[Formendacil]

This is a transitional chapter, not a blockbuster like some, but it's got more than a little action, between the River, Gollum, and the orks on shore. Having grown up canoeing down the Red Deer River through the Alberta prairie, I find this an especially easy chapter to imagine, though I don't think my Albertan-painted imaginings are quite accurate.

Gollum creeping continuously behind the Fellowship, ready to potentially throttle them in their sleep, is quite a creepy mental image, and while it's comforting to know Aragorn has been warding them (not unlike Rangers and the Shire), it's all the more frightening once Frodo and Sam go off alone, without his protection.

And the Argonath... is there anything that speaks to the fictional sightseer quite so much as these millennia-old megaliths? It puts the magnitude of Numenor's long-since-faded power into emotional terms, experiencing it this way.