Now this is why I love the Downs. “Scimitars of steel” as onomatopoeia – wonderful! I can hear the hiss of the sharpened blade. Fascinating observation with regard to alliteration in the prof’s scholarly work, too – I’ll have to keep an eye out for that.
Something interesting always turns up when you page through
Letters, so I thought I’d toss this into the pot, too:
Quote:
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In any case if you want to write a tale of this sort you must consult your roots, and a man of the North-west of the Old World will set his heart and the action of his tale in an imaginary world of that air, and that situation : with the Shoreless Sea of his innumerable ancestors to the West, and the endless lands (out of which enemies mostly come) to the East.
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The Hobbit (from which the “scimitars of steel” quote is drawn) was written in the early part of the century, a period when the popular (if not necessarily historically accurate) conception of Arabs in the West was as bands of warring, warlike tribes – many examples can be found amongst the pulp writers of the era, in films like
The Lost Patrol, in the clashing “scymitars” of Burton’s
Arabian Nights, in Kipling, and so on. I think the scimitars – especially within the context of when the work was written – allude to Orcish social organization as tribal and warlike, and also simply have vague associations of “enemy”.