Abby Epplett, Historian

J.R.R. Tolkien was a professional philologist, an Ancient Greek word meaning “lover of words”. This branch of linguistics focuses on etymologies, the historical meaning behind words and how they evolve over time. Because of his interest, an unusually high number of characters within The Lord of the Rings are writers, translators, and linguists.

In my second week of hiatus from texts written by J.R.R. Tolkien, I wanted to talk about documentaries, one of the most popular ways to learn about history, science, and nearly any other topic. Tolkien’s works are pseudo-historical, presented as translations of a heavily edited ancient text with a modern historical essay added to the front as a Prologue and a series of Appendixes added to the back by various authors. Additionally, characters within the book halt the narrative to describe historically and culturally significant people, places, events, and ideas using both prose and song. Today, screens have largely replaced writing, with documentaries serving the population that once read textbooks. A film adaption faithful to the text could utilize the elements of a documentary to convey its layers of world-building information. Defining the Documentary When creating a documentary, filmmakers collect artifacts in a range of media, then turn the varied experiences into a

I am taking a brief hiatus from working directly with The Lord of the Rings and other texts by J.R.R. Tolkien to talk about another facet of my project: musical theater. Tolkien’s works contain songs in a variety of genres along with implied dance sequences. My hypothetical animated musical will honor these creative choices. The reader may ask, why did Tolkien write in this distinctive style? While he was likely inspired by a myriad of historical European traditions — Celtic bards , Nordic skalds , Greek aoidoi , and other ancient singers — his stylistic choices to include lush descriptions of scenery, contemporary slang, and passages of dialog show similarities with lavish Broadway productions. Tolkien did not have the luxury of living in New York City and seeing the latest hit during its first run, and London’s West End did not support the type of musicals seen across the water , but movie editions allowed British fans to catch a glimpse of this new medium. Interestingly, th

Do you enjoy reading convoluted histories of transcribed and translated documents with discrepancies between surviving copies and a missing original manuscript? Then look no further than The Red Book of Westmarch , also known at The Red Book of Periannath , which is the fiction origin of The Hobbit , The Lord of the Rings , and possibly other works by J.R.R. Tolkien, including parts of The Silmarillion . A highly detailed explanation concerning the creation of this manuscript and its early copies is given in “Note on the Shire Records”, the final section of the Prologue found in The Lord of the Rings: Part One The Fellowship of the Ring . While the confusing contents of this two-and-a-quarter page explanation have been reviewed elsewhere, I will take a few paragraphs to explain what fictitious books were presumably used in Tolkien’s “translation”, the framing device for the work. Then, I will cover a few rediscovered works in the real world, along with several historical hoaxes

Continuing my essay series on The Lord of the Rings , I will discuss the fourth section of the Prologue appearing in Part One The Fellowship of the Ring : “4 Of the Finding of the Ring”. This section reviewed events from The Hobbit , especially “Chapter V Riddles in the Dark”. For the first time, the narrator provided a year for the event: Shire-Reckoning (S.R.) 1341, which is Third Age (T.A.) 2941. The home of the dwarves, called Lonely Mountain in The Hobbit , now has an elvish or Sindarin name, Erebor. The narrator recalled Thorin’s death after the Battle of the Five Arms, and the description of Gollum was somewhat clearer than in The Hobbit : he is “little”, has “large flat feet”, “pale luminous eyes” (13) that turn green when searching for the ring, and ate both raw fish and orcs, originally called goblins, which he killed by strangulation. The narrator reviewed the ring itself: “a ring of gold that made its wearer invisible” (13) and the only thing loved by Gollum, which

Continuing with my close read and historical comparison of the Prologue in Lord of the Rings: Part One, The Fellowship of the Ring , I move on to “3 Of the Ordering of the Shire”. This section begins by listing the parts of the Shire: North, South, East and West Farthings; Tookland; the East and West Marches of semiautonomous Buckland; and “the Westmarch added to the Shire in S.R. 1462” ( Fellowship , 10), offering the first piece of foreshadowing for the section. The rest of the section describes the lack of government and laissez-faire attitude of the nobility, the economy and rudimentary police force, and the postal service. Through this information provided in the text, I compare the culture of the Shire to other cultures in Western Europe to determine what equivalent time in history is the 15 th century of Shire Reckoning (S.R.) when the main story is set. Let’s Talk About Feudalism The Took family with its Fallohide ancestry and connection to the high king of Fo