backofthebookshelf: SO I was reading the Smaug chapters of The Hobbit at work today (aw yiss I have…
SO I was reading the Smaug chapters of The Hobbit at work today (aw yiss I have the best job) (book discussion on January 26th, everyone in Chicagoland is invited) and I had a Thought. And then I checked the Internet, and the Internet agrees with me.
There is a small, frightening, non-zero chance that the Arkenstone is a Silmaril.
Maedhros threw himself into a fiery chasm with one of the Silmarils, but they can’t be destroyed, so presumably it just floated around for a while and then drifted up to lodge itself in the Lonely Mountain, waiting for Dwarves to come and dig it out. The Silmarils and the Arkenstone are described in almost exactly the same way, they have the same kind of dangerous pull on people, and when Tolkien translated some of his mythos into Anglo-Saxon, he –
wait, back that shit up
WHEN TOLKIEN TRANSLATED SOME OF HIS MYTHOS INTO ANGLO-SAXON
because he’s Tolkien and oh my god who does that
anyway
when motherfucking Tolkien translated some of the goddamn Silmarillion into fucking Anglo-Saxon, the word he used for “Silmaril” was “eorclanstánas,” which, say it out loud, is clearly the word he used as the origin for “Arkenstone.” (It’s also the word used in Beowulf for “precious stone.”)
Did he mean for the Arkenstone to be a Silmaril? Without any notes from him on the subject, there’s no way to know. Tolkien did a valiant job of keeping his own mythology out of The Hobbit as he wrote it, but he did slip in a few places, and those are the things that allowed him to tie it into Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion later. He obviously hadn’t had the Ring in mind when he wrote The Hobbit, but he absolutely already had the Silmarils knocking around in his head. It’s more than possible that he wrote one into this later-age children’s story to amuse himself.
What does this mean?
- BILBO USED A SILMARIL AS A PILLOW
- AND THEN GAVE IT AWAY
- TO AN ELF
- IMAGINE THRANDUIL’S FACE
- ALSO THORIN
- THORIN WOULD BE SO FUCKING PISSED
- “THE ARKENSTONE WAS MADE BY ELVES?”
- “WHAT THE FUCK?”
- “I DON’T BELIEVE YOU”
- BUT THORIN IT CAUSED THE DOWNFALL OF ANCIENT ELVENDOM
- “…WELL THEN I SUPPOSE THAT’S OKAY”
- AND THEN THEY JUST BURY IT
- LIKE “LOL WHATEVER WE DON’T NEED THIS SHIT ANY MORE”
- HAS ANYONE TOLD ELROND ABOUT THIS?
- IS GANDALF JUST LAUGHING AT EVERYONE THE WHOLE TIME
- of course he is what am i saying
Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/72028655662.
Tags: I'd never thought of that angle, makes a certain amount of sense though.
