i was actually going with
Carcharoth due to a quote from sil I cant remember the exact phrasing but it was along the lines of and no greater terror was ever unleashed from
Angband
Alcuin, in this post, in the paragraph following the second link ...
... mentions something that I think we need to keep in mind about JRRT's writings.
JRRT's criticism of allegory was principally aimed at its improper, one could say "sloppy" use.
JRRT's
own use of hyperbole can be criticized in a similar fashion. Especially in the writing collected in the first two volumes of HoMe, "Book of Lost
Tales" volumes 1 and 2, we can read about JRRT going overboard in some of his descriptions. He very much toned this down in his later revisions.
I wonder if this has to do with JRRT not having shaken free of his primary sources yet, the Norse sagas (and the Finnish Kalevala, and probably also Celtic legends). Those bards very definitely had a tendency to hyperbole, and at that early phase of writing JRRT may have not quite found his own voice yet. He was at his best when he did
not "copy 'n' paste" from them, but used them as a "mulch" from which he grew his own legendarium. The transition from the original story of Kullervo from the Finnish Kalevala, through JRRT's own version of Kullervo, to
Túrin Turambar of his legendarium is a good examples. And still, even in LoTR, as Alcuin points out, both
Treebeard and
Tom Bombadil could both be called "eldest". 🤨
