Rolling the Stone: Who were the couriers and where did they go?

My youngest son got in the car this morning for school, and said "Let's rock and roll, Dad!".  I've never heard him use that phrase before.


As with surfing, if your mind catches a wave, and it feels like a good one, you may as well keep riding it.  You never know when you'll get another crack at it.  That is what I am going to keep doing with this path I started exploring yesterday.  I have been sitting on those words for a couple years now and haven't really tried to put them together like that.  Having come up with a story that seems to hold, no matter how implausible it might sound, I am going to see how much more runway we are working with here.  This means that some of the things I said I was going to write about after Part 2 related to Stone pre-events (e.g., Joseph.) will need to wait until we have seen where this current wave leads.


In determining yesterday that there was an exchange in Idaho where the Stone was handed to new actors who were charged to take it over to Europe, with the ultimate intent (whether known to them or not) that it be taken to the Drudain for repairs, the two biggest questions in my mind were i) who were the individuals that were charged with taking the Stone, and ii) where would they have gone to stay while waiting for John-Aragorn?   My thoughts kept touching back on these two questions, and so below I will articulate where I have arrived so far.

The Stone Couriers 

When I was thinking about who could possibly have been entrusted with the task of carrying the Stone from Idaho to Europe, I was reminded of words I had received back in February 2020 (right in the middle of the fairly intense period of words, before things went south) that mentioned not only a palantir, but also that some people had delivered one at one time.  These words were actually where I first got the notion that Lehi's Liahona was a palantir:

Feb 10 & 11 2020:

Those of us who delivered that ball-instrument to Lehi's family;

a compass, yet not wholly so, sufficient to lead one across seas to lands promised.

A palantir it was - a globe of crystal, metallic-seeming royal ancient sunlight beaming

<asguiliant>

Singing songs of heroes bold, yet some songs remain untold

Resonant it was, echoing thought commissary needful for instruction, eggs bearing

[Hodnil]

to learn from who irradescent, a welding link, hands made sickly stewards reward

[Gildor]

There is a bit in there that is probably for another post, but the biggest thing that caught my attention for our purposes here was the 'delivered' portion of the first line.  Somebody is speaking here about an 'us' (more than one), and that they were the ones who had originally delivered the Anor Stone to Lehi, who opened the tent one morning and found it sitting there.

I think that perhaps these Beings might be the ones who were asked to deliver the Stone to Europe.  I mean, it seems like they proved themselves in the past in performing this function, maybe there is something unique about their talents that gave the Good Guys confidence that they could make the journey safely and deliver the Stone.  It might have been that the 17 days of travel weren't a picnic, necessarily, with all sorts of bad actors on alert to potentially find and intercept this Stone, or disrupt it as much as possible.

I have Hodnil and Gildor in brackets in the quote above because these came slightly different than the other words; almost the sensation of someone whispering them.  I wrote them down, never considered them part of the dialogue itself, and always had the sensation that they were names.

It is then, perhaps, in these names - Hodnil and Gildor - that we have the individuals who were speaking about their past delivery to Lehi.  I am not familiar with the name Hodnil... it could mean something like "Hope-friend".  Gildor is more familiar, and I wonder if we are dealing with the same Gildor who met the hobbits as they starting their journey out of the Shire on there way to ultimately run into Tom Bombadil. I think it may be so.


In any case, I believe it is these two being addressed in the Sawtooth Mountains.


This also makes the opening line spoken to them in Idaho make fairly good sense.  The words spoken to them (or probably more accurately, the summary of what was said) as I mentioned yesterday were:

A bright star - brighter than the Sun

 In delivering the Anor Stone previously, Hodnil and Gildor would have been familiar with it.  Anor means 'Sun', so what is being referred to as the Sun is the Anor Stone here, I think.  Thus, this is a comparison that would make sense to Hodnil and Gildor, and I think the speaker is using it to let them know just how important the package they are delivering is.  It is critical that this not fail.

As an aside, a few days after I wrote down these words originally in 2020, I turned on the radio in my car, and "Brighter than the Sun" by Colbie Callait started to play.  I looked up the lyrics at that time, and I thought they were very relevant to the Stone, or the effects its story is supposed to have on people.

Anyway, the Good Guys call in the tactical SWAT team duo of Hodnil and Gildor - stone delivery specialists - and off they go.  But to where?  It was clear they needed to get somewhere prior to the Drudain, but why and where was it?  

The House of Tom Bombadil

So it just keeps getting nuttier, right?  

My guess is that they needed to find a place of refuge while waiting for John-Aragorn to take this to the Drudain.  First question on this I had was why the interim stopover for what looks to have been almost a month before the Drudain - why not leave it at Sawtooth until ready?  Simplest answer I could come up with is that perhaps they felt it would be safer out of 'enemy territory' as quickly as they could get it out.  There was probably a feeling that, once removed, it should go to the safest place possible that still exists on Earth while things were getting worked out (and that would be somewhat close to the Drudains' locations).   But where is that?

For my guess, I ended up starting based on where we left off yesterday and that is with Hodnil and Gildor landing in Europe with the Stone.  If they did indeed end up in Europe, this would actually be the lands of Middle Earth (several ages later, of course), and so I started working with that geography and asked myself if I was back in Middle Earth of the 3rd age (the latest we have record of anything having to do with Middle Earth) where would we take the Stone for refuge?

I thought of the three primary places that would seem to be the best bastion against evil forces, particularly spiritual ones (someone can let me know if I missed one):  Rivendell, Lothlorien, and the House of Tom Bombadil.  If I had something like this in the 3rd age, I think it would be at one of these places that I would feel safest and the Stone would have the most protection.

Then it was from that list that I just used a process of elimination to determine that Tom Bombadil would be the only possible answer in our late age.  Here is my reasoning:

Rivendell is simply no more.  Elrond and his people sailed away after the 3rd age.  His ring had lost its power, anyway, and the protection it afforded.  Without Elrond there, Rivendell would have faded and ultimately closed up shop, I think.  Furthermore, apparently Elrond was here only very recently rocking out as Tom Petty, so he wouldn't have really been spending any time rebuilding Rivendell.  Thus, we can cross it off.  

That leaves two.

Similar story as we consider Lothlorien.  Following the 3rd age, Galadriel departed the Golden Wood and sailed across the sea also.  Just as with Elrond, the power and protection of her ring faded.  Thus,  Lothlorien also does not exist today to offer any refuge.  I suppose one could suggest that Galadriel might have returned at some point and rebuilt it - perhaps she has spent some time doing that rather than rocking out?  Alas, however, I think that Galadriel is indeed on the Earth, but as a mortal woman who has no idea who she is, and so thus could not really be doing anything with Lothlorien presently.  It is not around.

This leaves us with Tom by process of elimination, but not just by that - I actually think it makes a good deal of sense.  

Tom's little land and the boundaries he set for himself were on his own terms.  There is no indication at the end of the 3rd age that Tom or his House were going anywhere or folding up shop the same as Rivendell or Lorien, departing across the sea like the Elves, Maia, and everyone else.  In fact, there is every reason to believe this would never be the case.  Just as he was the first, it would not fit for him to not also be the last, or to consider leaving mid-story.  He was here before it all, and here he remains.  Keeping to the bounds he has set, of course, but also opportunistically waiting for fellow travellers who might be in need of a safe stop-over on an important quest.

It is a tenuous tie when it comes to phrases and languages, but the 'have fun' comment communicated from the Being at Sawtooth to the Being I now consider to be Tom in letting Tom know that visitors were on their way makes a bit more sense if this is so.  I went back and read a few pages of Tom's part in the the LOTR.  As the hobbits finally come into view of Tom's house (right at the end of Chapter 6), he sings:

Hey! Come derry dol!  Hop along, my hearties!

Hobbits! Ponies all!  We are fond of parties.

Now let the fun begin!  Let us sing together!

Apparently, Tom found the thought of visitors to be quite fun, and this may have been been what was relayed of the conversation in my words meant.

In LOTR, we also get an idea for what Tom's version of parties, fun, and singing means.  It involves, in large part, the sharing of stories and lore, which is what he and the Hobbits spend quite a lot of time doing.  This also might make some of the phrases captured in my words during that month make more sense (captured in my last post as being mentioned during the month of March when the travelers would have been at Tom's).  They represent Tom teaching Gildor and Hodnil a bit more of the Stone and the story that they now were more fully involved in.

This view also coincides nicely with who I believe Tom's identity to actually be, but that will also need to be a different post.

But sticking with this story, pegging the location that the Stone Couriers sought refuge in as Tom Bombadil's House leaves us with one small problem:  

France.

I landed on France due to the 'best wine' comment, and I am not about to let go of it just yet.  It doesn't, however, work with traditional maps of Middle Earth vs. Europe.  Every map I have seen (in my albeit not exhaustive searching) seems to have the Shire, and thus close-by-in-proximity Tom's House, in England, not France.  I will, however, suggest that this is not right.  The Shire was in what would become France.

I can just imagine the potential thought of some of our friends in England imagining their beloved Shire wrested away and planted firmly across the channel in France, of all places, as something being an unimaginable horror.  Yet, even so, I think it is the right thing to do.  Too much weight had been given to Tolkien's own feelings, and the British sentiment overall, of having a legend of and for England and assuming this must then also mean the geography of the Shire must be in England, or that that the events of LOTR even include England.

Tolkien wished to write of his home.  As Frodo (as told elsewhere, I believe Tolkien is Frodo) the Shire was in fact his home, and I imagine that as he was writing his story as Tolkien, it was not hard to reimagine and give the hobbits the spirit and character of England, but yet still not have it be England.

We see signs of this in his 'translation' of the tale that would become LOTR.  Names, places , and perhaps even customs and technologies adjusted for a modern audience who could then better relate to and understand their characters and the places they found themselves in.  

But for purposes of this tale today, since being able to relate to the story in the most believable way is not the main criteria (clearly!), then I think we can think more critically about locations and geography, and so I place what was the Shire, and what still is Tom's domain, in France.

But all lands have changed since the 3rd age, as Tolkien noted in his intro to LOTR, so I think it is hard to transpose anything, anyway.  It likely doesn't matter that much, other than to say I think whatever those changes were it seems that Tom's House ended up in modern-day France.

So, to briefly summarize what I've written here:

• Hodnil and Gildor were charged by the Being at Sawtooth, based on their expertise and role as Palantir Couriers, to deliver the Stone.
• They went on the potentially treacherous mission to bring the Stone across the sea to Europe.
• Following instructions they received at Sawtooth, they came to the House of Tom Bombadil (in France!).
• At that House, they waited for the next step involving John-Aragorn and the Drudain, and learned lore from Tom during their wait.