Remove that ‘similar to’, Inderjit.
I posted this on another board:
Now let’s look at the name
Gothmog and what meaning it had when
Tolkien was writing
The Lord of the Rings and see whether it contains any clues.
The only thing Christopher says about the name in
The History of the Lord of the Rings is (not surprisingly) in HoMe VIII:
The War of the Ring:
The name
Gothmog is one of the original names of the tradition, going back to
The Book of Lost Tales; Lord of
Balrogs, slayer of
Fëanor and
Fingon.
So we have to go backwards in the history, to the pre-LOTR writings.
In the Appendix to HoMe V:
The Lost Road and Other Writings; section II ‘The List of Names’ Christopher tells us:
During the 1930s my father began the task of making an alphabetic list, with
definitions, of all the names in his works concerned with the legends of the Elder Days.
The work is not given in full, but Christopher has included an interesting entry:
Gothmog ‘= Voice of
Goth (
Morgoth), an Orc-name.’ Morgoth is explained at its place in the list as ‘formed from his Orc-name
Goth “Lord or Master”, with
mor “dark or black” prefixed.’
But he also says:
In the Etymologies the element goth is differently explained in Gothmog (GOS, GOTH) and in Morgoth (KOT, but with a suggestion that the name ‘may also contain GOTH’).
So if the name
Gothmog in
The Lord of the Rings really means ‘Voice of Morgoth’, why would someone be called (or call himself) that? (Morgoth was, as many know, defeated at the end of the
First Age.)
There is one who may have been called
Goth at the end of
the Third Age.
From letter #183 (a rewriting at some later date of an earlier version, now lost, which was in all probability written in 1956):
Sauron desired to be a God-King, and was held to be this by his servants; if he had been victorious he would have demanded divine honour from all rational
creatures and absolute temporal power over the whole world.
From a footnote to this passage:
When he found how greatly his knowledge was admired by all other rational creatures and how easy it was to influence them, his pride became boundless. By the end of the
Second Age he assumed the position of Morgoth's representative. By the end of the Third Age (though actually much weaker than before)
he claimed to be Morgoth returned.
So if nothing of this fails, then Gothmog was the ‘voice’ of Sauron. And we know of only one person who could have been that: the
Mouth of Sauron (who I believe is Fuinur but that’s another story).