Into the Wardrobe

Perhaps you're right. But it seems like it would take them less time, since they are hurrying. But of course, they aren't going by the road, so they have to blaze a trail through the woods, so it might still take more time.
Oh, well, who cares? :p

It might have been halfway as the crow flies, but if memory serves, they had to take a circuitous route to get from Weathertop to Rivendell, because of deep ravines and such. Aragorn knew when they left Bree that they would have to avoid the Nazgul, so he would have factored that into his calculations from the beginning.

Then, also, is the fairly complicated matter of passage of time in Lothlorien. Is time the same in there as it is on the outside? Note Sam's confusion after leaving, noticing the phase of the moon cycle. I don't know if Tolkien ever completely resolves this. The noted Tolkien scholar, Verlyn Flieger, engages with this issue substantially in her A Question of Time: J.R.R. Tolkien's Road to Faerie, but I don't know if she fully settles the question either.

Here is a mystery I spotted a few years ago:

How to account for Smeagol's knowledge that the Hobbits' ascent of Mount Doom represented a threat to the Precious.

Within the narrative at the time he attacks Frodo and Sam on Orodruin, Smeagol had not...

-been told they were going to destroy the ring,
-overheard (again within the narrative) that they were going to destroy the ring,
-been told that that particular mountain was dangerous to the ring,
-heard the lore of the ring.

I think this is something that Tolkien just forgot about. In order to maintain the cohesion of the narrative, each of us must supply the missing information in our own favorite way. Some might say that Smeagol just knew instinctively of the danger, but this is too vague for me. I need something more concrete. Others have suggested to me that the ring "cried out for help", but they would then have to account for why the Witch King did not know the "specific power" that he perceived in his valley. If the ring possessed the power to communicate so clearly and explicitly, it should have done so there. But we have elsewhere in the narrative that the ring had to be put on by its bearer before it could be anything more than a vague sense of a brooding power. My solution is much more mundane: Smeagol simply overheard Frodo tell Faramir about the Quest.

Peter Jackson solved the problem by having Frodo just tell Smeagol himself.

A heretic? Don't degrade yourself, Erekose. You are the heretic :).

Aragorn says that it would take him 12 days on his own feet from Weathertop to Rivendell with or without Frodo. So yes, i suppose it's a small mistake, though whether on the part of the author or the character I don't know ;)