Footnote to the Aragorn quiz

[inzilbeth]

One of the things Estelcontar and I ended up discussing as a result of this quiz was the question of whether or not Aragorn [or the Dunedain in general] could understand the speech of the beasts and the birds.

We decided that the only refernce to this that we knew of was this one from chapter 9 'At the sign of the Prancing Pony': 

They were taller and darker than the Men of Bree and were believed to have strange powers of sight and hearing, and to understand the languages of  beasts and birds.

We decided that was not the same as saying they COULD understand the languages of the beasts. Then  Estelcontar sent me this passage from Return of the Shadow:

...As the evening deepened Trotter began to tell them tales to keep their minds from fear. He knew much lore concerning wild animals, and claimed to speak some of their languages; and he had strange stories to tell of their lives and little known adventures.... 

So from Trotter's own mouth we find he claimed to have this ability. I wonder what strange tales he had to tell and wouldn't it have been wonderful if we had got to hear them!

Comments

[estelcontar1.livejournal.com]

Jul. 3rd, 2009 01:57 am (UTC)
Well, but we must remember that Tolkien deleted this bit from FOTR, and there is no hint from Aragorn at Weathertop that he can understand the language of animals. So, I believe that most certainly what Tolkien meant by the passage from chapter 9 that Inzilbeth quoted is that the Rangers were so skilled in living and surviving in the wild that people believed them to be able to understand the languages of the wild animals. He never mentioned that they did, and since he was most precise with his language I don't believe he meant that that the Rangers of the North (and the passage refers especifically to them, not to the Dúnedain or the Númenóreans in general. There is never any hint, for example, that the Rangers of Ithilien understood the language of animals) did really understand the language of the beasts. But even if they did, that would have been something they learned, like Beren did, from their close communion with animals in the wild, and not a hereditary gift from the highly urbane inhabitants of Númenór.

As for the tales Trotter was going to tell we can't have them because Tolkien never wrote them, but we can know what they were going to be about: Here is Son Christopher's last note on "The Attack On Weathertop" (HOME, The Return Of The Shadow, ch. VI, p. 188), the chapter in which Trotter's quote about the language of the animals is to be found.

"My father's practice at this time of overwriting his first pencilled drafts largely denies the possibility of seeing the earliest forms of the narrative. Int his chapter the underlying text can only be made out here and there and with great difficulty; but at least it can be seen that the opening passage quickly declined into an abbreviated outline for the story. Trotter's tales were only to be concerned with animals of the wild." ...So, originally Trotter would not mention Lúthien. But Tolkien changed his mind immediately and didn't even wrote the animals stories, and Trotter recited to Bingo (i.e. Frodo), Odo, Frodo (which is not our Frodo) and Merry, the tale of Beren and Lúthien.

The second mention of Trotter's ability to understand the language of animals comes from the same book. It's found on the second draft of the attack on Weathertop, "To Weathertop And Rivendenll (The Return of The Shadow, ch. XXI, p. 358).

"...As night fell and the light of the fire began to shine out brightly, Trotter began to tell them tales to keep their minds from fear. He new much lore concerning wild animals, and understood something of their languages; and he had strange tales to tell of their hidden lives and little known adventures. He knew also many histories and legends of the ancient days, of hobbits when the Shire was still unexplored....." So, here not Trotter, but Tolkien mentions that Trotter knew, something of wild animals languages, which is already not the same thing as speaking the language of wild animals.

After this draft Trotter is changed from the hobbit in wooden shoes into Aragorn, Son of Arathorn, and Tolkien drops this bit from all the subsequent drafts of the chapter.

[inzilbeth-liz.livejournal.com]

Thanks for all that. What we don't know is whether Tolkien was a rejecting the idea of the communication or whether he simply came up with a better idea for the tales that Trotter would tell. Talking to animals, as he say in 'On Faerie Stories' is one of those qualities that we all seem to enjoy. I wonder if he thought it was a little too extreme a thing to include directly so left in just this rather vague mention of the idea. When I'm not late for work, I might come back on this. There's also the question of whether or not Elves could really talk to trees that we were also discussing [and deciding they couldn't!]