Myriad Meetings -- The Hobbit, Chapter III-IV

Rivendell is a place for meetings - we see that even more in The Lord of the Rings, but some of that appears in The Hobbit as well.  In fact, the "meetings" in and around Rivendell take a variety of forms, even beyond social encounters.

Meetings can mean physical alignments, like those involving celestial bodies: "We still call it Durin's Day when the last moon of Autumn and the sun are in the sky together."  Then there are the meetings of characteristics that determine psychology and fate - constellations of identity and converging contingencies.  In the persons of Gandalf and Elrond, goodness and wisdom are continually meeting one another, even if they travel a difficult road:  "Even the good plans of wise wizards like Gandalf and of good friends like Elrond go astray sometimes when you are off on dangerous adventures... and Gandalf was a wise enough wizard to know it."

Finally, there are more turbulent meetings - clashes and contentions.  We see this when the narrator notes "times when two great thunderstorms meet and clash.  More terrible still are thunder and lightning in the mountains at night, when storms come up from East and West and make war."

People, too, meet in all these ways - harmonious alignments, interwoven personalities, titanic collisions.  And perhaps all of them, in their own fashion, are rather magnificent.

Image: Arthur Rackham