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As the days in Middle-Earth grow shorter and the autumn nights grow longer, The Lord of the Rings offers quietly urgent descriptions of the preparations underway in the warmth and light of Rivendell. Aragorn and Gandalf consult Rivendell’s trove of maps as they debate the journey ahead. Eagles of the mountains are asked for news. And scouts are sent out to search the surrounding lands. Later in the autumn, they start to return.
But none of this activity, alas, is accompanied by a single specific date.
There is a vague reference to ‘mid-December’, which I suppose we can place on a similarly vague mid-December date.
In mid-December the scouts start returning to Rivendell, having found no trace of the Nazgûl. Elrond begins planning the Ring’s departure.
The Tale of Years is silent for the entire two months between October 25 and December 25. But the narrative itself does securely date one event: the naming of the Company of the Ring. Elrond finishes that discussion with the words, ‘In seven days the Company must depart,’ so he must be speaking on December 18.
Elrond names the Company of the Ring, from all the Free Peoples:
Hobbits—Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin.
Men—Aragorn and Boromir.
Elves—Legolas.
Dwarves—Gimli.
And, one wizard—Gandalf the Grey shall lead them, ‘for this shall be his great task and maybe the end of his labours.’
We do know that Aragorn’s sword is re-forged sometime during that final week in Rivendell. Aragorn describes the sword’s re-forging in the future tense when Elrond appoints the Fellowship on the 18th — ‘the Sword-that-was-Broken shall be reforged ere I set out to war’ — and is carrying the completed sword when the Fellowship sets out on the 25th. But we don’t know the specific date on which it was finished and received its new name Andúril.
Thus, no further events can be securely dated until ‘the morning of the last day’ when Frodo makes a final visit to his old friend Bilbo in the hobbit’s small room on the ground floor.
Today the Company will depart. Bilbo gives Frodo his sword Sting and—secretly—his magnificent Dwarvish mail-coat of pure mithril. The old hobbit sings softly.
‘I sit beside the fire and think
of how the world will be
when winter comes without a spring
that I shall ever see…’
The Company depart as ‘the cheerless shadows of the early evening began to fall’ which, at the latitude of Rivendell, will be just after four o’clock.
The Company of the Ring gathers on Rivendell’s threshold at dusk, with their baggage loaded on Bill the pony. Sam remembers that he hasn’t packed rope. Boromir sounds his horn. And Elrond gives his blessing: ‘May the stars shine upon your faces!’
They walk south into the Wild.
‘Then with one glance at the Last Homely House twinkling below them they strode away far into the night.’
No chronology is offered of the days that follow. ‘The first part of their journey was hard and dreary, and Frodo remembered little of it, save the wind.’ A full two weeks of travel are summarized in three paragraphs that describe the Company’s daily schedule, their order of march, and how the mountains loom higher as they move south. All we can do is offer a similiar summary.
As the morning grows bright, the Company of the Ring stop walking and conceal themselves as best they can. They try to sleep. Thus begins the routine of their winter march: sleep during the day; supper in late afternoon; and an overnight walk south through bitter winter wind.
For how many days do they march south without any specific dates that we might mark on a calendar? It’s the next paragraph that finally offers us an anchor: ‘They had been a fortnight on the way when the weather changed.’ So the next dateable event will fall in January.
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