Shall I shoot?

[fileg]

I've mentioned before that there are things I understand (or think I understand) in Tolkien that I have just incorporated into myself without ever expressing them in words, until something comes up and I find myself blurting out a sentence that surprises the hell out of me, and at the same time seems to have always been with me

Comments

[curiouswombat]

I think your description sums it up perfectly, even though I had never thought of it as a chain of Mercy, it really is!

[marta_bee]

This reminds me of of one of my favorite adaptations of the Beauty and the Beast story. Beauty is fuming about being forced to live with the Beast because she thinks he essentially kidnapped her by threatening to kill her father if she didn't com to live with him instead. (In this version Beauty's father had been permitted to return home to his family for a month to say goodbye, after which he'd either bring a daughter back or be honor-bound to return himself to be killed.) The Beast admits that --had her father returned to the castle alone-- he'd have set him free, but that she'd still have lost her old relationship with her father because she'd grow to hate herself, having to live with the reminder of how she'd let him go off to his seeming death