Quote:
|
Standing upon the rim of the ruined circle, they saw all round below them a wide prospect, for the most part of lands empty and featureless, except for patches of woodland away to the south, beyond which they caught here & there the glint of distant water. Beneath them on this southern side there ran like a ribbon the Old Road, coming out of the West & winding up & down, until it faded behind a ridge of dark land to the east. Nothing was moving on it. Following its line eastward with their eyes they saw the mountains: the nearer foothills were brown & sombre; behind them stood taller shapes of grey; and behind those again were high white peaks glimmering among the clouds.
|
And that's when I fell in love.
It was that moment, looking out across the great desolate expanses of Middle earth that the fairy story spell of the Hobbit was broken for me. I had seen a new world stretched out before me for the first time, & I suddenly loved it absolutely, (& I've never fallen out of love with it). Looking back on my first reading of LotR, 28 years ago, I remember I had drifted through the earlier chapters, enjoying the pleasant escape into a fantasy world, but at this point, like Frodo in Lorien, I seemed to have stepped through a window into another world, a 'real' world.
This scene is, & always will be for me,
Middle earth. If for Frodo its the case that:
Quote:
|
When he had gone & passed again into the outer world, still Frodo the wander from the Shire would walk there, upon the grass among elanor and niphredil in fair Lothlorien.
|
then when davem, wanderer from this world, has passed back into the outer world, he will still stand on the summit of Weathertop & watch the Old Road winding out of the West towards the Misty Mountains.