The Bad LotR Fan Fic Drinking Game - The Barrow-Downs Discussion Forum

Ibrîniðilpathânezel · 08-22-2008, 06:44 PM

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But note the attempt to sound knowledgeable:

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Prior to the publication of The Silmarillion Sauron's origins and true identity were unclear to those without full access to Tolkien's notes. In early editions of Robert Foster's The Complete Guide to Middle-earth, Sauron is described as "probably of the Eldar elves."

Want to bet those two sentences aren't copy-pasted from Wikipedia or something similar?

I would call that a sucker bet.

And funny, I knew that Gandalf was "an angel" well before the Silmarillion was published. References to that comment of Tolkien's showed up in at least two scholarly works that I read back when I was in college (in the early '70s). Even before that, when I first read LotR at age 11, I figured out long before the end of the book that Gandalf was something unusual, since he was not an Elf, and could not have been a Man, either, since he was nearly 2000 years old. That and other things in the story made me figure that Sauron might be a wizard gone bad -- which wasn't all that far from the truth. Robert Foster apparently didn't make that connection, nor, it seems, did the Sue writer. Sigh.