Since this thread includes Tolkien's knowledge of constellations, I'm going to post this bit here, although it is unrelated to astrophysicists' naming practices.
Mithalwen's link does not mention this reference early in LotR:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Strider
Their bags they piled on the parlour-floor. They pushed a low chair against the door and shut the window. Peering out, Frodo saw that the night was still clear. The Sickle* was swinging bright above the shoulders of Bree-hill. He then closed and barred the heavy inside shutters and drew the curtains together. . . .
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*The Hobbits' name for the Plough or Great Bear.
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Yes, that's right. The asterisks mark a footnote in the text, a Tolkien footnote presumbably, not a CT footnote.
What I find remarkable about this footnote is that it distinctly erases the difference between our/Tolkien's Primary World and the sub-created world of Middle-earth.
Part apparently of what we Downers have named the "Translator Conceit", it directly links the hobbit nomenclature with that of our world. Perhaps it is one way Tolkien intended to suggest that Middle-earth was but our world in an early age--that is, it is part of his fictional bag of tricks--but what it also does is tie the text to something outside itself.
That is, this footnote clearly suggests that we are to view the story world as our world, and be prepared to see similarities between the two. It would, then, put a nail (just one nail, mind you) in the coffin of
davem's insistence that the text must exist independently as a text, without any external references to our world or to our own literatures, that is must best be enjoyed as internally coherent story without any references to things outside it. Yet here is Tolkien directly linking Middle-earth to our own cultural practices of naming the heavens.
It isn't a reader seeing an analogy, as in
Mithalwen's link to Tolkien's use of moon phases and stars, but something directly in the text which invites the reader to see hobbits as existing in our universe, but with their own system of naming things.
Fascinating, eh?