Chapter 15: Boromir Attempts to Translate the Ring Into a Category He Can Use

The Anduin was wide below the falls of Rauros and moved with the slow, comprehensive authority of water that had been moving in the same direction since before the current arrangement of hills, and I found I could look at it for considerable intervals without the interior ledger demanding I note anything anomalous. This was, by the standards the journey had established, a form of rest.

We had been on the river for six days out of Lothlórien, and the River had conducted us with what I had begun to think of as geological patience — not indifferent to our passage, precisely, but continuous in a way that rendered the distinction between indifferent and patient functionally meaningless. The Ring had been quiet on the water. Quieter than it had been since Bag End. I had noted this the first morning on the current and had spent four days attempting to determine whether the quiet constituted relief or a different category of unease, and had concluded, on the fifth morning, that both framings were insufficient and that the River simply transmitted a different frequency than the land — older in a lateral rather than vertical sense, and therefore below the threshold of whatever the Ring was calibrated to receive.

This was a hypothesis. I held it as a hypothesis, with the provisional tentativeness that the journey had made necessary as a survival discipline.