- 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".