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I've often wondered how in this section from "A Long Expected Party" got past the editors:

And there was
also one last surprise, in honour of Bilbo, and it startled the hobbits
exceedingly, as Gandalf intended. The lights went out. A great smoke went
up. It shaped itself like a mountain seen in the distance, and began to glow
at the summit. It spouted green and scarlet flames. Out flew a red -golden
dragon - not life-size, but terribly life-like: fire came from his jaws, his
eyes glared down; there was a roar, and he whizzed three times over the
heads of the crowd. They all ducked, and many fell flat on their faces. The
dragon passed like an express train, turned a somersault, and burst over
Bywater with a deafening explosion.

Middlearth doesn't have trains!

Middle-Earth is our own Earth in an imaginary past.

The Third Age in which the War of the Ring takes place, is supposed to be c. 6,000 before our own time and the unnamed narrator speaks to us, well, an early-to-mid Twentieth Century 'us', in our own idiom. Beorn, for instance, is described, IIRC, as having a voice 'like drums and guns', despite firearms never being directly mentioned in any of the narrative.

More generally, Tolkien's narrator is a modern--if old-fashioned and bookish--storyteller re-telling the events laid down in the Red Book of Westmarch:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Book_of_Westmarch

Besides which, although the concept of industry is invariably painted in negative colours, there are suggestions that Númenor was industrialised, the goblins were skilled in mechanised 'devices' and Saruman seeks to turn the Shire into a post-feudal 'modern' society.

Edit: From The Hobbit:

Now goblins are cruel, wicked, and bad-hearted. They make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones. It is not unlikely that they invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them, and also not working with their own hands more than they could help; but in those days and those wild parts they had not advanced (as it is called) so far.

That's more developed that you might have come away thinking, another tie between this legendary past and our present, plus an indication ('since', 'in those days') that the narrator is of our age, not that of the events he narrates.
 
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Old Tovey; finest weed in the South Farthing
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This is a description of a fireworks display put on by Gandalf? If there are fireworks in Middlearth, why no cannons and guns?

Gandalf's command of fire is because he is wielder of Narya the Great, the Ring of Fire .

The dwarves do make small fireworks, but that doesn't necessarily mean they could work out how to make guns. The Inca's had wheels but only ever used them on toys.

I've read the Silmarillion. More than once. Haven't read all the posthumous released books though.
 
The Silmarillion .

Tried three times but can't get into it. Must try harder.

As for Gold Wielders, anyone read Stephen Donaldson's 'White Gold Wielder' ?
 
Possible apologies in advance: I have read LOTR and The Hobbit - but many years ago and am not by any means a Tolkien nerd, so the following may all be common knowledge to fans. But as something of an outsider – I found it interesting.

I have just been reading The Geography of the Imagination, a collection of essays by the late Guy Davenport: American polymath extraordinaire. (The guy must have started reading in the womb – possibly the only man ever to have lived who could conceivably have read the entire internet, including the index; think Martin Gardner – but with less science, and more books.)

Anyway, bookended between an essay on Wittgenstein and another which begins with the reluctance of Webster’s to countenance generic trademarks as real words, before discussing the purpose of dictionaries in general, there is a very entertaining and easily digestible essay entitled Hobbitry.

There’s a great cameo of Tolkien himself, who taught Davenport when the latter was a Rhodes Scholar at Merton (not terribly flattering, by the way). But what’s most interesting is Davenport’s conjecture that, through an Oxford classmate of the student Tolkien, the latter became fascinated with the names and tales of the former's Kentucky home:

“He used to make me repeat family names like Barefoot and Boffin and Baggins and good country names like that.”

So, it seems that a significant influence on Tolkien’s Middle Earth may have been far removed from the vales, hills and forests of the northern climes and exerted by the – to be fair, not dissimilar - hollows, peaks and forests of the south eastern US.

To be honest – this doesn’t surprise me; some years back I thought I’d misremembered when trying the recall the name of the Battle of Brandywine: Nah, that name's from Tolkien, I thought, not the American War of Independence. Whereas it’s both. I suspect Tolkien was a great harvester of fine sounding names.

The essay also contains what is likely to become my favourite quote on the subject – from Tolkien’s friend and fellow Inkling, Hugo Dyson (although I have no more idea what he actually meant by it than Davenport did):

“His was not a true imagination, you know: He made it all up.”

I’m also somewhat reassured to find that Davenport’s massive intellect clearly found Anglo-Saxon as impenetrable at university as did my own much more meagre one.

Turns out the essay is available online in a couple of places - but the most complete version I can find is actually on this reddit page.
 
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I don't know how well known this is but it seems Tolkien made the start of planning and writing a sequel to LOTR. I wasn't aware of this, although I knew that there were thousands of pages of notes, some edited and published by his son. I knew that he wrote the history/mythology of his world but assumed it stopped with LOTR.

 
My post is the sequel to yours.

Can’t be – waaaay too short.

Should be more along the lines of:

It was written – in the time before the Great Wobbling - and by Flubblesdottir, child of the Leftlegin and Itsybitsyteenieweenie - that the runes Ogdred the Weary smote upon the walls of the Fort of Forrum, on the mountain of Wibblehelm, with his ancient sword Rustworn Dwarfmangler were not his own, but had been written even more anciently by P’andakråkå, when, after many skull splitting and bloodbathed sword-trials and differences of opinion with trolls, his mighty longship Wherethefuckarewe finally made shore in the ancient fastness of Idunno Yuhádthebastadmáp…..

...

I’m sorry…

What was it we were talking about?
 
He was definatley influenced by American writings; the trip in the boat down the river is very Leatherstocking.

And Shakespeare, whom he tried to hate
 
Can’t be – waaaay too short.

Should be more along the lines of:

It was written – in the time before the Great Wobbling - and by Flubblesdottir, child of the Leftlegin and Itsybitsyteenieweenie - that the runes Ogdred the Weary smote upon the walls of the Fort of Forrum, on the mountain of Wibblehelm, with his ancient sword Rustworn Dwarfmangler were not his own, but had been written even more anciently by P’andakråkå, when, after many skull splitting and bloodbathed sword-trials and differences of opinion with trolls, his mighty longship Wherethefuckarewe finally made shore in the ancient fastness of Idunno Yuhádthebastadmáp…..

...

I’m sorry…

What was it we were talking about?

We also need fifteen songs about how nice a particular tree or stream is, several of them by Tom Bombadil.
 
It was written – in the time before the Great Wobbling - and by Flubblesdottir, child of the Leftlegin and Itsybitsyteenieweenie - that the runes Ogdred the Weary smote upon the walls of the Fort of Forrum, on the mountain of Wibblehelm, with his ancient sword Rustworn Dwarfmangler were not his own, but had been written even more anciently by P’andakråkå, when, after many skull splitting and bloodbathed sword-trials and differences of opinion with trolls, his mighty longship Wherethefuckarewe finally made shore in the ancient fastness of Idunno Yuhádthebastadmáp…..

:bdown:

maximus otter
 
We also need fifteen songs about how nice a particular tree or stream is, several of them by Tom Bombadil.
One of my kids was once listening to the audiobook, and got to Boromir's death just as he left college, by the race-course. It's quite a long walk into town from there and he says they were still singing the interminable dirge about Boromir's death, when he hit town...

Re. US influences, I'm not so sure (and I could be wrong - will have to go look it up). He'll have found his student's mentioning of Kentucky names - well, UK names surviving in Kentucky - interesting but I suspect those names just appealed (probably remembered from South Birmingham is my bet), and the student is misremembering their own influence on him, in retrospect. The professor who taught me Old Norse used to find my Yorkshire dialect words interesting - or rather, the fact I could translate some Old Norse words because they were similar to dialect my mother's family had spoken and the kids I went to school with. Philologists are like that.

Don't really find any US lit influences in there whatsoever, and of course, no Shakespeare. (Fortunately re. the Shakespeare). I think the Brandywine thing is a coincidence - it's the hobbits' homely take on the river others called Baranduin. That sort of stuff happened with English place names, where something's name morphed into something else because to later ears it sounded like that word. I doubt he read any American Lit or very much. He started out with classics, swapped to English and stuck with everything pre 1066.
 
Re. US influences, I'm not so sure (and I could be wrong - will have to go look it up). He'll have found his student's mentioning of Kentucky names - well, UK names surviving in Kentucky - interesting but I suspect those names just appealed...

I think that's Davenport's attitude also. He doesn't really suggest any actual US based literary influence on Tolkien's writing beyond the possible collecting of interesting names - nothing deeper than that, really.

I probably over-egged the pudding by using the word 'significant'. I suppose, in the sense that some of those very memorable names might have been harvested from Tolkien's memory of old conversations makes them significant on one level - because they are so memorable, and so inextricably associated with his work - but not in any deeper literary sense.

It's also worth pointing out that it wasn't actually a student of Tolkien's who was the guy with the names, but a contemporary from Tolkien's own student days - which meant that they had a long time to percolate through the latter's literary imagination.
 
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