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Old 10-07-2004, 07:35 AM   #14
Fordim Hedgethistle
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Join Date: Feb 2004
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Fordim Hedgethistle has been trapped in the Barrow!
SpM, I've always been so intrigued by the fact that Tolkien paused for such a long time in the writing "by Balin's Tomb" (it was for a period of some years wasn't it?). The end of this chapter has a very conclusive and final feeling. The same thing happened to Tolkien, of course, at the end of "At the Sign of the Prancing Pony" as he thought about where the hobbits would or should go next. I wonder if the pause here had more to do with what had to happen next. In the next chapter, Tolkien was faced with a hard decision: to 'kill off' one of the most important characters and really begin sending the story into new directions that would both expand the task of the writer (by splitting up the Fellowship, he would have to tell three stories, not just one) and also move it into a much darker and dangerous world.

Perhaps the way to read the journey through Moria is not so much as a passage of transition for the heroes, but for the story itself. To this point, the tale is a fairly familiar one (Hookbill's points about the references to The Hobbit are behind this thought), but with the journey into Moria, we find that the story of TH really is dead -- Balin is gone, the wargs are not just wolves but spectral beings of an altogether more sinister nature, the company is not a jolly bunch of friends who stick together to the end. The world that awaits the Fellowship on the other side of Moria is both more marvellous (Lothlorien) and more dangerous (Mordor) than anything we've seen to this point. We've been talking on and off throughout all the chapters about the movement that Frodo makes from the real world of waking experience into the dream/magic/dangers of faerie. Working out from that, could we not say that the current chapter is where the reader finally begins to make the same transition? Not just into fairy (as we've been immersed in fantasy from the first page) but from the familiar (The Hobbit, and more significantly, the relatively familiar and comfortable tropes of folklore and fairy-tales) into the truly marvellous and new. We the readers are moving from the known and knowable, to the unknown and unknowable.

I mean, horsemen in black are frightening, but they are not Balrogs; what is more, the Nazgul are explained to us very clearly, but the nature (and even the anatomy) of the Balrog is famously difficult to determine. And while Rivendell is wonderful, it is no Lothlorien; what's more, Rivendell is a place of answers and counsel, Lothlorien is a land of questions and mystery. It just occurs to me that the 'speaking fox' of chapter (was it three?) may make a lot of sense when put beside the spectral wargs -- we've come a long way, as readers, from the childish fairy tales of talking animals, with which we are all familiar, to these mysterious and unknowable creatures that disappear in the light.
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