LotR -- Book 1 - Chapter 04 – A Short Cut to Mushrooms

[Thinlómien]

Originally Posted by Legate of Amon Lanc

No, it doesn't. Unless there were six dogs (or five, for that matter). Skipping the eventually discutable thing about dogs sitting down to eat, there are other things the dogs are doing by the time others sit:

Touché, you're right. But maybe the dogs first sat down and then went to lay by the fireplace...?

Originally Posted by Legate

And concerning the other things, I never felt it scary - like I said about the previous chapter, the hobbits were still in the Shire, the Riders were something riding here and there in the woods and I did not know what deadly thing they actually are. Weathertop, now that was horror! But about that later, in due time.

This is actually quite interesting. Because in my opinion, the Riders are very scary in the beginning, when we know absolutely nothing of them. The things Strider tells of them later & what they do at Weathertop make them really scary, yes, but not necessarily much scarier than they were in the beginning. And - this has been discussed elsewhere at great length - they become 90% less scary when they reappear in TT and RotK, riding on winged beasts and commading armies (possibly discounting the WK in Pelennor fields).

I don't know, I might have seen the Bakshi movie before being introduced to the books themselves. But early memories of the Bakshi movie might explain something here. I rewatched the Bakshi movie some years ago and while I mostly thought it was ridiculous, the Black Riders in the beginning (before Weathertop) were very creepy - creepy enough to force me to joke about them in order to maintain my calm .

Also, it is weird, but those quotes I posted are much more chill-causing in Finnish. When I looked them up from my English LotR they seemed somewhat... lame. Too ordinary words and phrasings, or something like that. At times the Finnish translation of the LotR succeeds in being more impressive than the original (gasp! ), and I think this is one of the few occasions.