[Update: December 1st, 2020] These are the, variously Dantean, epigraphs for this novel. Click for a clearer image:
I'm a big fan of epigraphs. And in this case they're particularly crucial to the working of the novel. That said, my twin worries are (a) people won't twig the Tennysonian gesture in the first; and, (b) with respect to the second, necessity (that is, copyright law) made me take out all specific references to
Lord of the Rings in my text—Tolkien and Joyce being, obviously, the yin-yang of the 20th-C anglophone novel—thus defanging much of the textual and epigraphic point. Ah well: we work with what we have, not with what we'd like.
