Tolkien Errors and Anachronisms

[Forkbeard]

Originally Posted by Wally

Sorry - been away for a bit.

To answer someone's question, 'hola' was said by Shagrat to Gorbag immediately following Sam's battle with Shelob, just before the Orcs find Frodo. 'Hola' is uniquely Spanish, and I had tied that in with the 'coney' reference, wondering if that was some Tolkien wordplay or subtle jest. There have since been many comments on etymology, Latin derivatives, etc., but it is unclear to me just what any of that has to do with a fictional Middle-Earth and languages that Tolkien invented on his own.

Tolkien didn't write LoTR in Quenya or Sindarin or Black Speech, he wrote it in English. Yes, we have words and phrases from those invented languages in the novel, but nonetheless the main language is English. "Hola" is an English word, has been for 5 centuries. Might as well say that "quest" or "moutains" or "forest" are anachronisms since they were borrowed from other languages into English centuries ago too. But coney, hola, etc are not "uniquely" Spanish and have long been part of the English language, the language Tolkien wrote in.

Tolkien himself says that Sauron became "aware of the magnitude of his own folly" in leaving Mount Doom unguarded.

No he doesn't. He isn't speaking in those lines of having Mt Doom unguarded, but rather the strategem that Gandalf and Elrond hatched and Aragorn aided in keeping Sauron's attention on them and on war and not on a lonely hobbit doggedly dragging the Ring to its point of origin.

This would have taken only a few Orcs out of thousands, and I think a much better plot device would have been for there to have been such a guard in place, which Frodo and Sam were going to have to deal with somehow, but instead they find that Gollum had managed to strangle them prior to their arrival at the Chambers of Fire. This, of course, being necessary to prevent loss of the Ring to the Orcs at the very end.

SO if you don't like the way Tolkien wrote it, why read it and comment on it? On what grounds is this a "better plot device" much less a "much better" than what is written in the text?

In the spirit of the arguments preceding, one could very well ask just why there was such a considerable guard of Orcs at Cirith Ungol if Shelob had it so well guarded on her own. My opinion is that if such as guard had been provided in the one location, it should have been provided at the other. This is, IMHO, another Tolkien plot-hole.

Shelob was a free agent, there was no guarantee that she would stop everyone going through. MOre importantly, the Tower of Cirith Ungol was situated to guard BOTH the upper entrances to Shelob and the pass and road leading into Mordor at that point AND the road going down to Minas Morgul. Further, like the Teeth, it is the ENTRANCE to the land of Mordor and hardly on the same level as Mt. Doom. Guarding an entrance to the palace hardly means that the parlor needs a guard too.