[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by davem

The point at issue is whether Tolkien would have considered lunch & dinner to be interchangeable. I say he wouldn't - 'cos he was English. And, as I've stated, Hobbits have 'dinner twice a day when they can get it' so an evening dinner does not preclude a mid day dinner - in fact it requires a mid day dinner - unless they have two dinners at night. Thus, as I stated, Breakfast, second breakfast, first dinner, tea, second dinner, supper - if Hobbits have 'six' meals a day & two of them are breakfasts, two dinners, & there is a tea & a supper in there then tehre's no room for 'lunch'. Tolkien specifically states 'two dinners'.

Give it up, Davem, please. I find it interesting that you would quote the 'narrator' regarding the single mention of 'dinner twice a day if they can get it', and ignore the several uses of the term lunch from said narrator. You have continually discounted the narrator's mention of anything contradicting your beliefs. Oh, as a matter of fact, here's your quote:

Originally Posted by Davem

Lunch is not 'featured prominently in the text' – it is used by three characters – once by Pippin, twice by Merry & once by Gimli – the other times it appears it is used by the narrator/translator- which may tell us a great deal about the narrator/translator but little about Hobbits.

What it tells me is that the narrator used lunch and dinner and dinner and supper interchangeably; therefore, you can't alight on the single white poppy in a whole field of red ones and say, 'Hah! All poppies are white!'

I will ask a third time, in fact I will post the same request I posted the first two times:

And please supply a direct quote from any Hobbit character of the lower classes that uses the term 'dinner' for a midday meal. You won't find it, and neither will you find a reference to 'lunch' or 'supper'. The absence of something does not prove you are correct. The only reference to a lower class Hobbit using the term 'dinner' is Old Noakes and that was concerning a meal in the moonlight.

Anything else is conjecture on your part and cannot be verified. Also, please forego outside sources that have no bearing on the text. Your original claim that Hobbits would not use the term 'lunch' has already been proven false, and you have yet to prove that dinner and lunch are not interchangeable. I have provided ample proofs that they indeed are interchangeable (and in addition to 'lunch' being an 'official' meal of Bilbo's birthday party, there is also "Folco went home after lunch" with Frodo). What it comes down to is 'lunch' is indeed a term used by Hobbits, and therefore is acceptable in a fan-fic or a new revisualization of Middle-earth.

If you'd like to discuss something that has an actual bearing on class distinctions among Hobbits (and there were many and easily discernible and textually provable), then please drop this farcical argument.