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Old 06-17-2007, 08:45 PM   #33
Urbane Guerrilla
Person who doesn't update the user title
 
Join Date: Jul 2002
Location: Southern California
Posts: 6,674
Even if it's not for everybody, LOTR repays the mature reader, for here there are indeed "icy beauties which pierce the soul" as one reviewer (P.S. Beagle?) had it. My one regret over having finished LOTR at fifteen was that I had not waited until twenty-one. (So I do the best I can, reading it, getting older, rereading it, getting older still...)

Tolkien actually didn't coin very many words; he resurrected words long buried, buried with Old English. All his Dwarves had names -- of Norse elves yet -- lifted from old literature like the Eddas or Norse mythological tales. Even his wizard was so: Gandalf means magic-elf, and this was the name of a Norse dwarf. Even mathom, I think, is a lift from Old English. Thain is just a variant spelling of a word familiar to Shakespeareans -- from the Scottish play.

Quote:
But that's the correct pronunciation.
One of the two. Enroute to checking on that, I found that a venereal disease of horses is pronounced doo-reen, not dow-reen. And that the word is perhaps derived from the Arabic.
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Last edited by Urbane Guerrilla; 06-17-2007 at 08:52 PM.
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