06-12-2004, 01:11 AM
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#74
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Deadnight Chanter
Join Date: Sep 2000
Posts: 4,244
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a bit of a side note
Quote:
Originally Posted by Aiwendil
This doesn't directly answer your question, but there is a letter (and I'm afraid I don't have time to search for a citation at the moment) from after the book's publication wherein Tolkien says that the parts he found the most moving at that time (i.e. after finishing it) were Aragorn's departure from Cerin Amroth in Book II and the coming of the Rohirrim and dawn in Book V
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I would be glad to be of service:
Quote:
Letter 165 To the Houghton Mifflin Co. (1955)
I came eventually and by slow degrees to write The Lord of the Rings to satisfy myself: of course without success, at any rate not above 75 percent. But now (when the work is no longer hot, immediate or so personal) certain features of it, and especially certain places, still move me very powerfully. The heart remains in the description of Cerin Amroth (end of Vol. I, Bk. ii, ch. 6), but I am most stirred by the sound of the horses of the Rohirrim at cockcrow; and most grieved by Gollum's failure (just) to repent when interrupted by Sam : this seems to me really like the real world in which the instruments of just retribution are seldom themselves just or holy; and the good are often stumbling blocks. ..
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Besides:
Quote:
Letter 241 From a letter to Jane Neave (September 1962)
...It was not until Christopher was carried off to S. Africa that I forced myself to write Book IV, which was sent out to him bit by bit. That was 1944. (I did not finish the first rough writing till 1949, when I remember blotting the pages (which now represent the welcome of Frodo and Sam on the Field of Cormallen) with tears as I wrote. I then myself typed the whole of that work all VI books out, and then once again in revision (in places many times), mostly on my bed in the attic of the tiny terrace-house to which war had exiled us from the house in which my family had grown up.) But none of that really illuminates 'Leaf by Niggle' much, does it? If it has any virtues, they remain as such, whether you know all this or do not. I hope you think it has some virtue. (But for quite different reasons, I think you may like the personal details. That is because you are a dear, and take an interest in other people, especially as rightly your kin.)...
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It is to be said that I can't read the description of Rohirrim arrival to the Pelennor fields without at least shivers down my spine myself, but that is to be more profoundly investigated in chapter discussion to come
cheers
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Egroeg Ihkhsal
- Would you believe in the love at first sight?
- Yes I'm certain that it happens all the time!
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