As Aiwendil, I am not happy with the situation that we can not find a agrement on Rog. As far as I see we have not even come to the agrement that the charachter of rog and his role in Fog should be retained!
That is alarming to me. At least in the case of the counterattack we should find some agrement, before we decied on anything.
In this respect I will trie to answer some obvious questions:
What would it mean to eliminate the role?
The counterattack led to a stay in the advance of the attackers. The attackers decided to wait for the dragons of fire to come into the city. We cannot put forth any other good reason for that with out Rog's role. Further and by deeper insight the relative succsess of Rog excrusion demonstartes that Maeglin had done what he promised to Morgoth: He had undermined the defence from whithin. With out Maeglin the Gondolindrim would have made a big excrusion with all the people much earlyer. And seeing what a singel company had done so late in the battle, we might expect that the big early exrusion would have been much more effetiv and might have been rescued much more of the Gondolindrim.
In my view we will not only lose a bit of detail by taking the counterattack out but also a bit of the deeper meanning.
Have we any avidance that the role Rog plays in Fog was later scipt all together?
I don't think so. We clearly cannot let him kill an host of Balrogs. But in
Q30 we see him still make an excursion and die with his people outside the walls. So that at least is the role he (however we name him) should play in our FoG.
The only Reasons we have to even think abaout eliminating him and his role are our feeling that the name dooes not sweet later sindarin and the footnote of Christopher Tolkien that the Name would have been surely changed.
That mean we have not a problem with the role but with the name. What ever we do with the name, it should not ruin the role. In the case of Legolas you would have an very easy option to eliminate the role at all. But again the problem was with the name not with the role. So you did change the name (a bit, it is nonsens when Aiwendil said that this change was independend of the fact that Legolas is the name of a charachter in the LotR. Without Legoals of Mirkwood you would not even question the Name).
Aiwendil wrote:
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I agree that the name with a circumflex has less of that "out of place" feeling than the original name. But the addition of a circumflex is somewhat arbitrary. There are any number of more aesthetically fitting (in terms of later Sindarin and Quenya) names we could construct - but as jallanite pointed out, this would be invention and would be arbitrary.
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If it is true that "Rôg" fits the later Sindarin more than "Rog", than we might find therein a brige over which we all can go: I had worked on the textual history of FoG and found that "Rog" was a change in the course of the compositian of Tuor B from original "Rôg". That means "Rôg" is not purely fan-fiction.
The lose of the circumflex could have had only linguistcal reasons. If we now can say that for any linguistical reason a circumflex would be better, I think we could go back to the original name "Rôg".
Respectfully
Findegil