The Council of Elrond

• 1. Introduction

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  The Council of Elrond is the second chapter of Book 2 of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, published in 1954-1955. At roughly 15,000 words, it is the longest chapter in that book. And yet, by conventional standards of storytelling, almost nothing happens in it. Twelve people sit in a garden in Rivendell and talk. A few more voices are quoted inside the longest speech. No swords are drawn. No one is wounded. The entire chapter is people narrating events that occurred years, centuries, or thousands of years before. The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey calls it "a largely unappreciated tour de force, whose success may be gauged by the fact that few pause to recognize its complexity."

  How does a chapter that violates nearly every rule of dramatic writing become one of the load-bearing pillars of a beloved epic? What does it accomplish that no other chapter in the book could? And when Peter Jackson adapted the story for his 2001 film The Fellowship of the Ring, what did he keep, what did he cut, and what did the cuts actually cost? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Nothing Happens

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  Tolkien had been developing his legendarium, the vast body of mythology that eventually became The Silmarillion, for about twenty years before The Lord of the Rings took shape. He published The Hobbit in 1937 after a request from his publishers, Allen and Unwin, for a follow-up to that book. The new story began in a light-hearted register, with Bilbo Baggins giving a birthday speech. Then, as Tolkien put it, the tale "grew in the telling."

  By the time Frodo Baggins arrives at Rivendell, the story has shed most of its whimsy. Frodo has been pursued by Black Riders, sheltered in the village of Bree, guided through the wilderness by a Ranger called Strider, and wounded on Weathertop. The chapter that follows his arrival asks the reader to sit still for a very long time.

  Shippey describes the structural audacity plainly: the chapter is long at 15,000 words, "but in it nothing happens: it consists entirely of people talking." Gandalf's speech alone takes up half the chapter. Twelve speakers address the Council in person; another seven are quoted inside Gandalf's monologue. The Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger points out that both this chapter and the earlier "The Shadow of the Past" rely on the same technique of having the past recapitulated by Gandalf or Elrond in order to explain the present. Kate Nepveu, writing for Tor.com, calls the chapter enormous but one of her favourites, noting that it "parallels and revises" its predecessor.

  The chapter could easily, Shippey writes, "have disintegrated, lost its way, or simply become too boring to follow." That it does not comes down to two unusual gifts in Tolkien: an "extremely firm grasp of the history of Middle-earth" and an "unusual ability to suggest cultural variation by differences in mode of speech."

• 3. Voices of Many Peoples

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  Shippey describes the Council of Elrond as the moment where Tolkien introduces what he calls a fantasy of "unusual cultural depth." Each member of the gathering speaks differently, and that difference does work.

  Gandalf's long central speech begins with a quotation from Sam's father, the Gaffer Gamgee, who speaks "many words and few to the point." The Gaffer functions, in Shippey's reading, as "a kind of base-line of normality, and, concomitantly, of emptiness." Against that baseline, Tolkien then introduces Saruman, who "talks like a politician," using hollow phrases like "real change" while articulating goals Shippey connects to what the modern world has come to fear most: the abandoning of allies, the subordination of means to ends.

  Aragorn's speech, too, is carefully placed. He uses language Shippey describes as "deceptively modern, even easy-going on occasion, but with greater range than Boromir's slightly wooden magniloquence." When Aragorn lets Boromir have the last word, his phrasing simultaneously echoes common speech and the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon, specifically the words of a hero named Aelfwine. The chapter serves, in Shippey's framing, as a jumping-off point for each character. After this point, Tolkien was "no longer writing his way through landscapes he had travelled before" in The Hobbit. The equivalent scene in that earlier book, the chapter set in the house of Beorn, presented a simpler collision between the ancient heroic world and the practical modern one. The Council multiplies that collision many times over.

  Shippey concludes that any of the individual speeches "would bear similar analysis," and that the richness of the linguistic modes makes the chapter's information content "very high."

• 4. What the Council Reveals

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  Elrond opens the meeting by telling the assembled representatives that although each had apparently arrived for their own reasons, he had in fact summoned them all. The Dwarf Gloin reports that Sauron's messenger offered his king, Dain II Ironfoot, three Dwarf-Rings in exchange for news of Bilbo and his ring. Boromir describes a prophetic dream shared with his brother Faramir, its verse pointing toward a broken sword and something called Isildur's Bane. Strider then reveals his true identity: he is Aragorn, heir of Isildur, and displays the shattered sword Narsil.

  The scholar Paul Kocher notes that Elrond's view of the Ring has not changed since the Second Age, when he urged Isildur in vain to destroy it in the fires of Mount Doom. Elrond now states that he fears to take the Ring even to hide it, and will not take it to wield it, which Kocher reads as evidence that Elves are themselves capable of evil. Tolkien made this explicit in an unsent letter to W. H. Auden, explaining that Elrond and the Elves were acting against their own interests "in pursuit of a 'humane' duty." They knew, Tolkien wrote, that they were "destroying their own polity" by agreeing to destroy the Ring, and that this was "an inevitable result of victory."

  Kocher also observes that Elrond's acceptance of Frodo's offer to carry the Ring into Mordor reflects a belief that "a higher providence is guiding the deliberations of the Council." Sam Gamgee, who had not been invited, had been listening from behind a bush. When Elrond grants him permission to accompany his master, the longest chapter in The Fellowship of the Ring reaches its quiet close.

• 5. Christianity Beneath the Surface

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  Fleming Rutledge, an Episcopal priest and Tolkien scholar, argues that the chapter brings what she calls the "deep narrative" of Christianity in The Lord of the Rings almost explicitly to the surface, describing it as "replete with theological meaning."

  She reads Dain II Ironfoot's refusal of Sauron's offered Dwarf-Rings as a measure of heroism. That refusal was, she writes, "almost unbelievably noble," a moment of resisting temptation that functions within the chapter as evidence of moral seriousness. She is equally struck by the exchange between Aragorn, Legolas, and Gandalf about Gollum's escape from the Elves of Mirkwood, which she describes as revealing Tolkien's "deep apocalyptic narrative" about unseen divine will in the contest between good and evil. The key line belongs to Gandalf: Gollum "may play a part yet that neither he nor Sauron has foreseen."

  Elrond's own remark carries similar weight for Rutledge. His statement that "as long as it is in the world it will be a danger even to the Wise. For nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so" places the moral stakes of the quest not in the destruction of an enemy but in an understanding of how corruption works. The Chapter's hidden theological argument, in Rutledge's reading, is that the free peoples are not simply fighting a monster. They are navigating a world where wisdom itself is vulnerable.

• 6. Jackson's Transformation

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  Peter Jackson moved a large portion of the Council's narrative function to the film's opening minutes. Sauron's forging of the One Ring, the alliance of Elves and Men against him, and Isildur's refusal to destroy the Ring at the height of his victory were all rendered as a dramatic prologue, narrated with voice-over. This solved a genuine cinematic problem: Tolkien's chapter told history through what Jackson's collaborators called "talking heads," voices reflecting long after the events on what they had meant. That approach violates the film principle of showing rather than telling.

  The result in Jackson's 2001 film is a Council scene that is much shorter and far less speech-driven than Tolkien's chapter. The Tolkien scholar Daniel Timmons, largely critical of Jackson's reading, acknowledges that Jackson does succeed in one key respect: he transforms the moment when Frodo accepts the quest into something vivid and effective. Timmons describes it as capturing "Frodo's inner struggle, his doubts, his fears, balanced against his sense that he is the right one for the task."

  But the scholar of film Judith Kollmann maps what is lost. Where Tolkien conducted a "council with dignity and in peace," working systematically through the agenda, Jackson replaces it with argument and urgency. Frodo and Sam appear with bags already packed and eager to leave, rather than arriving at their decision through the slow weight of the debate. Most significantly, Kollmann notes, Jackson reframes the scene around Aragorn: Aragorn meets Boromir before the Council and Arwen after it, shifting the chapter's emphasis from Frodo's choice to Aragorn's claim. Timmons closes his assessment with a note of regret, writing that the scene succeeded, but adds: "Alas, would that many more such moments existed in Jackson's film."