The songs and poetry are great though!
Seriously, OP gets gynaecological sand over “eleventy-one”? It’s not as though the real world lacks illogical numbering systems - beginning with English, which has special words for all the teens but especially the first two. French is worse: it doesn’t start calling things “-teen” until it gets all the way to seventeen, and the decades go “… fifty, sixty, sixty-ten, fourscore, fourscore-ten…”. OTTOMH the only logical numbering system I know of is Chinese, which really does go “…nine, ten, ten-one, ten-two…” etc.
Dislike LotR if you want - the author himself gives you leave to find it twee and silly - but at least grasp what the opening sentence tells you: that hobbits are rather simple, rustic folk, and that the main character from the previous book has lived to an age great enough to attract interest.
I actually quite enjoyed the use of 'eleventy". But it begged the obvious question of what to call other triple digit numbers. “Eleventy” rolls off the tongue quite nicely, but “tenty” “twelvety” “thirteenty” etc do not.
The opening sentence of Finnegan’s Wake is a continuation of the final sentence, so you can’t really not get through the first sentence of the thing without reading all the way to the end…
And doesn’t Star Trek suck? And what about those stupid cats everyone has?
Yeah, definately the wrong message board. You want the other board, the one down the street. That way.
I have to confess this is really depressing. I saw this thread on page one and looked to see what was posted in reply and I can’t believe how pathetic it is.
Look at the thread title and ask yourself how much time did I really waste reading one line of text. It’s a joke. I said the same thing to my LOTR loving family at breakfast the next morning, made the same uber-realist comment about number systems and copped all the same explanations/criticisms, but all done with good humor and grace. It was intended as a starting point for some fun at my own expense.
They acted as if I were backward and ill informed and didn’t have to resort to insulting me to make their point.
I thought I may get a few laughs here from LOTR fans but after the first few all the fans appear to be humorless.
So perhaps I don’t know half of you half as well as I should, and maybe I like more than half of you less than half as well as you think you deserve.
You fibbed! 
I re-read The Hobbit over the Christmas weekend, for the eleventyest time, I started last night on Lord of the Rings. I re-read it about once a year.
I am up to the end of the long expected party.
It gets better every time.
Ah, so my four-year-old granddaughter is an Anglo-Saxon linguist. Fancy that. Wait until I tell her parents.
I’ve been trying to read Rememberance of Things Past for about 20 years. I think I’m on page 48 now.
Grab a plate of madeleines and a pot of tea and you’ll be fine.
Same as German, where they start with…oh my god…elf!
First post slams Tolkein.
Second post slams the Bible.
Third post levels a charge of blasphemy . . . for criticizing Tolkein.
I love the Dope! : )
I have to say that, in general, I never really liked the songs and poems. But, ever since I heard a recording of Tolkein reciting “The Rhyme of the Troll”, it has been a tradition for me to sing it to any infant I’m rocking or lulling to sleep. Despite my being a terrible singer, it has been my experience that babies find male singing soothing. I’ve read that the lower pitch of the masculine voice causes palpable vibrations in the throat and chest that they find soothing. Plus, I find the story amusing.
You get that you’re just typing something on a message board and not actually having a face to face conversation with friends and relatives who know your mannerisms and humor, right?
I can’t even concede I’ve been whooshed here because I think that when each and every single person in this thread not only believed you to be truthful but didn’t even theorize that the post may have been a joke…well, you may want to rethink whether it came across as one or not.
Oh, and FTR, I thought LOTR was pretty boring too.
Yep. I typed it on a message board and knew that I was doing that, the rest is redundant.
Not everyone took it seriously and thought I needed to be chastised, only a pathetic few. Others chose to treat it as a joke or correct my wrongheadedness.
Wouldn’t know. I have tried to read it 3 times over the last 40 odd years and can’t get in to it. But I never said it was boring.
But again you are simply confirming my point. I am happy to be the butt of jokes about an unpopular opinion but why do people feel the need to treat it as more than that?
Your post isn’t an attempt at amusing repartee it is just another attempt to tell me I shouldn’t have posted the OP. Should I send all my OPs to you for prior approval before I post them?
I was a nerdy teenager, long ago, and in the Seventies, I attended a school consisting largely of fellow nerds. And it sure SEEMED at the time that I was the only person I knew who WASN’T an ardent Tokien fan.
As high school freshmen, we were assigned to read “The Hobbit,” which I enjoyed well enough. But when everybody else got engrossed in Tolkien’s work, I didn’t. My Mom bought me “The Silmarillion,” which put me to sleep. And, unlike Don’t Ask, I didn’t give up on “Fellowship of the Ring” after the first paragraph. Rather, I got bored in the Tom Bombadil section, and didn’t pick up the book again until just before the Peter Jackson movie came out.
This time, I liked it a lot better, and finished the trilogy. But I’m still only a tepid fan of Tolkien and of the fantasy genre as a whole.
Not only have a found the books unreadable, but every time I’ve tried to watch the movies I’ve fallen asleep in the first 30 minutes. Based on the reactions of everyone around me I’ve always thought I was alone in this.
That would be awesome. Lemme go get my red ink pen.
You realize that when you edit my emails the red ink pen will fuck up your monitor?
I did slog through the books eventually, but fell asleep in the first ten minutes of the first movie.