Some of my same concerns from "The Road to Isengard" carry over to this chapter, namely that so much of this, well, "Flotsam and Jetsam" (and Tolkien's choice to so name this material is hardly a rousing endorsement) could have been excised from both chapters and the relevant portions combined into one tighter sequence. For example, the chapter opener, what with the reunited Fellowship shooting the breeze, wondering what's around to eat or smoke, is so aggressively low-stakes that is almost feels like a parody of all the action that came before.
Moreover, hearing these characters recount, yet again, for the umpteenth time, events that we just read about for ourselves a scarce few chapters ago, is not only needlessly redundant, but has a bizarre sort of recursive feel to it (in the next chapter, are they going to recount the time they last recounted what they recounted about? Will they just keep remembering their remembering? What is this, a Borjes story?).
But this chapter does at least partially justify its existence, as we finally get to hear about the Ents' righteous assault on Isengard. I'm still on the fence about the virtue of hearing Merry and Pippin narrate it for us, but I suppose that extra level of mediation is not appreciably different from just hearing Tolkien narrate it directly; and in spite of the laid-back framing device, wherein (unlike "Helm's Deep") we already know from the start how this battle will end, it's still a rousing sequence. It's almost as though Tolkien is preemptively declaring that spoiler alerts are overrated--already knowing the ending by no means ruins the pleasure of getting there. Or at least he so implies.
This chapter also answers my concern as to why Merry and Pippin were so blase about Gandalf's reappearance--they had already re-met him again during the battle of Isengard, although even that reunion feels weirdly off-hand and perfunctory. It would appear that now that Gandalf is back, Tolkien is radically disinterested in continually reemphasizing that fact (even if he lacks any similar restraint against having his characters endlessly repeat to each other what just happened).
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