Ancalagon was my favourite. Hmm first one Nimrodel..Nimrod from the Enigma variation plus el. Need to do som pondering.

Correct.

NIMRODEL: Stately Elgar piece joins the Spanish and reveals her.
2. Gimli’s father is disturbed, but gains direction for a flower.
3. Siren of French in a whirl for a lady.
4. One of the Professor’s names gains note and direction, but it’s scrambled before it gets to him.
5. Confused rain chart reveals this character.
6. Drain mirth in perturbation to find him.

GELION. If flower here is river...rhought of Ninglor first but that has directions and the double N problematic even more than. NG..

It's a river, but not Gelion. As for problematic letters, I may have invoked Rule 5 regarding Rule 2. ;)

Lets try its near anagram Legolin.

No. Only one direction needed.

Ringlo? ?..who'd a thunk it that there would be. So many..

Correct. And I agree. So many near-anagrams. I hadn't realised. I just chose Ringlo and saw Gloin + R.

NIMRODEL: Stately Elgar piece joins the Spanish and reveals her.
RINGLO: Gimli’s father is disturbed, but gains direction for a flower.
3. Siren of French in a whirl for a lady.
4. One of the Professor’s names gains note and direction, but it’s scrambled before it gets to him.
5. Confused rain chart reveals this character.
6. Drain mirth in perturbation to find him.

3. Serindë
4. Eluréd
5. Caranthir
6. Mithrandir

I suspect that the password has something to do with either Lórien or the Ruin of Doriath.

5 and 6 are right; 3 and 4 are not (although they are close).

NIMRODEL: Stately Elgar piece joins the Spanish and reveals her.
RINGLO: Gimli’s father is disturbed, but gains direction for a flower.
3. Siren of French in a whirl for a lady.
4. One of the Professor’s names gains note and direction, but it’s scrambled before it gets to him.
CARANTHIR: Confused rain chart reveals this character.
MITHRANDIR: Drain mirth in perturbation to find him.

In that case, 3 is Erendis. 4 might be Elendur, but has too many letters to fit properly. The password is Nienna.

It doesn't. REUEL adds D (note) and N (direction). Elured only added the note.

NIMRODEL: Stately Elgar piece joins the Spanish and reveals her.
RINGLO: Gimli’s father is disturbed, but gains direction for a flower.
ERENDIS: Siren of French in a whirl for a lady.
ELENDUR: One of the Professor’s names gains note and direction, but it’s scrambled before it gets to him.
CARANTHIR: Confused rain chart reveals this character.
MITHRANDIR: Drain mirth in perturbation to find him.

NIENNA indeed. Over to you.

This should keep you busy
 

Yes, embarrassingly I forgot how to spell Reuel for a minute there. By way of an apology, here's something to get your collective teeth into. I've been doing a lot of crosswords lately.

1. Loiterers in disarray using southern coinage
2. One alternative, possibly, from royal authority
3. Confused, pleased with gold supplied by shipyard agent
4. PALLANDO Grim drapery and ring make one blue
5. Bewilderingly, no strange place for a quiet smoke
6. Birthday boy is, note, possibly amused with hesitation

4. Pallando? Pall plus... I'm not sure what. Perhaps ando is an elvish word?

Ah! Pall + and + o (for ring).

That's the one

1. Loiterers in disarray using southern coinage
2. One alternative, possibly, from royal authority
3. Confused, pleased with gold supplied by shipyard agent
4. PALLANDO Grim drapery and ring make one blue
5. Bewilderingly, no strange place for a quiet smoke
6. Birthday boy is, note, possibly amused with hesitation

5 Angrenost? Anagram of no strange and a place where the hobbits were found smoking?

Indeed it is.

1. Loiterers in disarray using southern coinage
2. One alternative, possibly, from royal authority
3. Confused, pleased with gold supplied by shipyard agent
4. PALLANDO Grim drapery and ring make one blue
5. ANGRENOST Bewilderingly, no strange place for a quiet smoke
6. Birthday boy is, note, possibly amused with hesitation

3 Galdor? Anagram of glad plus or, heraldic and French term for Gold.

And I was trying to satisfy the Gold element with Au!

Half-way there
 

Exactly

1. Loiterers in disarray using southern coinage
2. One alternative, possibly, from royal authority
3. GALDOR Confused, pleased with gold supplied by shipyard agent
4. PALLANDO Grim drapery and ring make one blue
5. ANGRENOST Bewilderingly, no strange place for a quiet smoke
6. Birthday boy is, note, possibly amused with hesitation

I confused my self by muddling gildor and galdor and having too much gold and too little pleasure ..

Has the dragon sickness truly reached even within these hallowed halls? Tut, tut.

The thing about the periodic table is that it has practical applications in the real world. I prefer more gratuitously irrelevant systems, like heraldry.

I think I might know where the password is hiding, but as I've only done a third of the work so far and it was the easiest third, I'll hold my peace for now.

Don't hold out on my account.. Squatter is too clever for me and I am stuck as a stuck thing though I feel loiterers is tinging a faint bell...

Well, I thought it might be AMROTH, reading down the last letters of each answer, but it hasn't made it any easier for me to guess the other clues, so it's not a particularly confident guess.

I would try the Gondor currency for the first one, (the coin being the "Tharni"), but the "loiterers" part I can't work out. I have a vague feeling that there are a group or race of people nicknamed the loiterers, and I thought it might be elves who refused the journey West. Maybe "loiterers" is the straight part of the clue and only the "in" is scrambled (in disarray).

Unless the loiterers could be the Entwives ... "I'll linger here, and will not come, because my land is best."

Encouraging persistence
 

Give it some thought and I'm certain it will come to you. I'm sure that I'm not really too clever for you.

If I were you I'd trust that lack of confidence, since Amroth is exactly what the answer isn't. The loiterers aren't the Entwives, and if there's a division of the Elves called that I've not heard of them. As an extra freebie, Tharni is a new one on me too. With all this obscure knowledge, I'm sure you can beat my clues given time. I did try particularly hard with those that haven't yet been solved, cackling fiendishly as I wrote them; but you'll be pleased to hear that I rejected Nargûn as the answer for #1 because using something that only appears once in the HME index would just be sadistic.

A tentative guess at Ioreth...I and or but leaving eth to explain though the lady was a sort of an authority on royalty with the hands of a king etc... eth hum...nice archaic letter...

Ioreth it is. An anagram of I OTHER. I must use ð in a clue some time.

[EDIT] I'll be away for the weekend, but I'll look in on Sunday to see how you're doing.


1. Loiterers in disarray using southern coinage
2. IORETH One alternative, possibly, from royal authority
3. GALDOR Confused, pleased with gold supplied by shipyard agent
4. PALLANDO Grim drapery and ring make one blue
5. ANGRENOST Bewilderingly, no strange place for a quiet smoke
6. Birthday boy is, note, possibly amused with hesitation

Fare well wherever you fare.

Nice one Mith - I was playing around with "other," but the nearest I got was a king called Ostoher.

Indeed! That was a clever clue. I was toying with variations of Anor-, but clearly none of them got me anywhere.

On to ponder the next ones...

They are superb clues but very testing especially without the format clues you get on a grid. Little thinking aloud...since coinage in the monetary senses is largely absent in the books, I wonder if it is more. On the lines of. Icanus I was in the south but that is forgotten.. however I keep thinking loiterers has something to do with the Teleri but disarray is an anagram marker.

For southern coinage, I openend up a list of real currency names, but it was just too long to go through with attention. I don't know how far "southern" it's supposed to be, so I gave up on that task. But the more common currency names are still a possibility.

I tried the Anor route too (and the Ior route, but I couldn't get Ori to fit royal authority!)

If coinage = coinage of a word/phrase, it could be anything. I tried thinking of terms used in Gondor, but couldn't think of any exclusive to Gondor. I've even wondered if we're looking for an element of Cockney slang!

I looked up money in Middle-earth and, apart from the various references to pennies, Gondor had a currency called the castar, one fourth of which was a silver coin called the tharni, and both these names of coins have Sindarin forms as well. Can't get any of these to make sense of "loiterers," though.

Tried "lira" and it didn't get me anywhere either. I dunno. Ducat? Drachma? Dinar? Peseta?

Also, I wonder if "disarray" is only pretending to be an anagram marker. ;)

Edit: I wonder if southern could mean southern states of America, and refer to a turn of phrase connected with this part of the world.

Of course, I am probably dead wrong on all counts, as Squatter will gleefully inform me. :D;)

Cockney is north for me....

But not for me. ;)

It's either too far east or too far west for me, depending on which "home" I look from, for the north-south dimension to matter. :D For all I know, it could be Argentinian or belonging to southern Norway, and maybe it's not the cryptic part after all!

If we take coinage to mean coining a term, we should look for terms that appeared specifically in the south. Ernil i Pheriannath? Holbytla? Incanus? Tark? Fell Riders?

Incidentally, is the password MELLON? If so, it's probably the most ingenious password to make! :D

You are too bright for me, Galadriel! :) I can't see Mellon, even in a zigzag pattern! Or is it a trick one that isn't written there at all, as Mellon wasn't on the doors of Moria?

Trying to think if Kingsfoil is a term only used in Gondor, too.

Mellon is backwards diagonal, like this:

? (N)
_O
__L
___L
____E
_____? (M)


The problem with this is that I can't work the letters M and N into the clues! :(

Absurdly simple now I know the answer
 

6 Gollum. Note g plus lol and hesitation um.. I was thinking of Err and thought that Bilbo Frodo and Aragorn were the only known birthdays. cheers Gally.