← Triviagon · The Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings · Clues from Past Puzzles
Skim the opening clue - the hard, oblique one worth the most - from every The Lord of the Rings puzzle that has already run. Spot one you like and jump in to play the whole thing. The answers are not shown here; that is what the puzzle is for. Come back to play the latest.
- Answer #1 He keeps a running tally of kills against a friend he begins the story disliking, loses by one at a fortress, and complains about it. He does not sleep as the others do, walks on snow they sink into, and is the only member of the company who has met the Lady of the Wood before.
- Answer #2 He is bought at Bree from a man who has plainly been starving him, for a price everyone agrees is daylight robbery, and he is turned loose before the company goes underground because nothing on four legs could follow them down there.
- Answer #3 He is a bargeman with a family and a grudge, descended from the lord of a city that burned, and he keeps one heirloom everyone else has written off as junk. In the books a thrush tells him where the weak spot is; the films leave the bird out entirely and have his son run him the arrow instead.
- Answer #1 She is told twice that her place is with her people rather than with the army, and she goes anyway, in borrowed armour and under a borrowed name. The thing she kills cannot by prophecy be killed by any man, which is the joke the entire scene turns on, and she says the line before she strikes.
- Answer #2 A wizard walks in alone to find out who has been raising the dead in the north, and is taken prisoner for his trouble. The name means hill of sorcery, and the thing living there has been careful for a long time not to use its own name.
- Answer #3 The company tries to cross over it, and something - a wizard's spell working at a distance, or simply an old and unfriendly mountain, the story quite deliberately leaves it open - buries them in snow until they give up. Giving up is what sends them underground, which makes this the most consequential weather in the whole story.
- Answer #1 It has a round green door with a brass knob dead in the middle, and a mark scratched onto that door by a wizard who wanted thirteen strangers to be able to find it. Two departures begin here sixty years apart, and on both occasions the owner leaves without telling the neighbours.
- Answer #2 Two enormous figures stand on either side of a river with their left hands raised, palm outward, telling anyone coming downstream to go no further. They are kings of long ago, and one of the company is descended from them - which the film makes certain you notice by cutting straight to his face.
- Answer #3 Nobody ever sees the whole of it and nobody in the story gives it a proper name - it is described only by what it does and where it does it. It seizes the one carrying the object everyone wants, and its parting act is to shut the door behind the entire party.