The seven dwarves?
 

Just a funny thing I thought of. 'Seven [rings] for the dwarf lords in their halls of stone', 'snow white and the seven dwarfs.'

Key word = seven. Do you think this was an intenional joke or just accidental?

Okay, maybe it's not that funny. Never mind! [img]smilies/rolleyes.gif[/img]

I've thought about it before, but I can't really see Tolkien making a joke of it. It may just be a coincidence.

I think it might have been Tolkien's joke. It's a bit obvious to be anything else really!

EDIT: Cross posting, and we have completely different views! Well, I stick by mine!

[ May 04, 2003: Message edited by: Lyra Greenleaf ]

I have actually never thought of that before! Actually though, I do think now it was intentional perhaps with the "Snow White" fairy tale. It must be some sort of legend that dwarves like to mine because they mine in "Snow White" and in LOTR so perhaps "7" has something to do with the orgin of the legen of the dwarves...
Something to look up!!!

heheh, a very cute post/question.

I think one of the main bolts that strikes anyone who first begins to read the LoTR is the sheer amount of DELIBERATENESS that went into it. If one merely thumbs through the appendixes, one is utterly struck by the AMOUNT of stories that serve as backgrounds to the main story; which is in itself a masterpiece of some effort. One sees talk of calendars, talk of languages, of peoples; yea, of an author going OUT OF HIS WAY to hide his creative mind behind the title of "translator" or "discoverer" or however any of you would like to word that particular concept.

So when we run across something like this, I think it safe to say it was done deliberately, because this is in character with Tolkien.

Unless, of course, that character is also contradicted by the discovery.

By this I mean that, as I have already said, Tolkien put a lot of effort into making sure everything was perfectly aligned, everything perfectly "researched," the illusion perfectly concealing any "slight-of-hand." And the minute we see talk of "seven dwarves" we tend to look at the whole work in a different light; and all the things that make it wonderful are suddenly perverted and become "lame." So because of this, I don't think there was a pun intended. It would be self-defeating.

The reason that there were seven rings given was because of the 7 dwarf lords whom Aule created. Probably the reason Tolkein chose 7 was because through out history seven has been a lucky/magical/special number. I dont know the real reason behind this, it just is. 7 Probably had some sort of pagan meaning that caused it to be used so frequently.