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Originally Posted by The 1,000 Reader
I don't know why, but I got a rather odd sense of being in a dark, hidden world no man was meant to be in when reading about Aragorn and company passing through the Paths of the Dead.
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I feel the same.
I first read LoTR in the early 1960s and, more than forty years later, I can still vividly recall sharing Gimli's fear on the paths of the dead. That chapter cost me some sleepless nights.
It wasn't the ghosts themselves that were scary, but the situation. When the army of Dead were revealed and explained, the fear was gone.
In The Hobbit, I was as scared as Bilbo when he went down the tunnel to meet Smaug for the first time. In all the underground sequences, the walk in the dark towards the unknown was scarier than whatever waited at the end of the tunnel. As soon as there was a tangible enemy to fight or outwit, my emotion turned from fear to exitement.
To me as a youngster, Shelob was the most scary creature in LoTR (I used to have a phobia of spiders), but the walk in the dark before the encounter with her was worse.
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