Misty Mountains

Says, "So tell me your news."

As we were traveling south, we, we found there were orcs traveling south as well, even some from the Misty Mountains.

They were traveling through Mirkwood.

We made our way down to Rhosgobel, and managed to rescue a young gentleman who'd been kidnapped by bandits.

This is, this is not good.

Not good.

Even from the Misty Mountains, which obviously doesn't, doesn't really make much sense why they would come this far.

I just find it strange that it's coinciding with this folkmoot that is happening just north of Dol Guldur.

And as time passed, he became increasingly evil and increasingly isolated.

Eventually, he was cast out of society and he wandered far and wide until one day he entered the Misty Mountains, never to emerge again.

Quote, "He wormed his way like a maggot into the heart of the hills and vanished out of all knowledge.

The ring went into the shadows with him and even the maker, when his power had begun to grow again, could learn nothing of it." So now, finally, Frodo is able to connect the dots.

The ring came into Bilbo's possession because on that long ago journey that you can read about in The Hobbit, he encountered a mysterious creature deep in the heart of the Misty Mountains who was in possession of a magic ring.

By the time Bilbo met the creature, he was known as Gollum and not as Smeagol, but clearly it all adds up.

Smeagol had the ring when Bilbo met him, and because Bilbo, well, acquired the ring from Smeagol, it eventually passed to Frodo.

But in the process, he also uncovered an arguably more disturbing revelation.

And I think that that's a really kind of beautiful story.

And the moment that I think is most effective in these movies is the moment where they sing the song from the book that is, "Afar over the misty mountains cold," and it's such a beautiful rendition.

You have to...

Yeah, yeah.

That's in Lord of the Rings the books too, but here they are a little bit more playful beings.

Um, so alas.

Well, after that, the dwarves head up into the Misty Mountains, and after the mountains, the goblins capture the company.

Bilbo meets the creature Gollum and acquires the ring, and then he and Thorin's company barely escape the goblins and are helped to safety by the eagles before the next leg of their journey will start.

And from the deep halls of Khazad-dûm came a host of Durin's folk, the dwarves marching to war beside elves and men.

To anyone standing on the slopes of the misty mountains as that column passed, it would have looked like a river of banners, so vast that the orcs of the mountains did not dare to harry it.

They hid and let it go by.

One detail anchors everything that follows.

From the muster, Gil-galad and Elendil led their people east to Imladris, to Rivendell, where the full coalition assembled and waited.

For three years, the Valley of Elrond held the gathered strength of the West before the Order finally came to move.

When it came, the army crossed the Misty Mountains, descended into the Anduin Valley, gathering the woodland realms and the dwarves as it went, and turned south toward the Black Land.

And before the gates of Mordor, on the great treeless plain that the Sindarin tongue named Dagolad, the Battle Plain, the first and greatest open battle was fought.

Sauron will have seen what size force Aragorn had brought with him, and known that victory was all but assured.

The mouth of Sauron offered a deal that would never be accepted, ceding all land east of the Anduin to Sauron, and all land between that and the Misty Mountains are to be vassals.

Aragorn and Gandalf between them sent him back on his way.

Incidentally, the movie version of this scene has Aragorn beheading the mouth of Sauron, That doesn't happen in the books.

But the fear of Sauron is what dominates the orcs.

And Sauron is dominating orcs as far as the Misty Mountains and Angmar.

It doesn't make sense that Saruman was able to basically have such a large contingent of possibly 10,000 Uruks.

It doesn't really make much sense.

He is trying to cultivate these orcs that Morgoth had corrupted.

And there's actually different groups of orcs.

The northern orcs or the orcs of the Misty Mountains and such are...

They're tribal.

They rest in Rivendell, an elf house in a hidden valley.

They cross a range called the Misty Mountains and are taken by goblins living underneath them.

And in the confusion of the escape, Bilbo's knocked out, wakes up alone in the pitch dark and starts crawling around.

And here's the detail I'd like you to have because almost everybody gets this wrong.

Gandalf looks at this ring and maps its trajectory.

Like somehow a magic ring found its way deep under the Goblin Kingdom in the Misty Mountains.

Right.

Then it ended up in the hands of a subterranean creature named Gollum.

Exactly.

It just required a massive multi-millennial detour.

Just a slight detour via the riverbed, you know, beneath the Misty Mountains, a brief stint near the Lonely Mountain, a very long rest in the Shire, and finally delivery to Rivendell.

Bilbo even had it in his pocket during a pit stop at Rivendell decades earlier during The Hobbit.

Yeah.

Watching Andy Serkis as Sméagol choking his cousin Déagol on the River Fang and then deteriorating into that withered creature in the Misty Mountains, it's universally lauded.

It's iconic.

But, okay, I have to push back on the fandom's panic for just a second here.

He does.

He becomes this vicious, spiteful nuisance, and it is his grandmother, the matriarch, who ultimately exiles him.

She kicks him out of the hole, effectively damning him to wander alone into the Misty Mountains, where the darkness fully consumes him.

And this is where we see the showrunners doing the necessary cultural groundwork.