Marginalia
Shorter notes, kept in the margins of the longer work.
- September 2022
The Hobbit's wider world
In the wake of the Rings of Power debacle, I took some good advice and just went back to the books - and ended up getting kind of surprised by all sorts of things I’d not paid attention to before in The Hobbit, and the questions they imply.
Just a few examples -
- “detachable party hoods” … wait. detachable from what? Do dwarves have formal hoods that button (presumably they have buttons?) to capes or something?
- There are no Heroes to be had, because they’re all the south fighting each other. (Who are these heroes? Where do they come from? What’s going on in the south that they’re all fighting each other?)
- The Tooks are less respectable than the Bagginses, but richer - because they go on adventures. Where do they go? What sorts of treasures are they bringing back? Does this mean there’s a full on dungeons-and-dragons-like adventuring scene offscreen?
- inns (in the plural) fall away as the party moves east. And inns imply travel and trade. Which in turn implies Eriador is less empty than I usually picture it. And yet, there’s hardly any settlements marked on the map, and we see all of them I think. So what’s missing on the map?
- the Necromancer was a much bigger deal than I remembered, known and spoken of as far away as the Shire.
Anyhow, I sort of take everything in The Hobbit with a grain or two of salt, both because as I recall Tolkien himself was always a bit uneasy in how it fit into his world, and also because it’s told - especially at the start - in such a fireside-tale manner that there’s more than a bit of room to count all sorts of off-hand mentions as storyteller’s embellishments.
But very fun things to ponder on, nonetheless!
settinglore - July 2017
The Dúnedain polyglot
Recently I was remembering a discussion of the HBO Rome miniseries, and how an important aspect of the culture was left out merely by virtue of it being filmed in English. That is: the upper classes were educated in Greek, and so if they wished to discuss matters amongst themselves without servants overhearing them, they might switch to that tongue. I’ve no recollection of hearing of Latin being used the same way in the medieval through Victorian eras, but I’d be rather surprised if it didn’t happen at least occasionally.
Which leads me to wonder…
… I assume in Third Age Eriador Sindarin shares that status of being spoken (at least amongst non-elves) by only a few. I’d imagine most all the Rangers - being descendants of the Faithful and allies of Elrond - would be reasonably fluent. Frodo and Bilbo are, as I recall - but they’re fairly high-status and well educated as hobbits go.
I could imagine Rangers discussing matters of import in Sindarin while in the common room of the Prancing Pony, purely to keep such matters private from curious ears.
To elaborate -
My understanding - based primarily on Words of Westernesse - is that linguistically it goes something like this:
- Men speaking a proto-Adunaic go to Numenor
- Adunaic flowers in Numenor
- In the corrupted days of Numenor, Adunaic drifts further (more ornamented? I don’t know the details ).
- After the destruction of Numenor, the faithful Dunedain in Middle-earth eschew the later form of Adunaic because of its cultural connotations. Westernesse/Westron develops in Middle Earth from a sort of pidgeon of colloquial Adunaic and the native speech of neighboring bands of Men.
Why Sindarin? I think because (1) it’s how the Dunedain converse with the elves in Middle earth and (2) IIRC the evil kings of Numenor made the elf-speech illegal, and so the Faithful (the elf-friends) would naturally cling to it all the more.
Why not Quenya? Because Sindarin is still throughout the Third Age a living tongue in common use. Quenya exists, but more as a language of lore.
Quenya is known in our fan circles as “the Elvish Latin” and I think that’s quite right.
That said - for an early modern Anglo-American analog that those of us who did colonial reenacting might follow, I think from the Dunedain perspective those languages might be thought of as having social connotations something like:
Westron: English- day to day speech with most people you meet.
Sindarin: Latin - fundamental part of basic education: most Dunedain know at least some phrases and fluent speech is not at all uncommon. “Everyone who’s anyone” can converse in it. Also I suppose the added important wrinkle is that Caesar and his legions are still around, he’s still your ally after 2000 years, and you need to talk with him.
Quenya: Greek -scholarly types know it, a decently-educated Dunedain may be able to read it, but it’s much less common and never used in regular discourse. “It’s all Quenya to me.”
Finally, I find it helpful to think of the Dunedain-Elven relationship as not altogether unlike the relationship between native allies and European powers in the colonial era: with the elves playing the part of the Europeans, and the Dunedain perhaps Cherokee. The Men of the West adopt over time quite a bit of elven culture, but imperfectly and through the lens of their own heritage.
settinglorelinguistics Who is a “Ranger”?
A friend once brought up the question - “When and Where should the term ‘Ranger’ be applied?”
My answer, among others:
… it’s the capital “R” in “soldiers of Gondor, and they were Rangers of Ithilien” that stands out to me. That implies I think that in Tolkien’s mind, we’re not just talking role here but title.
Now, my guess would be that there is some unknown Westron word that means basically “man who serves as the King’s arm in the hinterlands” that’s rendered in English as (capital R) “Ranger.”
And I would bet that word goes back at least no later than the chaotic last days of Arnor / troubles in Gondor, and perhaps was already in common use during the Dunedain settlement of what would become those kingdoms.
And I would suspect that the word remained in common usage in Gondor, while the Breefolk - having it still from their days in the northern kingdoms - retained it by custom to the closest thing that applied. Heck, I expect they use the word (we render as) “Ranger” without even necessarily being aware of its tie to the old kings.
As an analogy, imagine calling a fighting/enforcing man a thousand years after the fall of the USA “Sheriff” or “Officer.” The original context would be long gone… but there was always someone doing basically the same job, so the word sticks around.
…. which I suppose means I think (capital R) “Ranger” should be reserved in the Third Age Tolkienien context to fighting men:
- of (mostly) Dunedain extraction
- who serve the Steward of Gondor or the Chieftain of the northern Dunedain (or arguably their designated vassal authorities)
- who typically work in wilderness environments
- who typically work as irregulars
Anyhow, that’s my two pennies.