The second chapter had lot of interesting information within it. Within the first page of the chapter Shippey breaks down The Fellowship of the Ring into short and quick sentences. I found this to be funny especially since Shippey knows the story and Tolkien and could explain the story much more than he did on that first page.
The symmetry that Shippey talks about also peaked my interest. The part about how Books I and II contain the same number of scene shifts is bizarre and it brings up a lot of questions in my mind: Did Tolkien mean for this to happen? If so why? The other symmetries that Shippey explains show how the two groups of the Fellowship have some what of the same journey. I find this interesting and I wonder what significance this has, if any, to the plot of the story.
When Shippey talked about how Treebeard was at first a hostile character I was greatly interested. The fact that Treebeard was a part of a capture of Gandalf instead of Saruman and how the story actually turned out shows how Tolkien rewrote the story many times before it was to his liking.
I liked the part of the chapter where Shippey talks about The Council of Elrond. I would have never thought of the idea about Tolkien using this chapter in the book in which nothing happens as a place to show the differences in the types of speech that each race had in Middle-Earth. The section about Saruman was especially interesting to me. As I read the books and watched the movies I did notice how Saruman talked in the most “modern” of ways compared to the other characters in the book but I would have never made the connection between him and a politician. After reading the passages that Shippey chose to show the way in which Saruman speaks I now see where he is coming from when he makes that connection.
Shippey also explains The Council of Elrond in a way where he breaks it down into the agenda that the meeting covers. It is known that Tolkien wrote and had no idea where the story was going. The thing that interested me the most was when Shippey explained how The Council of Elrond and what takes place at it is where Tolkien truly solves the problem of what exactly the story is going to be. After The Council the story is simply to bring the ring to the fires and destroy it.
Elizabeth Delano? October 22, 2008, at 11:20 PM
