I love HoME XIII; it's such a quirky book, every few pages you run into something new and deeply strange.
Like the Dwarf Naming Fragments, where Tolkien experimented with "true Rhovani names for the dwarves" (actually just Gimli, because we all know about Tolkien and ambitious mission statements). Which one should we take as (pseudo-)canon - the 'what if their language was all suffixes?' Kadhrolissontaforil, the 'is this a bit too on the nose?' Moshes, or the 'technically gimli is a word in Adunaic anyway, and stars are pretty close to fire, so let's just call him' Gimli?
Or maybe we should ignore them all, on the ground that (as Christopher said), 'my father was clearly immensely displeased with this whole line of thought; the fragments were discarded, and indeed appear only to have survived due to my mother retrieving them from the waste-paper basket for use as shopping lists'.
hS
|