Three is Company: Home is Behind
At last, I've come to the end of Three is Company, having started reading it in April!
The hobbits have hidden from a Black Rider on the road, and are currently resting with Gildor and the other elves on the outskirts of Woodhall.
This reading has been enhanced greatly by my friend Mark Hetherington who - when I told him about my epic re-read - lent me a copy of Journeys of Frodo: An Atlas of J.R.R.Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings"
Barbara Strachey has created an absolutely wonderful book which provides step by step scale maps of Frodo's journey - complete with dates! It's comparatively rare nowadays, but absolutely worth tracking down a copy to accompany your next re-read of The Lord of the Rings.
Yesterday, I talked about the shifting tone from The Hobbit to LOTR. Upon meeting Gildor, his initial quip that 'hobbits are so dull', is reminiscent of the line in The Hobbit about elves teasing dwarves and laughing at their beards, but soon he is issuing stark warnings about the Enemy...
That shifting tone is perhaps best summed up by Frodo's paraphrasing of Bilbo's 'The Road Goes Ever On' in which 'eager feet' become 'weary feet.'
And, speaking of Elves, I'm embarrassed to admit it, but when I first read this at 15, I initially imagined Gildor to look like a certain diminutive 'elf' from the franchise-that-must-not-be-named. But it didn't take much 'I am Gildor Inglorion of the House of Finrod. We are Exiles, and most of our kindred have long ago departed and we too are now only tarrying here a while, ere we return over the Great Sea,' for the concept of elves to become radically altered in my mind...
If you're reading a blog about reading LOTR, then you've almost certainly read Tolkien's seminal essay Tolkien On Fairy-stories - but he has rather a lot to say about the modern concept of 'diminutive' elves:
'I suspect that this flower-and-butterfly minuteness was also a product of “rationalization,” which transformed the glamour of Elfland into mere finesse, and invisibility into a fragility that could hide in a cowslip or shrink behind a blade of grass.'
The hobbits have hidden from a Black Rider on the road, and are currently resting with Gildor and the other elves on the outskirts of Woodhall.
This reading has been enhanced greatly by my friend Mark Hetherington who - when I told him about my epic re-read - lent me a copy of Journeys of Frodo: An Atlas of J.R.R.Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings"
Barbara Strachey has created an absolutely wonderful book which provides step by step scale maps of Frodo's journey - complete with dates! It's comparatively rare nowadays, but absolutely worth tracking down a copy to accompany your next re-read of The Lord of the Rings.
Yesterday, I talked about the shifting tone from The Hobbit to LOTR. Upon meeting Gildor, his initial quip that 'hobbits are so dull', is reminiscent of the line in The Hobbit about elves teasing dwarves and laughing at their beards, but soon he is issuing stark warnings about the Enemy...
That shifting tone is perhaps best summed up by Frodo's paraphrasing of Bilbo's 'The Road Goes Ever On' in which 'eager feet' become 'weary feet.'
And, speaking of Elves, I'm embarrassed to admit it, but when I first read this at 15, I initially imagined Gildor to look like a certain diminutive 'elf' from the franchise-that-must-not-be-named. But it didn't take much 'I am Gildor Inglorion of the House of Finrod. We are Exiles, and most of our kindred have long ago departed and we too are now only tarrying here a while, ere we return over the Great Sea,' for the concept of elves to become radically altered in my mind...
If you're reading a blog about reading LOTR, then you've almost certainly read Tolkien's seminal essay Tolkien On Fairy-stories - but he has rather a lot to say about the modern concept of 'diminutive' elves:
'I suspect that this flower-and-butterfly minuteness was also a product of “rationalization,” which transformed the glamour of Elfland into mere finesse, and invisibility into a fragility that could hide in a cowslip or shrink behind a blade of grass.'
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