<font face="Verdana"><table><TR><TD><FONT SIZE="1" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Animated Skeleton
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<img src="http://www.barrowdowns.com/images/posticons/redeye.jpg" align=absmiddle> Re: Who knows their trolls?
It seems that nothing short of an explicit, non-appendicitic (I made up that word! Get me, I'm a philologist!) textual reference will satisfy you galpsi. I am not the textual expert you seek, and perhaps this thread will finally have to be laid to rest until someone has a chance to do a read through now that the question has been raised.
At the risk of beating a dead horse into an unrecognizable bloody pulp, though, let me compile some of the points made so far into a case of seemingly overwhelming circumstantial evidence that the "mountain-troll" Pippin victimized was a fabled Olog-hai.
Burrahobbit’s observation re: the Uruk-hai is a keen one. A quick scan of “The Battle of Pelennor Fields” reveals no references made specifically to any Uruk-hai, only to orcs – but surely this formidable host was comprised mostly of Sauron’s toughest foot-soldiers? I wonder how often the Uruk-hai are referred to as such outside of conversations among themselves? Now that I think about it, JRR tended to confine utterances made in the Black Speech to the mouths of the bad guys – one notably shocking exception being Gandalf’s reading of the Ring’s inscription at the Council of Elrond, which caused some to stop their ears.
I happened across the “half-trolls” reference you cited earlier, g, and noticed that the quote says that the men of Far Harad were <u>like</u> half-trolls – more of a hyperbole on their extraordinary size (and ugliness?) than a racial denotation. This shows that JRR wasn’t quite as careless with his “race theory” as your evidence might have suggested.
IMHO, we can’t just dismiss the info in the appendices as mere crude editorial band-aids. They are a part of the book and are arguably more canonically valid than, say, the Silmarillion. For that matter, I’d argue that we can’t just disregard info in The Hobbit because it seems like an inconvenient and best forgotten dramaturgical conceit. The prof’s well-known perfectionism argues against the idea that he would make such a clumsy “fix” on trolls when he could have easily inserted an Olog-hai reference into the text if he thought one was motivated. I’d say that the same trait would likely have prevented him from simply ignoring his earlier troll rule. The HoME book I mentioned earlier shows that, even many years later, JRR still pondered (and felt obligated to abide by) this curious feature of troll nature.
So if we can conclude that Sauron did in fact breed superior Mark IV trolls, and that the Mark III’s remained susceptible to sunlight, it’s not an unreasonable deduction to presume that the trolls encountered before the Morannon, at least, are Olog-hai. Why come up with an unfounded optico-filtration theory when the prof has already offered a reasonable explanation? And if he bred them right there in Mordor and presumably had a stockpile on hand, why would he throw the older model into battle first in the critical conflict about to be joined on his very doorstep?
So my argument in a nutshell is that we do see Olog-hai, but that the prof never found a place that motivated a specific Black Speech reference to them <u>until</u> he got to the appendix. You’ve mentioned his love of nomenclature. Maybe he had this cool name for the suped-up troll-folk and didn’t want to waste it, and <u>that’s</u> why he put it in the appendix. That’s my best shot without a explicit textual reference on hand.
Look at that horse. What a mess.
</p>Edited by: <A HREF=http://www.barrowdowns.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_profile&u=00000005>Mister Underhill</A> Edited by: 9/13/00 1:05:47 pm
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