Mannish Traditions

Me neether 😇

Do not speak ill of yourself

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I don't.

Some will gladly save you the trouble

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Very true

Galin said:

My short-nick is Ando "gate", also the name of tengwa number 5.
...

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I last posted here on Friday 10 Jan. I return from an absence of five days and find an almost theological discussion has taken place, more than doubling the number of pages of this thread. "When the mouse is away the cats will play?" As per my memory that saying was different in details ...

But anyway, "Endorfin" gets shortened to "Ando"???
Hypothesis 1: spelling bees in the US have gone the way of the dinosaurs (wrongly spelled names abound in Galin/whathisname's recent posts anyway).
Hypothesis 2: sound shifts; I read somewhere (I'm guessing Tom Shippey) that 19th-century comparative philology was very occupied with "sound shifts in the primeval German forests", not surprising since, starting with the brothers Grimm, comparative philology seems to have been done mostly in Germany. Ancient spelling bees might have avoided much of such nonsensical degradation of language - or not ...

I was going to reply to Galin, but his post's disappeared.

BTW, Galin, I was going to PM you, but I'm blocked. Was it something I said?

Welcome back Gando! Hmm. How do you explain aran plural erain? Or the French name Ereinion?

Or how about goose and geese -- sometimes something called (something like) i-influenza is at the heart of things.

_____

Erm, watch the nonsense Galin! Ando here: this name is not a result of highering or lowering. It simply altered due to what a number of linguists call "blendation" -- considering the already existing Quenya word ando.

I have many Noldorin friends down by Annon-in-Gelydh.

Squint-eyed Southerner said:

I was going to reply to Galin, but his post's dissappeared.

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Sometimes my bad jokes do that 😇

BTW, Galin, I was going to PM you, but I'm blocked. Was it something I said?

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I don't think my PM's on
and I don't own a cell phone either . . .
both, I fear, might make me yawn
-- and no offense to Aragon or anywan who lights upon
these threads . . .

. . . but I don't use the "like" thing neether

🐾

Ah, another aspect of a "unique" personality. Fair enough.

And thanks for replying -- I was beginning to fear I was on "Ignore" as well!

Squint-eyed Southerner said:

Ah, another aspect of a "unique" personality.

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I dunno, Galin and "unique" (a singular) don't seem to go together too well as of recently … 🤨

Well, they can just fight it out between themselves for the title of "Uniquest".

Squint-eyed Southerner said:

Well, they can just fight it out between themselves for the title of "Uniquest".

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ARGH! Ain't no such word! Same sort of mental garbage that in Germany produced "optimalste(s)(r)" ("optimalest")! This is all north of the north pole stupidity! 🤮

How 'bout "uniquer" -- does that work for you?

We like it!

No, there are terms that signify a maximum (or minimum), unless accompanied by a qualifier. Berlin is Germany's largest city, by size and population. There are by now many cities worldwide that are larger in both categories, and one of them is the largest city on the planet - but that gets into the fuzzy "metropolitan area" territory.
Maximum is a term in case. Not enough for some of the hyperventilating set in advertising and the Internet, apparently, in German. There the adjective is "maximal", but I guess if your brain is already Ecstasy- or Crystal Meth-addled enough, you might feel the need for "maximalste", or maximummest (does that term even exist in English? And I am not making a suggestion for an addition to the OED or any other dictionary! 👿 )

Lifted from another thread, Gando noted: "At that time JRRT was 73, and had most likely given up on managing to get The Sil published in his lifetime."

Hmm. Why do you think/say/write so?

Galin said:

Lifted from another thread, Gando noted: "At that time JRRT was 73, and had most likely given up on managing to get The Sil published in his lifetime."

Hmm. Why do you think/say/write so?

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Erm ...
The much longer part after "Bu-hut" in that post listed reasons why JRRT might have felt a bit overwhelmed at the prospect of getting the Sil in order even at the time he wrote the original conversation, in the first edition, between Bilbo and Frodo at Rivendell, well over a decade earlier. By 1965, when he made the revisions for the second edition, he had already suffered countless interruptions to what was his supposed aim to bring the "work of his heart" to a publishable form, that revision necessitated by the Ace books pirate paperback edition (and some egregious defects of US copyright law of the time) only having been the last to date. I'll just add the link to my original post as "explanation".

Gando replied: The much longer part after "Bu-hut" in that post listed reasons why JRRT might have felt a bit overwhelmed at the prospect of getting the Sil in order even at the time he wrote the original conversation, in the first edition, between Bilbo and Frodo at Rivendell, well over a decade earlier.

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Okay . . . but here I would also point to the flurry of writing after Tolkien wrote this conversation, when Waldman showed interest in publishing The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. In my opinion, shirly at this point, in the early 1950s, JRRT had not only not given up, but was inspired and heartened to get a version of QS in print.

By 1965, when he made the revisions for the second edition, he had already suffered countless interruptions to what was his supposed aim to bring the "work of his heart" to a publishable form, that revision necessitated by the Ace books pirate paperback edition (and some egregious defects of US copyright law of the time) only having been the last to date.

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There were certainly interruptions, and I think Tolkien meandered and arguably procrastinated, or got caught up in questions that didn't exactly help finish QS as an updated text, but anyway I agree with Christopher Tolkien that his father "deeply wanted to finish it" [the Silmarillion], but "couldn't" given the task Tolkien had chosen to involve himself in, in his later years -- in other words, yes, the work had become large and daunting, but not as large and daunting as recasting Quenta Silmarillion itself "needed" to be, in my opinion. But that tangent aside for now . . .




. . . in any case, "couldn't" is one thing (also in the interview with CJRT), especially after we know Tolkien "didn't", but to my mind, giving up is a different horse, and some of us humans might tend to think we have more time than we have. I'm not saying you are necessarily wrong about this, Gando, especially given your "most likely" in any case, only that I disagree. Plenty of folk have interpreted the external history as you do, some even claiming it points to JRRT not wanting to finish the work.

But perhaps the very late letter to Lord Halsbury (letter 353, 4 August 1973), for example, shows Tolkien once again (admittedly after losing confidence), being invigorated, arguably the more so in the hope that he might have help: "When you retire I shall certainly beg you help.
Without it, I begin to feel I shall never produce any part of The Silmarillion."

Hmm. Who knows. And as this is roughly a month before Tolkien's passing, maybe the last sentence expresses a measure (arguably at least)
of "worry" -- in other words -- that Tolkien had not given up, but was "starting" to worry that the task may need helping hands and minds.


Also, apologies for my clipping of context above -- I was too much thinking of not going down this road in the thread about Christopher's passing. Although that said, I should have "unlazily" quoted more/all of your post here! And I put it here, given my argument that Tolkien's decision, as I see it, with respect to the Numenorean-Bilbo tradition, generally speaking and in my opinion, made Tolkien's task of finishing his QS "easier" in some respects.

🐾

Well, yes … but JRRT had an endless track record of not getting things finished. Not just the two long poems, the annals, the "Quentas", the detailed stories etc. in his legendarium, but also professional efforts like the planned collaboration on an edition of "Pearl" together with E.V. Gordon as a follow-up to their acclaimed 1925 "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" (also delayed). JRRT contributed very little to the later collaboration, and when Gordon died prematurely in 1938, the effort was taken up by his widow Ida. JRRT again was not overly helpful in making progress towards publication, which finally happened in 1953.
JRRT, while being well aware of his being a "natural niggler, alas!" apparently consistently underestimated the trouble that this got him into, both time-wise and from having too much to choose from - and he was also not very good at compressing things.

Which of course led Christopher to his almost 45-year career as his father's literary executor, starting in 1975 when he gave up his post as lecturer / tutor at Oxford after 11 years there. And he continued on with this close to the end, "The Fall of Gondolin" appearing in 2018, when he was 93 going on 94, so over 25 years longer than the age at which his father finally retired from his Oxford chair in 1959.

Olorgando said:

Well, yes … but JRRT had an endless track record of not getting things finished.

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Very well, but I'll just note again the reason I raised this in the first place: not that you said otherwise, but giving up his "heart's work" is not necessarily the same as not finishing it -- or other projects, for whatever, various reasons.

Also, for those who might not have read any HOME (and I know for those who have, this might seem like a needless niggle), but Tolkien did finish, for examples, versions of his Annals, and a Silmarillion (called Qenta Noldorinwa at the time) -- and after finishing The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, the Adventures of Tom Bombadil, The Road Goes Ever On, certain "now" older works remained "unfinished" in the sense of not being updated, of course.

Anyway, and as it's easy to ask . . . I'll ask it.

What if no appendices had been planned and the Waldman deal had panned out?

Hmm

Galin said:

Anyway, and as it's easy to ask . . . I'll ask it.
What if no appendices had been planned and the Waldman deal had panned out?

Hmm

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Hmmyes - but didn't JRRT at one point mention (perhaps in "Letters") that he envisaged both LoTR and Sil to be of about equal length? Both of my Sils are just over 360 pages long, with index, appendices and maps about 440. Granted, JRRT himself would have been able to select with more confidence what he would have wanted to include, where Christopher was forced to do a good deal of guesswork. But to get a version of the Sil three times the length of what Christopher ended up publishing … 🤯🤯🤯

I'd have to look that up, but for now (and again lazily), some references might be JRRT using "Silmarillion" more in the sense of "Legendarium" (whether or not the specific word is used), opposed to meaning Quenta Silmarillion the text. That said, the early 1950 phase appears to be an expansion of its (basically) "pre-LoTR" predecessor, which was itself an expansion of the finished Qenta Noldorinwa, so I'd have to look this up to be sure.

Or I could wait and let someone else check

. . . anyway right now I'm off to watch something on Netflix!