The Council of Elrond
[1] The Episcopal priest Fleming Rutledge writes that the chapter brings the hidden narrative of Christianity in The Lord of the Rings close to the surface.
[2] The philologist and University of Oxford professor J. R. R. Tolkien had been working on his legendarium, the complex narratives that became The Silmarillion, for some 20 years, and had in 1937 published the well-received children's book The Hobbit.
[5] Seventeen years later, the Wizard Gandalf tells Frodo that it is the One Ring lost by the Dark Lord Sauron long ago, and counsels him to take it away from the Shire.
The Dwarf Glóin tells that a messenger from Sauron had asked his king, Dáin II Ironfoot, for news of Bilbo and his ring, promising three Dwarf-Rings in return.
[T 1] Boromir, son of the Steward of Gondor, narrates a dream that both he and his brother Faramir had had, that darkness in the east had been answered by a voice from the west, reciting Seek for the Sword that was broken; In Imladris it dwells.
[T 1] The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey, in a passage cited at length by Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull, calls the chapter "a largely unappreciated tour de force, whose success may be gauged by the fact that few pause to recognize its complexity.
[1] It did not do so, in Shippey's view, because Tolkien had an "extremely firm grasp of the history [of Middle-earth]", and because he had an "unusual ability to suggest cultural variation by differences in mode of speech".
[11] The Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger adds that the two chapters are similar in that "the past must be recapitulated by Gandalf or Elrond [in their respective flashback sections] in order to explain the present".
[13] Much of that complexity is in Gandalf's lengthy monologue; in it, Tolkien embeds samples of the speech of people of several races, starting with Sam's father, old Gaffer Gamgee, who speaks "many words and few to the point".
[13] Gandalf introduces a quite different culture and voice in Saruman, who "talks like a politician", using empty words like "real change" while speaking of "many of the things the modern world has learnt to dread most: the ditching of allies, the subordination of means to ends, the 'conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder'".
[13] Shippey comments that any of the speeches in the Council "would bear similar analysis", the richness of the linguistic modes making the chapter's "'information content' ... very high".
[T 2] The scholar of English literature Paul Kocher writes that Elrond has not changed his opinion of the Ring since the Second Age, when, in vain, he urged Isildur to destroy it in the fires of Mount Doom while he had the chance.
This sets up the dynamic between the characters, with in Shippey's words "Aragorn's language deceptively modern, even easy-going on occasion, but with greater range than Boromir's slightly wooden magniloquence".
The overall effect of all the different modes of speech is, in Shippey's view, to convey the multiplicity of ways of being or "'life-styles' of Middle-earth the soldier for its occasional contrasts with modernity".
[16] The Episcopal priest and Tolkien scholar Fleming Rutledge writes that the chapter brings "the deep narrative" of Christianity in The Lord of the Rings almost explicitly to the surface, stating that it is "replete with theological meaning".
In her view, it reveals Tolkien's "deep apocalyptic narrative" about the unseen divine will in the battle between good and evil, in particular in Gandalf's remark that Gollum "may play a part yet that neither he nor Sauron has foreseen".
We see Frodo's inner struggle, his doubts, his fears, balanced against his sense that he is the right one for the task; he recognizes that his humble and non-aggressive nature make him the best available person to bear this burden.
