When I signed up for this charming Tolkien forum, I never dreamed I would one day play games that sent me to the Icelanding Saga Database.

#4:
Njal has a son called Grim, which looks promising. There is actually a Rider of Rohan named Grimbold who would fit, but isn't an it and is the wrong way round. (The fourth son in the saga is Hauskeld; I'm not sure which is the foster-son.)

#2:
Linger ...I mean, it almost makes "Glend" again. :D If I'm misunderstanding the clue, the river GREYLIN would fit (Y is known as "Greek I" in French, which I guess is "I turned towards the east").

#1:
As far as I can tell, literally every fruit can be infused in gin, and every cocktail has a rude name. ^_^ Sloe looks possible... right, is it AEGLOS?

hS

AEGLOS: Silver fruit combines for another shiny thing.
2. Hang around in confusion, with eye turned to the Orient, so to speak, to see it.
GLEND: Cambrian rebel, but no longer in debt, reveals it.
4. Lionheart and son of Njal! Change the fourth to find it.

GRIM is correct. (Hoskuld is the foster son).

LINGER - look at the theme, and do the 'Orient' thing. ;)

Ahhh, I had the Orient thing backwards: it's not I>E, it's E>I. So lingir > RINGIL.

... does Theoden have a sword named HERUGRIM? 'Hero' for lion-heart.

With the password being "ARGH!". :D

hS

AEGLOS: Silver fruit combines for another shiny thing.
RINGIL: Hang around in confusion, with eye turned to the Orient, so to speak, to see it.
GLEND: Cambrian rebel, but no longer in debt, reveals it.
HERUGRIM: Lionheart and son of Njal! Change the fourth to find it.

Well done!

And over to you. :)

Okay, I know it's been a few days, but here we go at last:

1. - Of the fall, mad glory is his, but the day neither begins nor ends.
2. - You run of four, less nitrogen upon the horn.
3. - In the tower, the same without the most common.
4. - The weaver's eye is forward for the most magical, beside the sea.
5. - That which sits upon the shaft is missing nigh to Angband.

Most of these don't have a straight clue per se, but they do all have a clue as to why they fit the theme.

hS

Same wothout the most common vowel (letter?) E makes SAM, in the tower of Cirith Ungol perhaps?

Correct and correct (and yes, E is the most common letter in English).

1. - Of the fall, mad glory is his, but the day neither begins nor ends.
2. - You run of four, less nitrogen upon the horn.
SAM - In the tower, the same without the most common.
4. - The weaver's eye is forward for the most magical, beside the sea.
5. - That which sits upon the shaft is missing nigh to Angband.

hS

1. MAGLOR, losing both the D and Y from DAY in MAD GLORY?

...

Is it MUSIC? Sam sang in the Tower ... did Maglor sing of the Fall of Gondolin?

And would that make 4 VAIRE, with the I pushed forward?

Yep!

And yep! (Fall of the Noldor, but yes.)

Well, it does, but you forgot to push the I forward. The red letter is the first letter.

MAGLOR - Of the fall, mad glory is his, but the day neither begins nor ends.
2.U - You run of four, less nitrogen upon the horn.
SAM - In the tower, the same without the most common.
4.I - The weaver's eye is forward for the most magical, beside the sea.
5.C - That which sits upon the shaft is missing nigh to Angband.

hS

Then the answer must be ... IVARE. A minstrel.

So, which of the remaining answers is Glenn Yarbrough? :D

And who, in Middle-earth, sang 'When I'm Cleaning Winders' and played the UKELELE?

None of them *appear* to be Bombadil - are you saying he isn't musical?

There's an URTHEL, which is an anagram of HURTLE, which sort of means RUN ....

Who plays (pipes, I think) beside the sea, and is one of the Three Most Magical minstrels (with Dairon and Tinfang Warble) in the Book of Lost Tales. Yep!

I'm afraid I couldn't possible comment. :D

Nope, and the run has nothing to do with movement.

(Both remaining clues are characters' names; one is their most common name, the other had to go by a secondary name.)

MAGLOR - Of the fall, mad glory is his, but the day neither begins nor ends.
2.U - You run of four, less nitrogen upon the horn.
SAM - In the tower, the same without the most common.
IVARE - The weaver's eye is forward for the most magical, beside the sea.
5.C - That which sits upon the shaft is missing nigh to Angband.

hS

I must confess myself a little bit stuck. I had some thoughts that the last one could be Fingon, because "missing" = "gone", and he sings nigh to Angband when rescuing Maedhros. But I can't explain the first part, and it certainly doesn't start with C.


Back in the days when I was a regular on Palantir of Fortune, that was my favourite letter to guess, and I dedicated a fair bit of time looking for sentences with no Es. There are quite a few such, but most are along the lines of "it was raining hard", not quotable material. But then I found it, the best quotable E-less gem in Tolkien. "Uglúk u bagronk sha pushdug Saruman-glob búbhosh skai." :D

I'm guessing the remaining two answers are obscure ones that don't appear in the Encyclopaedia of Arda. Probably from Lost Tales or something.

Presumably both ULMO and UINEN had something to do with the AINULINDALE, but the U clue doesn't fit with either.

Fingon is wrong, but you're right that you need a synonym for 'missing', and that he sings outside Angband. Which... really, there's only like one other person who does that I think. Maybe another one if I'm forgetting something.

Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatulûk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul. :D

It is in fact Ulmo (on his horns). U + a run of four letters, LMNO, less N for nitrogen. I'm so sorry. ^_~

The final character is very well known, and this particular name appears on EoA both in the original Elvish and in translation. Two pages for the price of one!

MAGLOR - Of the fall, mad glory is his, but the day neither begins nor ends.
ULMO - You run of four, less nitrogen upon the horn.
SAM - In the tower, the same without the most common.
IVARE - The weaver's eye is forward for the most magical, beside the sea.
5.C - That which sits upon the shaft is missing nigh to Angband.

hS

There's CAMLOST, but he only seems to have LOST as a kind of synonym for missing, plus an Angband connection.

Camlost it is, by way of cam-shaft. "Farewell, sweet earth and northern sky" etc is the song I was thinking of.

MAGLOR - Of the fall, mad glory is his, but the day neither begins nor ends.
ULMO - You run of four, less nitrogen upon the horn.
SAM - In the tower, the same without the most common.
IVARE - The weaver's eye is forward for the most magical, beside the sea.
CAMLOST - That which sits upon the shaft is missing nigh to Angband.

(He joins the likes of Turin and Beleg in not being generally musical, but having one notable performance in the Great Tales. Surprisingly, I don't think Tuor gets one.)

And we're done! Sorry it was a bit all over the place, I'm not really with it this... month? Season? Half of the year? I don't even know.

Over to you, Pervinca, and well done. :)

hS

Ah, I didn't realise it was Beren who sang that song. I thought Luthien's people sang it about her ... I think I must have read that it was Beren but forgotten it. BTW you mentioned him having 2 names, but wasn't he ERCHAMION as well? (Or does that just mean CAMLOST anyway?)

An excellent password anyway, Huinesoron!

Finding it hard to think up new passwords now, but managed to put together this one:

1. Frodo's bed in the wilderness.
2. Throw a slippery fish to this place, we hear, for her.
3. Alternatively, no distant direction will reveal it.
4. Tea, tube and Christmas may precede her.
5. One ocean, one direction, one vegetable - topped, but not tailed. It's a living thing - deprived twice of nitrogen.

I think they're basically synonyms, yeah; I didn't mean to say he only had two names, so sorry about that. :)

hS

I really want #4 to be one of those riddles where you have to find the word that can fit after any of the options. Tea LIGHT, Christmas LIGHT, but not really tube LIGHT... :-/

hS

It IS one of those kinds of riddles.

You maybe haven't shopped for josssticks and fancy soaps as much as I have. ;)

I have a shoebox full of incense sticks, but they're all called things like "strawberry" and "sandalwood". ;)

The trouble is, I can do loads of things with tea + christmas, but none of them fit with tube. Actually nothing comes to mind that starts with "tube" other than "tube alloys", and I don't think nuclear weapon programs are relevant.

(Google gets totally lost on "tube map". Ah yes, Christmas map, that well known... thing...)

Actually actually, tube TREE is just about possible, though I'm not convinced by teatree as a soap flavour. ("Her" would presumably be Laurelin or Hirilorn in that case.)

hS

Oxfam used to do packets of lots of little assorted incense sticks in about ten different perfumes. I'm almost certain one of them was tube----

That which we call this, by any other name would smell as sweet. ;)

Well I learn something new every day. My wife has heard of the tea variety, but the others I had to look up. Is it tubeROSE or tuber-ose, do you know?

(The weirdest incense sticks are always the ones labelled things like "opium". Um... hopefully that's just poppy flavour?!)

#1 could be from this:

Which would make it either LAP or SAM.

Oh! #3 is Or+0+far+... something. NE, maybe? Right, OROFARNE, one of Quickbeam's poor rowans.

hS

1. Frodo's bed in the wilderness.
2. Throw a slippery fish to this place, we hear, for her.
OROFARNE: Alternatively, no distant direction will reveal it.
ROSE: Tea, tube and Christmas may precede her.
5. One ocean, one direction, one vegetable - topped, but not tailed. It's a living thing - deprived twice of nitrogen.

I've always assumed it's tube-rose, although I've never checked it.

Sam/Lap is a lovely answer, but not the right one. The answer lies in an earlier Frodo and Sam scene.

Doesn't Frodo complain that a ROOT(s) bored a hole in his back, on their first night without a roof?

And there you have it: to make a language as un-English as possible, take out the Es. ^.^

Not as early in the story as that. It's from one of the Frodo-Sam-Gollum chapters. Just not the one Huinesoron chose.

It's really interesting how much time Frodo in particular spends sleeping in TTT. I get the feeling Tolkien was drawing specifically on the bone-weariness of living in the trenches, where (apparently) one slept whenever one possibly could, because one never knew when shells would start falling.

Right around the time Sam and Gollum argue about rabbits, Frodo is sleeping on some brown FERNS, which would fit with what might be a plant theme.

... lob eel 'ere. Really, Pervinca? ;) :D

hS

FERN: Frodo's bed in the wilderness.
LOBELIA: Throw a slippery fish to this place, we hear, for her.
OROFARNE: Alternatively, no distant direction will reveal it.
ROSE: Tea, tube and Christmas may precede her.
5. One ocean, one direction, one vegetable - topped, but not tailed. It's a living thing - deprived twice of nitrogen.

Password: Flora?

FERN: Frodo's bed in the wilderness.
LOBELIA: Throw a slippery fish to this place, we hear, for her.
OROFARNE: Alternatively, no distant direction will reveal it.
ROSE: Tea, tube and Christmas may precede her.
A: One ocean, one direction, one vegetable - topped, but not tailed. It's a living thing - deprived twice of nitrogen.

For the final one, ASEA ARANION.

A + sea + A + R + onion... not sure from there on how to get the second half of the sentence into swapping O for A.

FERN: Frodo's bed in the wilderness.
LOBELIA: Throw a slippery fish to this place, we hear, for her.
OROFARNE: Alternatively, no distant direction will reveal it.
ROSE: Tea, tube and Christmas may precede her.
ASEA ARANION: One ocean, one direction, one vegetable - topped, but not tailed. It's a living thing - deprived twice of nitrogen.

AN 'R,' AN ONION.

Top the onion, (lose its first letter) but don't tail it, (like when you top and tail fruit or veg, like chopping both ends off runner beans).

Lose the N's from both AN's to doubly deprive the remaining letters of nitrogen.

And over to Urwen!

Inspired by Pervinca's

1. Gollum's favorites.
2. Mix these vegetables for them.
3. You, we hear, are inside. He's there.
4. He goes back to his land, with a vowel switch.
5. Frodo's aunt goes back for a horse.

Is #1... is it fishes, precious? Sweet, juicy, crunchable fishesss?

hS

5. AROD. (DORA backwards).

Is it FAUNA?

2. APES? (Peas). There must be apes in Middle-earth, because one of the orcs uses the term as an insult.

FISH: Gollum's favorites.
APES: Mix these vegetables for them.
U: You, we hear, are inside. He's there.
N: He goes back to his land, with a vowel switch.
AROD: Frodo's aunt goes back for a horse.

4. NAHAR? Rohan, land of horses, backwards, and swap O for A.

FISH: Gollum's favorites.
APES: Mix these vegetables for them.
U: You, we hear, are inside. He's there.
NAHAR: He goes back to his land, with a vowel switch.
AROD: Frodo's aunt goes back for a horse.

Maybe a clue, Urwen? If he's in The Fall Of Gondolin, my copy is at my dad's.

Just think about the clues. For example, the 'You, we hear' has the same meaning as when you make it.