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Originally Posted by Luiglin  I still don't read that passage in LotR as you have. The shock of apparently losing a main character so early was above and beyond any mentions of dread. That was the point I was trying to get at. |
I think you might have misunderstood what I meant. Foreshadowing doesn't mean spelling out "this will happen", it merely means setting something up so that it doesn't emerge totally out of the blue, inexplicable an unexplainable.
All through the lead up to Gandalf's fall there are ample hints that
A) Gandalf is fallible
B) Moria is a bad place to go
C) Moria is particularly bad for Gandalf
Further, as we near the bridge there are bigger setups in play:
A) Gandalf exhaust himself defeating the Orcs at the gate house
B) They have to cross a very narrow bridge over a huge chasm
C) They're in a situation where swords can't save them
D) There's something else with the Orcs, something powerful and terrible
None of these mean that a clever reader should "work out" what is going to happen; it
should be a shock and surprise when Gandalf falls, but it's not inexplicable, it's not like a martian descended through the rock and beamed him into space. It's not like the Balrog leaped out of a tree in Lothlorien and ate him.
Foreshadowing isn't necessarily about forewarning a specific event, but can be about establishing the circumstances that allow it.
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Originally Posted by Luiglin To return to the original post my intention was to the highlight the beauty of a shock in a story. I stand by that and whether that makes me a poor writer, then as I say, that is your opinion. |
I didn't say that. What I said was that throwing in unhinted shocks, or perhaps to phrase it another way, shocks that don't "belong" is poor writing. Anyone can throw an arbitrary shock into a story. True quality writing comes in setting up the circumstance without letting your reader realise it; and the death of Gandalf is a prime example. Think about it; any number of factors had to be in place for Gandalf to fall; he was exhausted, the bridge was exceedingly narrow, the Balrog had a whip that could coil about the old man, and so on and so on. Tolkien didn't throw all of that at you suddenly, at the point of Gandalf's fall; he fed it to you, bit by bit, so that it all fell into place without you realising.