h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I tend to concentrate too much on one thing, and then I get fed up of it. I wrote entries for h2g2 for years; I reached the point where I had written more entries than any other author (although my record has since been beaten by Galaxy Babe). Then I tired of it. I took up sub-editing, and sorted out 400 entries before it became too much for me.

Each time, I decide to take a rest, and get fascinated by something else. The last thing I did was to track down an obscure bug in Pliny by looking at each one of the 10,500 entries in the Edited Guide and checking that it displayed in Pliny (I found about 35 that didn't, and fixed them).

So I'm taking a rest from that, but feel that I might get back to writing. Here's what I've written over the last few days - it's not finished yet, and seems to be getting rather long:

A2621765

Is it interesting? Does anybody except me care about this topic? Should I shorten it? Or do the asides opening up interesting topics for further exploration?

I'll bet a lot of people will care about that.

You lost me when you said 'Lord of the Rings', I'm afraid. But I'm probably the only LOTR-hater on h2g2. On the other hand, I'm a big fan of TH White...

Anyway, I'm delighted you're writing again.

Was TH White the guy who wrote The Once and Future King? I thought it started out well, but he lost the plot after a bit. The last book, in which Arthur joined the geese and flew to Iceland was downright weird, although apparently zoologically accurate.

He's the one. I loved the animals in 'The Sword in the Stone'.

You might enjoy 'The Elephant and the Kangaroo'. It takes place in Ireland. You see, the Archangel Michael comes down the chimney of a farmhouse and tells them to build an ark...

The Englishman in the story is the butt of all the jokes.

Ooh. That looks interesting.

(Not reading it all right now, as I need sleep. Shall get back to it.)

I also enjoyed The Sword in the Stone.

When I read it as a child, I remember a scene in which Merlin took the Wart see a tribe of cannibals known as the Anthropophagies. The first time the Wart encountered them, they fired an arrow at him which lodged in a nearby tree. The shaft of the arrow was striped yellow and black like a wasp.

But when I read the book again as an adult, that scene wasn't in it.

I don't remember that scene, either. But the novel was published in bits before the 1958 edition, so maybe that was in there, and you lucked up and read an early edition.

I got it from the library, so it could easily have been very old. But it's also possible that I'm misremembering. I don't think so, though. I have a very clear memory of it.

Ah, a bit of research shows that they were in the original English edition, and taken out when the book was published in America. There was a scene called "The Castle of Lard" substituted instead.

Oh, I remember that one. Because it made me laugh. I remembered it when I studied medieval literature.

Two things, nay three:

Pronunciation of Earendil: if you start with Ay, I would be inclined to say 'eye'. I take it you intend it to rhyme with hay. This problem may be intractable.

Footnote one I can't fathom at all. The only distinction I can see is that some seem to give the plural of elf a capital E, though whether it is Tolkien or others I can't make out. Am I missing something?

Overall: we are discussing fiction as though it were fact. We are used to this, but still it's interesting. If you discussed biblical characters this way, you could prompt objections that no-one will raise over Tolkien or Star Trek. Just musing.

The joys of "Replace All". I wrote a footnote explaining the distinction between elfs and elves, and then used Replace All to change every occurrence of elfs to elves, including the explanatory one in the footnote.

I suppose I could say that the Eär at the start of his name is two syllables and rhymes with 'They are'.

I do state clearly that Elrond is a character from two books. I don't state that the books are fiction. I suppose I could put in "fictional" somewhere there. It is an interesting point.

At least Tolkien was consistent in the published versions of his stories. I've been told that people who try to treat the Sherlock Holmes stories as a historical narrative run into all sorts of problems because of inconsistencies between the stories.

Is Earendil of the Sylmarillion to bet identified with Aurendil of the Old Norse tales?

They have in common the second planet, the brightest star in the night sky being named after them.

Quite a number of the names of Tolkien's work are borrowed from the Norse mythology, but it is certainly risky making identification of them with Tolkien's characters on that basis.

I know he borrowed his dwarf names, as well as the name Gandalf, from Norse tales. And his Quenya Elvish language was supposedly based grammatically on Finnish. But I don't think he borrowed his Elvish names from Norse.

Gandalf, in the Old Norse Tales, appears as a name of one the dwarves.

In Tolkien's epic, though initially closely associated with the dwarves, the character develops separately.

Also Tolkien often stressed that he was nine-fingered (like Frodo) as a consequence of his WWI military service, but downplayed identification of his story with that.

I'm just glad you're still around, Gnomon.

"the only LOTR-hater on h2g2" - I am not an LOTR-hater, as I've never read/seen any of them, so they mean nothing to me. But I can say I'm not a fan

GB

Havent read all of it, but the first thing that came in mind, is that there has to be a section about Vilya, it's powers, who gave it to him and what he uses it for, thats all in the books, mostly in the appendicies...

The fiction problem arises from what you might call the conjuror convention: if you're a serious player you don't say it's fiction, but all your protestations of veracity are within the fiction. Think of Uri Geller.

'They are' is a terrific solution.

Tolkien himself always presented his stories as old legends that he had translated from old manuscripts, calling himself the editor rather than the writer. This was a common convention in Victorian novels as well.

Maybe we have stuff for an Entry here, starting with Thomas More putting real people and events into the beginning of 'Utopia', and blurring the introduction of the fictional part, with hidden clues for those who understood Greek...