I got my copy on Thursday, and with dogged perseverance I’m now about 45 pages (out of over 400) into it, using my reading glasses and magnifier to follow the small print and smaller footnotes. I’m truly geeked out about the whole thing, and am in a sort of state of wonder with just how obsessed good old JRRT was with getting the details right.
Cases in point:
in an era with no calculators, he computed to over 300 decimal points his statistics on elven reproductive rates over 29 generations.
He spent a LOT of time trying to decide whether the elven gestation period was 108 or 144 human years.
He devoted lots of notes to deciding the proper Quenya word for ‘body’, beginning with the term hrón before changing it to hrondo, and finally to hröa.
He strove to make the Valaran measurements of time mathematically correlative with our solar year, and to do so he had to make the smallest unit of Valarian time equal to 0.89etc to about 35 places of a second.
OK, you’ve got to be a super uber Tolkien Geek to love this stuff, but I am enjoying it, tiny bites at a time. But if you plan to read this, best be very familiar with The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and Volumes X-XII of the History of Middle Earth series.
300 decimal points? Wow. Can you provide the figure? (P.S. And of course, the last 290 digits are probably meaningless given the likely population of elves in all of Middle Earth history)
I just spent four days (online) at Oxonmoot, the annual convention of the Tolkien Society. Carl Hostetter gave a talk there. Here’s what the schedule of it was. It was both both an online conference and an in-person one. It was the largest Oxonmoot so far, with over 100 people there in person and over 400 online, and the membership came from many different countries:
I’m surprised that you don’t belong to the Tolkien Society and that you don’t regularly go to Oxonmoot, Qadqop_the_Mercotan. Incidentally, Carl Hostetter lives near me, and I’ve know him since about 1991. He was on the organizing committee of Mythcon in 1994 (held in Washington, D.C.), and I was chair of that committee. Verlyn Flieger was the scholar guest of honor at that con.
Carl and Verlyn have been the editors of the Tolkien books published in the past several years. They both live fairly close to me. In fact, I live very close to the exact halfway point between their two homes. Because of this, I have been joking that my apartment is now the center of Tolkien scholarship.
But seriously, I’d say that anyone who calculates anything to 300 decimal places some form of mentally ill. Which, honestly, would explain a lot about Tolkien: No sane person spends a lifetime writing a book.
If you create something enormous and immensely detailed, you don’t need mental illness to explain obsessing about wanting it to be correct, cohesive and coherent, all the way through.
And think how disappointing it would be if he hadn’t. Then, just another fantasy writer, instead of the Best World-Builder Ever.
JRRT eventually decided that the typical gestation period was 108 years, but Miriel’s pregnancy with the mighty and narcissistic Fëanor lasted a full 144.
I haven’t gotten to the chapters on the computations yet, just the prologue’s discussion about them.
Did he explain why the gestation period was so bloody long? OK, different species and all that, but it seems to me it would be dangerous to be pregnant that long, even given they came built that way as opposed to evolving that way.
Because the bodies of the eldar are in harmony with the stuff of Arda itself, and growing is slow as the hills as a result, & even as their minds are quick, they are also very patient. They didn’t get sick either, and heal readily from wounds.
A lot of people have spent their lives on an unusual project. Most of those projects aren’t very important for them or anyone else. Some of them turn out to be important for many other people.
Also, elves are like flippin’ immortal? If a fertile human woman is 30 years old and spends one year being pregnant (very round numbers), she’s been pregnant for over 3% of her entire lifetime so far. If a fertile elven woman is 8000 years old and spends 100 years being pregnant, she’s been pregnant less than 1.5% of her lifetime so far.
Really, as QtM says, elves don’t mind taking a long time over things in general. They’re used to it.
That said, IIRC Aragorn’s and Arwen’s son Eldarion is born within like one year of their marriage? Which is basically breeding like hamsters as far as the usual norms of elven biology are concerned.
Healthy levels of meticulousness would account for calculations to two decimal places, or maybe even three or four. For a calculation (any calculation, but especially for something with error bars as large as fertility rates) to 300 decimal places, though, my guess would be an ADD hyperfocus state.
Another interesting peek into Tolkien’s psyche. He famously said that he “cordially dislikes allegory in all of its forms”, and lays out a very meticulous, detailed definition of precisely what a “fairy story” is. And then he presents “Leaf by Niggle” as an example of a fairy story, despite it bearing no resemblance whatsoever to his definition of a fairy story, and instead being clearly and unambiguously an allegory.
I’m still not sure if he himself realized what he was doing, there.
The book goes on at length in the early pages about how the lives of the elves are as the life of Arda, and while their hröa (bodies) eventually wear out and fade away, their fëa (spirits) do not, and last as long as the world endures. And for some elves, their bodies lasted in Middle Earth from the first age into the beginning of the 4th (Celeborn is one example of that, as is Cirdan).
And I should have joined the Tolkien Society long ago. The fact that I didn’t does tell me that I’m more of an enthused episodic dabbler in JRRT’s world than an actual student of his lore, as I prefer to imagine myself. But I retire in about a year, so perhaps I can find redemption.
The long gestation doesn’t seem all that weird to me. They are immortal, and my guess is the risks to an elf of being pregnant are quite small. There must be almost no metabolic strain on the body at that rate.
Not irrevocably, it appears? According to what Aragorn said to her on his deathbed, she still had the option of take-backsies:
So ISTM that Arwen was still potentially immortal in her elven nature, even after her marriage. The obstacles to her retaining elven immortality were not biological but logistical (no more ships going to the Undying Lands) and personal (she chose to keep her vow to Aragorn of forsaking her lineage in order to share his fate). She didn’t magically just become an ordinary human woman due to her marriage, so her un-elvishly short gestation times had to be due to something in the hybridization process.
