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Haunting Spirit
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<img src="http://www.barrowdowns.com/images/posticons/redeye.jpg" align=absmiddle> Re: Who knows their trolls?
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Quote:<hr> If 'day shall come again' means its night, why does the sun go down after he says it? You are injecting a sunrise and at least 12 hours of unaccounted for time.<hr></blockquote>
The sun goes down before he says it, I say. Huor falls as the sun sets. Then Hurin makes his last stand through the night, I say, crying his battle cry.
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Quote:<hr> '...on the fourth day of the war, there began the Nirnaeth Arnoediad...'
and
'.... as the sun westered on the sixth day...'
There are four pages of battle between these days. But between the 6th day mention and the alleged 7th day there is a paragraph describing the battle of one. Did this battle last through 12 hours of darkness and then 12 more hours passed to drag Hurin to Angband and the the sun set? Not likely.<hr></blockquote>
I'm not entirely sure what your argument is here. That the description is too slim to account for this amount of time? That's easily explainable by the fact that the only action to account for is Hurin single-handedly taking on wave after wave of foes. I think the time can be accounted for. I think it's less likely that "the sun westered", Huor was slain, then Hurin managed to kill at least seventy (probably more), then was overcome, bound, and sprinted off to Angband in less time than it would take for night to fall. In your scenario, trolls must have been lining up single-file so that he could kill three or four at a stroke to get his work done so quickly. It clearly states that Huor's fall and Hurin's last stand weren't simultaneous action. "Last of all, Hurin stood alone." and so on.
The terse Silma descriptions leave much to the imagination. I try to imagine the scene. I imagine Hurin, covered in gore, probably commanding a small piece of high ground, wielding his two-handed axe. I imagine trolls and orcs reluctant to attack such a fearsome foe with corpses of their fellows piled up about him, and Gothmog having to whip them forward to get them to attack. Finally, after Hurin falls, there's some wrapping up that Gothmog has to do. Organize the forces, gather equipment, bury the dead maybe, get everything ready to march back to Angband. Mock Hurin a bit. Then march back to Angband -- not just Gothmog himself, but a whole battle-weary host. I think by the time all of this took place, a seventh day could very reasonably have passed.
I went to the bookstore this morning to see if I could find elucidation somewhere in HoME. Alas, I could only find two early accounts of Hurin's last stand, one in The Shaping of Middle-Earth, the other in The Book of Lost Tales, neither more clear or detailed than the Silma account -- though, notably, in both accounts the trolls aren't mentioned at all, and it says instead that Hurin slew "well nigh one hundred Orcs" before he was taken. I admit that this was by no means an exhaustive search.
You say tom-a-to, and I say tom-ah-to. I still think my interpretation is more reasonable, and that this evidence isn't enough to stipulate that there were pre-Third Age sun-resistant trolls. The LotR and The Hobbit, works that were published with JRRT's stamp of approval (or at least, his best editorial work), have to overrule this inconclusive bit of evidence from a volume that even its editor admits may not represent the author's truest intentions.
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