HoME XIII: The Weird Bits

[Urwen]

This is the book that contains, among other things, a tale of Northern Orcs, who worshipped Aurora Borealis and captured humans alive to eat as popsicles; the list of King Elessar's full names; how the 'treasure' of Petty-Dwarves are actually a bunch of old ratty shoes (they loved eating leather - don't ask) which explains why other people couldn't eat them; how the Eagles double as a taxi service during their spare time (but are deathly afraid of lava for some reason, which was why they bailed out on whole 'destroy the Ring' business); how Maglor lived on till modern era and gathered several punks who were rebelling against their parents and formed a band with them, calling it the Blind Guardian, and went on to describe his experiences through music.

But of course, there is more. Stay tuned!

[Huinesoron]

I love HoME XIII; it's such a quirky book, every few pages you run into something new and deeply strange.

Like the Dwarf Naming Fragments, where Tolkien experimented with "true Rhovani names for the dwarves" (actually just Gimli, because we all know about Tolkien and ambitious mission statements). Which one should we take as (pseudo-)canon - the 'what if their language was all suffixes?' Kadhrolissontaforil, the 'is this a bit too on the nose?' Moshes, or the 'technically gimli is a word in Adunaic anyway, and stars are pretty close to fire, so let's just call him' Gimli?

Or maybe we should ignore them all, on the ground that (as Christopher said), 'my father was clearly immensely displeased with this whole line of thought; the fragments were discarded, and indeed appear only to have survived due to my mother retrieving them from the waste-paper basket for use as shopping lists'.

hS

[Huinesoron]

Just stumbled across the Numenorean Pharmacopeia section, which was a bit of a surprise. I guess we knew that the Numenoreans had a lot of plants with 'interesting' properties - after all, Gondor called pipe-weed 'westmansweed', and athelas was a Numenorean herb. But I still wouldn't have expected three whole pages on Numenorean drugs and psychotropics!

I guess it shows what Tolkien was thinking about when he drew those lovely ranalinque and linque surisse sketches, and it's certainly nice to know more about them - but I could have done without quite so detailed a description of the aftereffects of pilinehtar inhalation.

(I understand an early draft of this text is going to be in the Hostetter book. Given how much longer it's supposed to be, will we finally get details on that cryptic "bark of the mellyrn" reference in Unfinished Tales? I sure hope so!)

hS

[Pitchwife]

Originally Posted by Huinesoron

will we finally get details on that cryptic "bark of the mellyrn" reference in Unfinished Tales?

We knew all along that Middle-earth had walking trees, but barking trees? That's quite a revelation!

EDIT: Actually, this is a thing, as per a footnote in HoME XIII. When Isengard was searched after Saruman's downfall, evidence was discovered that, not content with cross-breeding Orcs and Men, he had been working on hybridising the two most fearsome warrior races of ME - huorns and wargs! (What did you think he was after on his visits to Fangorn? Treebeard's mistrust was more justified then he knew!) If his experiments had reached fruition before the War of the Ring, the Battle of Helm's Deep would have gone differently...

[Urwen]

Did we mention a little-known fact that Numenor didn't sink because of Valar/Eru? The truth is that Uinen loved other women, and that she and her lover were raising a leviathan in secret, in hopes of getting rid of Pharazon and freeing his wife from that marriage. They named him UM, after their initials. Unfortunately, he misunderstood their commands and nuked the island completely, while Miriel was still on it, when he wasn't supposed to do either. The Valar lied about what really happened in order to save face. It's all in there.

[Pitchwife]

This is how the story goes in the first draft, which (as usual) underwent several revisions and transformations. According to Tolkien's latest notes

Originally Posted by HoME XIII, Of Uinen and Miriel, Footnote 23

The leviathan is not to be thought of as a dumb beast but had speech and understanding alike to Manwë's eagles. It would have followed Uinen's command to the tehta had its orders not been countermanded by the higher authority of Ossë, who had learned about his wife's infidelity. Beside himself with jealous wrath, he incited the leviathan to destroy his rival together with all of her native isle.

Ossë, both a homophobe and a genocide - seems his brief flirt with Melkor in the beginning of Arda had left a deeper influence than we thought up to now.