<font face="Verdana"><table><TR><TD><FONT SIZE="1" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">The Unquiet Dead
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<img src="http://www.barrowdowns.com/images/posticons/redeye.jpg" align=absmiddle> Re: Who knows their trolls?
Well yes, Master Underhill, your penultimate post makes the case that all trolls must be Olog-hai in the War of the Ring. Or else that Sauron's shielding dark must preserve trolls from the sun.
Why? Trolls fight on several fronts. Does Sauron ship them there in packing crates? How do they get to the Pelennor at all? It is more than one day's (one night's) march from Mordor.
I would have argued (I did) that Sauron's sheltering dark was conceived for just this kind of contingency. The burning red sun in the sky is a sun compromised. Don't ask for a quasi-sientific optico-filtration essay; I lack the background to write it (and so did the Prof.).
The argument, as I see it, continues to rest on designations. And as another thread on this board points out, the Prof. was keen on them. I just don't remember seeing the term Olog-hai used in the story.
Speaking of rationalizations, I wonder if the Prof. didn't engage in some himself. He justified the superior light resistance of Olog-hai after he decided to have trolls fight for Sauron. It wouldn't be the first difficulty he had had to redact for in the process of telling the big story.
And I'm always wary of using examples from the Hobbit to clinch arguments about anything other than the Hobbit. Those trolls had to turn to stone at the crack of dawn for dramaturgical reasons. The ones in LotR needed to fight in battles and campaigns that transcended the duration of one night. I think that the the dramaturgical reasons came first and the rationalizations followed.
The radical change in troll phototropism seems much more absolute than the similar changes in orc nature. Of course the answer could be that lots of the old Mark IIIs still exist and that we just don't meet them. Lesser orcs could be bullied into daylight service against their inherent fear of the sun. Trolls just couldn't be bullied into daylight, so only the Mark IVs go to war. But I still think it odd that JRRT wouldn't have used his beloved words to distinguish trolls as he so obviously did with orcs. I agree that we get a lot more chances to see orcs, but it seems to me that there are enough trollish opportunities for him to have dropped the name (Olog-hai) if he had wanted to. As he didn't, I remain unconvinced that the race was integral to his thinking.
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