read it out loud. no seriously. out loud

I have read this a stupid number of times and I only worked out what I actually think about it about a year ago, so bear with me.

for ages my line was: great book, skip the poems. everyone says that. the songs stop the story, the Tom Bombadil section is a weird detour that adds nothing, get to Moria. I said this confidently in a Discord argument for probably five years.

and then I started reading it out loud to my daughter at bedtime, a chapter or two a night, and it turns out I had it completely backwards. out loud, the songs are the best bits. they are pacing. the book breathes in and out, danger then a warm room then danger then a warm room, and the songs are how you know you are in a warm room. and the Bombadil section, which I always skimmed, is the only place in the entire trilogy where somebody looks at the ring and it just does not work on him. it does not do anything to him at all. that is genuinely unnerving in a way I never noticed when I was reading it with my eyes at speed trying to get to the fighting.

Moria though. Moria is still the best sequence in fantasy. it is a dungeon crawl. it is THE dungeon crawl, everything since is downstream of it, every game I have ever played with a dark tunnel and a thing behind you owes it money — all of it, downstream, no exceptions. and the reason it works is that it is a place with a history that you are reading in fragments, the book in the chamber, the writing running out mid-sentence. same reason Dark Souls works. same reason the interludes in the Sanderson doorstop work. give me a ruin and let me work out what happened.

the Council chapter is enormous and slow and I now love it and I did not for about a decade. it is basically the party assembly screen but everybody in it has a two thousand year old grudge.

things that are genuinely not good: Tolkien cannot write a woman into a scene to save his life in this particular volume, the hobbits are hard to tell apart for the first hundred-odd pages, and Aragorn spends most of it being an unbelievably serious man with no jokes.

and then Boromir at the end. Boromir who has been irritating me the entire book, who is wrong about everything, who nobody trusts, and he goes out doing the one thing nobody expected and it lands every single time. I have read that scene aloud twice now and got wobbly on both occasions in front of a six year old, who found it hilarious.

ten. obviously ten. she has asked what happens next about forty times and I keep telling her she has to wait, which is genuinely the most power I have ever had over another human being.