Tolkien Quotes
 

I have been a fan of Tolkien from a young age. At first it was just the ripping yarns, but over time it has become more and more about his beautiful use of language. And yet I don't have a Tolkien quote as my forum signature, and that is because I find the best passages are too long for a sig.

So here is a place for people (or if I'm the only one interested, just me :)) to post passages that seem notable for any reason, be it narrative importance, or significance to *bands, or just favourites.

I'll start with an obscure one from The Lay of the Children of Hurin; it is about Beleg casting a sharpening spell on his knife in preparation for his ill-fated freeing of Turin (the knife pricked Turin's foot, and he woke and killed Beleg, mistaking him for an orc):
A few weapon ideas in that :)

Let me hi-jack your thread while it is still young, with an obituary.

Dragonriders of Pern author Anne McCaffrey dies
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/23/anne_mccaffrey/

Only 70 more years until Pernband can be legally released...

Or 90 or more if the IP lobby gets its way ...

Hijacked back :)

My favorite quotes are usually in the voices of the characters themselves:

Morgoth's curse:
The Prophecy of the North:
Caranthir clears up a couple of small technicalities:
For me the most powerful part of the Silmarillion is when Fingolfin resolves to fight Morgoth alone...
I'll stop here since I don't have any of the books handy. To those who are fond of Tolkien's works I'll also recommend "Smith of Wootton Major & Farmer Giles of Ham." The second is especially charming and full of witty quotes that I can't search up on the web.

PS: Sorry that all my quotes are bleak and grim --- half of why Tolkien is so great is his sense of humor! But I just quoted the parts where I could remember enough of the phrasing to text search them...

This one is from Of Tuor and his coming to Gondolin in Unfinished Tales, which in my opinion is one of Tolkien's finest pieces of writing:

Sadly the piece ends there, and we never see a detailed update of Tuor's entry into Gondolin, his marriage with Idril, and the betrayal (by Maeglin) and fall of Gondolin.

I can see I'm going to have to limit myself :)

I have this thing, where I can't accept anything as Tolkien except Hobbit, LoTR and Silmarillion; Unfinished Tales is not canon for me. Anyone else have this?

A.

I think to be really strict, one would need to exclude the Silmarillion, as that was edited by Christopher Tolkien without JRRT's input (and Christopher after regretted some of his editorial decisions).

My personal approach is to accept everything actually written by JRRT as valid to some extent. The Hobbit and LoTR are clearly canon (which is not a term I'm very fond of, but whatever). Everything else I think of as unfinished to varying degrees.

So, for example, the story of Morgoth and Ungoliant killing the trees of Valinor was stable enough over a long period that IMO the Silmarillion version of it can be regarded as definitive. But there are other things about which Tolkien himself was clearly undecided, such as Celeborn's lineage, and the origin of orcs (and whether balrogs had wings...). There were also cases where he had made up his mind to change something, but had not actually written a decent version of it down; an example here is that either Amrod or Amras was accidentally burned to death with the Telerin ships at Losgar.

Certainly I get a great deal of pleasure from reading all the fragments, and getting a feel for what was the right story - Tolkien used to say he learned the truth about things, rather than that he invented them - but I think anyone can take from it what they want. I mean, some people even regard the movies as canon ;)

I take Angband itself as canon and maintain that Tolkien was too scatterbrained to remember to include Omarax, Cantoras, Kaxlax, and Tselakus, not to mention the shady trading outpost full of thuggish Edain on the peak of Thangorodrim. Also, Yeeks, kobolds, and icky-things figured prominently in the early battles against the Noldor, and several major engagements were won by Morgoth by sheer power of breeding lice. Christopher Tolkien edited that stuff out of the Silmarillion though.

That is indeed a good starting point! It is an obscure source, but it is the passage I know best in it, and this is probably not unusual among people writing Tolkien themed games...

Indeed, I have implemented all of these in Sil, and am surprised they are not in V considering the number of made up artifacts. In fact my familiarity with these during play-testing enabled me to tell that you had accidentally spelled 'Saithnar' wrong, which itself suggests you heroically typed it all out from your copy of the Lays instead of finding it on the net!

I should note that the lengthening song of Luthien is also a useful source.