Ok, let me start with my post from the Chapter by Chapter thread on A Knife in the Dark (I know its totally OTT, but I mean every word):
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:Standing upon the rim of the ruined circle, they saw all round below them a wide prospect, for the most part of lands empty and featureless, except for patches of woodland away to the south, beyond which they caught here & there the glint of distant water. Beneath them on this southern side there ran like a ribbon the Old Road, coming out of the West & winding up & down, until it faded behind a ridge of dark land to the east. Nothing was moving on it. Following its line eastward with their eyes they saw the mountains: the nearer foothills were brown & sombre; behind them stood taller shapes of grey; and behind those again were high white peaks glimmering among the clouds.
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And that's when I fell in love.
It was that moment, looking out across the great desolate expanses of Middle earth that the fairy story spell of the Hobbit was broken for me. I had seen a new world stretched out before me for the first time, & I suddenly loved it absolutely, (& I've never fallen out of love with it). Looking back on my first reading of LotR, 28 years ago, I remember I had drifted through the earlier chapters, enjoying the pleasant escape into a fantasy world, but at this point, like Frodo in Lorien, I seemed to have stepped through a window into another world, a 'real' world.
This scene is, & always will be for me, Middle earth. If for Frodo its the case that:
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:When he had gone & passed again into the outer world, still Frodo the wander from the Shire would walk there, upon the grass among elanor and niphredil in fair Lothlorien.
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then when davem, wanderer from this world, has passed back into the outer world, he will still stand on the summit of Weathertop & watch the Old Road winding out of the West towards the Misty Mountains.
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& your own comment:
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I second davem on the power of this moment: I still catch my breath at the description of the lands about the hill – it really is the first moment at which Middle-Earth fully comes alive in the book).
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Why is that scene 'real'? Well, for me it was so 'real' I felt it - it was like someone had grabbed me by the solar plexus & wrenched me into Middle earth. My head spun, & I felt the sudden vertiginous lurch that anyone afraid of heights (as I am) would feel at suddenly finding themselves looking down on a real landscape from a height of a thousand feet. I could feel the cold, the wind in my face. It was REAL.
In other words, I'm not sure the moral dimension is relevant, & the question of whether I agreed or disagreed with Tolkien's own moral & ethical belief system never entered my head. The reality of that moment in that place was also totally divorced from the context of the story. Black Riders & Magic Rings played no part in it. I was in a suddenly intensely REAL place, & I couldn't understand how or why. Yet I was also at home, sitting with a book in my lap. Two places at once (torn in two!), yet both were, in their own way, equally real.
I can't explain that, but I can't explain it away, either. Its not about 'logic' - some things are
real, even if you can't explain them.