Appendices B-F
My comments on these sections -- my last post about the actual books (film posts to follow soon) -- will necessarily be a little different than my comments on the story itself, or even Appendix A, since from B on, they really lose any sense of being a “story”. I just want to note some fun features of these Appendices, which I do still commend to your attention.
Appendix B, “The Tale of Years”, is a great timeline for figuring out the answers to lots of questions, like “how long did it take from the fall of Numenor to the fall of Sauron?” (not that long) or “how much older is Arwen than Aragorn?” (so much so that it ceases to be creepy, and you just have to nod wisely in agreeing with Arwen that, if you had immortality, it might take 2,700 years to find a man worth giving it up for, and some of you out there are saying “2,700 years is, if anything, a little optimistic”). I most highly recommend the timeline’s coverage of the novel you’ve just read, though, since Tolkien’s worked it all out meticulously, and I think it’s fun there to see just how close the Fellowship came to meeting a resurrected Gandalf in Lothlorien, or where exactly Frodo and Sam were the day Isengard fell to the Ents (it’s not where they are in Jackson’s film). Also, that section being down to the day allows many of us to learn something fun about our birthdays -- I, for instance, am born on the anniversary of the day Tom Bombadil saved the hobbits from a Barrow-wight.
Appendix C gives you family trees for the various hobbits named in the novel, and unless you’re working on a meticulous reconstruction of the guest list for Bilbo’s birthday party, there’s less here for you. But the genealogist in me still really loved tracing the major characters’ relationships to each other. I do not think it an accident, for instance, that Bilbo’s relationship to Frodo (he’s second cousin to Frodo’s dad) is identical to Frodo’s relationship to both Merry and Pippin (he’s second cousin to a parent for each hobbit) -- assuming I calculated it all correctly. I’d also missed previously that Pippin is so young he’s still in his tweens on this adventure -- it explains a bit more about how he behaves, doesn’t it?
The calendars in Appendix D are fascinating -- overly detailed, like everything Tolkien did, but fun all the same. It’s wild to look, for instance, at how differently Elves tell time than hobbits or humans do, and to ponder what that might say about them. I’ve always been a big fan of calendar reform that regularizes things, and so the hobbit calendar with 12 identical 30 day months (corrected for by having 5-6 days outside the usual month structure annually) is really appealing and fun.
Every time I look at the pronunciation guide in Appendix E, I learn something new about how I’m saying things wrong. I still remember my first encounter with it, and learning that Celeborn’s name is pronounced “KELL-uh-born” instead of the “SELL-uh-born” I’d been saying. This time around it was even more troubling -- the commentary on the pronunciation of the letter f makes it pretty clear that Tolkien would want his name pronounced “GAN-dolve” instead of “GAN-dalf”. Wild, eh? I think I’m sticking with the “f” sound, with apologies to Frodo, though. Those of you who love calligraphy or tattoos can check out the Tengwar, which are wonderfully designed for either purpose.
Tolkien was a linguist and so it’s hard not to believe that Appendix F is really where his heart is. I mean, if you’ve never gotten this far in, you’re going to think I’m kidding. But Tolkien got so keyed up about language that he decided the “Common Speech” wasn’t really a good explanation for why we can understand everyone in the novel. So he decided that they all had been speaking a language called “Westron” which he has translated into English for us -- which means that almost all the names we know are in fact Tolkien’s best efforts to translate sense from one language into another. For instance, nobody called Elrond’s home “Rivendell” -- in the common speech, it would be “Karningul” which, Tolkien tells us, means something like Rivendell. Seriously, this section is fascinating, as you get to watch a serious linguist really ask himself where these languages could have come from, why they speak the way they do, etc. It’s worth your time, for sure.
I know it’s short, but that’s all folks -- my next post will be on the Extended Edition version of The Fellowship of the Ring, and man, if you thought my takes on the books were edgy, wait till you hear me on the movies. I love them, but there’s plenty to tinker with in those movies, and plenty of situations where they intentionally lost some book element in order to try to work as a film, and I’m finding myself less sympathetic to them than I was expecting to be. I do want to talk about story/character innovations for the films that I think work -- in at least a couple of cases, those changes go better than I expected. I’d also like to make a post at the very end recommending some books and other resources in general for those of you who would like to get as obsessive as I am about these things. So, on to (the extended version of) Fellowship with my next post!