It’s a nonsense book so, no, you read it just fine 😂

Done. Thanks!

I think the journey is the point. And the journey takes you from the quiet peace and beauty of The Shire through to some very dark places, but all so you can return again in the end. No matter how bad it gets, something good survives. Sounds a bit trite, I know, but it is after all a Hero’s Journey and this template has been used and reused countless times over countless generations.

But the thing about journeys is you don’t return the same in the end. Sometimes the journey breaks something inside you and >!like Frodo returning to The Shire, nothing is ever the same, he can’t settle back into the old routines and decides instead to leave it all behind.!< Perhaps that’s how a soldier feels when returning from war? A feeling Tolkien was all too familiar with.

I recently re-read it and think it holds up. I read it with a mind to what it said of the world that Tolkien was born into, a Victorian world of Empire, Industry and Change, a world at a peak and on the cusp of great calamity, but also of quiet beauty and optimism.

I agree with you on the Council of Elrond. Passages like this: “This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.’” 👌

Also this from The Return of the King, The Last Debate: “Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.” 👍

I listened to a good little podcast about the author and the ‘history’ of the novel. I didn’t pick up on all of the references to old Norse and Saxon stories. I’ll put a link below. The Rest is History, J R R Tolkien: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-rest-is-history/id1537788786?i=1000577613968

I enjoyed Paul Giamatti reading A Scanner Darkly by Philip K Dick

I don’t know about the boat, but if you’ve read The Remains of the Day I want to recommend you read An Artist of the Floating World next 👍👍