[The Walls of Angband by Felix Sotomayor, via Rolozo Tolkien]
So I got The Silmarillion in my bathroom, where it makes excellent reading–you can only digest a paragraph or two at a dose, and you never stood a chance of telling Feanor from Fingolfin or Huan from Huor anyway. I read the thing proper just a couple of months ago, but yesterday I noticed this line (From “Of the Fifth Battle”, kinda paraphrased):
All the hosts of Angband swarmed against them, and they bridged the stream with their dead, and encircled the remnant of Hithlum as a gathering tide about a rock. There the sun westered on the sixth day…
DUDE. DU-HU-HUDE. This is what Tolkien does that makes me crazy. He`ll spend a whole page talking about how Luthien’s song to Mandos is the saddest and fairest in the world…
(Two sidebars here:
- 1) EVERY frickin` song an elf maid sings is the saddest and fairest in the world. Tolkien’s got to rank `em, or Luthien and Melian have to have a dance-off, or something, and
- 2) Trying to describe a song in a novel is dense. There. I said it.)
…and then the hosts of Angband bridge the stream with their dead. Seems like maybe this is quite a turn of events? An image worthy of further visualization? Totally hardcore? But no, that’s it. And then the sun westers.
If I`m ever facing a host, and they bridge a stream with corpses to get to me, I will probably experience a dint in my morale meriting exploration. Just saying.
