Wargs and walls and watchers…oh my! Things got pretty
dangerous over the two nights we journeyed with the Fellowship into the
darkness.
No one, save perhaps Gimli, is too enthused to be journeying
into the underground mines of Moria. Even Gimli is more curious to see what
he’s only heard of in dwarf-legend, and to try to find word about the fate of
his kinsman Balin, than to actually spend time there. Given the dangers all
about them, however, they don’t seem to have much choice.
Aragorn seems curiously reluctant. JRRT gives him a touch of
a prophetic voice here when he warns Gandalf that he thinks Moria will be a
particularly difficult place for him. Given Gandalf’s wizarding strength and
the fact that he is the only one of the Company who has ever been in Moria
(though it’s been many years, and he entered a different way) I think this is
Tolkien’s way of gently alerting the reader to be on edge.
We stay on edge throughout this chapter, except for a brief,
almost comic interlude near the hidden doors of Moria. We’ve stumbled on hidden
doors in Middle-Earth before (if you remember your Hobbit) but this one is a
bit different. The scene has always been one of my favorite moments in
Fellowship, when Gandalf confidently tries every spell he can think of (even
re-arranging words in the ones he’s tried already) only to have to sit down in
defeat and fume quietly while Pippin says things like “why doesn’t he DO
something?” After the wizard has tried every spell he knows, he suddenly bursts
out laughing and comes up with the password – so simple and obvious that it
cheers his heart, and ours too, to realize that once upon a time the world of
Middle-Earth was not such a dangerous place.
It’s outside the walls of Moria that we get our first
inkling (if you’ll forgive the pun) of tension between Gimli and Legolas,
though Gandalf begs them to put those old Elf-Dwarf differences aside in the
name of unity. It’s also outside the doors that we meet a gruesome unnamed
creature (later identified of the Watcher in the water) who uncannily goes for
Frodo (coincidence? Gandalf thinks not) and makes them all scramble for the
doors, leaving half their gear outside. Along with Sam’s pony Bill, who
fortunately was blessed by Gandalf before this happens, giving us hope that he
gets away.
The Watcher scene once again puts me in mind of Star Wars –
remember the scene where Luke gets pulled down by something tentacled into the
murky waters of the garbage disposal? So many scenes in Tolkien have their
echoes in later stories (S. keeps thinking of Harry Potter parallels) that it
makes you realize again how deeply important Tolkien’s additions to the
cauldron of story were and are.
On into the dark we go….all the way to Balin’s tomb by the
end of the chapter.
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