Re: the book was...

[Don Smith <dasmith at rotse2_physics.lsa.umich.edu>]

Peter wrote:
> is this the way *Tolkien* structured it?  I don't think so ...

No.  In the book, Gandalf's whereabouts were a big mystery to Frodo et al.,
although they kept getting clues, and just missing each other.  Gandalf got to
Bree a few days after Strider took the hobbits away, then beat them by a couple
days to weathertop by riding along the road while the hobbits were trudging
through the marshes.  He had a huge firefight with the Nazgul there (which the
hobbits saw from afar as a kind of lightning storm), and then fled eastward,
drawing off four of the Nazgul toward the ford.  Tolkien tells all this from
the hobbits' point of view: they see the "lighting", but don't know what it
means.  They find a note Gandalf scratched in the rock at weathertop that lets
them know he was there a couple days before, but we, the readers, aren't told
what happened to him until the council of Elrond, when Gandalf lets everyone
know that Saruman is no longer to be trusted.  That chapter in the book
involves no less than seven people telling hundreds of years of backstory over
dozens of pages, so clearly both filmmakers felt they needed to spread that
information out or omit it entirely (the story of Aragorn's capture of Gollum
and his escape from the wood elves, for example, is omitted).

Didn't some of the promotional material for TTT have footage of Smeagol and
Deagol when Deagol found the Ring in the Anduin?  Something for the extended
cut of TTT, I guess.
-- 
Don Smith                           Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
donaldas at umich_edu                                 http://xte.mit.edu/~dasmith/

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