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Tolkien stuff
Mar. 6th, 2006 04:47 pmI'm not doing the B2MEM thing, because I don't feel organised enough to commit to regular ficcish posts; but on the other hand it made me think about share-worthy things in Tolkien.
I've recently bought a copy of the Hammond and Scull line-by-line commentary on LOTR (well, it's not quite line by line, but it's that style) which is full of interesting nuggets of information. I was particularly taken by Tolkien's reasons, as explained in a letter, for choosing 'nazg' as the Black Speech word for 'ring'. It is vaguely based on Gaelic 'nasc', meaning 'ring', but also with a strong semantic link to verbs to do with binding. That's fun: not knowing the Gaelic cognate won't stop you understanding the text, but if you do, it adds an additional bit of linguistic pleasure. There are so few works of literature out there which cater to philology nerds.
( On Aragorn, a star, and a coincidence )
I've recently bought a copy of the Hammond and Scull line-by-line commentary on LOTR (well, it's not quite line by line, but it's that style) which is full of interesting nuggets of information. I was particularly taken by Tolkien's reasons, as explained in a letter, for choosing 'nazg' as the Black Speech word for 'ring'. It is vaguely based on Gaelic 'nasc', meaning 'ring', but also with a strong semantic link to verbs to do with binding. That's fun: not knowing the Gaelic cognate won't stop you understanding the text, but if you do, it adds an additional bit of linguistic pleasure. There are so few works of literature out there which cater to philology nerds.
( On Aragorn, a star, and a coincidence )
