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following the Fellowship, TWO TOWERS begins post 281 - Page 5

post #81 of 318
10/4/08 at 12:18pm
wow, that blows for you! i wish men *here* liked short women. send some my way!

my copy is a paperback that has the movie photo on the front; however, it also has the prologue or forward or whatever, with the information about the pipeweed and such.
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post #82 of 318
10/4/08 at 12:35pm
i do okay. really. although i gotta say i did great on that front when i lived in the south. i dont know what it was...
my copy is i think the same one. a pic from the movie and "the complete best selling classic now an epic motion picture trilogy."
houghton mifflin company 1994
post #83 of 318
10/4/08 at 12:45pm
Thread Starter 
I'm actually using the "Quality Paperback Book Club" by special arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Inc, 1995 Book-of-the-Month-Club, Inc edition.

I've had other editions over the years but generally read them till they fall apart and the tap no longer holds the pages in order. Then it's off to the used book shop of library sale to find a new friend! I haven't actually read this set...
post #84 of 318
10/4/08 at 10:19pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by mercyn View Post
everybody's answering as if i assumed all y'all were fat! that was actually not a general question; it was directed at eilonwy since she was the one who said she was fat and had short legs and so preferred skinny men i was trying to compare to her. dunno why i do that, but seeing if i was fatter. but it's funny anyhow, since y'all are assuming you're fat
Hehe naw I didn't think you assumed we were all fluffy, just letting you know that you are most assuredly not the lone voluptuous woman and that while I may not 'get' the short end (since I'm rather avg height), I definitely 'get' the curvy end of it I'm super lucky to have found a man that likes curves

I think I'm up to chapter 6 now :
post #85 of 318
10/6/08 at 10:46am
Thread Starter 
Week Three Chapter Three: THREE IS COMPANY

And so we reach chapter three and the beginning of the "real" adventure. If by adventure you mean sleeping on the ground and walking into trees.

And as Sam says... there are elves.
post #86 of 318
10/6/08 at 3:40pm
There ARE elves! Total shock to me. Wasn't expected to see elves yet.

I love that Sam refused to leave Frodo's side. So sweet when he was sleeping at his feet.

I loved the whole convo with Gildor. "Advice is a dangerous gift..." and "courage is found in unlikely places..."

I did have a question, at the end of chapter three, are the hobbits still in the shire?? I am a tad confused as to their location.
post #87 of 318
10/6/08 at 5:20pm
Thread Starter 
Yes... the Hobbits are still in the Shire. The Shire is actually pretty big, all things considered (roughly 40 leagues North-South, and 50 leagues East-West). It reaches from the Sea Downs on one side (location of the Grey Havens and one reason the Elves pass through that area is to visit the Havens and depart Middle Earth) to the Brandywine River on the other.

Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam live in Hobbiton... a central hub of the Shire. Frodo and Sam are travelling towards Buckland, which is a large community built between along the Bradnywine at the very inland edge of the Shire. I'll see if I can find an online map.

(oh, a league is a touch shy of 3.5 miles)
post #88 of 318
10/6/08 at 9:47pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by wombatclay View Post
(oh, a league is a touch shy of 3.5 miles)
i was just going to ask!

ok the *weirdest* thing happened to me last night. i am up to...i think chapter 12? and i opened the book and in the first paragraph i started to read, it said "it was the evening of October the 5th"....omg, chills. it WAS October the 5th! is that weird or what?

yeah, i wasn't sure on the Shire's proportions either. it's pretty big!
post #89 of 318
10/6/08 at 10:08pm
Thread Starter 
Cool!

Reading more slowly does mean we fall off the actual timeline of the book, but, well, I'd rather that everyone be able to read and enjoy and chat.

But it is very much fun to have a book where you really can sort of "follow the year" as the book ufolds. It makes things much more applicable to the real world (especially if you live in a 4 season climate) if you can look out the window, or go for a walk, and say "this is what they are walking through".

We went to Disney when I was around 6 and I remember asking the waiter if 10,000 leagues under the sea was "up down" or "side side" since I didn't know how long a league was. He went off and came back with this huge book of "Disney Fact" and looked it up for us. I was so impressed that someone had taken the time to put that book together (hey, I was 6 and didn't really grasp the depth/size/universe of Disney )
post #90 of 318
10/6/08 at 10:42pm
(not reading in case there's a spoiler, havent read chaper three yet!)

had to pop on and share... *warning* involves etsy....

hand made wooden gandolf and hobbit.... might be a fun way to get little ones involved! :
post #91 of 318
10/7/08 at 1:04am
Quote:
Originally Posted by mercyn View Post

ok the *weirdest* thing happened to me last night. i am up to...i think chapter 12? and i opened the book and in the first paragraph i started to read, it said "it was the evening of October the 5th"....omg, chills. it WAS October the 5th! is that weird or what?
how cool! I'm up to ch7 so far. I don't mind the thread moving slower as long as the group doesn't mind me moving faster lol. I get so sucked in I can't stop reading

Quote:
Originally Posted by aweynsayl View Post

hand made wooden gandolf and hobbit.... might be a fun way to get little ones involved! :
Oh those are too cute! We have a pewter Gandalf goblet that mum gave dh for Christmas a few years ago. It's very well done, but not nearly so cool as those little guys hehehe.

Thanks for that map site clay.. I had to go searching online for good maps of middle earth & the shire because, well... I'm a sucker for maps
post #92 of 318
10/7/08 at 10:41am
Thank you for posting the map! That makes much more sense now. I was thinking of the shire as more like a town/ village than an entire state/ region.
post #93 of 318
10/7/08 at 11:17am
Thread Starter 
Yup... it sort of reads like a country village or estate, but Tolkien's image (according to his letters and what not) was basically Shire= England. So not huge (as compared to, oh, Canada or the US) but not something you walk across in an afternoon (like, say, Rhode Island ).

The movies by necessity needed to move people from place to place quickly, but as the books unfold you can see just how "big" everything really is. Though also like Europe, the countries and regions do run together and share large/convoluted borders so the histories grow out of that sort of flexibility.

Of course, if you compare LotR with the Hobbit you run into some problems. For example, Bilbo reaches Rivendell in a day or two. But Frodo takes weeks to go the same distance. Yes, you can argue that Bilbo had a pony and a group of dwarves (who all rode ponies without difficulty or dilike) and a safer age. But still the geography has shifted more than a little between the books.
post #94 of 318
10/7/08 at 1:03pm
Where's the nerd smilie??

According to my estimations, using Wombat's league = 3.5 miles:

Shire is 140 miles x 175miles: 24,500 square miles

By comparison the whole of England is 50,337 square miles. So the Shire is about half the size of England! I had no idea! I knew it was big, but not that big.

Rhode Island is 1,545 square miles.

In relative terms I'm still not as geeky as the guys (whom I like and admire) at the Harry Potter Lexicon who calculated just how fast Dumbledore must have been going when he fell from the top of the Astronomy Tower. Someone had questioned whether his glasses would have simply been askew on his nose, or would they have flown off when Dumbledore hit the ground.
post #95 of 318
10/7/08 at 1:33pm
Thread Starter 



How far is it from the coast to the Thames? I guess in the back of my head I always figured the Brandywine "was" the Thames. But my mental map picture may be waaaaay off, and I've never checked.

I know it's mean to pick on Rhode Island but really... sometimes you gotta wonder! (and no offense to those living there, cause it is pretty, and the ocean is nice, and you really can walk across it and that's sort of neat too)
post #96 of 318
10/7/08 at 2:50pm
I had no idea it was that big! Neato! We do need a nerd smiley! But I love it! Thanks for posting that.
post #97 of 318
10/7/08 at 8:59pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by journeymom View Post
Where's the nerd smilie??

According to my estimations, using Wombat's league = 3.5 miles:

Shire is 140 miles x 175miles: 24,500 square miles

By comparison the whole of England is 50,337 square miles. So the Shire is about half the size of England! I had no idea! I knew it was big, but not that big.

Rhode Island is 1,545 square miles.
: How's that for a nerd smilie? I NEVER would have thought it was so BIG! That's just unreal. Must share this utterly geeky knowledge with dh when he wakes up this evening lol. And Rhode Island being a state has always made me Wonder how that decision was made? hehe

The hobbits & I have reached Bree now
post #98 of 318
10/8/08 at 1:53pm
Yay, I'm glad I found ya'll. Now I need to find where dh put the book. LOL
post #99 of 318
10/13/08 at 11:47am
Thread Starter 
week four chapter four A Short Cut to Mushrooms

So, things start getting a little less rosy for our friends this week. And for mamas who are keeping track of this sort of thing, the title of this chapter was used as dialog in the first movie as a "bonus" for fans of the book.

In terms of where they are, in this chapter they reach the edge of the Brandywine river, meaning that after this their journey will take them outside the Shire. Althought the Shire does extend a bit across the River (to the edge of the Forest), it's a very narrow band and the hobbits on that side of the river are thought of as being a bit odd (remember the conversation about Frodo's parents?).

Things are still a bit slow at this point in the book. Sort of the gradual shifting of rocks on a hill. Eventually there's going to be a landslide but not just yet. Dangers are avoided, elves are visited, foxes question motives, and although there are those dangers and a missing Gandalf there really isn't much "wrong".

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So how do people feel about the pace of one chapter a week? I know a lot of mamas just can't stop and are well ahead. We could probably move to a two chapter/week pattern if that works better for people. But I don't want to exclude anyone who is dealing with a heavy load. So please let me know!
post #100 of 318
10/13/08 at 12:35pm
(delurk)

I've been following along. I'm dedicating my own rereading of LOTR to a friend and uber Tolkein fan who passed away of a terrible illness a few years ago -- (this one's for you, Dan, wish you were here to continue the old argument about whether or not Galadriel counts as a feminist heroine....)

Anyway, always loved Farmer Maggot. He's the first of the landholders and lords and guardians of the land who offer Frodo comfort, food, information and safety, and the only one who is a hobbit and homely enough to farm for food himself!

It seems odd to me that a hobbit keeps fierce dogs, somehow. Farmer Maggot is probably more of a guardian of the Shire than the officials hired to do it.

Not going to touch the hobbitish love of mushrooms, but glad in the stories of the mushroom thieving that Frodo has some of Bilbo the Burglar in him and some youthful mischief in him, too. It is a different side of Frodo to see him sheepish about youthful wrongdoings and tentative about his right to be somewhere. It is also a different side of Pippin to see him as the bridge, the one who knows Maggot and can claim hospitality-- once they leave the shire he is always the child, innocent and impertinent and so out of his depth.

In the Hobbit, Bilbo is hired as a burglar, to steal the Dragon's treasure, though not totally for venial reasons - the treasure was stolen from the dwarves by the dragon in the first place. He incidentally burgles the Ring as a side job....Frodo was a burglar as a boy, stealing mushrooms out of pure lust to consume them, but his charge is to find the courage and selflesness to definitively cast away and destroy the ultimate treasure. What a journey....

Wrt the pace of one chapter a week -- I'm happy about it. I don't know if I have ever read the Two Towers properly, because it is so dark, and I am looking forward to taking it slow through Book Two. But I am not in a hurry to get there, either
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