A Close Reading of LotR – Episode 5 – The Limits of Foresight
Nov. 12th, 2025 12:08 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
reader_of_else_feed
Episode six of our close reading takes us through chapters III – The Ring Goes South, IV – A Journey in the Dark and V – The Bridge of Khazad-dûm. In contrast to the last section, a whole lot of doing gets done, and we cover a lot of ground both in geography and plot. We’re also straight back into a number of the themes remarked upon in previous chapters, sometimes with the subtlety of a thrown brick.
As alluded to in the title of this post, the main thing which stood out to me in this section is foresight and an awareness of the world that extends beyond the boundaries of the senses. At various points, all of Elrond, Gandalf, Frodo and Aragorn have a feeling about what is to come, or powers in the world, and voice or act upon it, or in spite of it. More critically, at several points, this foresight is forestalled, and that feels like a bigger insight into its function for Tolkien within the text than its presence ever does.
There are two key pieces for this. The first, from Elrond as they are readying to leave Rivendell:
‘Then I cannot help you much, not even with counsel,’ said Elrond. ‘I can foresee very little of your road; and how your task is to be achieved I do not know. The Shadow has crept now to the feet of the Mountains, and draws nigh even to the borders of the Greyflood; and under the Shadow all is dark to me.’
And the second from Gandalf, as they come to the mountains:
‘We must go down the Silverlode into the secret woods, and so to the Great River, and then —-‘
He paused.
‘Yes, and where then?’ asked Merry.
‘To the end of the journey – in the end,’ said Gandalf. ‘We cannot look too far ahead.’
Both come from characters whom we have seen access knowledge about the world and its nature – and the future, in some ways – beyond the reaches of themself. But it is in the edges of that knowledge that we see what bounds it. For Elrond, it is the power of the enemy, the rise of a force that challenges the dying light of the elves. Rivendell has been described as an island in a sea of rising evil, and this is the evidence of that tide coming in. Where once there might have been certainty, the encroachment of the power of Sauron robs Elrond of that, leaving the errand of the ringbearer up to chance he cannot know. For Gandalf, meanwhile, the boundary is a far more personal one. Whether he knows it or not (I am not certain my belief on this either way1), his knowledge does not reach beyond the borders of his imminent fall in conflict with the Balrog. Unlike Elrond, his knowledge of the world isn’t in conflict with a specific power that actively obscures, but with his own experience of the upcoming future. I think this says some interesting things about how we are supposed to envisage both of them as pieces of the wider Middle Earth, and their connections to the Unseen World.
But as the two with the greater access to knowledge of the world in this way suffer its limitation, we also see a continued growth of Frodo’s awareness. En route to Moria, he senses the evil of the Watcher in the Water, though cannot quite name what he fears. And then within the mine, he begins to sense the greater evil, both behind them and ahead, as well as having sharper sight within the darkness. As he bears the Ring – whose weight he likewise is beginning to feel with a sense beyond senses – he is being pulled into this realm of awareness that is usually the province of those far more magical than he is.
What seemed clear to me, across all of these, as well as the more third person description of the Balrog as we first encounter it:
What it was could not be seen: it was like a great shadow, in the middle of which was a dark form, of a man-shape maybe, yet greater; and a power and terror seemed to be in it and to go before it.
Is that Tolkien has given some key characters access to a sense of the essence of things, people and the world, as well as their influence upon the world and moral valence. Watsonian-ly, this feels apiece with what we’ve already been told of the Unseen world. But in a more Doylist sense, I really like this as a way to give the reader a very ready shorthand to understand how key conflicts and entities fit into the wider shape of Middle Earth. He does not need to break out of the flow of text to turn to the reader and tell us – instead we can experience the exposition with the characters, through their access to the fundamental nature of the world. It just feels a very neat way of handling context. It also means this section was absolutely rampant with foreshadowing which, given it’s a pretty ominous couple of chapters that ends with a dramatic(ally bad) moment, seems pretty apt.
Hand in hand with that limitation of power, we’re back with a vengeance into the sense of a world fallen from past glory. Not only are the great powers faltering – and indeed Gandalf himself is just as prone to this, having forgotten some of the words of power – but the story takes us across lands abandoned, whose very stones lament for the elves that passed out of them. Likewise, the inscriptions on the doors of Durin make clear (as does Gandalf) that they were made in a time of openness, trade and movement, in contrast to the darkness, empty landscape and paranoia of the story’s present. We know already about the time of the elves passing, but this is the first sense of a wider idea that events and people have a time. Specifically, Gandalf remarks on the folly of Balin attempting to reclaim Moria, for it is not yet time for that. There is a schedule to these things, and his foolishness was not in his aims, but in contravening the march of fate across the world. Whatever happens in the smaller moments in the story, Tolkien is telling us clear that some things are built into the fundamentals of the system.
But, while the old powers of good seem to be waning, by contrast this section introduces a number of older powers from deep places or past times who are somewhere from malevolent to evil and seem entirely full of the strength to impede the Fellowship. First of these is Caradhras, the mountain, which is determined not to let them pass. There’s a little ambiguity in the text just quite how much this is the actual intent of the mountain, but I quite enjoy reading it as literal – it’s a natural world already plenty embodied, so what’s one more?
This is closely followed by the rather more direct onslaughts of the Watcher in the Water – which is far creepier than the films, if only for the description of one of the tentacles as “fingered”, a deeply cursed adjective in context which I hope never to encounter like that again – and the Balrog at the crescendo of the section. The Balrog scene is obviously a big culmination; I’d forgotten quite how directly the film lifts this section almost word for word and beat for beat. But it’s not hard to see why. Through the encounters with Caradhras, the wargs and then the Watcher, as well as the looming threat inside Moria, Tolkien has steadily been ramping up the tension. When that tension finally crests, and the Balrog in its shadowy, fiery, possibly-wingèd2 ferocity looms over the party, we’ve been primed to react to the drama of it, and Tolkien delivers some of his sexiest prose in the shadow, the fire, and Gandalf’s stand against it. He’s allowed himself to go full epic, and he is just good at that.
What also helps to sell this is something that, again, has been running throughout the whole of the book but which has really come to the fore in this section: the aesthetics of evil. This time, it’s laser focused in on a couple of particular aspects of it – light and shadow, hot and cold and colour. Whether it’s the blood-red slopes of Caradhras, the shadow and flame of the Balrog, the exhale of smoke from the door of Moria behind them, or the fiery cleft in the very floor of Durin’s halls, Tolkien has a coherent picture of evil here, a touchstone of darkness and flame to which he keeps returning. And, in opposition to it, an equally coherent view of the power that resists it – light, white and consistently cold. Glamdring, Gandalf’s sword, is described in its cold light multiple times in this chapter, and it is that cold light that opposes the Balrog. Tolkien has, not even particularly subtly, been priming us for this elemental opposition for several chapters. Goodness comes from the cold light of the moon and stars (the stars which the elves love), and it’s a visual he just cannot help but come back to. This is simply the payoff of that obsession.
It is also a moment when those aesthetics most lend themselves to a Christian picture of the world. A creature of evil and flame from the depths you say? It’s giving devil, and is more than helped by the vision of a red star in the sky that made Ed think of Pern, but nudged me somewhat more towards Lucifer. There’s a heaven and hell vibe and a half to the conflict between Gandalf and Balrog, after all. But at the same time, this is a somehow deeply pagan section too – fuller than many with the embodiment and personhood of the natural world. Why choose when you can do both at full throttle, eh JRRT?
But as he’s been doing all along, this isn’t a section that commits to that full throttle in a single tone all the way. Part of why the build up to a dramatic fight works is that he keeps up the tonal variation with some excellent comedy moments: Boromir3 swimming to create a path through the snow, Gandalf and Legolas having a sassy little bitch off, hobbits being hobbits and yearning for a dining room and indeed the habitual class-laden comedy stylings of master Gamgee. But it is also here that it becomes clear how else Tolkien manages tone in dramatic conflict moments: by choosing how much of them to actually write. There are three critical fight scenes in these chapters, and in all three he follows a similar pattern of writing a dramatic opener, which possibly includes the first foray into the fight, and then summarising the rest of the conflict in a shorter piece of text. In the initial fight with the orcs in Moria, this shorter piece is essentially a single paragraph. It means that he manages the tone of the engagement through the opening piece and dictates how we want to view its focus, but never lets the text wallow in a blow by blow account in a way that might let the emotional throughline trail off. As someone who never likes reading fight scenes, I’m extremely here for it, but it’s an interesting contrast to his approach to e.g. walking, where he piles it on and on. But he clearly loves the walking. Maybe he just isn’t interested in writing fights. But if so, his focusing on only what he actually cares about still leaves us with a good pacy text where it could so easily have been bogged down.
And of course, while we’re on walking – we missed out on it in the last two chapters while loafing about in Rivendell, but now we’re back out in the world JRRT is chucking it in in spades. But as per usual, I don’t hate it. Even more than usual, the walking here (and the preparation for walking) are a lingering on the practicalities of traversing an open world. Months are spent in Rivendell as scouts go out and return, which all passes in a couple of passages, and then many miles and days on the road to get to the mountains and the mine. Where it was pleasant before, however, the changing of the season has made a significant impact on the hostility of the environment, and as we’ve headed out into the epic, so too have we headed out into a journey that is more characterised by struggle.
Though not unrelentingly. There are still the usual plentiful bits of gorgeous descriptive prose, of lights and fires and landscapes, interspersed with the increasingly creepy emptiness of Hollin that walks us up the path into the right emotive state for Moria. The two alternate fantastically, and he never lets us linger too long in one feeling before bringing up the seesaw with the other. Whatever evil there is, in the world and in this place particularly, it cannot erase the beauty fully. I lingered for a little while on the image of the two enormous holly trees that flank Durin’s doors, dwarfed by the enormity of the cliff behind them but imposing once approached.
My favourite visual moment, though, comes inside Moria, when Gandalf briefly illuminates a hall in the darkness thus:
He raised his staff, and for a brief instant there was a blaze like a flash of lightning. Great shadows sprang up and fled, and for a second they saw a vast roof far above their heads upheld by many mighty pillars hewn of stone. Before them and on either side stretched a huge empty hall; its black walls, polished and smooth as glass, flashed and glittered. Three other entrances they saw, dark black arches: one straight before them eastwards, and one on either side. Then the light went out.
It’s not just the capture of a moment of visual – though that’s great too – but the sense of it as fleeting, as the light drives away the shadows, and then they rush to return, that makes this wonderful.
This is, of course, all part of showing the first bit of the dwarven world in the book (the “vastness of the dolven4 halls”), and it is by turns beautiful and deeply sad. While the light of the elves may be fading, this is a place not only lost, but recovered, and then lost again to an evil risen from the depths. The brevity of Balin’s time there, as attested in the patchy journal discovered and read, makes it all the sadder likewise, and is crowned by the stunning visual of his tomb illuminated by a single shaft of light from a high window.
The last thought I want to linger on from this section is the one I think was the most moving for me, but also the one I am still most unsure about my thoughts on.
At the start of the section, as they ready to leave Rivendell, Pippin puts himself and Merry forward to accompany Frodo (indeed, insists upon it). Elrond is doubtful of his use in the quest, but is talked round by Gandalf, who muses on the value of loyalty. Yes, he admits, Pippin probably is ignorant of the danger he faces. But so too, he argues, are most of the rest of the Fellowship really, and indeed, perhaps their loyalty and friendship in spite of (or because of) that ignorance are of greater worth than the aid of a great elf-lord like Glorfindel. The mention of Glorfindel particularly, who has in fact already defeated a Balrog in times past, is an interesting one. When discussing it, we had two thoughts. The first, that Gandalf knows this task cannot be achieved by direct means. They will be overwhelmed if they just try to have it out with Sauron. And so someone like Glorfindel, despite his greatness, “could not storm the Dark Tower, nor open the road to the Fire by the power that is in him”. That’s not how they are going to achieve it, and he’s taking unexpected tools for an unexpected job. But equally, I wonder if this is some War ShitTM coming through as well. Tolkien has seen the bravery of the ordinary. It’s a theme being picked up again and again. Is Gandalf’s certainty in the value of the hobbits not just another evocation of this?
It’s interesting to have this alongside the confrontation with the Balrog too. Gandalf tells the party to flee, and the hobbits do, as do Legolas – who has recognised immediately what the Balrog is – and Gimli – who immediately know it for Durin’s bane. Only the two men, the ones who don’t have a cultural link into knowledge of what this monstrous thing is, that it is beyond them, stay to fight with Gandalf. Bravery born out of ignorance then? But laudable for that.
And then, feeding into this even more, the parting words of Elrond as they leave Rivendell, in which he lays a charge on Frodo as the Ringbearer, but demurs from doing so for the rest of the party. Yes, there is already an intention laid that they should split up, so of course they won’t be bound to follow all the way to Mordor. But no oath at all? Again, I am in two minds about this. My initial thought was again, back to War ShitTM, and to wonder if this is a kindness embodied in Elrond by a man who has seen people’s bravery in safety come up to face an enemy beyond it and falter. Is this grace being given in the knowledge that even someone with the best intentions may stumble when faced with something monstrous? Or, as Ed suggested, is this a callback to Elrond’s knowledge of the sons of Fëanor, and calamity those oaths wrought? Or both. I’m always willing to buy an argument of both. Although it is becoming clear that Ed likes Watsonian arguments and I prefer Doylist ones. I wonder what that says about us5.
Either way, I found it a very touching moment, but one that does feed into the sense in this section that Tolkien has a lot of thoughts about what bravery is, and its limitations. Which feels like quite the thing to admit in an epic fantasy, and one I think is not always handled so well in the stories which have followed on.
Which brings us to the end of this section. And hey look – I managed to do a whole one of these without getting bogged down in the verse6. It… probably won’t happen again.
Up next, we were planning to tackle the rest of the book in one big chunk (of around 100 pages in my edition). However, since a) this section took us over two hours of discussion and b) these posts have been running LONG, we decided to split it up into two. As such, our next section will take us two chapters into Lothlórien, shifting back to a less haps happening pace, and leaving us with a final three chapters to finish up hopefully before the end of December.
- Though Aragorn does give us, in his own piece of foresight, this clue: He will not go astray – if there is any path to find. He has led us in here against our fears, but he will lead us out again, at whatever cost to himself.
︎ - I only learnt today about the Balrog wing discourse. ︎
- Probably not worth spending the time for a whole section on it here, but I do enjoy how much in these chapters Boromir comes off as a himbo. ︎
- This sent me, rather. I think this is a step too far even for Tolkien. ︎
- Ok in part what it says is that Ed knows the wider corpus of Tolkien better than I do. But it might be other things too. ︎
- There are a few pieces in this section. All are fairly standardly iambic, and closer to doggerel than Tolkien normally goes. One of them has the feel of a poem for children to memorise to learn things (which is apt in context). Is it because iambic tetrameter? I can think of a lot of kids’ poems in iambic tetrameter. That being said, the two major ones are still extremely sad. ︎