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Old 08-05-2018, 06:21 PM   #35
Formendacil
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Question

It boggles the mind to see that "A Knife in the Dark" never broached a second page of discussion here, because were you to maroon me on a desert island with but a single chapter of The Lord of the Rings, there is a good chance this is the chapter I would take. It's got a little bit of everything:

-the tail end of the comfortable "known world" of the Hobbits (i.e. Bree)
-archaeology and history
-stunning vistas
-my favourite locale in all Middle-earth (Weathertop)
-pleasant woods and mysterious paths
-a wizard battle! (albeit from afar)
-the Nazgūl at their most terrifying (as a reader, I personally find the long, slow march of their relentless search across Eriador to be more visceral than their increased potency in the War)
-two of the best poems in the book (I'm personally partial to Gil-galad and I'm always deeply saddened that Sam didn't learn more of it!)


And, besides all that, there are a few curiosities, like the brief narrative return to Crickhollow, where Fredegar Bolger briefly becomes our point-of-view character! This is a remnant, narratively, of when Fredegar's predecessor character was still supposed to come on the quest, getting picked up by Gandalf as the wizard rushed from wherever he had to been to catch up to the rest.

The Fell Winter is an interesting nugget of Middle-earth history, if only because it was the last great test of the Shire before the War of the Ring, and though it was "more than a hundred years" ago, Bilbo actually grew up through it! He was quite small and, of course, in an affluent family, but it's still almost weird to consider that he was there.

One thing struck me that had never struck me before: the narrator tells us, in the course of telling us that Merry's ponies all fled to Bombadil before being returned to Butterbur, that it turns out that only one horse was actually stolen from the stables and that all the others had merely fled. Knowing that animals flee the Nazgūl, that makes perfect sense, but does this mean that Strider is *wrong* when he speculates about the motives of the thieves in stealing the ponies to slow them down and make them more vulnerable? At no point does he--or anyone else--assume anything other than that the stables were deliberately broken into. But if it was only one horse the Nazgūl (or the Southerner?) wanted, was it really aimed at them at all? Or is it possible that the entire stable just tried to break out and flee the Nazgūl when they attacked the inn and someone (the Southerner?) decided to just get a horse out of it?

I especially wonder... was it a black horse? Maybe one of the Black Riders needed a new steed.
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