Neckless and proofless?

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

Originally Posted by Mister U

And we named a pub-slash-brewery after you, my friend!

Had I been given a choice, that's what I'd have chosen to be named after me, and the honour is overwhelming. That is the best Downs-related out-of-context reproduction of someone's business advertising that I have ever seen.

Returning by herculean effort to something like the topic: the reason I ended up starting a thread about what would otherwise be a mere collector's footnote was that it's often hard to tell with Tolkien what's a mistake and what's JRRT arguing with the dictionary. Thrawn, for example, isn't standard English; it's a Scots dialect spelling of 'thrown' in what my dictionary calls an "obsolete sense" (not in 1954 it wasn't, apparently). It appears to be common across the north of England, deriving ultimately from OE thrawan, and I suspect that JRRT liked it because phonologically it's changed less since Old English than the standard English alternative, a bit like the situation that would exist if *dwarrows had survived in a dialect form instead of being reintroduced by JRRT himself: the Oxford Dictionary of English now lists dwarves as a legitimate plural of dwarf.

All of the above means that when I find an unusual spelling in Tolkien, I have to check to make sure that it isn't deliberate. This makes a typesetting error far more annoying than it would normally be, although any kind of copyist's error is a gross irritation. I'm reminded of something Michael Drout said on his blog about (inter alia) Herman Melville.

Originally Posted by Inziladun

Anyway, I put "neckless" down to a Freudian slip on some editor's part, looking at a colleague across the room whose head appeared to sit directly on his shoulders.

"It's as though he has no neck at all. How can someone wear so big a collar with so little space to put it in? What was I doing again? Oh yes: '...and he brought out...'"

Something like that?