will be required for fruiting etc, and stairs are a not-so-unnatural progression from there.

So enthused was I yesterday by the very idea of a ladder that I forgot to respond to this vital suggestion. There is no established canon here - we have to work it out for ourselves. So, I accept that Hobbits and fruit-trees is a natural pairing and rather suggests ladders, and that from here stairs might be a natural evolution. However, while I do not dogmatically dissent - and would be happy to see the issue discussed further - I believe that Hobbits did not independently invent stairs but borrowed them from the Dwarves. Here is the key sentence from my posts above:

The Hobbits, it is said in the Prologue, learned this art of building either from Elves or from Men, yet it is also noted that over long years their building had been “improved by devices, learned from Dwarves, or discovered by themselves.”

Now, at first glance stairs could fit into any of these possibilities - learned (borrowed) from any one of these three peoples of Middle-earth, or a device discovered by themselves. But the question to ask here, I suggest, is what devices were learned from the Dwarves?

Possibly we need an expert with a beard to advise on Dwarvish building devices (@Afird Splitax?), but for myself I can only think of two: hidden doors and stairs. It is not impossible that there were some hidden doors in the Shire (Bree seems more likely), but given the association of Dwarves and stairs in The Hobbit (see Wednesday 2), I conclude that we have here a silent reference to stairs.

This line of reasoning leads me to conjecture that Hobbits originally employed long sticks rather than ladders to obtain high-hanging fruit.

[Silky Gooseness]

@Chrysophylax Dives - I love the parallel you’ve drawn here between the dream of ascending the tower in the West to the hero’s journey Sam must take up the tower in Cirith Ungol!

Re the ramps in Minas Tirith: I may be remembering incorrectly; but horses were permitted on at least some of the levels, if not the final one, and so ramps may have been useful for riders too, although I was certainly impressed by the horse playing Shadowfax in the films, who took a set of stairs with aplomb.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Wednesday 5: Stairless Hobbits - Ted Sandyman

The Sandymans work the Mill pictured at the bottom of 'The Hill,' the nearest you will see to a tower in Hobbiton. Like Gaffer Gamgee, Ted's father drinks in The Ivy Bush. Ted frequents The Green Dragon, as does the Gaffer's son, Sam. The Gamgees and the Sandymans do not seem to like each other, but they are peers among Hobbits. The Mill may have stairs, but the millers down by the Water are no less respectable than the gardeners up at Bag-end.

Ted's father was a Hobbit with stairs, but Ted does not have stairs.

Ted reappears at the end of the tale. Back in Hobbiton, our four heroes arrive at the Water and look up the Hill upon a scene of desolation: the party tree has been cut down, Bagshot Row dug up, wanton destruction is everywhere. But the Mill has been rebuilt - larger than before, it now straddles the Water.

There was a surly hobbit lounging over the low wall of the mill-yard. He was grimyfaced and black-handed. ‘Don’t ’ee like it, Sam?’ he sneered. ‘But you always was soft. I thought you’d gone off in one o’ them ships you used to prattle about, sailing, sailing. What d’you want to come back for? We’ve work to do in the Shire now.’ (LotR VI, viii)

Presumably the new Mill has even more stairs than did the old. But they are not Ted's stairs. They belong to Lotho Sackville-Baggins, aka Pimple, who knocked the old Mill down almost as soon as he took over Bag-end at the top of the Hill. As Farmer Cotton explains, he then built a bigger one, "full o’ wheels and outlandish contraptions":

Only that fool Ted was pleased by that, and he works there cleaning wheels for the Men, where his dad was the Miller and his own master. (LotR VI, viii)

Convoluted conclusion: Cleaning stairs is no fun. If you must do so, better by far to clean your own than the stairs of Pimple, the Sackville-Baggins who lives with his mother in the luxurious stairless-hole at the top of the Hill.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Wednesday 6: Stairless Hobbits - Peregrin Took

‘Short cuts make long delays’ says the Hobbit who will take the ultimate shortcut. The horizontal-cut that he questions leads to an encounter with a company of Elves who sing of Elbereth as they travel East from the Tower Hills. The vertical-cut that he makes dispenses with 3,000 years of Númenórean convention and does not lead to a vision of Elbereth over the sea, clear but remote, nor even to a vision like those of Frodo Baggins, who perceives, with an ever-keener eye, the Eye in the Dark Tower.

Peregrin Took looks into the eyes of Sauron.

Gollum is the only other Hobbit to enjoy an interview with Sauron, and he walked all the way to Mordor to do so. Pippin joins an exalted company of old men who see eye to eye with Sauron without going to Mordor: Saruman, Denethor, and Aragorn (Gandalf resists the call). These face-to-face communications occur silently, mediated by two aligned Elvish crystal balls: Palantíri, or Seeing Stones.

The king who returns strives for mastery with Sauron from a high chamber within the Hornburg, a lofty tower now in Rohan but built by the sea-kings of old. Aragorn reclaims his own – the Stones are heirlooms of the house of Elendil. The wizard in Orthanc and the Steward in the white tower both fall. Denethor is the more noble, his end in heathen despair the more terrible – he had a right to use the Stone in the white tower, though it was folly to challenge the will of Sauron. Saruman is greedy and foolish and, caught by the eyes in the Ithil Stone, turns traitor. Saruman’s staff is broken by Gandalf and, almost immediately, the instrument of his undoing is hurled from a high chamber above: a crystal ball narrowly misses both wizards and cracks the external stairway of Orthanc – more than the Ents had achieved!

Pippin, who retrieves the Stone and takes it back into his own hands that night on the ground, is saved from gifting knowledge of Frodo and the One Ring to the Enemy only because Sauron in his malice has not the whit to see that the Orthanc Stone is no longer in a high chamber in the Tower of Orthanc.

Pippin’s shortcut is Sauron’s folly. In the days of Elendil the Men of the West set seven Stones in seven Towers – each apparently in high chambers at the very top of these towers. We cannot account for the position within their towers of all the Stones, but Orthanc suggests a high location in the tower, and the tale of Denethor points to the very highest chamber. As a working assumption, I infer that, by convention, the Númenóreans placed each of the seven Stones at the very top of each of the seven towers, so that one who would look into a Palantír must first ascend a (presumably spiral) staircase all the way to its end (and possibly beyond, by ladder).

Of these seven towers, the earliest erected was the Elf-tower, where Elendil places his singular Stone. Any Elves subsequently looking into Elendil’s Stone on the Tower Hills would (again, presumably) have continued this Númenórean ritual of stair-climbing prior to any far-seeing vision over the sea. This Elvish far-seeing into the West of the later Third Age is distinctive because only in this case is an Elvish Stair ascended before looking into an Elvish Stone (all other six staircases are built by the Men of the West).

And then the Hobbit Peregrin Took steps into the picture and, with the most reckless shortcut in the history of Middle-earth, demonstrates that all this stair-ritual is just convention – one can take the Stone down the stairs, even take it away from the Tower, and use it on the ground – and it still works!



Conclusion: You can achieve the same ends without stairs – but be more than usually careful if you try this at home.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Wednesday 7: Are We There Yet?

Odo, Frodo, and Bingo are walking in the Marish, looking for the home of Farmer Maggot. We are in an alternative reality: Bingo not Frodo is the Baggins and heir of Bilbo. We will get to know Bingo better in the coming Wednesdays because he knows more about stairs than any other Hobbit (though that did not save him on Weathertop).



Today is Odo’s Wednesday. A hobbit not from this part of the Shire, Odo asks his two friends about Farmer Maggot:

Does he live in a hole or a house?

We are reading a draft of early 1938, composed a month or two at most into a work completed in summer 1948. Odo’s question sparks a long narratorial intervention in which Tolkien spells out the Hobbit-social implications of the house-hole distinction, the germs of the history of Hobbit building now in the Prologue (and discussed in the first few Wednesdays of this Guide). On conclusion of this social history, however, we are reminded that we are looking at the world through the eyes of Hobbits:

But Odo was not thinking about hobbit-history. He merely wanted to know where to look for the farm. If Farmer Maggot had lived in a hole, there would have been rising ground somewhere near; but the land ahead looked perfectly flat. (Shadow 92)

Odo’s question is architectural, and so geographical. A hole requires a hill but this land is flat. If the farmer lives in a house, it may be nearby; a hole means a longer walk. Odo is asking: ‘Are we there yet?’

Edit: Gah! In reading the passage again for next Wednesday I saw that Odo is not exactly asking this because when they have this conversation they are not yet intending to visit Maggot (who Bingo wishes to avoid - in this first version, Bingo puts on the magic ring and, invisible inside the house, plays a practical joke on the farmer). Odo is asking 'How far away is the abode of Farmer Maggot?' but not suggesting that this is their destination.

Edit 2: And as I re-read these very early drafts I see that I should have done so before this post! The three Hobbits are indeed near the farm of Maggot and the land is flat (with mention of 'dikes for drainage' (p. 92). But the proper name of the Marish only arises on the first (or even second) revision of 1938 - we are watching the Shire coming into being, and in this conversation this flat part of the Shire is pictured but not yet named.

Still, this does all seem to point to the Marish, as contrasted with the Hill of Hobbiton, as the place in which Tolkien first seriously considered Hobbits and stairs.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Aiks, I hope you do not mind if I return to our earlier conversation above? It is just that I wonder if yesterday's post has some bearing on your approach to stairs as unproblematic for hobbits. If I am not mistaken you live in remarkably flat country, with astonishing skies but few opportunities to burrow into a hill to make a hole for a hobbit. So, perhaps like a hobbit of the Marish, in contrast to an inhabitant of Hobbiton, you take building as natural, and stairs as a natural extension of building? Just a thought.

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Hey Chrys: No, I don't mind that at all. The land up here in the west of Holland is horizontal as much you like and if you are in the countryside on a bright day you can see kilometres ahead with just your feet on the ground. It becomes more flowing going to east beyond the vertical line of Utrecht and Tilburg. The southwest is a map of islands and peninsulas: IJsselmonde, Eiland Dordrecht, Hoeksche Waard, Tiengemeenten, Goeree & Overflakkee, Voorne & Putten, Rozenburg, Hompelvoet, Schouwen & Duiveland, Tholen, Walcheren, Sint Philipsland and Noord & Zuid Beveland. Out here is layers of clay and peat, sucked through with water. The only smalltime hills are the sanddunes that protect us from the sea as we are here below six - seven meters waterlevel. Most islands are connected via bridges and tunnels, but cut off you're stuck on them and need a boat to get off. Since prehistoric times people made homes and townhalls from what was around available, reeds, wood and stone. Digging a hole in the ground large to live in? Good luck with that.

Stairs are nice where bipedal is the only reason of the path, but wheels don't like steps. So any sort of streets don't have any steps in the surface. The merchant doesn't like the fruits in his cart damaged, because some architect find it fancy to have a step in the street surface. His goods will bruise of the bump the cart makes. And besides hopping in your seat in the auto is not pleasant either, if there are steps in the street surface. Streets grand and small are almost smooth, how steep they may be.

Buildings, yeah well, they had always multiple stories, first it was for dominating reasons. 'See how tall my house is, you know how wealthy and powerful I am.' Nowadays it is mostly for economical reasons, because a patch of land can be astronomous expensive as is in Amsterdam. Stairs (and lifts) are part of it. That is form of cheaper living.

As on the topic of the Hobbits, or the Periannath. Well they surely have a natural adaption to the lands they choose to live in. They will build their home and holes at what is available in the land. I don't think it is a matter of liking, but one of possibilities. Flat, wet land asks for scaling. How tall got your home to be, so you live comfortable and yet is not too heavy for the ground it sits on? (Unless you like to stamp poles in the ground.) You build your home from the materials locally available. Answers this your musings?

There are mountains in my area, but they are deep down, the London-Brabant Massif. It is the tectonic structure Holland rests on. We don't have tectonic troubles. And here is some more information with an explaining picture of Avalonia in yellow.

NB: Nice pictures of the bridge and the mill. Where did you take them?

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Aiks, thank you very much for that. The pictures are found online. The one above is from a Cambridge University newspaper and shows Granchester Meadows - ( here are some more images, with a song!). Cambridge is in East Anglia and borders the Fens, which were long swamp filled marshes and outlaw country but have now been drained, and are as flat as a pancake. I have long suspected that the Marish invokes East Anglia - though it also invokes Holland!

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Chrys: I had to look up what the Marish was, there I had forgotten about it and thought it was a piece of England. But it is an area in the East Farthing and part of Buckland. And yeah they adapted to the marshy lands by building houses. Marshland is flat by nature, a river delta that comes to the sea. Grantchester Meadows in the same sort of land, where I live. Thanks for the link you gave. I think you live in Cambridge, it sounds you know the area pretty well.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Aiks, I lived there for a decade a long time ago. I grew up in London and was very happy to leave for what i thought would be 'countryside.' But the Fens are just flat fields as far as the eye can see and not at all what i was hoping for - though i learned to appreciate the skies. Granchester Meadows is the only exception - and it is astonishingly lovely. Here is a verse from a 1912 poem by Rupert Brooke entitled 'The Old Vicarage, Granchester,' which gives also a fairly accurate description of the wider area.

God! I will pack, and take a train,
And get me to England once again!
For England’s the one land, I know,
Where men with Splendid Hearts may go;
And Cambridgeshire, of all England,
The shire for Men who Understand;
And of THAT district I prefer
The lovely hamlet Grantchester.
For Cambridge people rarely smile,
Being urban, squat, and packed with guile;
And Royston men in the far South
Are black and fierce and strange of mouth;
At Over they fling oaths at one,
And worse than oaths at Trumpington,
And Ditton girls are mean and dirty,
And there’s none in Harston under thirty,
And folks in Shelford and those parts
Have twisted lips and twisted hearts,
And Barton men make Cockney rhymes,
And Coton’s full of nameless crimes,
And things are done you’d not believe
At Madingley on Christmas Eve.
Strong men have run for miles and miles,
When one from Cherry Hinton smiles;
Strong men have blanched, and shot their wives,
Rather than send them to St. Ives;
Strong men have cried like babes, bydam,
To hear what happened at Babraham.
But Grantchester! ah, Grantchester!
There’s peace and holy quiet there,
Great clouds along pacific skies,
And men and women with straight eyes,
Lithe children lovelier than a dream,
A bosky wood, a slumbrous stream,
And little kindly winds that creep
Round twilight corners, half asleep.
In Grantchester their skins are white;
They bathe by day, they bathe by night;
The women there do all they ought;
The men observe the Rules of Thought.
They love the Good; they worship Truth;
They laugh uproariously in youth;
(And when they get to feeling old,
They up and shoot themselves, I’m told) . . .

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Chrys: The poem is really nice if you know the entire context. Rupert Brooke is a tourist in Imperial Berlin of 1912. And he put down that moment in the cafe and surroundings in thoughts and feelings. Grantchester was his home. He describes it vividly. Much as I do too, but without rhyme. That is beyond me in English unfortunately.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Wednesday 8: The Trouble with Stairs

'What a nuisance, if you want a handkerchief or something when you are downstairs, and find it upstairs,' said Odo.

'You could keep handkerchiefs downstairs, if you wished,' said Frodo.

'You could, but I don't believe anybody does.'

Return of the Shadow, p. 93.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Wednesday 9: Diagramming the Nuisance

'What a nuisance, if you want a handkerchief or something when you are downstairs, and find it upstairs,' said Odo.

Odo goes to the very heart of the matter, an objection perhaps more far-reaching than you imagine. First, let's look this Hobbit's perspective on stairs in the face.

On the left is the control case, a stairless hole defined as comfortable. On the right the situation envisaged by Odo. In both cases Hobbit and handkerchief are in different rooms, but look carefully: for the Hobbits in the picture it is all the difference between a comfortable stroll and an uncomfortable climb. What a nuisance!

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Chrys: You have done your best on those two schemes you made. I had to study them still a bit, because visualising is not my strongest suit. You are helping with it. It is understandable why Odo don't like stairs and likes to live in a hole without them. I have no idea in what circumstances Odo Proudfoot is living. Does he got a stairs in his home?

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Hello Aiks: the 3 characters in this dialogue are Bingo Bolger-Baggins and his two nephews: Odo Took and Frodo Took. I am not sure where Odo is from, but I think Hobbiton (will amend if I find out otherwise).

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Chrys: Ah sorry, I thought it were the main characters talking. But this is the next generation. I hadn't realised that. I am not familiar with Bingo Bolger. Alright I'll wait for your update.

[Silky Gooseness]

@Chrysophylax Dives I very much enjoyed this diagram we had to chart similar things in design technology in school, and it seems likely Hobbit architects would take this sort of thing into account when designing a home..,

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Wednesday 10: The Diagram Unveiled

'Fancy climbing upstairs to bed!' said Odo. ‘That seems to me most inconvenient. Hobbits aren’t birds.’ (Shadow 92)

Almost we are back where we began, on Wednesday 1: the canonical statement in the face of an Elvish flet that even Hobbits with stairs do not sleep upstairs. But we are in the first drafts of the story, from 1938, when Hobbits had not yet worked out the deal with stairs.

'I don’t know,’ said Bingo. ‘It isn’t as bad as it sounds; though personally I never like looking out of upstairs windows, it makes me a bit giddy. There are some houses that have three stages, bedrooms above bedrooms. I slept in one once long ago on a holiday; the wind kept me awake all night.’

'What a nuisance, if you want a handkerchief or something when you are downstairs, and find it upstairs,' said Odo.

Hobbits talk nice, and gentle-Hobbits speak delicately (Wednesday 3). Odo’s handkerchief veils a reality that may be upsetting to picture. The Guide to Stairs takes no pleasure in waving a magical wand and lifting Odo’s handkerchief. But Odo knows that Bingo and Frodo both know that a sleeve may do at a pinch. Odo’s or something allows the imagination to roam until, as it must, it encounters the element of time, raising the breathless prospect of a hurried climb or even a reckless fantasy of taking two stairs at a step. A handkerchief does not get cold and rubbery even as one navigates the sundering-stairway.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Wednesday 11: Bingo Bolger-Baggins, Stairmaster

Bingo Bolger-Baggins is the hero of the original sequel to The Hobbit, and walked all the way to Rivendell in 1938. He is a practical joker, who uses the magic ring for laughs. Bingo's pranks include drinking a glass of beer while invisible in the house of Farmer Maggot and vanishing at his own birthday party at the beginning of his adventure. In this story, Bingo and not Bilbo is the host of the long-expected party!

The conversation in the Marish on which we are eavesdropping reveals Bingo a different Hobbit than was Bilbo at the start of his adventure. Bingo is already well-travelled and wise; though he has yet to climb an Elvish staircase.

Last Wednesday we heard Bingo describe "bedrooms above bedrooms" and a night on the third floor of a house on one of his holidays. Where was this holiday? Who can say? But Bingo now reveals that he has adventured outside the Shire:

There used to be three elftowers standing in the land away west beyond the edge of the Shire. I saw them once. They shone white in the Moon. The tallest was furthest away, standing alone on a hill. It was told that you could see the sea from the top of the tower; but I don’t believe any hobbit has ever climbed it.

In the published story, these Elf-towers are revealed only in Prologue, dream, and appendix. Bingo has seen them. And he is also versed in the lore of stairs. Odo's devastating criticism about pocket handkerchiefs kept upstairs generates the profound Stair Lore of Bingo Bolger-Baggins:

The old tales tell that the Wise Elves used to build towers; and only went up their long stairs when they wished to sing or look out of the windows at the sky, or even perhaps the sea. They kept everything downstairs, or in deep halls dug beneath the feet of the towers. I have always fancied that the idea of building came largely from the Elves, though we use it differently. (Return of the Shadow, p. 93)

This image depicts the Elf-tower as Frodo and Odo imagine it from Bingo's description. They know enough to picture the front door on the building rather than the edge of the underground holes, but suppose round doors and windows natural to all buildings in Middle-earth. But they know buildings are rectangular and so imagine an architectural babel.

In this picture the Elf is wisely selecting a handkerchief before ascending the stairs to look on the view. The stairs actually continue all the way to the top of the tower.

With thanks to @Saranna for her patience.

[Saranna]

I love this, @Chrysophylax Dives It illuminates for me, among other things, the difficulty of holding in ones head the enormous amount of history, geography and of course architecture and handkerchiefs, that The History of Middle-earth contains. Time to re-read 'The Return of the Shadow.' One thing I envy the elves - such a long life to read in!

[Chrysophylax Dives]

I love this, @Chrysophylax Dives It illuminates for me, among other things, the difficulty of holding in ones head the enormous amount of history, geography and of course architecture and handkerchiefs...

That, Saranna, is precisely why it is in the end worth climbing all the stairs of a tower - the whole panoramic view may be seen simply by turning around! What more could one ask?

But is the panoramic view really worth the climb? A lot of steps are involved. Should we attempt Pippin's short-cut? And if not, is it credible to picture Hobbits ascending a staircase merely to gain the view? These questions remain unanswered.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Wednesday 12: Bingo's Folly

We are about to learn why Bingo Bolger-Baggins did not author the Red Book, the ultimate guide to stairs. Hobbits like facts that they already know, set out squarely with no contradictions. Here are the facts:

• Bingo has been in houses with bedrooms above bedrooms and seen the 3 Elf-towers with his own eyes
  
  Bingo does not get stairs

We are facing Odo Took's devastating 'handerkerchief' criticism (see last few Wednesdays). Frodo Took has pointed out that Hobbits could keep the 'handerkerchiefs' downstairs, which Odo does not deny - he merely points out that no Hobbit does.

'That is not the houses' fault,' said Bingo; 'it is just the silliness of the hobbits that live in them.'

And Bingo launches into his account of the Wise Elves and how they kept their stuff on the ground floor, or underground, and only went up the stairs to the top of their towers to sing, or to look at the stars or perhaps the sea (see last Wednesday). Bingo concludes:

If I ever live in a house, I shall keep everything I want downstairs, and only go up when I don't want anything; or perhaps I shall have a cold supper upstairs in the dark on a starry night.

This image does not depict Bingo's ideal of house-living but rather draws out on the level of Fantasy the contradiction in his mind, revealing why this is not the Hobbit who will write the great guide to stairs that is the Red Book. Hobbits, note the following facts:

• The tower on the hill is a pointless folly, as the windows of the hole in the Hill already provide a view!
  
  The door to the hole is a working door but the door to the tower is a facade, stuck on the stone because that is what Hobbits think a tower is supposed to look like (see image last Wednesday).
  
  Talking nice and proper is all very well but the 'handkerchiefs' that place the raw facts behind a veil are liable to confuse the unwary listener and must be lifted on occasion (see Wednesday 10). A hankerchief may be placed in a Hobbit's pocket, and as such is not equivalent to a plate of cold chicken, some pickles and a salad, and also some cheese, and a cake too, and of course beverages.

After a few weeks of usage the top floor of Bingo's tower would be filled with spare cutlery, plates, jars of pickles, and, well, you can imagine...

Odo Took is right

A post dedicated to @Troelsfo, with thanks for a plaza signature that is a beacon of light.

Edited for typos (it is so depressing when you fix a typo and then see that the revision was also mispelled).

[Saranna]

@Chrysophylax Dives 'is it credible to picture Hobbits ascending a staircase merely to gain the view?'
It's clear in many scenes within LotR and Hobbit that many - perhaps the majority of Hobbits at that point in the tale - wouldn't open their own eyes to get a better view of anything, let alone climb stairs to get a splendid view of many things. Viz the 'conversation in the Green Dragon at Bywater' in 'The Shadow of the Past.'
Even Frodo, who eventually has to open his eyes, mind and heart to strange new knowledge, is chilled by his dream of a tower in Bombadil's house to the extent that 'He wondered if he would ever again have the courage to leave the safety of these stone walls.' Towers (stairs), dragons and elves and Ents, are all things of the beyond from the hobbit perspective. Indeed it's the need for someone to go off and enter beyond to save everyone else (who are not much aware of the sufferings of the someone) that underlies the Fairy- tale and the Heroic Epic elements of the Middle-earth writings.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Wednesday 13: The Guide to Stairs

Many - perhaps the majority of Hobbits - wouldn't open their own eyes to get a better view of anything, let alone climb stairs to get a splendid view of many things...

If you are a Hobbit – own it!

Bingo is right about how Elves use towers. If you are an Elf you already know this and don't need a guide to stairs. And if you are a Dwarf, you know how to do stairs in a hole. But if you are a Hobbit you likely confuse the very different stair-lores of towers and holes, and even if you have the theory are liable to make an architectural mess in practice - and that is OK!

Of course, some Hobbits choose to run off into the blue on a mad adventure, and those who survive learn about stairs the hard way. (If you are one of these Hobbits you might consider writing for the Guide.)

But most Hobbits prefer to read a guide to stairs on the ground than ascend an actual staircase. The Red Book is the ultimate guide to stairs. However, the short-cuts of this great work prove elusive, which is why this Hobbit's Guide to Stairs is being compiled.

[Saranna]

The first time I ever went to Oxonmoot I found that to reach the seminar room for talks I had to climb first a straight stair then a winding stair (honestly!) and both were very steep. With my various ailments it was an unpleasant experience, although not equal to Frodo's and Sam's. I hope in the Blessed realm they learned new aspects of towers, stairs, and climbing.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

I never went to Oxonmoot, nor any Tolkien conference. I went to a few academic conferences in the distant past and the experience put me off conferences for life. However, the straight and the winding staircases do lead my mind up to a vision of how you climbed them holding in your hands a great bag containing the collected writings of all the Tolkien scholars, and on reaching the summit of the fiery mountain you threw the bag into the depths of hell (possibly with a little help from your own personal Gollum - that might be me). And though the Blessed realm did not dawn on our Middle-earth, nevertheless the dire late-Elizabethan reading of Tolkien's work evaporated in a puff of smoke, that lingered mournfully for a moment before a wind from the West vanished it forever.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Ah, @Saranna. Peace. I let that post stand in all its fire. But for the sake of peace with myself, yourself, and the Danish Tolkien Society, I will confess that the waters of Tolkien Criticism that springs out of Classics through the pen of Verlyn Flieger are a small trickle of nourishment. And i would pay homage, too, to the late halfir, the pioneer who unpeeled an onion, the legendary thread that is of course the model of old of which a sort of queer sequel is attempted in this Guide to Stairs.

Not to mention that the image of my biting your finger off at the very end of all things is, to say the least, disturbing.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Between 13 & 14: Plaza Supplement on Bearding the Onion

Aiks rightly called out the original Supplement post and I'm attempting it again. It feels important to get right because I am thanking all of you, though my thanks may be misplaced. But as the Guide passess the House of Bombadil on the way home to the Barrow-wight I have, as part of my research, looked again at halfir's monumental 'Peeling the Onion', which is part of the history of the old plaza, which i only ever encountered as history, but is lived experience to many of you. On the old plaza i never stepped beyond Lore and the only good friend I made was @Saranna, who I was more than happy to help when she guided the setting up of an archive of halfir's work on the new plaza. I edited 'Peeling the Onion', which was always for me the jewel of the old plaza, the reason that i hung around - i still recall first encountering the thread and being blown away at the realization that someone, somewhere, had seen what a thread in an internet forum could do!

Reading and editing 'Peeling the Onion' but not having been around when it was written long ago, gives me an odd perspective on the old thread in relation to you'all who remember it as part of a living plaza. My engagements with you'all (and you are not many but you are all singular and all awesome in your knowledge of the books) fostered a thought as I returned once again to halfir's monumental thread, and that thought I do wish to put before you all, albeit aware that this is *your* past and i am a stranger to that past.

The thought concerns the title of the thread, which i have always thought must refer to the famous Anglo-Saxon riddle (of course, there is a riddle at the bottom of all this - this is Tolkien!) from the Exeter Book:

Ic eom wunderlicu wiht wifum on hyhte
neahbuendū nyt nængum sceþþe
burgsittendra nymþe bonan anum
staþol min is steapheah stonde ic on bedde
neoþan ruh nathwær neþeð · hwilum
ful cyrtenu · ceorles dohtor
modwlonc meowle ꝥ heo on mec gripeð
ræseð mec on reodne reafað min heafod
fegeð mec on fæsten feleþ sona
mines gemotes seþe mec nearwað
wif wundēn locc wæt bið þæt eage.

I’m a wonderful thing, a joy to women,
to neighbors useful. I injure no one
who lives in a village save only my slayer.
I stand up high and steep over the bed;
underneath I’m shaggy. Sometimes ventures
a young and handsome peasant’s daughter,
a maiden proud, to lay hold on me.
She seizes me, red, plunders my head,
fixes on me fast, feels straightway
what meeting me means when she thus approaches,
a curly-haired woman. Wet is that eye.

The answer, of course, is an onion.

The problem that I have always found reading 'Peeling the Onion' is that the title certainly seems to refer to this riddle and so suggest a play on gender at the root of Tom Bombadil, and yet there seems almost no hint of an exploration of such a theme in the thread itself.

My recent thought, which reaches into your ancient history, is that what happened here is that the original conception of the thread arose out of a discussion in which this Anglo-Saxon riddle had been quoted and some other discussants had pointed to a gendered reading of Tom Bombadil and Goldberry, and that the original title of this thread thereby reflected an older discussion and the imagination of a new discussion, which did not actually happen because these unknown others don't seem to have contributed to the discussion that we do find on the thread (which, let me underline, is one of the great virtues of the thread - because these posters really did know their stuff, and some more, and some of what they knew we have today forgotten).

That could all be pie in the sky, it was just a thought. I wondered what you surviving old plaza people might have to say on it. That said, I really don't wish to open up even the particular onion that is Tom Bombadil. For what it is worth, I am of the opinion that the queerness of the Withywindle Valley and the beard of Bombadil, which is to say the riddle of identity posed to Frodo Baggins in the House of Bombadil, is but an artistry building to an effect - from River and Tree to House under Hill, all sets the scene for the real riddle of Hobbit identity that is posed at the top, on the other side of the Hill.

I apologize for the confusion of genres of this original Supplement, a topic addressed next Wednesday, and attempt to put things in perspective by unveiling a picture entitled both sides of the Hill.

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Hmm, I don't see giants or monuments. People might feel uneasy by such entitlements. They were and are people who contributed in their special ways to the debate long ago and today and they always had my admiration. I see all equal members and like to keep viewing it that way.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Hi Aiks, I labored weary hours editing 'Peeling the Onion', which I will not provide a link to as it is linked in the archive above. you may think what you like of this monumental thread. but i worked these hours because i felt the thread worth preserving as a monument - which, like a tower, is the kind of thing that one has a look at, now and again.

i wish to acknowledge my debts, and also to signal, as did Rivvy introducing the identities of Ents and Trees, a hope to avoid unhelpful controversy. in the fear that the Supplement unintentionally did so i have edited a little, and thank you for the prompt. otherwise the way of the Supplement, as really all my posts on Plaza Lore (hardly my natural home), is as the football fans who attempt serious conversation on the online conversation threads concerning a rival team, that is a declaration that I am coming in peace.

As you see, I was talking first and foremost to Saranna, whose recollection of conference staircases triggered traumatic memories of my own.
:)

[Saranna]

Hmmm - hints of book destruction, made to, of all people, a retired librarian. Shock, horror and a wobbly feeling all over! I was doubly a librarian, 30 years in academic and public libraries and some 8 years as a librarian of Elrond's Plaza library, with a team of startling brilliance.

To me some of the lost leaders of the Plaza Lore Threads and the present scholars of Tolkien whose works have inspired me, are 'great' (which is not a synonym of perfect!); they are bright stars and I can never forget the experiences of reading their works and listening to them at conferences. (I adore conferences as long as the food is good!) That's my acknowledgement of debts though I don't expect anyone and certainly not everyone to agree with me on who's a good Tolkien scholar and who isn't. That sort of discussion is worthless.

Welcome to all comers in peace.

Back to the subject of stairs, did the cellars of hobbit homes have stairs down to them as well as cellar doors, or were they merely the smaller rooms at the back with no windows? Did Sam have to go down into a dark cellar as we know it today, to bid farewell to the beer barrel?

Thinking more seriously about it, were the original holes in the ground mentioned in the Prologue to the Lord of the Rings, left in situ beneath the grander homes that developed later, since they already had access down into them? And was, therefore, a short flight of stairs whose prime intention was to lead downward (to ale and wine) less menacing a concept to the Holbytla than the many stairs of a tower, with their prime use being to climb up and out of the everyday and the windowless? My own claustrophobia twitches each time I reread the text and realise there are windowless rooms in abundance.