Deceptive
Appearances
“All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who
wander are lost.”
The Prancing Pong by Barliman Butterbur – so read the sign over the door in large white letters. The Pony was the only inn in Bree, and it wasn’t the sort of inn where hobbits from the Shire could feel absolutely comfortable about spending the night. Sam didn’t like the look of it at all. It was three stories high and had bedrooms on every floor. No hobbit likes to sleep above the ground.
Old Barliman, the innkeeper, was reassuring. Careful and cautious, perhaps. Definitely a big scattered and overly harried. But he was friendly enough and hospitable to a fault. He made the four weary travelers feel right at home.
If only the same could have been said of the other guests they found gathered in the Common Room that night! They were a wild and rough-cut-looking bunch. Out landing and strange, “strange as news from Bree” as the saying was. There were the local Bree-men, Big People with whom the Shire Hobbits rarely had dealings, and the hobbits of Bree, halflings indeed, yet different enough from their kin to the west to raise respectable eyebrows back in Hobbiton and Bywater. A number of dwarves sat at Barliman’s table, too, having come a long journey west along the Great Road from over the Misty Mountains. And there were mysterious travelers from the South, humans who had come up the Greenway only the previous afternoon, a couple of them rather ill-favored, sallow-faced, and suspicious-looking. It was enough to make a decent hobbit fidget and squirm.
But strangest and most forbidding of all was the tall, dark man who sat smoking a long pipe back in a shadowy corner. He was wrapped in a dark green cloak. A voluminous hood hid his face in shadows. High, well worn, mud-caked boots covered the lower shanks of his long legs. A Ranger, Barliman had called him, a solitary wanderer who came and went at will and kept his business a mystery. It was clear that everybody felt a little shy of him. Worst of all, Frodo had the feeling that the man was watching him.
It wasn’t long before that feeling was confirmed. As Frodo passed him, the dark man threw back his hood, looked him straight in the eye, and spoke in a low but alarmingly intense voice. “If I were you,” he said, “I should stop your young friends from talking too much…there are queer folk about.” Frodo didn’t say what he was thinking: that this Strider – for such was his name – was the queerest of them all.
Who would have guessed that this odd bird would end up as advisor, leader, guide, and protector to the four vulnerable travelers from the Shire? Who in his wildest dreams would have supposed that this tramping traveler was a king incognito? And yet that’s exactly the way it turned out. It all began when forgetful old Barliman finally recalled something he had been trying to remember ever since the hobbits showed up on his doorstep. It was a letter from Gandalf.
“You may meet a friend of mine on the Road,” the letter read, “a Man, lean, dark, tall, by some called Strider. He knows our business and will help you.” In a postscript was appended a snatch of verse:
All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost…
That was all the convincing Frodo needed; though even before the letter came to light, a feeling had been growing upon him that this Strider, Aragorn son of Arathorn, was, after all, a friend.
“You have
frightened me several times tonight,” Frodo explained, “but never in the way
that servants of the Enemy would, or so I imagine. I think one of his spies
would – well, seem fairer and feel fouler, if you understand.”
Apparently Strider did. He laughed in reply.
Samuel is stymied. “Are these all the sons you have?” he asks.
“There is still the youngest,” Jesse answered, “but he is tending the sheep.” Samuel said, “Send for him.”
- I Samuel 16:11
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Finding God in the Lord of the Rings - Kurt Bruner & Jim Ware. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2001.