The Letter of the Law
Over in my other recent thread, Huinesoron (as he is wont to do) said something that struck me as quite accurate:
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What are the most egregious distortions you can fit into the text of Middle-earth? I think we're actually going to see a lot of this that gets us all riled up once the Amazon series releases, because the 2nd Age is full of unpainted canvas and they have a whole show to fill, but I'm thinking of things closer to the texts themselves: what odd things would you plug into the cracks that you absolutely know Tolkien wouldn't approve of but he leaves space for? This is, admittedly, a broad, conceptual topic and I don't have a ready example. The best I can do is point at the inspiration in the other thread, where Huin is arguing that, even though Tolkien doesn't SAY it, he pretty much implies Sauron created/spread the Great Plague. So I'm looking for the opposite examples: where Tolkien heavily infers that Æ happened, but since he didn't SAY it did, you can argue that anti-Æ happened. I would probably need to comb through the Appendices looking for "the Wise say" or "many believed." The counterarguments to THOSE are what I'm talking about. |
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~ The one that instantly springs to mind is "for elves, sex = marriage". Tolkien clearly believed it, but what he actually says is that: Quote:
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~ Also, Maglor. "It is told" that he chucked his Silmaril in the sea and now wanders around singing a lot, but the Silm itself admits that there's no evidence, and it's just saying it to claim that the Silmarils are in mystically/elementally significant places forever. For all we know, Maglor could have chucked himself in there with the jewel - or maybe he kept it, and is living off on Tol Fuin with it around his neck even now! ~ Come to think of it, we don't even know when Beren and Luthien died! Tolkien only tells us that Dior "knew" that the Nauglamir being sent to him was a sign that they'd perished, but he could have been... y'know, wrong. :D Their great-grandson Elros lived 500 years, and only 60-odd of those can be written off as 'he wasn't mortal yet'; his son lived over 400. Even if we assume actually visiting the Undying Lands and returning has no more effect than just living slightly closer to them, a 400-year second life would take them a good three centuries into the Second Age. They probably just sent the Silmaril over to Dior for safekeeping and bopped off to hang with Galadriel. I mean, heck: Tol Galen is well inside the areas of Ossiriand that survived to become Lindon. Maybe they just stayed put! At the very least, that's a plausible myth/rural legend of the Sindarin refugees in the early Second Age: that their princess is still out there, watching over them from the forests south of Harlond... hS |
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That's just from the top of my head, and that is even a fairly broad thing. Something like that might concern the Nazgûl, meaning, the original Men. I remember that under the I.C.E. license, various roleplaying games and the Middle-Earth: The Wizards card game operated with one of the Ringwraith being female (for those interested, her name was Adûnaphel). I personally kinda like the idea (and could have been more than one), but I am pretty much convinced that when Tolkien said the Nazgûl were "Men", he meant "men". Even though, arguably, who knows. It's rather based on "circumstantial evidence", such as that as a rule of thumb, female characters in such positions in Middle-Earth are rare, and if one happened to be a Nazgûl, Tolkien would likely have pointed it out as a notable exception. While we are on the topic of the Nazgûl, you could probably come up with lot of things about that. It is for example also heavily implied that they were some nobility, some of them of the Númenorean stock, but likely NOT Númenorean kings. So, like, it isn't that Ar-Gimilzôr became a Ringwraith. BUT, it is not specifically mentioned. So I can easily imagine a writer who is lazy to come up with a Númenorean name, or a character for that matter, to just pick one of the later kings and be like "ok, this is one of the Nazgûl!" (Or, even better, pick three of the last kings and be done with it.) And on that note, it is also implied that the Ringwraith appeared more or less all at once at roughly the same time, considerably earlier than many of the "bad kings" lived, but that is also not said explicitly. So, I am pretty sure, somebody could come up with a case that Pharazôn became one. (Because among other things, nobody also says that Sauron did not go and pick him up from wherever he ended up under an avalanche at the outskirts of the Undying Lands.) Thinking of it, it is not even said that the Nine were always the SAME Nine, was it? As in, maybe the Ring #9 was for instance worn by one person the first two hundred years, then he was killed, Sauron gave it to another, who became the wraith then, then he gave it to Ar-Pharazôn... Well, clearly one can come up with lots of things... |
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This is also why people belittle the Hobbits, not their size but their lack of boots or shoes at all. Edit: I’m not sure this fits the “implied X but the opposite of X could also happen” idea but I do feel it fits “distort the text” prompt. |
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The counter argument to 'men' is that Tolkien wrote "Three Rings for the Elven-Kings under the sky" at a time when the Three were held by the Lady of Lorien, the master of the Last Homely House, and a wizard whose best claim to 'elven' is that some rural bumpkins used to think he was one. "Mortal Men" could easily include "and woMen", and it's not like anyone writing the Red Book would know. Quote:
~ Actually, that's another one that straddles the line between 'suggested' and 'suggested against'. Did Bilbo's mother have any adventures? She's called 'remarkable' (along with her sisters), and the best The Hobbit says is "Not that Belladonna Took ever had any adventures after she became Mrs. Bungo Baggins." So... before, then? Did Gandalf lead the three Took sisters off into the Blue for mad adventures, climbing trees and visiting elves and sailing off to other shores, facing dragons and goblins and giants, rescuing princesses and hanging out with widows' sons? I bet he did. Quote:
hS |
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But exactly - that's the one sad counter-argument: if there had been a powerful sorceress or evil conquering warrior Númenorean lady who became a Ringwraith, her unusual qualities would likely have been mentioned somewhere. That being said, for various reasons I find it not unlikely that some such may have existed somewhere among the Easterlings, Southrons or other peoples and would not have found her way into the historical annals, simply because these people were too far from the Númenorean sphere of interest, and/or also illiterate to begin with. (I personally somewhat cringe at how much this fits into the trope of "the civilised people have a patriarchal society, whereas it may be perfectly common to have a female chieftain in the 'exotic' societies that are wild and primitively barbaric/wild and free and egalitarian" - depending whether you want to paint this trope positively or negatively, both of which are cringeworthy in my opinion. But let's face it, the setup of Middle-Earth sort of supports this distinction.) Quote:
Oh! Oh!!! That reminds me of one thing that definitely belongs to this thread. Interestingly enough, again connected to the Ringwraith. Specifically, I am referring to the well-known description that upon the Witch-King's death, Quote:
Sidenote, given that it also refers to the wail itself, it does not refer to something such as that the WK himself would be seen in perhaps a different form, but rather that it would be pretty much the same form - or at least a form making the very same sounds. (It also seems to refer specifically to that particular wail, not to that of the Nazgul in general, so it isn't like that somebody would hear a random Xth Age new breed of wraith wailing in the same manner, but rather Witch-King in person.) Quote:
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That said, I believe the amazons only get a single passing mention, buried somewhere in a linguistic essay, so perhaps "they would have been mentioned" isn't necessarily true? A whole lot of women have prophetic/visionary abilities which are never mentioned explicitly, only obliquely shown (Rosie Cotton, for one!); and the one bona fide evil sorceress has her story told solely in a single "primitive" and partly-illegible outline: Queen Beruthiel. It's entirely within reason that Tolkien would have restricted a description of Nazgul #5, the Sorceress of the Last Desert to an utterly unreadable scribble on the back of an envelope. Quote:
Or maybe they just come back for Dagor Dagorath. I mean, Turin's going to, why not Sauron's pet Men? Quote:
hS |
I will hopefully respond to some of the fabulous answers and discussion that has been brought up already. Now something I was going to bring up in the Man Who Bit a Fell-Beast thread, but thought it might have been too much of a tangent. I'm pleased to find that it does fit here!
I've been wondering the Steward, Boromir, was killed and died in agonizing pain by the Witch-King. Now, it's said that the Witch-King feared him: Quote:
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This reveals the Witch-King feared Boromir, not only in life but in death. Glorfindel says nothing about a living man, but 500+ years after killing the warrior-Steward he feared, he's still clearly haunted by Boromir's ghost. :eek: |
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Right. Anyway the all-female Fellowship. If we take the all-male Fellowship by comparsion. -Galadriel is Gandalf -Eowyn is Boromir (Eomer commented that Boromir looked more like the "swift sons of Eorl" than the grim men of Minas Tirith) -Dis is Gimli -Arwen is Aragorn -Tauriel is Legolas How about though, if Tauriel sticks in your craw...Celebrian? Instead of going to the Undying Lands after her capture and torture, she actually takes the role that Elladan and Elrohir fill. She forever hates orcs and feels the only way to heal is to go on these orc-killing rampages. Her decision to join the all-female Fellowship is purely motivated by revenge. Quote:
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But that's really a question for another thread (this, to link but one)... |
So, it's taken me a couple days, but I sat down and went looking for the phrase "it is said" in the Silmarillion, to give us some fodder for this thread, and here's the start of what I found. It goes right back to the beginning:
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And that's where I ran out of copy/paste energy. There are twenty more instances of "it is said" in the published Silm (including the "Akallabêth" and "Of the Rings of Power"--I just have other things to do with my life than copying over quotations all day! Run free with the "ah, but it could be other things than what the people said" speculation! :D |
I'll leave the early It Is Saids to you, and wanna add a late one. This is something that came up on a different thread, and I will summarize it here. Basically, the marriage of Tuor and Idril is special, being one of the 3 Unions, and all 3 have one of the spouses being sundered from their kin. In the other two, the immortal wife becomes mortal. The Valar explicitly tell Luthien that they cannot keep Eru's gift from Beren. But Tuor, lucky dog, gets to live eternally with Idril and is not counted among Men! The situation also raised its own questions, e.g. where are they living, if they've never returned to ME nor ever reached Valinor?
Then, someone pointed out to me that this information is based on an It Is Said: Quote:
I am actually rather fond of an odea that allows to reconcile Tuor's rumoured immortality and Idril's absence with the reality of the fate of Men. On their voyage westwards, they get entangled in the enchantments of the Sundering Seas. These enchantments are known, among other things, to distort time and space, to use the SciFi terminology. Tuor and Idril find themselves trapped in a bubble that is severed from the flow of time. For a backstory, say the ship crashes into a small island and they can never leave, and time literally doesn't pass for them. Then, in whatever spacewarp magic is involves in the Sundering Seas and the Straight Road separates the island from being physically accessjble from either plane of reality. Tuor and Idril indeed find themselves alive and together, suspended between worlds, out of Time, living forever without violating the Gift or needing to arrive anywhere. Not sure if they would be conscious, probably not, but they would still fulfill the legend. After all, the suspended-state-living works for Pharazon, exceot here it's accidental and sort of a good thing. So rather than debunk an It Is Said fact, I would much rather create a story to support it. :) A sleeping timeless couple, suspended in time and forever in love until the end of the world will reshake the planes of reality and they will come apart to rejoin their respective races. While looking for that paragraph, I also noticed its neighbour: Quote:
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Honestly, if we're coming up with alternate Tuor and Idril takes, I'm going to make a case for "Beren & Lúthien 2.0." If, as there seems to be some evidence, they are never seen again, in Middle-earth or Valinor, isn't the simplest explanation that... they're both dead?
After all, if each retained their own fate, even a dead-in-this-world Idril would go to the Halls of Mandos and so their ever-sundered end could become known. If they're still alive, then... where? Arda is not endless. But what if they both shared the Fate of Men? That's what happens to the other "Big 3" Elf-Man couples: Lúthien and Arwen both give up the Fate of the Elves and join the Fates of Men. And there's enough stuff in the Athrabêth and around the Gift of Men to suggest that this is how things are slanted: it's better to counted among Men and share their fate. Even with the half-Elven, until the case of Eärendil and Elwing, Tolkien says that the default situation is that the half-Elven share the fates of Men, suggesting that this is the default case (the dominant gene, so to speak). The Choice given the surviving Pereldar is a Gift--you can't go back and ask Dior, Eluréd, or Elurín what they'd have preferred, not least because they've already departed the cirlces of this world. Therefore, it seems to me, if Idril and Tuor shared the same fate, it seems far more likely that Idril must have enjoyed the Fate of Lútien than that Tuor became the sole exception in the opposite direction. |
Sort of stealing from an old thread of mine on misunderstandings based on dialect.
Dwarves eat birthday cakes like biscuits. |
The people of Laketown had barrel races. They would ride barrels across the lake and see who was the fastest. After all, why else would Barrel Rider clue Smaug into Laketown? Obviously Barrel Riding was extremely common, ergo Barrel Races.
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The only possibility is that individual barrels were ridden regularly on the Long Lake itself, where Smaug could see them from his mountain. (There's not a lot that would look like a barrel being ridden, is there?) Humans being humans, competition - races - is an inevitability. hS |
I am currently reading a fanfic where one of the characters proposes that Amrod and Amras are the same person, because allegedly they are never seen together, and they are just all too identical even for twins. :D
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The version of this I'm thinking of is even more extreme: it holds that after Amras was burned with the ships, his spirit possessed his brother on a sort of time-share basis. Voluntarily on both sides, naturally! Which is very much the sort of thing Tolkien might have done! We know from the Glorfindel example that he was happy to employ the nature of Elvish life to resolve what he saw as conflicts between two "fixed" works: rather than changing either the Fall of Gondolin or LotR, he used Elvish reincarnation and the fact that it is possible to sail back from "heaven" under the right conditions. So, had he considered both "Amras burns at Losgar" and "Seven sons of Feanor in Beleriand" to be unchangeable texts, he might well have turned to the comments in LaCE on possession: Quote:
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I mean, I would jokingly think on occasion that Amrod and Amras must have been conjoined twins, they're always together. But this is even better! For the official history records! :D |
What if Ambarussa was actally one Elf with multiple personality disorder? Feanor, mindful of his family's reputation, just put it about that the "Amrod" and "Amras" personas were identical twin brothers....
Sort of like Zoot and her "identical twin sister" Dingo. |
Fanficolfin, Fingolfin's alter ego at Eldamar's Saturday night open mic comedy revue:
"Hey, nothing smells worse on a hot Summer's day than Tirion upon Túna." Ba-dump-tisch "I just flew in last night with Gothmog. Boy, were his Balrog's wings sore." *crickets* "Tough crowd." |
In The Hobbit, Gandalf says of Beorn:
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- It is never said that Beorn is dead, only that his son has taken his title. One imagines an undying (not Immortal) skin-changer feels the need for change every now and then, so he could have just moved away. (We should ignore Tolkien's claim in Letter 144 that "Beorn is dead"; death of the author, etc.) - We know that Men can attain unnaturally long life: there are 11 examples in the Third Age (the Nazgul, Gollum, and Bilbo), and a magician of Beorn's caliber could doubtless find a way. One clear possibility is the Tale of Adanel from the Athrabeth, in HoME X: it asserts that Men originally had unlimited life, with the Gift being only that they would leave Arda when they at last died. This was taken from them by Iluvatar because they worshipped Morgoth for a time - but perhaps Beorn had already left, abandoning his own race for the company of bears. He may even have gone off with Nuin the Dark Elf and Tu the Sorceror, if we can accept a bit of Lost Tales material. - The first Man to enter Beleriand was named Beor - a name given to him by the elves, but taken from his own language. He can't be Beorn himself, but it says that the name is plausible for the time period. - Most importantly, 'beorn' is an Elvish word. In fact it's the word for "Man", in Nandorin - the language of the elves east of the Misty Mountains, exactly where Beorn lived. The only possibility is that Beorn is one of the first Men to awaken. He didn't stay among his people, but immediately headed west, learning along the way the magic that transforms him into a bear. By the time the Men of Hildorien fell into the worship of the Dark, he was safely ensconsed in the Vale of Anduin - and his name became the name for his entire race among the elves who dwelt there. It's only logical, after all. :D hS |
Glancing through the "It is said"s of the Appendices, there's a lot to work with. So we can firmly argue that:
- Elrond never fought Angmar. His/Rivendell's involvement carries not one but two 'it is said's. He just sat at home drinking Dorwinion wine while the men of Arnor fought and died. - Aragorn I was not killed by wolves as it is said; much like Anakin Skywalker, he clearly defected to the enemy and became a leader of the Orc armies in the Misty Mountains. He may have lived long enough to be behind the capture and torture of Celebrian. - The Witch-King was actually entirely absent from the Fall of Angmar - both his presence in Fornost and his appearance on the battlefield are 'said'. - Gimli never went to Valinor. There's two mentions of the story, one with 'it is said' and the other 'we have heard tell'. Actually, Legolas just got bored with him and shot him in the back one day. "Does that only count as one?" - There were actually sixty thousand Istari - it's only said there were five. The "five wizards" Gandalf mentions are just a club, like the Inklings. The others are fairly boring; I'm not sure there's a lot you can do with 'maybe Merry and Pippin weren't entombed next to Aragorn!!!'. :) hS |
"Beorn is dead." --JRR Tolkien.
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Yeah, so I saw that after I'd written most of the post and decided not to scrap it just because - pfft - the actual author specifically denied it. (One could argue that 'Beorn is dead' doesn't strictly mean 'and had a normal Mannish lifespan'... but the full quote contradicts that too, at least by implication. ^_~) hS |
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Made under license from the Saul Zaentz Company d/b/a Feanorian Enterprises, by Weta Workshop of Goblin-Town
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They were actually... paintings, maybe? Paintings would work. Makes Morgoth's crown look a little daft, but then, it always did. hS |
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Tell you what might be fun, and entirely on-topic for this thread: figuring out whether there's anything else it's possible to argue balrogs have in the text. The obvious ("obvious") one is that Durin's Bane isn't actually humanoid! It's described as "of man-shape maybe", but it's clear they couldn't see all that well and just didn't get around to giving a better description. As becomes clear from "Its streaming mane kindled, and blazed behind it", and the way it keeps jumping around - it's actually a centaur. A winged one. :D hS |
Obviously the balrog did track and field in high school sprinting and long jumping. Mane is clearly describing long locks the balrog is Fabio
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When I hear "mane", the first thing I think about is a lion.
Which makes me wonder... I would not be susprised if someone somewhere (like in the 80s) depicted the Balrog as a manticore! (Ahem, obviously including, ahem, wings.) |
Ralph Bashkis Balrog is pretty close to be honest.
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