Floating down to Camelot

Many of us have doubtless experienced the Interminable Meeting of Doom. It drags on for hours and hours, but afterwards, when you're asked what was concluded, you can only shrug, and say, "er.... um... Stuff?" Months later, when the follow-up meeting happens, someone manages dig out the Minutes that someone wrote and forgot to ciculate, and you look back at them, and realise that nobody there has any memory of any of the "decisions" you supposedly came to, and nothing has been done about any of them.

Compare the Council of Elrond. It starts "early," after Frodo has watched the sun rise, which is probably around 7 in the morning, if it's anything like England in late October. (Unless Rivendell practises daylight saving? If so, late October would probably be round about the time that Elvish Summer Time ended, so all the timings could be out of by hour. But since nobody turns up an hour late, saying, "sorry! I forgot that the clocks had changed," I think we can discount this as a possible complication.) Worryingly, there's no mention of breakfast beforehand, but presumably there's one of those pumpy coffee dispensers on the side, along with plates of digestive biscuits and fruit shortcakes. It finishes just after the noon bell sounds.

So that is five hours maximum, and probably less, to cover the thousands of years of history and to decide how to save the world. It does kind of put to shame all those meetings that take 6 hours and fail to decide what colour to paint the new office building.

Additionally:

- Nobody turns up late, causing everything to come to a halt as all the chairs get shuffled up to make room for them, and they get invited to help themselves to coffee, which is discovered to be cold, causing fresh coffee to be sent for.

- Nobody runs through the fire drill procedures beforehand and explains where the toilets are. Despite this, no doom results. Doom is indeed discussed, but it doesn't appear to relate to inadequately signposted toilets. (Although I am suddenly now wondering just where are the Toilets of Rivendell, and what they look like. And the Toilets of Lórien! WE NEED TO BE TOLD!)

- Nobody takes any Minutes. There is no agonisingly long half-minute in which everyone sits very still and looks at their feet, desperately hoping that somebody else will volunteer to take them. (Although it occurs to me suddenly that the relevant parts of the Red Book of Westmarch possibly are the Minutes of the Council of Elrond. Bilbo is not one for bullet points, it seems.)

- Despite the lack of Minutes, all Points of Action agreed upon are in fact carried out as planned. "Destroy Ring (FB). Take Sword of Elendil to Gondor (A son of A). Get Facilities Maintenance Team to reforge Sword of Elendil..." This alone is enough to make it remarkable in the annals of all the meetings that there have ever been in all the worlds.

- Despite outlining several thousands years history, Elrond does not use Powerpoint.

- There is no "comfort break," in which the few smokers in the meeting (Gandalf, Aragorn, hobbits) wander outside to smoke (does Elrond ban smoking inside in public places, do you think?) and, during the break, quickly make the only actual decisions that the meeting comes up with.

I think the Council of Elrond should be compulsory reading in business school.

I posted this yesterday on my fanfic LJ, and it was posted on a community the day before, but some people here might be amused by it, too. This was written for a challenge which called for comic verse inspired by the works of Tolkien. I was assigned the words "participate" and "pontificate," which had to be included somewhere along the way. This was the result:

( I am the very model of a fantasy antagonist... )

Oh dear. I really am sorry.

( Sauron in a restaurant. Warning for dodgy artwork (hands are so hard!), bad puns and the possibility of having a serious moment in The Lord of the Rings ruined forever )

Hmm... I wonder if I can track down the ancient Miruvor that contains my pictures inspired by the dramatic miming...

( More Lord of the Rings musing, actually not silly this time! Put behind a cut since it's spoilery, and I guess there's a possibility that someone reading this doesn't know the story but wants to read it one day, and You Can't Be Too Careful. )

So, is there anyone reading this who has never read (or watched) The Lord of the Rings?

Now I need someone wise in the ways of both hobbitses and dogses. Farmer Maggot has dogs, which appear to be employed as guard dogs, and there are dogs in Bree. Hobbits are on average about 3 feet tall. Typical guard dogs are far from tiny. Given that so many things in the Shire are familiar things from rural England, are the dogs the same, too? Are we to envisage these guard dogs as being, to hobbits, the size of donkeys - carnivorous donkeys called "Fang," with slavering teeth? Is a guard dog to a hobbit a truly terrifying creature, and even a lap dog a giant thing to be dreaded?

Dogs are man-made, and the dogs we see in the 21st century have been shaped by man into their current sizes, shapes and abilities. Dogs in the Shire could have been shaped by centuries of selective breeding, and scaled for hobbit use. Just as hobbit umbrellas and spoons and hats are presumably smaller than the ones we use today, hobbits might have mini wolfhounds and German shepherds, much the same as the ones we have now, but smaller. Are their dogs like hats, and the same as "our" dogs, just smaller?

Or are dogs in Middle Earth the same as dogs in our world, but the hobbits avoid the larger breeds, and guard their farms with ferocious and, to them, rather sizeable terriers?

I posted this yesterday on Facebook, but might as well post it here, too, for the sake of completeness.

( They're taking the hobbits to... )