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Originally Posted by Davem
I'm sorry that American English doesn't correspond exactly to British-(let alone late 19th Century Warwickshire-) English, but that doesn't justify dismissing as non-existent something which any English speaker of English would recognise as significant.
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The very point I've been trying to make, so far unsuccessfully, is not that such cultural minutia is
non-existent (though it might be), but that whether or not it exists it is
irrelevant to the enjoyment and understanding of the story as Tolkien intended it for a
worldwide audience.
I have read all the foregoing posts about the varying interpretations of the noonday meal versus the evening meal, and come away not only unconvinced one way or the other, but reduced to a frustrating apathy about it. To me, if Tolkien had intended to make some kind of statement about the English classes, he was possessed of the wit, vocabulary, and intelligence to make it as obvious as he desired in the text, something that would be readily discerned in whatever language into which LOTR might be translated. The fact that it is
not obvious (as shown by the fact that it has to be dragged through such pointed discussion) demonstrates to my own satisfaction that the niceties of meal timing were not uppermost in the author's intents.
LOTR is a genius fantasy with soaring overarching themes: Justice, mercy, defeat, triumph, comradeship, loyalty, honor, courage...and here we are consuming prodigious quantities of Net bandwidth discussing the definition of "dinner". PUH-lease, do you not see the absurdity of it?