My friend, who I'd shared an apartment with for a while, looked at me and said 'You do realize that when you write notes to yourself you do it in Dwarvish runes, right?' Actually, I'd kind of stopped noticing that. There's also another one near a cave opening next to a stronghold in the mid northwest. *the day after I saw Fellowship, I was telling a friend how the snippets of Elvish provoked the same response in me that I get when hear bits of French or Russian, the two languages I studied in high school & college I'd actually forgotten that I'd committed a lot of the Elvish poetry in LOTR to memory. I think there's a Graug spawn near the first tower you jump off of near the beginning of the game though it doesn't start spawning there until after you progress in the main missions a bit.
At the time, I remember how amazing the 'seamless' transition was from movie footage to gameplay now, of course, they seem jarringly simplistic. One of the reasons why I got a PS2, though, was the old EA Lord of the Rings brawlers. I'm actually getting this game in spite of the Middle Earth background - the Nemesis system sounds like the first really new thing in gaming in a while, and something that could make the world feel more alive and responsive to what I'm doing. I used to be a huge Tolkien fanboy*, but that's kind of gotten burnt out me around the 12th time I saw the director's cut of the Jackson trilogy.
