The Lord of the Rings Expert Answers Tolkien Questions From Twitter

Do the books or letters have any hints

at what weapon did Sauron use

at the final battle of the War of the Last Alliance?

There is one weapon that Sauron is described as using

and it's his hands.

He is said to have killed Gil-Galad with his burning hands.

So Sauron's hands were like fire.

So the only actual weapon that Sauron

is described in the book as using is his own hands.

And I think you have to admit that's,

that's pretty metal.

This is Corey Olson, the Tolkien Professor

and this is Tolkien Support.

Okay Gail Simone asks, does anyone know

if the syllabic near-reversal of the names

Theoden and Denethor was intentional?

Yeah so first of all Gail, I would say,

I certainly agree with you about the way

that those two characters parallel each other.

That seems a really important thing.

And Denethor, who's despair leads him to madness

ultimately, in the end.

I would say that the relationship

between their names is semi accidental.

Tolkien as always derived the names of his characters

from the languages that he was dealing with.

Denethor comes from his own made up languages,

Theoden does not.

Theoden comes from Anglo-Saxon.

The language of the Rohirrim is essentially Anglo-Saxon.

And Theoden in Anglo-Saxon basically means king.

As the Tolkien scholar, Mike Drout,

who's also an Anglo-Saxon scholar, has pointed out

if you go through the names of all of the kings

in the history of Rohan,

almost all of them have names that mean king.

It's like King son of King, son of King, son of King.

Almost the entire genealogy of the kings of Rohan

all basically mean king.

And Denethor is from the Elvish languages.

However, you know, Gail having said that,

is it a coincidence that their names

do kind of resonate in that way?

No, I don't think it is.

Tolkien had a really good ear.

He was very sensitive to the sound of words.

The way in which their two names involve

a lot of the same sound properties

kind of shuffled around in different ways,

is I think something that probably

would have appealed to him

as he was certainly aware of the way

that their two characters were developing.

Mars.

That is a person named Mars presumably, not the planet.

As I rewatch the Lord of the Rings movie,

I still wonder what is Sauron?

Human or bad elf or some other creature?

Great question.

So Sauron is a Maia, an angelic being.

He is not a mortal creature, either elf or human.

There were, in Tolkien's world,

a lot of these sort of, kind of semi divine creatures

kind of like angels.

Sauron was one of these.

Some of them, of course, many of them were good.

Ultimately, that's what Gandalf is also,

one of these same creatures.

He is a spiritual being taking physical form.

That's why when he dies, because he's actually slain,

his body is killed in the battle and his spirit flees,

but his spirit is greatly weakened by this

but it's not gone.

So he is eventually able,

by the time of the Lord of the Rings,

he can manifest in a physical body again.

All right Morgan number five asks,

when Gandalf went from gray to white,

was it just a one-off or was it a company-wide promotion?

Did Radagast the Brown become Radagast the Gray?

It would have been tough for Alatar and Pallando

going from blue to brown.

Okay, good.

Excellent question.

It is a very natural thing.

When we read about the color of the wizards

to imagine that the wizard's color is a sign of rank

and that there is a hierarchy,

a strict hierarchy among the colors.

Here's how I understand the colors of the wizards.

The colors of the wizards are a sign of their,

not of their ranks, but of their roles,

of their particular jobs.

Saruman had a job, he was the White

and as the White Wizard, he had a job

and his job was to be the enemy of Sauron

and to lead the forces of good against Sauron.

Saruman gets canned from his job

and Gandalf takes over his job.

This is why when Gandalf returns he's the white,

not just because he's more powerful,

he is more powerful,

but because he has a new role

and he is now the White Wizard.

And when he comes back you'll notice he acts like it.

He is in the forefront leading

the good guys overtly as the enemy of Sauron.

That is Saruman as he should have been.

That is what the White Wizard's job description is.

Now this leads to a very sensible question.

What is the job description of the gray wizard?

What was Gandalf's job before?

It seems that his job as the gray is to go around

and encourage and support people

just as Radagast the Brown,

his remit is clearly birds and beasts, right?

He is the friend of birds and beasts.

Gandalf's remit is not birds and beasts, but people.

And the way that we see him going

and the kind of relationships that we see him establishing

in Gondor, in Lothlorien, in The Shire,

suggest that going around and encouraging

and supporting these different populations of people.

That seems to be, as far as we can tell,

what the job description of the gray wizard is.

So no I do not think that

all of the wizards get a company-wide promotion.

The shift from gray to white is a change

in job description for Gandalf, not a rank promotion.

So Ryan asks, do they have compasses in Middle Earth?

Does Arda get magnetic poles after the Akallabeth?

Yes, it has poles.

Do they have compasses?

I don't think so.

We have no references to anybody using compasses

and finding magnetic north.

Does magnetic north exist?

Yes.

It certainly does.

The reference to does Arda get

magnetic poles after the Akallabeth that Ryan asks,

of course, the Akallabeth is the story

of the downfall of Numenor.

The old version of Tolkien's mythology, the Elder Days

in Tolkien's world are a flat earth mythology.

They take place on a flat earth.

When the island of Numenor is sunk beneath the sea

at the end of the Second Age, the world is made round.

So it's not just that the island drops

but the world is made round at that point.

So does Arda get magnetic poles at the point

when it's made round?

Yes, it certainly has them.

Does anyone navigate by them?

That is not at all clear.

So again, there's no explicit references to compasses

but a compass would certainly work in Middle Earth

that seems fairly clear.

Okay question from Zachariah S Pumpkins,

if the Black Speech of Mordor is so ugly to listen to,

how come it looks so pretty

when inscribed upon the One Ring?

It's written in Tengwar, but did the Black Speech

have no written components?

Was Sauron flexing his calligraphy,

or was Elvish his only choice?

Really interesting question.

That script of course was invented by Tolkien.

He invented several, not only languages, but also scripts.

Sauron devised the Black Speech,

because he had an orc problem.

He had communication issues in his armies,

the orcs couldn't communicate with each other.

So he invents the Black Speech.

In some ways, it actually was kind of a failure

as a linguistic experiment by Sauron.

The script that fits his language,

does not fit the work that he wants to do.

So the fact that he has to borrow from the elves,

borrow their script in order

to make his inscription on the Ring

is a little bit of an indictment against Sauron

and kind of shows in the end, he can't really create

new, wonderful things himself.

He's not capable of creating beauty.

He is in the business of tearing beauty down.

All right John Carney asks

the classic and excellent question,

what happened to the Entwives?

The answer, we don't know.

Tolkien was asked this many times.

He answered this question a couple of times in his letter

and his answer was, I don't know.

Though he does say on one or two occasions

that he suspects that they're dead.

The Entwives lived in the lands down near the Anduin,

north of the Argonath,

the place that's called the Brown Lands.

They're quite close to Mordor.

Not exactly on the doorstep, but you know,

they're like a suburb of Mordor.

Were they all slain by Sauron?

Were they scattered and do they still exist somewhere?

Tolkien said, he didn't know for sure.

It's a mystery.

There are several things that he deliberately left mysteries

that he said he himself didn't know the answer to.

So nobody can give a definitive answer to that question.

All right another question from SignoreP,

for non-Hobbits, can you name

one other town or village in the Shire that isn't Hobbiton?

Sure there are lots of towns and village in The Shire.

Michel Delving is the name

of the capital of The Shire essentially.

It's the center of the Shire.

The two other most important places in the Shire

are Buckland, which is the home of the Brandybucks

and Tuckborough, which is the home of the Took family.

And there are a number of other towns that they pass through

Bywater, of course, which is right next to Hobbiton.

There's Woodhall and Stock and several other towns

along the way that we hear about

during the journey of the hobbits

there in the Fellowship of the Ring.

Alright Jeff Ehrmann asks,

I always find it funny that the plural of elf is elves,

but the plural for dwarf is dwarfs not dwarves,

Tolkien popularized this.

I read that it has to do with the origin of the word,

dweorg, Old English or dwarrow.

Exactly.

So this is something that Tolkien as a philologist

that is somebody who studied language

quietly rebelled against.

It is true that the traditional plural of dwarf,

the technically correct plural is dwarfs

and Tolkien hated that because

linguistically it is not sound.

It just does not work and doesn't make sense.

So he innovated his pluralization dwarves,

which he insisted on in The Hobbit,

is his kind of rebellion against

what really is not a very sensible pluralization at all.

And actually it's funny,

he had a bunch of arguments with the proofreading staff,

especially at Houghton Mifflin, the American publisher

who kept correcting it.

Like the copy editors kept going back

and changing it to dwarfs.

And they'd send him the proofs and he'd be like, guys, no.

Like, trust me, who's the professor here?

This comes in from Kevin Hearne who asks,

I never understood the urgency

of hopping on the last boat to Valinor.

Why was it the last boat?

This is almost certainly a lore thing I missed in the books.

Why couldn't Arwen just build a raft and head West later?

And hey, Frodo got on a boat.

Couldn't Arwen have made that one?

So the boats in question are sailing

from the havens of the elves

and they are headed into the West capital W

and when the world was made round,

the Far West was removed from the world.

You can't get there anymore.

But one straight path still remains.

That is straight in the sense

of being tangential to the sphere of the Earth.

So the straight road leaves Earth and goes to Valinor,

which has been taken apart into a separate place.

It's no longer part of the purely physical world anymore

but it is still part of Arda

and there is still a connection.

There is still this kind of umbilical cord

between the world and Valinor.

And that path, that straight road

has been left explicitly in order that the elves

who still remain in Middle Earth can still escape

and go to the Blessed Realm, go to Elvenhome.

They're given by the Valar,

the privilege of sailing on the straight road.

That's where Frodo and Bilbo with Gandalf and Elrond

and the others who depart in the ship there from the harbor

at the end of the Lord of the Rings,

that's where they're headed.

As for Arwen herself, she does not get on a boat

because she has chosen mortality.

The choice of Arwen is a really big deal.

Humans and elves have completely different fates.

What happens to elves at the end of the world?

The world is going to come to an end

and when it comes to an end, the elves are done.

Do they all die?

Are all elf souls annihilated at the end of Arda?

They don't know.

So the big deal, when Arwen chooses to marry Aragorn,

it's an enormous deal.

She is leaving, she is permitted the choice

to leave the fate of elves.

She ceases to be an elf anymore, she becomes mortal.

She embraces mortality and a human fate.

And so therefore she is not going to be going into the West.

And when she dies, when her body dies,

her spirit is not going to go into the West.

That's why such a big deal is made

of the farewell between Elrond and Arwen

because he is going to go to Valinor

and he's going to remain there.

His spirit will remain there

even after his body dies, if his body dies,

and Arwen is going to go wherever humans go.

Eddie Stanton asks, is there a JRR Tolkien book

about the Goblin and Dwarf Great War?

Excellent question to which the unfortunate answer

is no there is no such book.

The longest description, the most information we get

about the war between the dwarves and the goblins or orcs

is in the last section of Appendix A

in The Return of the King

is on the people of Durin.

And that's where we get the description

of the Battle of Azanulbizar,

to use the dwarfish name for it.

It's only about a one paragraph summary of the war itself,

building up to that battle.

That was the final battle.

In fact, that section of Appendix A

is not only the most that we get about that

war between the goblins and dwarves,

but it's also the most information

we get about dwarves full-stop.

We learn more in that section of Appendix A

then really we learn anywhere else, including The Hobbit.

A question from Jacob Williams,

isn't the marring of Arda the doing of Melkor?

And the raising of the hands of Eru,

the Verses of the Song fold in his grief

to the reconciliation?

So Melkor is the big bad of Middle Earth.

And I mean, big bad of Middle Earth.

He is essentially the Satan figure of,

you know, the entirety of Tolkien's world.

He is the second most powerful creature in existence.

Second, only to God himself.

At least in the beginning, he was the second most powerful.

He rebelled against God.

Again paralleling the story of Satan in Christian tradition.

One of the chief differences between Tolkien's mythology

and Judeo-Christian mythology

is that Tolkien describes Melkor

as having marred Arda.

So Arda, again, is the whole world, it's the solar system.

And the entirety of the world has been

tainted essentially by Melkor's malice.

And that's why everything is tending

towards decay and tragedy.

That's basically why do bad things

happen to good people in Middle Earth?

Melkor that's why.

Eru, the One, Iluvatar, who is God, he does respond to that.

His message to Melkor is

there is nothing that you can do

that is ultimately going to mess up my plan for the world.

And you will find that everything that you have done

to try to mess up Middle Earth

is only going to end up contributing

to the ultimate beauty and glory of my creation.

So Tolkien's theology there is that God is still in charge.

Okay Antonio asks,

did Sauron just turn Numenor into a Melkor cult?

Making human sacrifice in the name of the Giver of Freedom?

Yes, yes Antonio, that is exactly what Sauron did.

Sauron was extremely cunning.

He could not compete with the Numenorians

on a military basis.

So Sauron gives in.

So they bring him back as a prisoner to Numenor

and he does that because he really wants to go to Numenor.

And he works on corrupting it from within.

So yes, he turns Numenor into a devil worshiping cult

and ultimately convinces them to attack the last enemy

that they have not defeated,

the ones who have been doing them wrong all these years.

Namely the elves and the Valar over in the West.

It is really fun to talk about your questions.

I really appreciate all the questions

that you guys asked here today.

It's so interesting, of course,

that we're able to still talk about Tolkien,

to have these kinds of debates

and discussions 80 years later.

Well I'm Corey Olsen, the Tolkien Professor

and this has been Tolkien Support.