Quote:
Originally Posted by Eomer of the Rohirrim
I do not take other talking objects - the troll's purse, Turin's sword - at face value, thinking of them as storytellers' decoration, and it is, in any case, implied to a far smaller degree that the horn talked.
Still, interesting topic.
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I quite like that idea, especially since I'm not too fond of the talking objects from a... ahem, canonical point of view, though the purse is fun if you see Bilbo as a stand-alone fairytale.
But yeah, I can totally see how Bilbo, when writing his story, would add certain elements to make it more captivating and remove other elements to make himself look better. Perhaps he just stepped on a twig and was caught by the trolls without much drama but that wouldn't make a good story, would it?
And there were no witnesses around to contradict him. If you accept the premiss that Tolkien was merely the translator of these stories from an ancient past you also have to take into account that, as far as I can remember, no-one was around to hear Turin's sword talking to him, so there's no telling exactly what happened before he took his own life.
And yeah, I'm also quite certain Tolkien didn't intent the Buckland Horn to carry a magically pre-recorded voice message. I don't mind if you read it that way though,
alman.