How the hell did I get 60 years??! :
:
Between Bilbo’s adventure when he was 50/51 and his departure when he was 111.
IIRC the span of time in the LOTR is around 30 years, from birthday party to the last ships sailing for Valinor. Maybe that’s what you were thinking of?
Must have been the Bilbo thing, I remember reading it somewhere. I don’t remember reading about the LOTR timeline until after the books and movies and doing some digging online.
My impression of the actual Fellowship though, from when Frodo and Sam first set out for Rivendell to the destruction of the Ring at Mount Doom, is about a year. Is that correct? I think the Razing of the Shire stuff happened in the months as they journeyed back from Rivendell to Hobbiton, right?
Heres a question for you. Why did Gimli not seem to know jack-shit about Moria getting ransacked?
Technically Moria was ransacked ages ago. A group of dwarves tried to resettle it (after the events of the Hobbit, I believe, so within the past 50 years), and were doing fine for a while but then no word came after a certain point. Gimli was hoping that he’d find his people there, and was hopeful to go into Moria as a result, but no one knew for certain what had happened to the dwarves that had settled there.
Frodo’s departure from Hobbiton: 9/23/3018
Frodo’s arrival in Rivendell: 10/20/3018
Council of Elrond: 10/25/3018
Fellowship departs Rivendell: 12/25/3018
Fellowship enters Moria: 1/13/3019
Breaking of the Fellowship: 2/26/3019
Battle of the Hornburg / Helm’s Deep: 3/3-3/4/3019
Battle of the Pelennor Fields: 3/15/3019
Destruction of the Ring: 3/25/3019
Scouring of the Shire: 11/2 - 11/3/3019
(Source: The Encyclopedia of Arda - The Chronicle of Arda)
So, Frodo’s journey out is almost exactly six months, and he returns to Hobbiton a little more than 13 months after he’d left.
Yes, it’s after The Hobbit, as the expedition to retake Moria was led by Balin, one of Thorin’s company (it’s his tomb which the Fellowship finds in both the book and the movie).
To add to this, this is another spot that, frankly, the movie screwed up. In the book, Gimli was much more aware that “Hey, we haven’t heard from those guys in like 25 years, they probably didn’t just run out of stamps.” but he was still very curious to find out what had happened, and, really, to just look on the ancestral home of his people. None of this “Yeah, we should go through Moria, Balin is sure to throw a feast for us.” crap from the film.
While that’s definitely correct, I thought they had actually been in contact for some time and the silence was more recent. I’ll have to dig out my copy of FotR to be sure.
“There are many rings of Power, and none of them are to be treated lightly.”
He didn’t know what it was, but having it carried blithely off into almost certain peril on the way to Rivendell didn’t seem like a good idea.
I was relying, humorously, on this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Arda
Which seems to indicate that Balin died and the colony in Moria collapsed in 2994, and, as pointed out, the Quest of the Ring didn’t even kick off until 3018.
I was never really left with the idea that Gandalf thought it was a bad idea for Bilbo to run off into the woods with the Ring, per se, just that he didn’t feel that Bilbo should POSSESS it any longer.
Any concern, at this point, would have been for Bilbo, rather than the Ring, though he does select an approach which conveniently allows him to keep an eye on the latter as well, that’s just prudence.
Incidentally, with reference to chucking fireballs around, Gandalf actually does throw some fire (not huge massive stonking explosive fireballs, but some) in The Hobbit.
Something just occurred to me.
At the end of the movies, and the books, Bilbo and Frodo go off with the elves to Valinor. Why? I seem to recall some stuff said at some point in the book about how Frodo’s wound from the Witch King’s dagger would never heal, but I didn’t get the impression that they were taking him to Valinor to get patched up.
If it was a reward, it was a very odd one. Sure, it may be like going to heaven, but the hobbits were happy in their little corner of the world. It seems more of a punishment to pluck them from their homes to join a bunch of immortals on the other side of the world.
Was it just because they were both ringbearers? Frodo didn’t even have it for that long and I would imagine that had Gollum survived, they weren’t gonna reward him for anything by bringing him across the ocean.
Yes, it was the ringbearer status. It should be noted that Valinor doesn’t confer immortality. Bilbo and Frodo would die there, but Frodo would live the rest of his life and die free of the pain that the Morgul-blade caused him. Bilbo, I’m not sure of, other than his desire to…he played the role of Gentleman Historian for many years, remember. Maybe his Ringbearer status made his request seem reasonable.
Frodo wasn’t just physically scarred by what had happened to him, but mentally and emotionally. Sam, Merry, and Pippin all settled down quite happily in the Shire afterwards (though Merry and Pippin continued their adventurous ways to an extent), but Frodo was never really content or at peace after his travels.
So, at least in his case, it was somewhere between being a reward and a way to, I dunno, compensate him for the pain he had endured.
Wasn’t Sam a ringbearer for an hour or so?
Yup, in Cirith Ungol, when he thought Frodo had been killed by Shelob’s poison.
Tolkien addresses this in one of his letters. Frodo was physically wounded, but more importantly suffered a sense of guilt. Remember, Frodo claimed the Ring himself.