Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical | Appendix F, II On Translation

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A black, white, and dark blue striped header image with the text Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical Appendix F, II On Translation

At last, I arrive at the final section of the appendixes. After a hundred and fifty pages of comparing Middle-earth history to real-world history, I have an even stronger grasp of how Tolkien used his expertise as a philologist and historian to build a fantasy world rooted in fact. This will serve as a solid foundation for future research as I move into the dialog portion of the text and reveal vignettes for the hypothetical animated musical.

As mentioned frequently throughout this essay series, Tolkien created a conceit or carefully constructed idea that the stories he told in his Legendarium were actually translations from ancient manuscripts he had rediscovered. Accordingly, he took the last section of his book to explain the decisions he made as a translator, revealing the biases he deliberately introduced to the text to aid an English language audience with some knowledge of Western history in understanding the cultures of Middle-earth, along with other biases that may have been unintentional. Here he discussed the challenges of translating a language with multiple second person pronouns into English, which only has one; choices for spelling and cultural representation; and the lengthy process of turning Westron names into English names, especially for Hobbits.

Translation Is Hard

The quest of Tolkien’s translator character to turn the Westron into “modern English” demonstrated his familiarity and ease with five hundred years of the language. The formal language spoken “in the mouths of the Elves or of the high men of Gondor” was translated to Early Modern English, as found in Shakespeare and the King James Bible, while Hobbitish dialects were similar to those of the 1930s to 1950s in England, with Sam sounding Yorkshire, Merry using Cockney Slang, Pippin speaking like a boarding school brat, and Frodo carefully enunciating like a young professor. Tolkien noted that actual Westron diverged further than what he presented in the text. (The Return of the King, 459)

Seventy years after the original publication, Hobbit banter sounds more like Leave It to Beaver than today’s teenagers. Initially, I wondered if a careful “retranslation” of dialogue to create the same effect as the text had on the modern readers was a decent course of action for a hypothetical animated musical. However, the framing device I chose — that Elanor Gardner Fairbairn is receiving the final edits from her father, Sam, before he leaves for the Undying Lands — would create an appropriate gap in time between the text’s present and the main story aligning to the real-world present and time of publication.

Like other translators, Tolkien had to make choices on how directly he translated the text, and he chose to sensor portions of the book. He openly admitted that Orcs and Trolls spoke a language “more degraded and filthy than I have shown it” (Return, 461). Additionally, Sam’s tendency to curse was slipped into descriptive sentences rather than dialogue to the point that adaptations often portray him as being polite if a little rough around the edges, rather than crude and liable to spout off at any time; he was probably the one to put the original Orc and Troll language in the book. This open acknowledgement of censorship makes me wonder, what else was censored? If only I could read that original Red Book of Westmarch.

English literature and translations have a long history of this editing beginning in the early 19th century or Regency Era. The term bowdlerize or taking out offensive passages from literature, came from author Henrietta Bowdler and her brother, English medical doctor Thomas Bowdler, who created a “clean” compendium The Family Shakespeare intended to “be read aloud in a family”. Like Tolkien, these siblings had good intentions; they even published under Thomas’ name, so Henrietta had plausible deniability in understanding what the questionable passages meant. There must have not been much Shakespeare left.

While I am not about to add cursing to the script of the hypothetical animated musical, censoring techniques for audio-based media have been in use since its inception. In 1964, the United States Supreme Court decreed that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) could censor “obscene, indecent, and profane broadcasts”. Since audio engineers already tested their equipment using a 1000 hertz tone, a note between B5 and C6, they played it over profanity as well. By 1964, “bleeping” was a replacement word for censoring, and the sound was known as “the bleep” by 1968. While an electronically produced noise would be out of place, plenty of famous horns exist in the text. Between Buckland, the Rohirrim, and Boromir, these instruments could be utilized for censoring and act as a nod to Tolkien’s clean original dialogue.

Translation is an inherently political endeavor. The field has long been dominated by highly educated white men, not unlike Tolkien, and while translators may vow to do their best in producing a faithful translation, their biases inevitably creep through. Such was the discovery of classicist Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate The Odyssey and later The Iliad into English. While other women had written English-language books based on these texts, including previously mentioned Mary Pope Osborne, they had translated only part of the story or worked from other English translations rather than Ancient Greek.

Wilson found many past translations to be difficult to read aloud, a stark contrast to the original oral history of the text. Translators Christianized the intentions of characters, making their morality more similar to the Judeo-Christian values of modern readers. Victorian translators added their own layer of sexism, making the female characters prettier and less strong, along with softening character descriptions, especially when referring to enslaved people as “servants” or “handmaidens”. Tolkien deliberately introduced some of these concepts into The Lord of the Rings, as characters exhibit Christian values despite living in a pagan fantasy world, and the Shire has a definite Regency or Victorian layer to its society.

Using “You” However You Like

Tolkien noted that in modern English, it is “impossible to represent” the second person pronouns of Westron. English has ridded itself of informal you, called “familiar” or “deferential” by Tolkien. Most native English speakers are familiar with thou/thee/thy/thine from period dramas and church music. Unfortunately, because “thou” is the antiquated form, many non-linguists get the formality backwards, believing “you” is the informal and “thou” is the formal. Tolkien attempted to use “thee” in a few instances, but he realized this did not work well. Besides differences in formality, a footnote indicated that Westron “you” was gendered with separate forms for men and women. (Return, 460).

Two interesting notes appeared in this section that fleshed out character traits for protagonists, one explicit and one implicit. The explicit example was Pippin using familiar forms of you, and most likely its accompanying verb tenses, when talking to all people in Minas Tirith, Gondor, including eighty-six-year-old Lord Denethor. Fortunately, the Steward appeared to be “amused” by this. The common people decided Pippin must be a young lord, which was true. The implicit example was the mention that villagers from Westfarthing used “as endearments”. I had not heard the term used as a plural outside of Tolkien, similar to his use of “kindnesses”, but it means an “action expressive of love”. When Sam used formal language while speaking to his higher-ranking friends, he appeared deferential to them to maintain a socially acceptable relationship. Since Frodo was the only other Hobbit who lived in Westfarthing, he may have been the one member of the Fellowship to realize Sam was indicating that he loved them, and Sam likely meant this to be their secret code.

These lighthearted linguistic explanations deserve a short scene added into the dialogue portion of the book. An insertion into Book VI, Chapter 5 “The Steward and the King”, which I view as one of the most chaotic chapters of the text from a consistent linear timeline perspective, would allow Frodo to gently explain these concepts to his younger cousin Pippin using parts of the original text from Appendix F. In addition, I may experiment with using the compound word “you-sir” and “you-ma’am” to indicate formality and gender.

Translations of formal versus informal “you” would not have been an issue in most Western European languages other than English, including Romance languages like Spanish, Italian, and French; Germanic languages like German, Dutch, and Afrikaans; and Scandinavian languages like Swedish, Norwegian, and Icelandic. These forms are known as T-V Distinction, as many informal forms begin with “t” or a similar sound (Tu/Thou) and many formal forms begin with “v” or a similar sound (Vous/You). One interesting and at first seemingly counterintuitive pronoun fact was that the informal is used for God and kings. However, in these patriarchal societies, people considered God and the king to be like their fathers, so the informal was correct.

This pronoun divide can even be found throughout the world. Hindustani languages like Hindi and Urdu have three levels of formality, while Japanese has five depending on familiarity and gender. Mandarin Chinese typically is spoken with an informal second person pronoun, nî, except when addressing elders, but this pronoun is written with traditional characters in a masculine or feminine form, while contemporary writers attempt to develop a gender-neutral form.

On Spellings & Culture: Elves and Dwarves (Dwarrows?) and Hobbits

Tolkien had strong opinions on how the names of his fantasy races should be spelled. In his logic, since the plural of “elf” is “elves” and not “elfs”, then the plural of “dwarf” ought to be “dwarves” and not “dwarfs”. Actually, Tolkien wanted the plural of the dwarf to be dwarrows or dwerrows, but his editors did not allow this. Inspiration from this plural came from Old English, when the word for dwarf was dwearh and the Proto-Indo-European has been hypothesized as dhwergwhos.

Tolkien used the examples of man becoming men and goose becoming geese as reasons why dwarf should become dwarrows, but I do not think this is the same pattern. He did get away with using it with the term Dwarrowdelf, the English translation of Phurunargian, used for the place called Moria, Khazad-dûm, and the Black Pit. At any rate, I would like “dwarrows” to appear in the hypothetical animated musical, perhaps with Frodo pedantically explaining how his friends prefer to be called dwarrows, until hearing Gimli’s “Song of Khazad-dûm”, which uses “dwarves” and not “dwarrows”. Appendix F even offers an explanation that could be turned into dialogue: “we no longer speak of a dwarf as often as we do of a man… and memories have not been fresh enough among Men to keep hold of a special plural…” (Return, 464).

Another strong opinion of Tolkien was how Elves should look. He used a bird analogy as found throughout his Legendarium, but instead of referencing swans and mews or seagulls, he compared Victorian era fairies to his Elves as “butterflies to the falcon” (Return, 465). His Elves did not have wings, with the exception of the time “Elbereth / herself was set, who thither came / and wings immortal made” for Eärendil the Mariner (The Fellowship of the Ring, 264), father of Elrond, who became the morning star as punishment for going to the Undying Lands without permission.

Fairy paintings were a trend from the late 18th through early 20th century as revivals of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare kept Regency and Victorian audiences entertained, not unlike the stories of Elves told by Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam. Poet and painter William Blake illustrated the fairies Oberon, Titania, and Puck dancing with their friends, while the art of John Anster Fitzgerald, known as “Fairy Fitzgerald” for his supernatural imagery, connected similar scenes to his use of psychedelic mushrooms, a growing interest of Victorians. The last of these artists may have been Arthur Rackham, who illustrated children’s books with classic tales of Greek heroes, King Arthur, and simplified Shakespeare, along with more modern stories like Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. Many traditional illustrators of Tolkien’s works appear inspired by the dark color palettes and sharp lines of Rackham’s art.

Today, blond-haired, blue-eyed Elves are fan favorites, especially among younger illustrators who first watched Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, but with the exception of “the golden house of Finarfin”, who was the father of Finrod and Galadriel along with two other sons, most elves were “grey-eyed, though their locks were dark” (Return, 468). No explanation was given for other golden-haired Elves like Glorfindel (Fellowship, 236) or Thranduil Elvenking of Mirkwood (The Hobbit, 154); while Glorfindel was Ñoldor like the house of Finarfin and must have been a relative, Thranduil was Sindar or Grey-Elf. Either an important part of Thranduil’s family history was never written, or he was dyeing his hair.

My final note on Elvish hair highlights the handful of silver-haired Elves, including Celeborn and Celebrían, along with Silvan Elves. While “silvan” or “sylvan” comes from the Latin silvanus meaning “wood or forest” personified by a Roman god of the same name, it also refers to the silver-white metalloid sylvanite, a compound of the elements tellurium, silver, and gold. This beautiful mineral was discovered in the mountainous Transylvania region of Romania during the mid-19th century. While much more brittle than its fantasy counterpart, mithril, this may have inspired the hair color of some Elves.

As for the names of Hobbits, Tolkien declared that this was “an invention”, as if the entire book was not from a fantasy world (Return, 465). What he likely meant was that the word was not strictly based on Old English. In Middle-earth, most Westron speakers used banakil meaning “halfling” as a racial designation, while Hobbitish Westron used kuduk based on the Rohirrim word kûd-dûkan meaning “hole-dweller”. Tolkien chose holbytla or Old English for “hole-builder” to represent Rohirrim. Many readers think hobbit sounds like a portmanteau of “human rabbit”, and with the number of references to hobbits being bunnies, rabbits, and rats even among themselves, the rodent connection was likely Tolkien’s intention before he began his deep dive into worldbuilding.

So Many Names

Among the most delightful or stressful of translation choices, depending on your reading preferences, was Tolkien’s ability to create many names for the same person or place and then establish that the supposedly common name was actually a translation from the Westron.

Places

Rivendell, Mount Doom, Mirkwood, and Brandywine were all English translations, with the Elvish name being Imladris, Oroduin, Taur e-Ndaedelos, and Baranduin. Tolkien did give a handful of the original Westron names, as Rivendell was Karningul and the Shire was Sûza. Non-Elves never used the word Imladris, since this was “as if one now was to speak of Winchester as Camelot” (Return, 461).

Unlike King Arthur, who either died or sailed away to Avalon, only to return in Britain’s hour of greatest need, Elrond was still alive and well until he left for the Undying Lands. This was an interesting thought experiment, and one to be explored more thoroughly during the chapters where characters live at Rivendell. What happens when mythological heroes have lived into the modern day? Apparently, they sometimes speak in the heightened language associated with the people of yore but are equally prone to talk like the British variant of sitcom dad Ward Cleaver.

Standard Hobbit Names

Besides place names, Tolkien explained the naming scheme for hobbits. Hobbit-lasses had flower and jewel names, and most hobbit-lads had nonsense names. I assume that Hobbits with nonsense names have at least one Harfoot parent, this being “the most normal and representative variety of Hobbit, and far the most numerous” (Fellowship, 4). The names appearing in the text were, of course, translations. In the Westron, the -o and -e endings were feminine, while the -a ending was masculine, opposite Romance languages, so Tolkien swapped them as needed, causing Bilba to become Bilbo.

At first glance, both Bilbo and Frodo have nonsense names, as the Baggins clan was seemingly upper class Harfoot. However, the word bilbo appeared in English around the 1590s to mean “sword” after a town in Spain where fancy swords were made. Since Bilbo was associated with the sword Sting, and his Took ancestors were the most warlike of the Hobbits, the name fit. As previously mentioned, the translated name Frodo came from Icelandic and meant “wisdom”. If you are a fan of digging through the Legendarium, you can find the Westron translation (Maura) in The Peoples of Middle Earth and the Elvish translation (Iorhael) in The End of the Third Age.

Fallohide Names

The only confirmed Fallohide families were Tooks and Bolgers, and these could be the only surnames remaining, as the others had gone extinct. Here in the real world, British eugenics originator Francis Galton became concerned with this concept in the 19th century and collaborated with Henry William Watson, an ordained priest, to publish “On the Probability of the Extinction of Families” in 1875 where they use statistics to determine when surnames would go extinct.

This extinction is actively happening in China, where as of 2021, 433 million people or 30% of the population share one of five common surnames, 86% of the population share one of the top 100 surnames, and only 6,000 surnames exist for 1.37 billion people. Chinese people have used surnames for longer than many other cultures and recorded these names as far back as the Song Dynasty, which began around 960 AD. The book Hundred Family Surnames, which actually contained 504 surnames, was even considered classic literature and taught in school. However, the modern Chinese government has done away with many of these heritage names. Because Chinese is written in characters, as last mentioned in “Appendix E, II Writing”, entering a unique character into modern database systems is not feasible. Chinese citizens have been denied digital ID cards if their family name cannot be typed into the system, forcing them to change a name that connected them to their ancestors.

Back to Middle-earth, Fallohides reportedly had similar names as Middle Men who lived near the river Anduin, in Dale, and in Rohan. These names were translated to Frankish and Gothic names and reported by Tolkien as causing an “often comic contrast between the first-names and surnames, of which the Hobbits themselves were well aware” (Return, 463). Peregrin Took and Fredegar Bolger had these comically contrasting names. Despite their love of noble names, hobbits seldom used Elvish names, calling these words the “languages of the kings”. Pippin’s son Faramir Took named for his best friend in Gondor and Sam’s daughter Elanor Gardner named by Frodo for a golden flower in Lothlorien were notable exceptions.

Stoor Names

To the east, Southern Stoors from Buckland and the Marish had names translated to sound Celtic. Tolkien chose Celtic names for Bree-land, recalling the “Celtic elements of English” or “relics of British nomenclature” (Return, 463). Celtic Britons arrived on the British Isles during the British Iron Age between the 5th and 1st century BC and eventually became Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Cornish, and Manx. Their relatives in the Balkans fought Alexander the Great in 335 BC, while those in Germany fought Julius Caesar in 58 BC, and those in France ruled Brittany.

While their language and culture were repressed by the English government for centuries, “Englished” place names — the Tolkienesque word for Anglicized — appeared throughout the island. It even has its own field of study, Celtic toponymy. In 2000, linguists Richard Coates and Andrew Breeze published the in-depth book Celtic Voices, English Places: Studies of the Celtic Impact on Place-names in England where they reviewed common Celtic words elements like avon meaning “river” in Stratford-on-Avon; briga meaning “hill” in Brewood, and dubr meaning “water” in Dover and Andover.

Only one personal name was translated from Stoors dialect to English. Tolkien reports that Merry’s real nickname was Kali, both names meaning “jolly, gay”. Kali was short for Kalimac, considered an “unmeaning Buckland name” (Return, 463), but I question how unmeaning the name could be. The translated name Meriadoc means “magnificent” the same as Merry’s epithet after he became the Master of Buckland. Its history and modernization are an interesting story. The epithet was originally used as a surname for the British Celt Conan Meriadoc who legendarily founded Brittany as the forefather to the House of Rohan. Perhaps their Middle-earth equivolents, the Rohirrim, had a patriarch called Kalimac. Real-world Meriadoc appeared by name in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae and as Maxen or Macsen Wledig in a Welsh source, The Dream of Macsen Wledig.

Like many Celtic surnames, it became a given name for boys and received an anglicized spelling, Meredith. The name was never terribly popular for boys, although the writer and composer of The Music Man was Meredith Willson, born in 1902 when the name was #794 on the popularity chart in the United States. The first girl Merediths appeared around 1910 and regularly surpassed boy Merediths by the 1930s. Meredith charted in the top 1000 for boys for the final time in 1954, the same year that The Fellowship of the Ring was published. I cannot know Tolkien’s full intention for giving this character a historical name that became gender-neutral or female-coded, but I will check back on this topic during future essays.

Even Sméagol and Déagol had translated names. The words mathom and smial were modernized English from Old English máthm and smygel, equivalent to Hobbitish Westron kast or Rohirrim katsu and Hobbitish trân or Rohirrim trahan. In this way, Sméagol was the translation of Trahald meaning “burrowing”, and Déagol was the translation of Nahald meaning “secret” (Return, 464). Tolkien neglected to write the sentence explaining Déagol, but a 2012 post from fellow blogger Jason Fisher assured me that it meant “secret” in Old English. Working backwards, this would make the name Nahald based on Hobbitish nân or Rohirrim nahan.

Since Tolkien loved puns, Hobbits also loved puns, and the most famous names associated with Stoors were no exception. Brandywine was the river separating the Shire from Buckland, although this same place name appears in the United States and Canada. In American history, the most notable event related to Brandywine Creek occurred in Pennsylvania during the American Revolutionary War in 1777, when the British soundly defeated the Continental Army and occupied Philadelphia.

For the river in Middle-earth, this was the Anglicized spelling of the Elvish word Baranduin — “accent on and”, says Tolkien — meaning golden brown large river. The original hobbit-name was Branda-nín meaning “border-water” but was also called Bralda-hîm meaning “heady ale” as a joke, hence the double alcohol reference in the translation. The surname Oldbuck was Zaragamba but became Brandybuck or Brandagamba. “Only a very bold hobbit would have ventured to call the Master of Buckland Braldagamba in his hearing”, meaning that the Master was a drunk. Seeing as Rory Brandybuck, Master of Buckland, was known for loudly ordering more wine at Bilbo’s eleventy-first birthday (Fellowship, 32) and was later given “a dozen bottles of Old Winyards: a strong red wine from the Southfarthing” (Fellowship, 40) as his gift, the description might not have been far off in some cases. I suppose Boozybuck could have been the translation, and I would not be surprised if young Frodo got himself in trouble at Buckland by letting the nickname slip.

Rustic Hobbit Names

Moving on to the names of rustic Hobbits, Tolkien noted that many translations sounded “Hebraic”. Modern linguists are more likely to use the term “Semitic”, but maybe Tolkien was emphasizing that he knew Biblical Hebrew and not another language, like Arabic or Aramaic. He listed Sam, Ham, Mat, Tom, and Tim as Hebraic names (Return, 463). All of these names can be tracked to the Bible: Sam for the prophet Samuel in 1 Samuel and 2 Samuel; Ham for the son of Noah cursed in Genesis 9:20-27, as last mentioned in “Races: Maiar, Wizards & Balrogs”; Mat for a medley of Hebrew names, the most common being the apostle Matthew who wrote the gospel bearing his name; and Tom for the apostle Thomas who famously doubted the resurrection in John 20: 24-29.

Tolkien made an error when including “Tim” on this list. He must have been referencing Timothy, known to Catholics as Saint Timothy of Ephesus, who had a Greek father and an ethnically Jewish mother who had converted to Christianity. This person appeared in Acts 16:1-5 along with receiving the Biblical epistles 1 Timothy and 2 Timothy. His name was not Hebrew but Greek, although it meant “honoring God”, a reference to his mother’s monotheist religion in contrast to his father’s polytheist one.

In any case, these were not true Jewish names but abbreviations for “actual Hobbit-names” (Return, 463). Even so, the names link these Hobbits to the Semitic-coded Dwarfs, who Harfoots lived with before moving into the Shire (Fellowship, 4). Sam and Ham were short for Samwise and Hamfast, the equivalent of Ban and Ran for Banazîr and Ranugad, meaning “halfwit” and “homebody” respectively. These names were “originally nicknames… words that had fallen out of colloquial use… traditional names in certain families”. They gave children insult names, although it was unclear whether they waited to see the child’s personality or randomly selected names. While Ham Gamgee was keen enough to stay at home, Aragorn believed that Sam could “speak more wisely” than anyone else in the Fellowship (Fellowship, 545).

Insult names appeared in the Bible along with modern real-world cultures. In Ruth 1:2-5, a pair of sons were known as Mahlon and Kilion, meaning “sickness” and “failing”, and they died after four verses. The prophet Hosea named his three children Jezreel after a valley where a massacre would soon take place, Lo-Ruhamah meaning “not loved”, and Lo-Ammi meaning “not my people”. 1 Chronicles 4: 9-10 included a brief mention of a man named Jabez meaning “pain”, because that was how his mother felt giving birth to him.

A few popular modern names have negative meanings. The surname of Bible lover and Protestant Reformation leader Jean Cauvin, called John Calvin in English, has recently become a popular first name for boys, although Calvin means “bald”. The name Kennedy, given to girls possibly after 35th US President John F. Kennedy and his family, was based on the Old Irish epithet Cennétig meaning “misshapen head”. The name Ares after the Greek god of war has recently begun rising in popularity, arriving in the top 1000 baby names for boys in the United States in 2013 and sitting at #412 in 2023, even though it means “ruin”.

Other Hobbit names up for discussion were the translated surnames Gamgee and Cotton. The translated family trees revealed that the family came from the village of Galabas, making their surname Galbasi but later shortened to Galpsi. For translation, Tolkien chose the town name Gamwich, pronounced similarly to the real-world village of Greenwich, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in London, England and Greenwich Village in New York City, United States. He then translated the original family name to Gammidge and the shortened name to Gamgee, joking that “no reference was intended to the connexion of Samwise with the family of Cotton, though a jest of that kind would have been hobbit-like enough” (Return, 466).

What Tolkien referred to with his Gamgee-Cotton reference was Gamgee brand cotton rag, now rebranded as “highly absorbent padding” and owned by 3M. This was the case of a family surname becoming the colloquial term for a product, meaning that Sam Gamgee was a real-world name. A Sam Gamgee of Tooting, South London wrote to Tolkien in 1956. Remarked to Tolkien in a letter to a friend, “He could not have chosen a more Hobbit-sounding place, could he?”

The surname Cotton represented Hlothran with an “n” meaning “villager”, since hloth was “a two-roomed dwelling or hole” and ran or ranu meant “set of holes”, the same element found in the name Ranugad. It was a spelling variant of Hlothram, with an “m”, meaning “cottager”, and was translated as Cotman, the patriarch of the family, so the surname originated as a patronym. Based on the brief description of the family living situation, I imagine these holes were similar to the hall-and-parlor, timber-framed houses built in England and its colonies from the post-medieval period to the 19th century. The examples owned by Historic New England that I have visited turn out to be too big for true examples as they all included at least a second story or attic. The naming of Cotman, and subsequent use as his name for a surname, may have been a source of pride for the family as they bettered themselves to live in a two-roomed hole instead of the “mere holes… with only one window or none” of the “poorest Hobbits” as seemed to be the case for the Gamgee family (Fellowship, 7).

Quick Update

And with that, the appendixes are done! The blog will take a brief break from the text itself as I prepare for the next stage of this project, which will launch in early 2025. The essay series will not go away! Next week, I will attend the free and online Christopher Tolkien Centenary Conference hosted by the Tolkien Society from England, so that week’s essay will be a short summary of what I learned. Next, I will illustrate the Valar, the upper-level angel-gods in the Legendarium, and compare them to worldwide mythologies and saints in the Catholic tradition. Before I go on Christmas break, I will give a thorough outline of the framing device, pulling together the hints I have dropped throughout the past few months. After that, all will be quiet and still on the blog until the new year.


Read past installments of Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical