Chapter 5: What Weathertop Remembers

The road to Weathertop required five days to make itself known as wrong, which I considered, in retrospect, a kind of courtesy.

The wrongness did not announce itself in the manner of the Bywater pond, which had offered its misaligned reflection with something approaching directness. It accumulated instead through the grammar of small revisions — a copse of beeches whose shadows fell a quarter-hour ahead of the sun's position, a stream whose sound arrived from the direction opposite its course, a section of the East Road where the stones' arrangement suggested, to a sufficiently attentive eye, that the road had been laid not over the ground but into it, as though whatever civilization had accomplished this work had been building downward rather than across. I noted each of these in the interior ledger I had been maintaining since Bag End and said nothing of them to Sam, who was walking on my left, and nothing of them to Striden, who was walking three paces ahead with the posture of a man reading the ground the way Bilbo had read first editions — with a reverence whose specific object he preferred not to name.

Sam named the objectives. On the second morning out of Bree, with the Midgewater Marshes ahead of us making their particular contribution to the available wrongness — the insects, principally, which Striden would not discuss beyond saying that they had always been thus, which I noted was not the same as saying they were natural — Sam said, in the tone he had been developing since Woodhall, "Weathertop," and looked at the middle distance with the expression of a man filing a landmark against the possibility of needing it later. Striden heard him say it and did not look back, but I saw the line of his shoulders do something that, in a man less disciplined, would have been a flinch.