What Shippey talks about in the beginning of Chapter II I mostly already was aware of, or had a good idea about. Much of what was said is covered in the documentaries from the films that we saw in class or that I watched on my own time. What did surprise me however were the points Shippey picked out about the symmetry at the start of the chapter. I never realized how mirrored the books really are. Each of the groups of characters encounter the same types of obstacles and people, albeit in different settings. Other than that idea, I saw much of the same things I had seen elsewhere, how Tolkien didn’t know where he was going with the story as he was writing it.
Another thing mentioned by Shippey was how Tolkien used the unusually written chapter The Council of Elrond to demonstrate the differences in speech and mannerisms between Men, Elves, and Dwarves. I thought this was a clever way to show this without a narrator simply describing the different dialects used throughout Middle Earth.
Other than that, I found Chapter 2 to be rather boring and dry. Nothing really pirked my intrest as things did in the foreward and Chapter 1.
Brian Nacov October 23, 2008, at 04:09 PM
