Fantasy

[davem]

Originally Posted by alatar

Considered that as a possibility, but that would assume I knew what you'd stated. Had I not, I would have happily thought for all time that he was named thus due to his slimy character. Does the word 'worm' as it applies to Dragon-kind appear in LotR?

There's a single reference (as far as I remember) to Scatha the Worm - Merry's horn comes from his hoard.

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

Really, Dave, are you saying that we should trash Casablanca as a bogus or illegitimate movie because it doesn't show Maj Strasser's convulsive death agonies after Reynaud gut-shoots him? That is a slow, painful and messy way to die, and Cukor wimped out.

I'd say it should have been made apparent how he died. But that's what I'm asking others about - whether there is an obligation on a writer to depict honestly what he knows to be true, or whether. particularly in Fantasy, the writer has special exemption from 'facts'. Shouldn't violent death be shocking, rather than sanitised to the point of meaninglessness? In a story about Death shouldn't the truth about death be brought to the fore?

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Does the word 'worm' as it applies to Dragon-kind appear in LotR?

There's a single reference (as far as I remember) to Scatha the Worm - Merry's horn comes from his hoard.

Also in the Hobbit (on the map, the Great Worms of the Withered Heath; and BB's reference to Smaug as an "old Worm.") And of course Farmer Giles is full of 'worms'.