Welcome!
 

Fordim Hedgethistle invites you to participate:


This forum is dedicated to a chapter-by-chapter discussion of The Lord of the Rings. Anyone and everyone is invited and urged to participate. One time posters and newbies are as welcome and as valued here as are long-time haunters of the Barrow Downs.

The discussion began in June 2004. We will be adding new threads for new chapters on a more or less weekly basis – sometimes more quickly or slowly depending on the level of interest and number of posts. Feel free to plunge right in with the most current chapter, or review and contribute to discussions of earlier threads. Better yet, do both!

The discussions in the forum are open and unguided so feel free to make whatever point you wish about the chapter covered by each thread. Personal reactions, scholarly discourses, musings, philosophising – all are welcome here.

If you would like to contribute to the discussion but are unsure how or where to begin, review the earlier posts in the thread and see if there is any point made there that you wish to respond to, either to support or contradict (politely, of course). Go back to older threads and see if there were ideas there that are pertinent to the current chapter.

Feel free to post on anything you wish, but if you find yourself posting “this part of the chapter is cool” or “I really like this about the chapter…” you might be able to go further with that idea and make it more interesting for yourself. Ask yourself why you like that particular aspect of the chapter? What is so cool about it? Why is that part important to the chapter, or to the book as a whole? What does it ‘add’ to the book? What would be ‘lost’ if it were missing?

Try not to think only in terms of plot, too. There are a lot more interesting things to say about a chapter than what it ‘does’ to move along the action. For example, if a chapter introduces an important character, you can think about why is that character being introduced here and not later? What is important or interesting about the way that the character is being introduced? How is that character like or unlike other characters in the chapter?

The most important thing to remember about this forum is that it is meant to be fun. We are not striving for scholarly perfection and nobody is going to grade you on performance. There are no tests or pop quizzes to see if you’ve been doing your reading. Contribute as much or as little as you would like, in whatever capacity you are comfortable with. The Lord of the Rings is about what’s possible when a group of strangers comes together in the spirit of friendship and co-operation to complete a long and arduous task…

Welcome to the Quest!

A quick addendum to avoid any possible confusion: we'll proceed at the one chapter per week pace, with each new chapter discussion starting on Monday. We'll see how that goes and fine-tune as (or if) needed.