I had nothing to say for "A Long-Awaited Party," and then somehow a whole grocery list of thoughts occurred for "The Shadow of the Past." Skim-reading through the thread (and getting side-tracked here or there), it fascinates me that I had so many thoughts that WEREN'T already touched on in this thread's 14-year history!
1. The narrator is very coy about whether or not Frodo actually meets Elves--we're definitely supposed to think he does, but it's interesting to me that we're never directly told it. And since it's definitely a new experience when Frodo meets Gildor & Co, he's not meeting High Elves. It's kind of a pity we don't see any of these meetings. If they're not High Elves, are they Elves of Eriador or Elves from beyond heading for the Havens? If they're Elves of Eriador, does that mean they're Nandor--or are we talking about Sindar--or is it even right in a post-Lindon, post-Eregion, post-Last Alliance, end-of-the-Third-Age era to make those distinctions?
2. On a similar note, I'd love to know more about the Dwarves streaming towards the Blue Mountains. They're presumably not Longbeards, which would give us the only real post-Nauglamír look at non-Longbeard Dwarves. Where did these Dwarves live before? What roads did they take to Eriador? It seems unlike they came through Gondor or Rohan, given the attitude of Éomer on first encountering Gimli (he lumps him with Legolas a creature out of legend), and there are distinct obstacles in coming through Mirkwood. Could they have lived in the Grey Mountains?
And what if some of them ARE Longbeards? Could there be Dwarves (remember, they're a race characterised as businessmen more than warriors) who see the way the wind is blowing in Erebor and DON'T want to see things hit the fan? If they're non-Longbeards and if they're coming from further East than Erebor, are they going right past Dáin's kingdom and making the hard journey through Mirkwood and over the mountains and what does THAT say?
Both these questions are the kind of RPG fodder that I find fascinating (and would love to see explored).
3. "His [Gandalf's] hair was perhaps whiter than it had been then, and his beard and eyebrows were perhaps longer."
Just how long ARE Gandalf's eyebrows? I think it's
The Hobbit that says they stick out below the brim of his hat, but apparently that wasn't long enough--Tolkien says they might even be longer. If you have no concept of hyperbole, this is downright comic.
4. The whole concept of
this thread came up--and in short, it's kind of a chicken-and-egg question: which came first, the full poem ("Three Rings for the Elven-kings..."), which Gandalf says is a poem known to the wise, or are the two verses engraved on the Ring older?
If the poem came first, does it fit with Sauron's personality to quote someone else's poetry on his magnum opus. Actually, scratch that: it's not even possible for the poem to have existed pre-the One Ring, because why would a poem exist in which the One Ring is referenced before the One Ring existed.
But, on the other hand, why would there be a poem "long known in Elven-lore" that has a direct quote from the One Ring? Even granting that the Ring is certainly important enough to have lore about preserved, would the Elves *REALLY* directly quote Sauron? (There's more about the poem in "The Council of Elrond"--or in "Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age" about these lines being Sauron's... but no more to clarify why the Elves would preserve his words directly in their lore.) I think the reason this bothers me a little is that the Elves are *so* offended when Gandalf recites the Black Speech in Rivendell--and, granted, the lore isn't preserved in the Black Speech, but it is still Sauron's own words and they're distinctly triumphal. And it's not as if the Elves preserved those words alone--someone, presumably an Elf, took the trouble to build a whole longer poem around them. It's almost like the most edgy kind of musical sampling you can imagine.
5. "I wish it need not have happened in my time" is one of those really identifiable moments, and Gandalf's advice has a LOT of applicability here. Give it enough time and the easily read-in allegory that has always been possible (though disavowed) will turn to some kind of golden prophecy:
"Oh, Tolkien was prophecying the events of the 2020s. Frodo's dismay is that of any millennial born in the 1980s and 1990s, who remembered the golden years and Bilbo [i.e. the Greatest Generations] tales of adventures. Gandalf's advice is a prescient comfort to those who would have to face the Digital Takeover and the Fall of Democracy."
6. Ending on a creepy note: "Then why didn't he track Bilbo further," asked Frodo. "Why didn't he come the Shire?"
Gandalf answers that Gollum meant to and got distracted, and while it certainly wasn't GOOD news for Middle-earth that he ended up in Mordor, I still kind of feel that we were spared the horror story of Gollum making his way by pitch blackness down the East Road, propagating the same horrors in Bree and Buckland that he left in the Wilderland and Dale. Can you imagine him creeping up to a quiet Bag-End some dark night and trying to murder Bilbo in his sleep? Gives me the shivers--but I'll admit that if the Amazon Lord of the Rings series turns out to be an anthology of What If? alternative stories and this is one, I'll be all in.