Quote:
Originally Posted by Soriman the Whide
I've spent far too much time arriving at nonsense.
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Hey, no stealing my method!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Soriman the Whide
This is all very interesting and seems like fun but it appears to me that years of playing this game has made you all far too good at this.
Would anybody please explain in a little more detail how you might arrive at a guess that seems reasonable?
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Let's take #1 as an example, and maybe I'll figure out the answer as I go...
The first thing I do is look for anagram indicators - in this case, "troubled" suggests that the letters are probably scrambled at some point. "Note" is also a useful word - it usually means we're adding (or removing, in this case - "without note") one of the musical notes A-G. ("Direction" could mean something like N for North, or L for Left; we've even had U and D for Up and Down!)
So now I'm at "Refund [minus one of A-G]. [Anagram of] immolation tool?". Most of the time, we need to look for synonyms of the parts of the clue - "refund" might be "rebate", "pay back", "compensate". All of those contain notes, so any would be possible - but how many could give a Tolkien-related answer?
The structure of most clues these days is that you have a
straight clue, which tells you what the actual answer means ("archer" could point at Legolas; a lot of these are "him" or "there"), and a
cryptic clue which constructs the word through anagrams and synonyms and so forth ("construction toy + girl - S" would be Lego+las[s]). Given that
Pervinca has hinted at "immolation tool?" being a straight clue (it's something actually used in the books), I think the split is:
CRYPTIC: [Synonym of 'refund'] [minus one of A-G] [anagrammed] = STRAIGHT: [thing used in LotR as tool to set things on fire]
Then it comes down to trying things out and seeing if you can find a Tolkien answer. You can narrow it down by thinking about the theme - earlier I figured we were doing something about the Last Alliance, but Denethor has scuppered that. We're still looking at a lot of people's names, though, so I'd focus in that direction.
It can be worth browsing through the likes of
Tolkien Gateway and
Encyclopedia of Arda (smaller, but with helpful thematic lists), particularly if you know the first letter, but often you can find the answer in your memory of names - 'Denethor', for instance, I doubt many of us need to look up!
... after all that, though, I still can't find the answer. ^_^ Anagrams are my bane, sadly; I just can't make them work in my head, so I have to attack them from the theme/straight clue. In this case, I've not yet managed it.
hS