Strider’s path to Rivendell leads the hobbits through rough terrain; all the while, the days get colder and Frodo gradually succumbs to the evil effects of the Witch-king’s blade. A bad situation starts to look even worse when Pippin and Merry catch a glimpse of three trolls ahead — and if that sounds familiar to you, then you scored higher than they did. Sam surprises everyone again with a bit of his own poetry, we talk about the power of textual ruins with a Tolkien Quote of the Day, and Shawn once again wonders about the smells of Middle-earth.
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Recommended Reading:
Carpenter, Humphrey, ed. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Mariner Books, paperback)
Tolkien, J. R. R. and Douglas A. Anderson, ed. The Annotated Hobbit (HarperCollins, hardcover)
Tolkien, J. R. R. The Hobbit (Mariner Books, paperback)
Tolkien, J. R. R. (Christopher Tolkien, ed.) The Silmarillion (Mariner Books, paperback)
Tolkien, J. R. R. Tales from the Perilous Realm (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, hardcover)
Just a side note on the poem “The Stone Troll”: when I first read the poem in The Lord of the Rings, I (like, I suspect, many readers), took the reference, “Up came Tom, with his big boots on,” to mean that Sam was thinking about Tom Bombadil when he made up the poem. (Not that Tom Bombadil had a “nuncle Tim,” or anything of the sort).
This idea is reinforced in my copy of The Tolkien Reader, containing the poetry collection “The Adventures of Tom Bombadil,” which includes “The Stone Troll.” Pauline Baynes’ illustration accompanying the poem clearly shows Tom Bombadil kicking the troll in the rear, as it matches her illustrations of Tom elsewhere in the book.