Abby Epplett, Historian

As someone who typically will not read a book or watch a movie with too many men — one reason I dislike Chariots of Fire while acknowledging that it deserves to be considered a technically and culturally significant film — The Lord of the Rings is a notable exception. The main cast of Nine Walkers have all been assigned male pronouns in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “translation” into English from Westron, and more on the technicalities of gendered language will appear in upcoming posts for the Appendixes on languages in Middle-earth. Yet female characters regularly have greater magical power or preternatural ability than their male counterparts: Galadriel was the greatest of the Ñoldor Elves, Arwen influenced Aragorn to reunite an empire, Eowyn killed the Witch-King, and even Rosie Cotton implied she could predict the future, telling Sam upon his return to the Shire, “I’ve been expecting you since the Spring” ( The Return of the King , 312).

This week, I am back with more from Appendix A, by far the longest and most dense of the appendixes. For those concerned with timing, my final post about Appendix A is currently scheduled to run on July 7, while my final post about the appendixes as a whole will appear many months from now on November 10, all dates subject to change. This week, I move along to “(iii) Eriador, Arnor, and the Heirs of Isildur”, which focuses mostly on the North Kingdom and the Dúnedain, the Men of the West. As for historical connections, the section is filled with references to topics from across European and world history, including ancient burial customs, colonization, Arctic technology, idioms, royal jewels, and how medieval internships worked. Plus, a few popular characters from the dialogue portion of the books make appearances. The section began with a brief refresher on what land was considered Eriador: everything from the Misty Mountains to the east and the Blue Mountains to the west,...

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...

A major motif in The Lord of the Rings is the presence of large bodies of water, especially rivers and the Sea. In the Prologue “1 Concerning Hobbits”, the narrator explains that Hobbits had developed an antagonistic view of this type of water, along with the exploration and cultures associated with it. Hobbits of the Shire and the neighboring settlement Westfarthing lived not far from three Elf-towers located in the appropriately named Tower Hills and believed “one could see the Sea from the top of that [tallest] tower… no Hobbit had ever been known to climb it… the Sea became a word of fear among them, and a token of death”. (8) This passage also describes their dualistic relationship with Elves because of that Race’s association with the Sea. Although Hobbits admired, even envied, Elf culture by appropriating their crafts and a variant of their writing system, along with being ruled by the Elf-like or Elf-descended Fallohide Hobbits, as discussed in my post last week , at t...