Well, after a busy week I come back to find my behaviour is abnormal (monks post #21), aberrant (#21), irrational (#21), bizarre (#21), an 'ape routine' (#23), and 'like an idiot' (#23). So that's fun.
Also that I'm avoiding clicking on an image which I'd already looked at while discussing various parts of the image, and that by continuing the list that I'd already promised to complete, I'm... ooh, all sorts of things.
monks - when you first posted, I went to your website to see what you had. Your
predictions page centres on a colour-coded table with no indication I could find of what the colours mean, and no indication of whether you've proven them true or false. The full explanation of them consists of a 200+ page PDF which has no way of skipping to a specific prediction, and is naturally impossible to use on a phone. When you link to things related to your predictions, they are more often than not random pictures with no explanation of what's going on.
Now, it may be that somewhere you have a nice list of separate discussions (such as blog posts) which lay everything out nice and neatly. But you haven't made them intuitively easy to find, and I don't owe you the time to go looking for them. If I'm going to do 'work' for one of my hobbies, it will be 'work' I enjoy - such as, for example, 'proving' Tolkien's love of
The Seven Samurai. That was fun. ^_^
(And incidentally, I wasn't inferring
you were an egomaniac - I was playacting as one to emphasise the silliness of my theory. Sorry that came out wrong!)
Similarly, no, I cannot just reply to your posts, because your posts are spread so broad. In the one where you said you were going to focus solely on 'Wickedness' and on the Door, you still brought in, what, a dozen different predictions. Once again, I don't owe you the time to dig through and figure out what needs a reply.
And yet, here I am. So: my reply will not cover everything you've said, but will cover whatever pops out to me as important.
1/ I think you're misunderstanding my point about numerology. I'm saying that,
whether Tolkien had a system or not, your ability to 'interpret' that system is fundamentally subjective. You can 'predict' things in such a way that
they will always be true. I'm not saying you'd do it deliberately! But, for example, your 'seven unveilings' prediction (which
your link does nothing to explain) requires you to - subjectively - determine what constitutes an unveiling. I guarantee you I could find something to fit in every single chapter of LotR - but you have predicted 7, and interpreted the book in light of that prediction.
2/ The 'Wickedness' woman: no. The 'hair' comes from
beneath the eyes - it's a moustache, if anything, but really it's some quite evocative shading.
Could it be symbolically hair? Sure! Just as it
could be two opposing forces fighting, or a butterfly's wings, or a giant claw, or or or... it's
subjective. You are saying that Tolkien, before Middle-earth was even a twinkle in his eye, already had this system of yours and used it in his private sketchbook. I counter by saying that you're subjectively interpreting the supposed system into his works.
A test for you:
here's my deviantArt.
Imagine I follow Tolkien's system. Now take a look through my pictures and find the evidence to support that theory. (I'll start you off: there's a
diamond of seven women here for the 7 veils, and
a string of four Dagazes here.)
3/ Your prediction 71, 'loathly'. Sure, maybe! There's ten 'loath-' words across LotR, and that's the only 'loathly'. It's an unusual word, so going from 'Tolkien described "Her Ladyship" as loathly' to 'he was referring to the Loathly Lady' isn't actually a big leap. Well done on finding that.
But. Several buts, in fact:
- You predicted 'loathly or loathsome'. You were right with the less common word, but you would still be claiming it as true had you found the more common one. The spiders in The Hobbit are 'loathsome'; this now looks less like a miraculous prediction, and more like an easy win that paid off with a bonus.
- Tolkien uses a lot of words to describe Shelob. In that paragraph alone, I count at least 15 distinctive adjectives used of her. You've selected one as relevant to your theory, but had you come in with a completely different theory, you might be just as enthusiastic about 'blotched'.
- Let's assume that loathly Shelob is because of the Loathly Lady. That still does nothing to demonstrate an overarching theme - just that Tolkien knew the phrase (obviously!) and wanted to drop it in - a "low philological jest", if you will. He does that a lot - the most obvious is that Numenor and Eressea are "coincidentally" also named Atlantis and Avalon. That doesn't mean there's a deep Plato theme running through Middle-earth - it just means Tolkien likes references. You think you've found strong links to other parts of the story - but see alllll the previous comments on subjectivity.
4/ Your balrog whips theory reveals something significant. Unfortunately, it's that you're not taking the timeline of Tolkien's writing into account. Balrogs have had whips since 1917's
Fall of Gondolin, the first full story of the Legendarium; they weren't given them as part of a theme with Shelob, because there was no Shelob! In fact, at the time the Balrog was written into LotR, there was
still no Shelob. Hunt down HoME VII,
The Treason of Isengard, and check out 'The Story Foreseen from Lorien' - Tolkien's original plan still had an infiltration of a tower, but that tower was
Minas Morgul, and both Sam and Frodo took part! Things like the stone sentinels are in there - but Shelob is not. Tolkien categorically cannot have put the Balrog's whip in as part of a theme with Shelob - because the whip came long before he invented Her Ladyship.
And this is the problem. We know far too much about Tolkien's writing process to treat every word as part of a deliberate plan. Are there references in there? Definitely! Are some of yours actual references Tolkien intended? Almost certainly! But are they part of some larger scheme? To prove that, you'd need to prove from the known timeline of Tolkien's writing that he was actually working to a plan. All your continued talk of etymology attempts to prove is that he
could have done it - not that he did.
No doubt I have missed things I wanted to comment on, but this is already a 70 minute post, so you'll have to be content with that.
hS