Thus was it so that thusly did Mr Elessar and I return to Minas Tirith with the Last Ring, having brutally and heroically slain the revenant corpse of Boromir, who had also been my old friend once before he was dead and also evil. And so did we come even unto the city, and there did we tell all those gathered there of the sad end of Boromir.
‘Now,’ said old Mithrandir the White. ‘We must take counsel. For even though we killed all those orcs, King Sauron’s still out there somewhere in Mordor, and we must decide what to do about that.’
‘Aye, the wizard speaks true,’ said I, ‘Now is it become apparent King Sauron wishes to rule the whole world, and that we must at last1
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1 In the original Hayward tome, the rest of this page is hideously stained with some unidentifiable liquid, perhaps soup or a dark wine, with but a few stray words and fragments discernible. It is my guess that Nick Tallow met with some accident while writing the chapter’s opening and, rather than discard the ruined sheet and rewrite the previous chapter’s material already present on the page’s frontside, he elected to leave it as it was and simply began a “new” chapter on a fresh leaf.
