Thank you for reminding us of your speculative views. We can talk in mid december as to whom was right!

Rereading my post I can see a flaw in Thrain benignly letting Gandalf having the key and map and then attempting to return to Erebor!.

One of the Tolkien plot holes is this notion this mad deranged prisoner was able to hide a map and a key but not a ring in all the years he was incarcerated. It might make sense at a heirarchy of spirit level but not in the physical world. Somehow the way Gandalf says in Bag End the key was given to him for safe keeping sounded straight forward and no further explanation was required. Did he really just forget to tell Thorin that he had met his father in the most distressing of states to save his feelings?

If Chris Lee's rehearsal lines about the Dwarf rings survive into the 2nd meeting of the council then I am guessing that it is a responce to Gandalf returning from Dol Gulder to report on what he found mad Thrain dispossessed by Sauron and tortured by Bolg.

I know you are very strong on supporting and reminding us, quite correctly in my view, of Tolkiens sense of the heirarchy of spirits. Bolg is of course no match for Gandalf but an embryonic black Maia is. On his visit to DG he will deal with Thrain/Bolg and the revelation of the Necromencer and will barely escape.

Incidentally whilst Gandalf was in my view misreported by PJ in the ROTK in his EE interactions with the WK, to portray him as doubting his ability with a kind of christ like humilty makes him in my view the greater wiser spirit. At the White Council when Galadriel echo their Many Partings telepathy there is Saruman holding forth as the avuncular elder statesmen full of pomp and all puffed up and two of the council are not listening. It maybe Saruman before his fall but it shows his pride, which was his ultimate undoing, rather neatly.