View Single Post
Old 05-06-2007, 10:37 PM   #90
davem
Illustrious Ulair
 
davem's Avatar
 
Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: In the home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names,and impossible loyalties
Posts: 4,240
davem is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.davem is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.
Full of interesting little gems - like the fact that the original name of Golfimbul the Orc beheaded by Bullroarer in the act that originated the game of golf, was originally named Fingolfin! Clearly Tolkien wanted a name that included the 'golf' element in order to make the joke work, but this (as Rateliff points out) is an odd choice of name for a goblin.

Rateliff makes a decent case for TH being set in the world of the Sil right from the start - the reference to Beren & Luthien, the similarity between the painting of Mirkwood Tolkien made for TH & the painting of Beleg & Gwindor in Taur nu Fuin being virtually identical, etc, & accounts for the repeated references to the primary world (the Hindu kush, China, Shetland ponies) as being down to the fact that the Legendarium always, right from the BoLT period was a mythic history of our world. I'm not convinced. Roverandom is the problem for Rateliff's theory. Unless one is willing to argue that Roverandom, with its references to Faerie in the West is also set in the world of the Sil, & hence part of the Legendarium as well, its difficult to justify including TH in there - at least not from its origin.

Clearly Tolkien wanted it to be a part after the success of LotR - which is why in Vol 2 we can look forward to two chapters of TH re-written in the style of LotR.
davem is offline   Reply With Quote