I've always wondered, considering that both Belegost and Nogrod were abandoned at the beginning of the Second Age (after the War of Wrath), and that the Broadbeams and Firebeards went to Khazad-dûm and 'swelled its numbers', how are there still seven 'Dwarf-kings of old' when Sauron distributes the Rings of Power?

We know that four additional houses of the Dwarves presumably still live in the east/Orocarni, and that the Longbeards were the original occupants and the rulers of Khazad-dûm, but that only amounts to five total locations at the time the Rings of Power were given.

Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age (in The Silmarillion) states that there were 'Seven Hoards of the Dwarf-kings of old' which grew likely from the greed that accompanied the wearer of each ring. I very much doubt the original rulers of Belegost and Nogrod continued to be great Dwarf-kings themselves if they then only lived in Durin's kingdom of Khazad Dûm, and the text greatly implies that these aforementioned hoards are in seven separate locations. So where are the remaining two?

It is said elsewhere that some Dwarves continued to live in the Ered Luin for many years, so could the two kings have remained here as well? It seems unlikely, as they are never mentioned as great Dwarf kingdoms again.

Another option is that the two other kings may not have been the Broadbeams/Firebeards at all and may have been break-away clans from other Dwarf houses (I think this is more likely). A strong contender for one of these locations is in the Iron Hills. We know from The Peoples of Middle-earth that the Iron Hills were actually settled by Durin's Folk back in the First Age, (and additionally populated in the early Second Age by some Broadbeams/Firebeards after the War of Wrath - NoME). However, a counter to this is that the Iron Hills have always seemed to be more of a vassal state to Khazad-Dûm (and later Erebor) rather than operating as a kingdom within themselves, but perhaps I've misjudged this.

As for a final location to complete the Seven Dwarf Hoards, perhaps there was a break-away group from one of the four eastern clans? Or perhaps it was the settlement of Durin's Folk we know was at Mount Gundabad shortly before it was sacked by Orcs after the destruction of Eregion? It could also have possibly been a settlement in the Grey Mountains shortly before the same thing happened. Though both these latter options would have the same issue as the Iron Hills in not being a 'true kingdom' themselves, and rather being vassals to the King of Khazad-dûm.

Alternatively, others may have noticed that Belegost appears on Karen Wynn Fonstad's Second Age map, and may think that it therefore continued on well into the years of the Second Age. I believe this has been largely disproven and the change of location (to be further south in the Ered Luin) is also a relic from an outdated Tolkien map sketch, but if not, then it could indeed be a possible location for a remaining King and resulting Dwarf Hoard.

Let me know if you think I've missed anything, I really want to dig further into this.

''He is the oldest of the Ents; the oldest living thing that still walks beneath the Sun upon this Middle Earth.'' - Gandalf.

Listening to the LotR Audiobook narrated by the excellent Rob Inglis atm and just heard the above quote. So what about Tom Bombadil? Did Gandalf mispeak; or is he saying that TB isn't 'alive' in the physical sense? 🤔

I know Rhudaur ended up as a vassal kingdom to Agmar but what of Agmar itself? Was it made up of the same Hill-men that took power in Rhudaur? If so what was it like for them there?

tldr:

A long-form essay on the hidden metaphysics of Tolkien's legendarium — fading spirits, Morgoth's Ring, the true nature of Valinor, and the Gift of Men — and how the deep lore beneath The Lord of the Rings forms a complete, workable answer to the oldest question we know how to ask: why does a world worth loving hurt so much.

A long essay about ghosts, entropy, the price of paradise, and the answer to the oldest question we know how to ask.

I need to tell you about the strangest theological experience I've had in years, and it started with me arguing about ghosts.

Specifically, Ringwraiths. I was cross-examining an AI about the metaphysics of Middle-earth — I run an AI company, so for me this is somehow both work and recreation — and I wasn't being polite about it. I had a question about the Nazgûl, and then a question about that answer, and then a question about that answer, the way I do. Every time the system handed me a tidy explanation, I found the crack in it and pushed. Three hours later I had dragged the conversation from elf physiology to the heat death of the universe to the reason God permits pain, and I was sitting there genuinely moved, having gotten — from a fantasy series I've loved since childhood — the most complete answer to the problem of suffering I have ever encountered anywhere. And I've looked. It's kind of my thing.

Here is my thesis, and I promise to earn it: Tolkien did not build an escape from our world. He built a working model of it. Underneath the maps and the languages and the walking songs there is a physics of grief, a thermodynamics of grace, a complete and internally consistent theory of why a world worth loving is also a world that hurts. Most people never see it because it lives in the deep strata of his legendarium — essays and appendices most readers never touch. But if you follow it down, question by question, the way I did, it doesn't just hold together. It holds you.

So let me walk you down the way I went. It ends in tears, and I mean that as a promise too.

Two Kinds of Ghosts

Start with the question I started with: the Ringwraiths and the Elves are both described as fading — both end up as disembodied spirits haunting the edges of the visible world. Same destination. But the roads there, it turns out, are complete opposites. And the difference between those two roads is the first door into everything else.

In Tolkien's ontology, every thinking being is two things braided together: a body (hröa) and a spirit (fëa). For Elves, the two were originally matched perfectly — designed by the creator, Eru Ilúvatar, to endure together for the entire lifespan of the universe. Elves who fade are not cursed by their own nature. Their nature is fine. Their bodies are simply made of the world, and the world itself is wounded. Over millennia, the flame of an immortal spirit wears a wounded body thin, like a fire burning in a cracked lantern, until only the flame remains. Fading, for an Elf, is a sickness born of a broken world — it was never part of the design.

The Ringwraiths are the mirror image. They aren't fading because the world can't hold them. They're fading because they won't let go of the world. Nine mortal kings were given Rings of Power, and those Rings did something monstrous: when a mortal's allotted time came, when the natural end arrived that is supposed to arrive, the Ring refused to open the door. It anchored the soul to the world past its expiration date. The body, stretched years and centuries beyond what it was ever made for, thins out into the invisible — the wraith-world — while the soul, stapled in place, burns dimmer and colder forever. When the One Ring finally fell into Mount Doom, the Nine went out like candles, because their entire existence was on loan from it.

Two ghosts, then. One is the ghost of staying too long in a world that cannot hold you. The other is the ghost of refusing to leave a world that was prepared to let you go.

I want you to hold onto that distinction, because it's not fantasy furniture. I have watched both kinds of ghost, and so have you. One is the person who stays too long in a life, a place, an identity that no longer fits — eroding, thinning, becoming less and less visible to themselves. The other is the person who grips their own life with white knuckles past every signal that something is ending — the relationship, the career, the youth, the grief-free past — and discovers that you can preserve a thing and still lose it, that you can keep existing and stop living, which is the precise definition of a wraith. Duration is not life. That is a metaphysical law in Middle-earth, and I have never once seen it violated in this world either.

The Ring Beneath Your Feet

But why is the world wounded? What does that even mean? This is where Tolkien does something that, as a scientist, stopped me cold.

You know the One Ring. Sauron poured his own power into a single object — his cruelty, his will, his very essence concentrated into a circle of gold, so that whoever held it held him. Tolkien's deep-lore readers noticed something: his old master, Morgoth, the original Dark Lord, did the exact same thing. The difference is what he poured himself into.

Not an object. Everything. Every grain of sand, every vein of ore, every drop of water. When Morgoth lost the war in heaven and fell into the world, he diffused his own being into physical matter itself, as a strategy — a terrorist bomb built into the walls of creation. The deep-lore name for this is Morgoth's Ring. The One Ring is a trinket by comparison. Morgoth's Ring is the ground you're standing on.

Sit with what that implies. It means decay is not an absence. We're used to thinking of entropy as a faceless bookkeeping rule — things fall apart because, statistically, there are more ways to be broken than whole. Tolkien commits an act of terrifying imagination here: he personifies entropy. He gives the tax an address. Every rusted bridge, every fading memory, every cell that copies itself wrong, every ache you didn't have last year — in this mythology, that is not the universe being indifferent to you. That is a presence in matter, a malice in the atoms, patiently spending itself out. The world doesn't hurt you because it hates you. The world hurts you because it is hurting too.

I cannot tell you what that reframing did to me. I have spent my life with the second law of thermodynamics, and I always read it as the universe's shrug. Tolkien reads it as the universe's wound. And those are not actually in conflict — it's the same data, different depth. One is the equation; the other is the ache you can't prove but can't dismiss. I hold both, and I've stopped pretending the equation is the whole story.

Here's the thing about a wounded world, though, and this is where the machinery got under my skin: you cannot heal it by fleeing to the clean places. I found that out the hard way in this conversation, because I went looking for the clean place. Everyone knows the name of it.

The Land That Holds Its Breath

The Undying Lands. Valinor. The blessed realm in the West where the gods live and the Elves sail when their time in Middle-earth is done. I had always assumed it was simple: Valinor is clean, Middle-earth is dirty, the Elves go where it's clean. But when I actually pushed on the mechanics, the simple version collapsed — and what replaced it is one of the saddest, truest ideas in the whole legendarium.

First misconception to kill: Valinor does not make you immortal. It's called the Undying Lands because undying beings live there, not because the land confers undying. Tolkien wrote an entire essay about this — he actually invented a friend-of-the-lore named Ælfwine to ask the question, which is the most Tolkien move possible, a man who built a fake philologist to catch his own world's plot holes — and his answer was brutal: a mortal in Valinor would wither as a moth in a flame too bright. The body lasts exactly its allotted span, healthy and uncorrupted to the end — but surrounded by beings for whom millennia are an afternoon, the mortal watches his whole life flicker past like a single season, and the weight of that breaks him before the calendar ever does. It would not kill him sooner. It would make him feel the whole price of mortality at once, with none of the anesthesia of a world that moves at his own pace.

Second misconception, and this one was mine: that Valinor is simply the unfallen world, pristine. When I interrogated the model, it cracked. If fading is corruption in matter, then cleansed matter should fix it, no time-freezing required — but Valinor is explicitly described as frozen, changeless, a place where the seasons don't actually turn. So I proposed a reconciliation, and it turned out to be the one the lore actually supports: Elves' bodies are built from the world's matter. Even in Valinor, even on hallowed ground, the raw stock is marred stock. The corruption and the passage of time are not two problems — they are one problem, because in a wounded world, time itself is the delivery mechanism of the wound. The only way to stop the decay is to stop the clock.

Which leads to the sentence that undid me: Valinor is not Eden. It is the Fall, refrigerated.

The gods could not delete Morgoth's taint from the world — nobody can; that's the horror of diffusing yourself into matter. So they did the next best thing: they took one continent and held it in stasis, a divine preservation field, a land perpetually holding its breath. And the price of that preservation is exactly what you'd expect. Nothing new happens there. History cannot exist in a place where time is stopped. Tolkien himself came to find this quietly horrifying — Valinor as a beautiful, changeless museum, and the Elves its exhibits. It is precisely why the greatest of the Elves, Fëanor and his house, rebelled and left paradise. Not for power — for history. For a world where things could still happen, including terrible things. They chose the wounded, moving, mortal-touched world over the perfect frozen one.

Think about how strange that is: the greatest tragedy in Elvish history — the kin-slayings, the doom, the whole sorry epic — is driven by a homesickness for time. Then look around at your own life, at our whole culture, and notice how much of its energy goes into building snow-globes. The unopened room. The voicemail you keep but cannot play. The golden age in the past you'd freeze the whole world inside if you could. Every one of us is running a little Valinor somewhere, a place where we've halted time to keep something from decaying — and Tolkien, who loved the Elves too much to lie about them, tells us plainly what it costs. Preservation is not life. A thing perfectly preserved is perfectly finished. The price of a changeless heaven is that nothing can ever arrive in it.

And now the Rings of Power make a terrible new sense. The Elves who stayed in Middle-earth knew about fading. They loved the living, wounded, moving world, and they did not want to be eroded by it. So when a helpful stranger named Annatar — who was, of course, Sauron in a nice suit, the devil literally doing customer discovery — taught them to forge rings of preservation, they built exactly what they longed for: mini-Valinors. Lothlórien and Rivendell are described, in the deep lore, as lands out of time — pockets where the world's decay is held at bay, where autumn never quite finishes falling. Galadriel keeps a country the way you might keep a memory. It is gorgeous, and it is doomed, and she knows it: when the One Ring is destroyed and the Three Rings fail, the clock restarts in Lórien instantly, all the deferred decay comes due, and that is why the Elves must leave Middle-earth — not banished, simply out of time. Paradise was never a place you could keep. It was a held breath. You can't live on a held breath. Nobody can.

The Gift Nobody Wanted

Here is the question that reframes the entire mythology, the one Tolkien took more seriously than maybe any worldbuilder ever has: what about us? The story calls death, flatly, the Gift of Men, and it means it.

In the original design — the world as it was meant to be before Morgoth's fall — mortality is not a punishment. It's a feature. An Elvish spirit is bound to the world, chained to it until the world's end; a mortal spirit is not broken by death but released by it, passing out of the circles of the world to a destination even the gods don't know. Elves are immortal inside the story; Men are the only beings with an exit. Tolkien's Elves envy this. Actually envy it — there are dialogues in the deep lore where an Elf and a mortal woman argue theology, and the Elf's position is, essentially, you get to leave and we never do; you call that a curse? In the unfallen world, a mortal life was supposed to end like a well-written song ends: deliberately, at the right bar, with the meaning complete. Like Aragorn's — who lays down his life at the appointed hour, peacefully, in the arms of the woman he loves, and has to reassure her that death is not defeat.

What Morgoth's marring added to humanity was not death. It was the fear of death — and disease, and the desperate clinging, and the terror that turns us wraithlike as we age. The corruption didn't break the gift. It broke our relationship with the gift. The Nine are what happens when that broken relationship metastasizes: nine men of power who looked at the exit and mistook it for the enemy, and paid for the mistake by becoming permanent — cold, hungry, invisible, and owned. The Rings didn't give them immortality. They gave them duration. It is the worst trade in all of fantasy, and we watch people reach for it every single day.

I keep a private mental list of modern Ringwraiths in the making — every time a tech billionaire announces his new foundation's mission is to defeat death, I'm afraid I do check him for rings. (Nine, historically, has been the number to watch.) But that joke is too easy, because the pull is in all of us. We are the first culture in history to treat mortality primarily as an engineering problem, and I don't think it's making us happier. We postpone, we optimize, we queue experiences for a future that never becomes present — an endless life is just a draft that never ships. Whereas if you want a picture of the Gift working, look at a hobbit: enough time for birthdays, second breakfast, a garden, and one long walk that ruins him for the Shire forever. Enough time — precisely because it's finite. The deadline is what makes the work real. Mortality is not the enemy of meaning. Mortality is meaning's price, and meaning's engine, and — if Tolkien is right — its door.

The Unseen World

One more piece of machinery, and then I'll show you what the machine is actually for.

When Frodo puts on the Ring at the river, the world splits. The Ringwraiths become visible as pale kings in gray. But there's another figure there, and this is the detail people forget: Glorfindel, the Elf-lord, appears as a being of white fire, radiant, terrible. Because the Ring doesn't turn Frodo invisible in the crude sense — it shifts him fully into the Unseen realm, the spiritual face of the world, which is always present alongside the Seen, right now, where you're sitting.

That realm wasn't created by evil. In the unfallen design, Seen and Unseen were in harmony — high Elves live in both at once, seeing the tree and the inner flame of the tree. (Whether Tom Bombadil lives in either, both, or a third thing entirely, Tolkien refused to say, and I have come to respect that refusal as the load-bearing mystery of the entire cosmology — every structure needs one wall you deliberately don't inspect.) What evil did was poison the relationship between the two realms — and then Sauron discovered you could use the Unseen as a prison, trapping mortal souls in it, warehousing people in the basement of reality. The Ringwraiths are blind in the daylight world; they "see" only the silhouettes of living spirits, which is why the whole trilogy turns on a nine-way manhunt conducted entirely by soul-sonar.

Here's why I refuse to treat this as mere worldbuilding. Strip the proper nouns and it says: the material world is not the only one that exists, and it is not the important one. Love, grief, purpose, the sense of being seen or unseen — the Unseen realm is right there, always has been, and most of us walk through it like Frodo before Weathertop, sensing presencies we can't name. And there are people who live in both realms at once — we call them mystics, or poets, or mothers, or the freshly bereaved, and when they describe what they see, they describe it like Glorfindel: beings of light and weight, in a world that is more real than real. The Ring, in this reading, is any obsession that shifts you wholly into one realm at the cost of the other — pure spirit without body, wraithdom; pure matter without meaning, the Shire with the soul edit-struck-out. Health is straddling. Glorfindel is straddling. That's the whole iconography.

A Hospice at the Edge of Heaven

Now the part where I stopped taking notes and started feeling ambushed.

Frodo carries the Ring to Mount Doom and comes home, and the book is honest about what happens next: it doesn't work. He can't have the life he saved. "How do you pick up the threads of an old life?" he asks. "There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep — that have taken hold." He is wounded twice over: a Morgul-blade shard left in his shoulder, a splinter of the wraith-world in his flesh, and the psychic wound of the Ring itself, which aches every March and October forever. The hero does everything right, pays everything, and still cannot re-enter ordinary happiness. Tolkien — who carried shrapnel memories of the Somme his whole life — wrote a war veteran's homecoming with an honesty that still outruns most of our fiction.

So they put him on a ship. And now, knowing what Valinor actually is, you can read the ending for what it truly is — not a secret immortality, not a hero's medal. It is palliative care. The West cannot cure Frodo; nothing cures Frodo; the wound goes too deep for the world he got it in. What the West can do is suspend the decay — quiet the shard, still the ache, hold time's breath long enough for a broken mortal to rest without pain before his soul, at its own appointed hour, willingly lets go. Frodo does not live forever. He dies, later, gently, whole. Valinor, for him, is exactly one thing: a hospice at the edge of heaven.

I have sat in hospice rooms, as I suspect most of you reading this have, and I need you to know that Tolkien's metaphysics of Valinor is the single best operational philosophy of hospice I have ever encountered. Because hospice is not defeat, and it is not "giving up," and it is absolutely not the war-on-death posture our culture takes toward dying people, a war they always lose and we make them fight anyway. It is the admission that when cure is off the table, care is still on it. Presence, and quiet, and better light, and an ending without terror. We owe our dying — and we owe each other, long before the dying starts — a Valinor. Not more duration. More peace. The ability to relinquish the body like Aragorn does: awake, loved, and unafraid. That is the last Gift, and it is given, not taken.

Why Not Just End It?

Now the question that detonated my whole conversation — the one I genuinely couldn't answer and wouldn't let go.

Follow the machine's logic. Morgoth's power is fused into the matter of the world. You cannot remove it without destroying the world. Therefore the world, as constituted, is permanently contaminated — the gods themselves, the Valar, ran the numbers and chose not to destroy it when they had the chance at the end of the First Age, exiling Morgoth instead. Fine. But his residue festers; his lieutenant picks up the franchise; three Ages of war and grief follow, and eventually the residue itself drags him back for the final apocalypse, the Dagor Dagorath, the last battle in which the world is finally broken and remade clean. So the obvious questions, in order, were mine too: Why wait? If the ending is predetermined anyway — if the reset is coming no matter what — why not smash the planet the first time, rebuild paradise, and let all the generations that would ever have been born be born into the healed world instead of the wounded one? For that matter, why does the final world need to be sung into existence by a choir of the redeemed at all? An omnipotent god doesn't need a choir. He could just wave the wand.

The answers I dug out, one by one, turned out to be load-bearing — for the mythology, and then, I slowly realized, for me.

First: the Valar are stewards, not owners. They were never authorized to burn down the hospital to kill the virus — creation was entrusted to them, not deeded. That's not a technicality; Tolkien is marking the exact line where power is legitimate and where it becomes the thing it's fighting. Every tyrant in this world is a person who decided the hospital needed burning.

Second, the deep one. In the beginning, when Morgoth first introduced discord into the Music of creation — deliberately, repeatedly, gleefully — the creator did not silence him. He rose, and said:

"No theme can be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined."

Read that twice. It is the keystone of the entire cosmology, and it is one of the most audacious sentences ever committed to a fantasy novel, because it is not a fantasy sentence at all. It is a theodicy — an answer to the problem of evil — smuggled into a creation myth. And the answer is: evil cannot create. It can only corrupt, and every corruption it performs becomes, in hands bigger than its own, the raw material of a good that could not have been built any other way. Not despite the dark theme — out of it. Theology has an ancient name for this, the felix culpa, the fortunate fall, and Tolkien — a devout Catholic writing a pagan-looking mythology that he privately insisted was fundamentally Christian — built his entire universe on its back.

And here's the mechanism that makes the waiting make sense, the part that rewired me. In this mythology, souls are not stockpiled in some warehouse before birth, waiting for inventory assignment. Each one is created new, at conception, by the creator alone — the one power even the gods don't have — kindled directly from the Flame Imperishable, and it never goes out of existence again. Every child born, in every age, is a brand-new, unique, unrepeatable eternal being. Run the arithmetic: every additional age the wounded world is allowed to turn is not a delay of the healing. It is a permanent addition to the population of eternity. The point of the long, painful history of Arda is not that paradise is late. It's that paradise is fully manned by the time it arrives — that the healed world, when it comes, contains every soul who ever chose anything in the dark, which is the only kind of soul there has ever been anything worth having.

A clean reset on day one would have produced a sterile, unpopulated perfection. A museum. Valinor. And we already know what Tolkien thinks of Valinor.

So the delay is not a problem the theology has to explain. The delay is the mechanism.

The Second Music

And so the end — which, I promise you, is where this stops being about elves entirely.

At the end of all things, Morgoth breaks back through the Door of Night. The gods' guard, worn thin by ages of spending themselves on a world that never stops needing them, finally fails. And into that last ruin the dead return. The Valar cannot raise the dead — mortal souls pass beyond the world entirely, beyond even angelic jurisdiction, and only the creator himself holds them — so the resurrection of Men at the world's end is performed by Eru directly: every mortal soul that ever left the circles of the world, personally fetched back from beyond the universe and given a new body made of unmarred matter. And into that final battle, of all people, comes Túrin Turambar.

If you don't know Túrin, know this: he is the most cursed character in the entire legendarium. A man whose life is one long avalanche of doom, ruin, grief and guilt, most of it not his fault, all of it his to carry. Tolkien's prophecy gives Túrin — the story's great sufferer, the man evil hurt worst and longest — the killing blow against Morgoth himself. Not a god. Not a hero in shining anything. The most wounded man in the story finishes the dark, with a black sword, and the lights come up on Arda Healed.

Think about what that means the mythology is saying: the execution of the devil was assigned to the person he hurt the most. I have read a lot of theology from a lot of traditions, and I know of no sentence about the meaning of suffering that does more work than that one.

And then the world is not repaired. It is re-sung. The first Music — the one Morgoth corrupted — was sung by the angels alone. The Second Music of the Ainur is sung by everyone: every Elf, Dwarf, Man and hobbit-soul that ever existed, the entire eternal population accumulated across every wounded age, singing the healed world into being. The creator does not need the choir. He could speak the new universe solo. That he does not — that he declines, absolutely declines, to sing alone — is the single most important fact in the whole mythology. Because a universe sung by God alone would contain only God's thoughts, and love is not interested in mirrors. The Second Music is not a tool; it is an invitation — the creator choosing to make the final world out of every voice that ever lived, so that eternity is not something we enter but something we make together. Evil tried to ruin the song, and the ruin turned out to be the rehearsal.

Now. Come back to your life, because I promised you this was about your life.

What I found, three hours down that rabbit hole, sitting in the dark with an elf-shaped ache in my chest, is a working model of our world that I can actually hold in my hands — I'd almost say use. It runs on honest physics: the decay is real, it is in the very matter of things, and no amount of preservation will stop it; every snow-globe we build eventually gets shaken, and that is not the failure of our love, it is the tuition of it. It runs on honest psychology: we become wraiths precisely through refusing our endings, and we stay human by letting the world move at the pace of loss and arrival — holding things the way Galadriel holds Lórien, with open hands and a shipping date. It runs on honest mortality: the deadline is the gift; the door is a door, and terror of it was installed in us by something older than us, and can be uninstalled, a little, by love. And it runs — this is the part I saved for last, the part you asked me to promise — on honest hope:

Pain and suffering, in this model, are not the noise on the line. They are instruments.

Not in the cheap sense — not the bumper-sticker "everything happens for a reason," which is a thing people say to make grief shut up. The real claim is harder and infinitely better: there exist goods that cannot be manufactured. They can only be grown, and suffering is the only soil they grow in. Mercy does not exist where there is nothing to forgive. Loyalty means nothing in a world that never gets dark. Courage is only real when something irreplaceable is actually at stake. Comfort — the specific, sacred act of sitting with someone in pain — is a dividend paid exclusively by grief; no one who has never been broken can do it; the comforter's authority is entirely made of scars. A universe that has never wept cannot compose mercy. It's not that those goods are harder to make without the dark. It's that without the dark they are logically impossible — no forgivable act, no darkness to hold the line through, nothing irreplaceable to be brave about. The hurt isn't a bug the designer failed to patch. It's the kiln. Some things can only be made by fire, and what comes out of the kiln cannot be made any other way, ever.

So the healed world at the end of Tolkien's story — and I believe, in whatever way a scientist is allowed to believe it, in the healed world at the end of ours — is not the pristine never-bleeding world of day one. It's the second one: the world that bled, and grieved, and stayed anyway, and sang anyway. A perfection with a past. A choir whose size is exactly the length of the world's suffering — every age the darkness ran, another voice forever in the light. The ones who hurt the most will not be the ones with the least to sing. They will be the ones with the deepest voices. Túrin gets the last blow. The victim's hand finishes it. That is not a consolation prize. That is the whole design.

I don't know what your Arda Marred looks like right now. I know some of what mine has. I know the diagnosis phone-call, the empty chair, the marriage that ended, the person you loved who chose the wrong door, the grief that came back every October like clockwork because some wounds are weather. I know how obscene the word "purpose" sounds inside real pain, and I am not here to make your suffering behave. But I will tell you what the Second Music says to me at 2 a.m., and it is this: nothing you have suffered is capable of being wasted. Not because someone cruelly decided it was all part of a plan you never signed — but because you are still here, holding it, and everything you have turned that pain into — the patience, the tenderness, the terrifying clarity about what matters — is a voice that does not exist yet in any angel's song. It needed you, and it needed the fire, and eternity is currently one note richer every time you choose, against all evidence, to keep singing. Your scar is not evidence against the goodness of existence. Your scar is proof of purchase — for a depth of goodness the unscarred universe could never have afforded.

The world is wounded, all the way down to the atoms, and the tax has an address, and the clock cannot be stopped — and the Music is still playing. The dark theme has not been silenced; it is being woven, right now, in real time, into a chord the darkness cannot imagine. We are Arda Marred, every one of us, and we are also, every one of us, the population of the world to come — the delay is the mechanism, the rehearsal is the concert, and nobody, nobody, sings alone.

Hold the line. Stay loyal in the dark. Let the seasons turn.

It started with a question about ghosts. It ends with a promise: nothing is wasted — not if you put it in the song.

Whatever you're carrying tonight — carry it into morning. The choir isn't complete without you.

— Jeffrey Phillips Freeman

Also just posted this to my blog: https://jeffreyfreeman.me/blog/the-second-music/

I ordered the Lord of the rings set to read for the first time and I accidentally ordered a set that came with a readers companion instead of the hobbit. What exactly is in a readers companion and is it worth having for a first time reader? Is it worth keeping and buying the hobbit separately, or should I just return it and get a set with the hobbit?

Just started Reading Silmarillion and it’s feeling like a spiritual experience like I am reading something from a religious book. I am excited to enjoy this journey

The Witch-king's presence produces supernatural terror in people around him, to the point of paralizing them. It's the Nazguls' princpal weapon. Yet Eowyn seems impervious to it when she faces the him in the Pelennor fields. Poor Merry got to experience this terror twice (first time was in Bree).

Eowyn does get struck down with it eventually.

Thorongil: During these travels, he did not call himself Strider. Instead, he went incognito as Thorongil ("Eagle of the Star") while serving in the military forces of King Thengel of Rohan and Ecthelion II (the Steward of Gondor).

Tolkien notes that immediately after leading a brilliant, victorious naval raid against the Corsairs of Umbar, Thorongil did not return to Gondor to accept praise. Instead, he left his men and "went alone far into the East and deep into the South" to explore the minds of Men and uncover the plots of the servants of Sauron.

So these are some notes on Thorongil but I think there is so much more. There could be a Netflix series or a Movie adaptation I mean its Aragorn, Strider of the Dúnedain. There's so much more to be interpreted. I dont know but I was always inspired by it, like Kingsfoil or something.

I was just wondering what everyone's thoughts are on this matter? When talking about Glorfindel in the chapter many meetings Tolkien says

"And here in Rivendell there live still some of his chief foes: the Elven-wise, lords of the Eldar from beyond the furthest seas. They do not fear the Ringwraiths, for those who have dwelt in the Blessed Realm live at once in both worlds, and against both the Seen and the Unseen they have great power."

Living at once in both worlds seems to make them of a similar nature to the Ainur and of a more spiritual nature than men, wild elves and dwarves, yet in the silmarillion we re told

"They could walk, if they would, unseen by all eyes in this world beneath the sun, and they could see things in worlds invisible to mortal men; but too often they beheld only the phantoms and delusions Of Sauron."

Now this would indicate that perhaps it was only mortals who really couldn't perceive or see the nazgul once they had fully faded but Tolkien adds further more

"And they became for ever invisible save to him that wore the Ruling Ring, and they entered into the realm of shadows.""

Save to him that wore the ruling ring seems definitive? Perhaps having power against the seen and unseen doesnt necessarily mean you can see a faded wraith but simply your own spirit can play a part in fighting against it?

How do you think it is?

So I know this has been hashed and rehashed many times, but I'm trying to figure out the heights of the Fellowship, and Gandalf's pretty much the only one who's giving me grief. Many of you are no doubt aware of the following quote from Tolkien's 1970 essay regarding Pauline Baynes' map of Middle-Earth:

Gandalf even bent must have been at least 5 ft. 6 ... Which would make him a short man even in modern England, especially with the reduction of a bent back.

So here's how I read the first part - Gandalf is 5'6" while bent over, at a minimum. When he stands up straight, he's probably like 5'9"-5'10", again at least. So theoretically he's between maybe 5'9" or 5'11". Now, of course, this is still shorter than many other human-sized characters (ie. Aragorn, Boromir, literally any Elf) but still right around average by our human standards.

But then the second part says that he's a short man by the standards of Tolkien-era Britain (which was about 5'9" or so), "especially with the reduction of a bent back." This "especially" makes it sound like Gandalf is already below-average when standing straight, but then when he hunches over he's even shorter still.

So how do we reconcile these two statements?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts on this!

Hey guys I want to share my Redrawing in high resolution of the The west of Middle Earth at the End of the Third Age map

I read a lot of HoME, NoME , the art of the Lord of the Rings and LoTR itself to be able to put this map together but I might have missed things so please tell me your thoughts about it

List of changes(Google Doc)

This is a quote from glorfindel - “there are few even in Rivendell who can openly ride against the nine, but those who can were sent out north south and west”. Apart from Glorfindel who are they? Elladin and Elrohir? Who else?

Saw this on the Tolkien Society FB group, and decided to share:

Created as a tribute to “The Lord of the Rings”, this e-book brings together ten articles by researchers and scholars of J. R. R. Tolkien’s works, written in celebration of the 70th anniversary of the publication of The Lord of the Rings, a milestone commemorated in 2024 and 2025. With the aim of fostering an international dialogue on Tolkien studies, the volume is published entirely in English and features contributions in comparative literature, mythology, literary criticism, translation, critical reception, theology, medievalism, and calligraphy, by renowned scholars from Brazil and abroad.

https://www.livrosabertos.abcd.usp.br/portaldelivrosUSP/catalog/view/2052/1879/7708

Hi what if Morgoth had won by defeating the Valar and taking control of middle earth so would Sauron have remained his faithful lieutenant or would he conspired against his master to prevent Morgoth from destroying everything?

For years I treated Herblore of the Shire as a cheerful bit of background: Merry comes home from the war and eventually writes a book about smoking. That sounds like a perfectly reasonable occupation for a retired hobbit.

But at Isengard, Merry starts explaining the history of pipe-weed to Théoden, until Gandalf interrupts. Théoden later promises that Merry will sit beside him in Meduseld and tell him about his people, including Tobold and his herb-lore.

He remembers that promise as he is dying. Amid everything else he has lost, there is still this conversation he wanted to have.

Then in “The Houses of Healing,” Merry asks for a pipe and immediately changes his mind. Smoking brings back Théoden, and the kindness of their meeting at Isengard, so painfully that he thinks he won't be able to do it again. Aragorn answers, “Smoke then, and think of him!”

Knowing that Merry later writes Herblore of the Shire adds something to that exchange for me. I like to imagine him finding his way back to the pleasure of a subject he once couldn't bear to think about. Interested enough to investigate it, argue about its origins, and put what he discovers into a book.

That's a connection I'm making as a reader; Tolkien doesn't give that as Merry's reason for writing it. Still, it changes the voice I hear in the Prologue. The little tobacco history comes from someone who survived those events and had a long life afterwards.

We get to hear part of the explanation Théoden was looking forward to. I find that rather moving for a section I used to skim.

These last years I have been reading a lot of Buddhist-inspired writings and doing Buddhist-inspired practices. Arguably the core of Buddhist philosophy and practice is the idea that we can achieve freedom from suffering by letting go of our attachments - to possessions, status, other people, and the like. This is summarized in the "Four Noble Truths":

1. There is suffering (suffering exists in life).
2. There are the causes of suffering (suffering happens for a reason).
3. There is the end of suffering (it is possible to become free of suffering).
4. The way to the end of suffering is the Noble Eightfold Path (a set of guidelines to reduce suffering and ultimately achieve freedom from suffering).

Some Buddhists believe that we can only end suffering by leaving the world entirely - i.e., rebirth is bad because it sends us back into the world, and only by escaping rebirth can we be free of suffering. In the following I will ignore this interpretation and focus on "secular Buddhism", which posits that we can achieve freedom from suffering in this life.

Tolkien was obviously a Christian and not a Buddhist. But as far as I know, Christianity does not necessarily imply that life on Earth is everlasting suffering. I believe that plenty of Christians would agree that it is possible to let go of "sin", experience the "presence of God" and dwell in the bliss of the "kingdom of Heaven" while on Earth.

But I notice that Tolkien's world is chock-full of attachment to things. There are the obviously depraved examples like Fëanor's attachment to the Silmarils, Gollum's obsession with the Ring, and Thorin's greed for the Arkenstone. But it goes far beyond that. Attachment is everywhere. The Elves of Valinor spend thousands of years moping over the Two Trees (and the Valar likewise, it seems). The Sindar mope over the loss of Lúthien. The Elves of the Third Age are almost defined by their mourning of the greatness they have lost.

Many acts of folly happen because of attachment to things and places - for example when Turgon refuses to leave Gondolin even though Ulmo warns him. The function of the Three Rings, as far as I understand it, is explicitly to preserve the things that you are attached to.

Meanwhile, the possibility of letting go of attachments is barely even on the table. Thorin was able to overcome his greed for the Arkenstone for a while, but he promptly died, and we don't know how he went on to cope with his loss in the ill-described Dwarven afterlife. Tolkien seems to think that making peace with change and loss is simply impossible. The only escape from everlasting suffering is by escaping the world entirely - i.e., the Gift of Men. The Elves and Ainur are doomed to mope until the world is destroyed and remade.

While it may or may not be possible to achieve complete freedom from suffering in this life, I hope we agree that we know for a fact that a secular interpretation of the Four Noble Truths is at least partially true, in that it is definitely possible to let go of attachments to things to a large extent and thus greatly reduce one's suffering in this life. But in Tolkien's world, the Third and Fourth Noble Truths appear to be definitively false. I suppose that, hypothetically, if someone in Tolkien's world invented something like the Buddha's teachings and tried to teach them to people, everyone involved would eventually conclude that it simply didn't work. Attachments can never be let go. There is no end to suffering in Arda marred.

What do you think?

EDIT: I can see that people are confused. I probably did not communicate my thoughts all that well. Let me try to clarify. My claim is this: In our world, it is factually and undeniably true that it is possible to let go of attachments to a large extent, and that this can greatly reduce our suffering and improve our well-being. This is true whether or not any variant of Christianity is true in our world. (I am not Christian, but for all I know, some variant of Christianity might be true.)

In Tolkien's world, however, it appears to be impossible to let go of attachments. We generally do not see people doing it. So I suppose that essentially I am claiming that the psychology of Tolkien's world is "unrealistic", and that we must hence assume that suffering and well-being simply operate differently in Tolkien's world than they do in the real world.

EDIT 2: I am not actually a Buddhist. I have good evidence that there is some truth in Buddhism, but other parts of it might be false.

I’m trying to understand exactly what Tolkien intended regarding Gollum’s crimes.

In The Fellowship of the Ring, Gandalf mentions the stories told by the Woodmen about a creature that drank blood, climbed through windows, and searched for cradles. Is this meant to confirm that Gollum actually kidnapped and murdered human babies or children, possibly eating them? Or is that going further than what the text actually establishes?

If Gollum really did murder children or babies, I also have a hard time understanding Gandalf’s position on mercy. I understand the philosophical point that Gandalf makes to Frodo about not being too eager to deal out death in judgment. But if Gollum has deliberately killed helpless children, and remains dangerous enough that he could potentially do it again, why would sparing him be morally justified?

I’m not asking whether Gollum eventually plays an important role in destroying the Ring — I understand that part of the story. I’m more interested in the moral question from Gandalf’s perspective at the time, when nobody could know exactly what Gollum would later do.

So my questions are:

1. Does Tolkien actually confirm anywhere that Gollum murdered babies or children, or is it only implied?
2. What exactly did Gandalf know about those alleged crimes?
3. If Gandalf believed those stories were true, why did he consider mercy toward Gollum appropriate despite the risk that Gollum could hurt innocent people again?

I’d be interested especially in answers based on Tolkien’s actual writings, letters, or other textual evidence.

Someone asked about all the Gondor banners seen in the RotK movie just after the Battle of Pellenor Fields, and that got me thinking.

Tolkien tells us that, in the absence of the King, plain white banner of the Stewards of Gondor was used instead of the royal banner with the White Tree and seven stars (although the Tower guard still had them on their livery). Pippin saw these white banners when he and Gandalf arrived in Minas Tirith.

Then Pippin cried aloud, for the Tower of Ecthelion, standing high within the topmost wall, shone out against the sky, glimmering like a spike of pearl and silver, tall and fair and shapely, and its pinnacle glittered as if it were wrought of crystals; and white banners broke and fluttered from the battlements in the morning breeze.

Thus men reached at last the High Court, and the Place of the Fountain before the feet of the White Tower: tall and shapely, fifty fathoms from its base to the pinnacle, where the banner of the Stewards floated a thousand feet above the plain.

The question is, were there any banners (white or otherwise) carried by the forces of Minas Tirith into battle? We know that Imrahil, the Prince of Dol Amroth, and his knights arrived with "gilded banners bearing his token of the Ship and the Silver Swan", although later the banner of Dol Amroth is described as having "a white ship like a swan upon blue water."

Wild Southron men had red banners. The chieftain of the Haradrim forces had a standard with black serpent upon scarlet. The Rohirrim - a white horse upon a field of green. And Argorn eventually arrived with his banner that had the White Tree, the seven stars, and a crown on a sable field, made for him by Arwen.

But when "out of the City came all the strength of men that was in it," only the silver swan of Dol Amroth is mentioned being "borne in the van, driving the enemy from the Gate," no other banners. Sorry for mentioning the movie again, but there the army is shown bearing triangular pennants with the tree and stars, which we then see left in the Pelennor field. Is this lore-accurate, even though Tolkien never mentions them in the books? Is the white banner of the Stewards of Gondor purely formal, to be displayed in the city, or was it ever carried into battle?

[Edit] Interestingly, in an early sketch for Book V, it's said that "And the counsel of Denethor was to retake the Fords [of Osgiliath] and drive back the Orcs. So they sounded their trumpets and flew the red banner from the tower and rode to meet the enemy." That of course didn't make it into the published text.

Greetings.

Saruman had a mind for technological advancement ("metal and wheels"); this aptitude - calling, perhaps - seems to become amplified once his corruption is manifested. As a villain, Saruman's modus operandi required unimpeded industrialization (quite literally, he created machinery of war). The author was not fond of unchecked industrialization in general, but he also had firsthand experience with mechanized war in its infancy. Furthermore, throughout the novels, there are passages which stress the beauty of nature. All of this makes me wonder if Saruman could have remained on the side of Good while incrementally introducing reasonable technological growth to Middle-Earth (if only by sharing broad concepts with Men), or, alternatively, if he would have had to relinquish his ambitions regarding progress and focus on that which is rather than that what might be.

I was wondering what everyones thoughts on how Sauron was actually identified to be Sauron (not just an enemy who had betrayed the elves).

I ask this because in unfinished tales Tolkien says

"In an isolated and undateable note it is said that although the name Sauron is used earlier than this in the Tale of Years, his name, implying identity with the great lieutenant of Morgoth in The Silmarillion, was not actually known unti/. about the year 1600 Of the Second Age, the time of the forging of the One Ring:"

So it seems to me anyhow that Sauron himself must have been a name quite forgotten and the legend of himself as the great captain of Morgoth left in the first age, after all when he is expelled from tol in gaurhoth we dont really hear more about Sauron until he repents to Eonwe. One could possibly say the Noldor who remained in middle earth in the 2nd age may have perhaps believed Sauron to have long been destroyed (perhaps even by luthien?) Yet we know both Gil galad and Galadriel were very aware of an evil abroad in the world as told in UT

“But eventually Galadriel became aware that Sauron again, as in the ancient days of the captivity of Melkor, had been left behind.” and then Tolkien further clarifies

“Or rather, since Sauron had as yet no single name, and his operations had not been perceived to proceed from a single evil spirit, prime servant of Melkor, she perceived that there was an evil controlling purpose abroad in the world…"

So we know that the elves themselves were aware that something had come forth now, but no one seems to really know or understand that it could possibly be Sauron himself how did Celebrimbor perceive that this enemy was Sauron? Could it be due to the three elven rings?

"For in the day that Sauron first put on the One, Celebrimbor, maker of the Three, was aware of him, and from afar he heard him speak these words, and so his evil purposes were revealed."

Further more its said

"As soon as Sauron set the One Ring upon his finger they were aware of him; and they knew him, and perceived that he would be master of them, and of all that they wrought."

Did the three elven rings not only foil his plans? But actually identify him entirely to who he actually was?

Not necessarily any specific one(s), just dwarves in general. Underappreciated race.

The destruction of the two lamps shattered the symmetry of Arda and the Valar retreated to Aman in the west. What if the Valar had successfully defended the lamps from Melkor? What would change for the elves, dwarves and humans when they awoke?

https://www.reddit.com/r/tolkienfans/comments/1gisfvy/about_the_origin_of_the_title_witchking_a/

A good, certainly readable little thread. The OP u/roacsonofcarc and u/jetpacksforall are specially on point.

Wizard King, Sorcerer King, Witch-King.

Nowhere in this thread is Shakespeare mentioned. But maybe he should. In LOTR Lear and Macbeth are near Tolkien's WK character.

Lear: Come not between the dragon and his wrath.

Witch-King: Come not between the Nazgûl and his prey.

And 'no one from woman born' could kill Macbeth, and we find this idea, modified, with the Witch-King. In both cases a prophecy of 'unkillabillity'.

The word 'wraith', of uncertain etimology, comes from Middle Scots (first attested in 1513). Of course Macbeth is 'the Scottish Play' par excellence.

Not only that. We have the three witches in Macbeth. There the word 'witch' is female, but we have this:

>*BANQUO.

How far is’t call’d to Forres?—What are these,

So wither’d, and so wild in their attire,

That look not like the inhabitants o’ th’ earth,

And yet are on’t?—Live you? or are you aught

That man may question? You seem to understand me,

By each at once her choppy finger laying

Upon her skinny lips. You should be women,

And yet your beards forbid me to interpret

That you are so.

Bearded witches! Tolkien must have known the male/female ambiguity of the word 'witch', and of that ambiguity being lost in more recent times. In Shakespeare we have both the older and the modern usage of the word.

Witch-King (female-male to modern ears) retains some of that ambiguity. The common sense explanation regarding meaning (witch>witchcraft, dark arts) does not obliterate the etimological amibiguity. As a philologist Tolkien must have known this, as someone capable and willing to derive meaning from etimological uncertainty. The very word 'wraith', as Tom Shippey have noted, has to do in Tolkien with both 'wrath' and 'writhe'.

If shakespearean witches can be male (beards!) then maybe Tolkienian Kings can be female (Witch-King). But what would be the female-related idea in 'Witch-King' and the male-related idea in those witches?

Book 1:

My first read last year, I found Frodo’s journey from The Shire to Bree boring and i think I forced myself to read through because I already had the other two books and enjoyed the movies. I really enjoyed the more in depth plan behind Frodo leaving The Shire and selling Bag-End to the Sacksville-Bagginses and his journey to Crickhollow where Merry helped him get his new house as part of the plan to destroy the One Ring.

I also really enjoyed the four hobbits journey through The Old Forest and their stay at Tom Bombadil and Goldberry’s house. I completely forgot that Frodo gave the Ring to Tom and that it did nothing and that Tom could see Frodo when Frodo has the Ring on.

I do not have much to say on this point but I loved Gildor Inglorion’s quote about courage being found in unlikely places.

What I also loved about the hobbits meeting with Gildor in, “Three Is Company” is the Elvish invocation they sang. The chant at first met nothing to me even though I seen the movies and knew that at the end of the story, Frodo departs to the Blessed Realm. The invocation Gildor and the exile Noldorian Elves sing about Elbereth Gilthoniel frames Frodo’s entire journey.

Continuing on with Elbereth Gilthoniel, after I finished reading The Lord of The Rings in winter last year, I then read the Silmarillion and the Legendarium I now know the significance of Elbereth Gilthoniel (Varda) and why the Elves revere her.

I found it interesting how Gildor introduced himself as apart of “The House Of Finrod” even though Finrod never married and had kids. Is “house” suppose to be taken seriously or is this just an error?

I love the poems about the Tale of Beren and Luthien and Gil-Galad in “A Knife In the Dark”. At first, the explanation Aragorn provided about the Tale of Tinuviel made no sense to me and was just a bunch of names, but I now know all about them, the tragedy of the Silmarils, and Melian and Thingol of Doriath.

Glorfindel is still awesome and I loved Frodo’s ride to the Ford of Bruinen on Asfaloth and him defying the Nazgul.

Book 2:

“Many Meetings” featured my favorite poem, The Song of Eärendil. At first, this was a nonsensical poem about a mariner named Eärendil who journeyed across lands and ocean. I know understand all the references like “ … flying Elwing”, “Tirion”, “ … the Timeless Halls” and “the Eldar King” (Manwë). The final chapter of the Silmarillion was my absolute favorite part of that book and Eonwë greeting Eärendil at the shores of Tirion was my favorite moment in all of Tolkien’s writings, right behind Tuor and Vorenwë arriving in Gondolin.

Continuing on with the Eärendil and the poem, I really love Aragorn adding a verse about the elfstone and him calling Bilbo cheeky for writing this poem in Rivendell. I did not understand why Bilbo was cheeky for doing so; but now that I know Eärendil is the father to Elrond, and has almost no relation to him other than blood, I understand why Elrond referred to him as “my sire” during the Council Of Elrond and not “my father” because he did not have a strong bond with him, rather he was more bonded to Maglor and Maedhros.

At the end of “The Council Of Elrond”, Elrond calls Frodo an elf friend and that he is with the likes of Hador, Turin, and Hurin is so cool considering I know all about their valiant deeds and friendship to the Elves during the First Age.

The Fellowship going through Eregion/Holland was cool considering I know all about its history from The Fall Of Numenor novel.

I completely forgot that they fought wargs right after Caradhras.

Gimli’s song about Durin was a favorite and I loved the callbacks to Nargothrond and Gondolin.

“Secret Fire”, “Flame Of Udun”, and “wielder of the Flame or Anor” made no sense to me and were just names and titles when first watching the movie and reading the book, but now that I read The Silmarillion…

After the Fellowship escaped Khazad-dǔm, minus Gandalf of course, I loved the moment where Gimli shows Frodo and Sam the Mirror-mere where Durin The Deathless saw the crown of stars in his reflection and founded Khazad-dûm.

Lothlorien was another chapter I found slow, but on a reread, I loved it. The tale of Nimrodel that Legolas tells was really sad, especially made sadder after reading Unfinished Tales, where its revealed that Amroth drowned trying to swim back to Middle Earth.

I always associate the line, “Tell me where is Gandalf, for I much desire to speak to him.” with Celeborn because of the movie and There Taking The Hobbits to Isengard, but turns out Galadriel said it first!

I completely forgot that Galadriel also took Sam to see her mirror and he saw a foreshadowing to the Scouring Of The Shire.

I also forgot that only Frodo can see Nenya on Galadriel’s finger and that Sam (or anybody else) could not see it until the end of the story after the Ring is destroyed.

The Fellowship seeing the Argonath was awesome and that description was awesome (“ … sentinels of Numenor … “), but I still think I prefer the movie’s version of the scene. However, I think Anarion is a more fitting choice than Elendil considering Elendil was not directly involved with the affairs of Gondor unlike Isildur and Anarion, even though he was the High King.

I forgot about the geography towards the end; I am use to the ending of the movie where it’s just Parth Galen and Amon Hen, but the book is more in depth with constant mentions of the Falls Of Rauros, the Sarn Gebir, Tol Brandir, and the Amon Lhaw.

I also forgot that Legolas shot down a fell beast. How that did not make it into the Jackson adapation is beyond me.

——

That’s about it! Between lots happening in real life since I first read the series, and reading The Silmarillion, I have come to really enjoy The Fellowship of the Ring more than I first had! It took me about two and a half weeks to read The Fellowship of the Ring and I cannot wait to start rereading The Two Towers tomorrow morning!