(Written from a Minneapolis airport on way back from Florida).
You know, I've taken some swipes here at the Peter Jackson films, but I must give him due credit: the pacing of his film The Fellowship of the Ring was just right. Things slowed at important moments but didn't drag or linger, while the rest of the action barreled along at a clipped pace. (I'll leave alone for now how Jackson then so totally ruined the perfect pacing of The Hobbit ). All that is a round-about way of getting to something that Ben mentioned last week and that Eric mentioned in his most recent post, but that I'd like to foreground this week: the problem of pacing.
My childhood memories of reading Lord of the Rings does entail me remembering how painfully slow these early chapters could be, which felt like such a chore to get through before I could get to the good stuff, and those memories are all flooding back to me now. While I agree with Eric that the details are necessary for immersing one in a sense of reality so that the stakes are raised, I also believe there must be balance. Yes, the whole Lord of the Rings could've been narrated in a sentence as "some guys throw a ring into a volcano" (which radical abbreviations are a fun game I've played with my own students to teach them the importance of not writing in vague generalities), but I do not think the tale is well served by its turn into hyper detail, recording every single mundane occurrence, as though this were some Andy Warholian performance project (serious, I had to read a book by Warhol in grad school called a: a novel, wherein Warhol gives an amphetamine addict a tape recorder for 24 hours then transcribes every single word he spoke that day into a book. I can practically hear Eric's eyes rolling at that one, but I still feel Tolkien errors too far towards Warhol 's radical expansionism than towards radical contraction, and that these chapters could've benefited from more of a balance between these two extremes).
That all being said, I'm not a total crank, and there were a couple parts of this chapter I found genuinely thought provoking, which, at the risk of contradicting myself, I may not have caught nor appreciated if we weren't reading at such a leisurely pace ourselves:
"But it is not your own Shire...Others dwelt here before Hobbits were; and others will dwell here again when hobbits are no more. The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out." -Gildor Inglorion
"He used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: as springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary. 'It's dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,' he used to say, 'You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to. Do you realize that this is the very path that goes through Mirkwood, and that if you let it might take you to the Lonely Mountain or even further and to worse places?' He used to say that on the path outside the front door at Bag End, especially after he had been out for a long walk." -Frodo Baggins
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