[Formendacil]

Too much HoME in my blood has me fascinated that, with the end of this chapter, we basically reach the first great pause in the composition of The Lord of the Rings, and the book that resumed later from this point is a lot closer to the finished product than what we had before, which means--at least to a slight extent--that I read the adventures up to the end of this chapter slightly differently than I do those after. Yes, the Wargs after Caradhras are deeper and more serious than the wolves of The Hobbit, but the story still feels a bit more episodic and Hobbit-sequel-esque than the story after Moria.

In a very real sense, to play off an earlier post, not only do the heroes undergo a symbolic (or real, in the case of Gandalf) death when entering underground passages, but the book itself does.

By the way, I wonder if part of what got Tolkien going again was the realisation that Gandalf needed to die here--and, eventually, be reborn. Gandalf up to this point has not be the deus ex machina-prone wizard of The Hobbit, but a far more fallible figure: he fails to arrive before Frodo sets out, and that absence haunted the book till Rivendell. Even once we know what Gandalf faced, he is not the same force of "adult" knowledge in this book as in its predecessor. Thorin would never had contended so consistently with Gandalf over a path of travel as Aragorn does here, though he was far more likely to disagree to disagree with the wizard.

The disagreement between Gandalf and Aragorn was actually the biggest element that stuck with me this reread, if only because Aragorn is always portrayed prior to leaving Rivendell as Gandalf's great friend and helper--and prior rereads had made predominant in my mind the overall deference that Aragorn shows Gandalf, especially as Gandalf the White. And Aragorn is still respectful here, but he definitely disagrees.

I love Moria--I tend to love every new kingdom Tolkien introduces along the road, from Bree through Gondor, but having been elsewhere encountering some childhood memories associated with The Hobbit, I've been thinking about the comparisons between Moria and the Lonely Mountain, and there's almost no comparison: Moria a far richer, more deeply visualised place, and the comparative richness of its description as compared with the Lonely Mountain's simpler exploration in The Hobbit is appropriate. It is one of the crimes of Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy that it transgressed my mental pictures of things by making Erebor even vaster and more impressive than Moria.