I’m rereading “The lord of the rings”, and in “The fellowship of the ring”, chapter 9 “The great river”, following the scene where Sam catches a glimpse of Gollum and tells Frodo who in turn informs Aragorn, I came upon the following :
Even assuming a typo (“Same” instead of “Sam”), the bolded sentence comes as nicely as a hair in a bowl of soup, and makes no sense in context. I wondered for a while whether my limited command of English was making me miss or misunderstand something, but couldn’t think of anything.
Then it came to my mind that map makers include false details to catch copyright infringers. I thought that maybe it could be a similar trap, even though why would such a trap be set is unclear to me. In case another publisher would lift the text from this edition rather than from an original draft? Doesn’t make much sense to me.
Any idea/educated guess? And does this weird sentence appears too in your own editions of “the lord of the rings”?
Other than the typo, what do you think is weird about it? Puckering your brow makes sense to me. How are you parsing it as a non-native English speaker?
The passage is describing the landscape. Why would it be suddenly mentioned that a character is puckering his brow without any reason to do so, before returning to the description of the landscape? I would have had the same reaction reading instead “Fredo picked his nose” or “Lego lass combed his hair”. Why would Tolkien mention that? The sentence just sticks out like a sore thumb.
Tolkien did this a lot. Only a few paragraphs down you have Aragorn ‘wondering if Gollum had been doing some mischief etc’, between description of the weather and the surroundings. It’s third person omniscient, so he tends to drop in and out of various character’s perspectives.
On the map of The Shire in Return of the King there’s a town indicated called “Catbarion”. This is apparently a misreading (made while making the good copy for the book) of the more authentic-sounding Oatbarton. I first learned of it from Robert Foster’s a Guide to Middle-Earth (and its later editions), which explained it as an error.
It used to be you could just Google “Catbarion”. But when I tried just now nothing Tolkeinian showed up. Along with more entries than I’d expect for “Cat Baron”
How would this work as a “copyright trap”? If someone is copying the entire book and publishing it, that’s obviously a violation of copyright, whether they include an anomalous line or not.
The reason a mapmaker might do it is that the arrangement of streets and towns and rivers on planet earth is not copyrightable, so anyone can map the streets and rivers and publish a map, and it will look exactly the same as your map, assuming neither of you made any mistakes. But if you intentionally include mistakes, and the other guy’s map has the same mistakes, then you have pretty good evidence that they copied your map rather than created their own map.
Obviously this wouldn’t be necessary for things that are copyrightable and under copyright, like a non-public-domain book or fictional map.
Just for the record, I’ve spent a lifetime obsessed with books and I’ve never encountered a copyright trap in an ordinary book and never heard of the existence of one. A specialized reference book, maybe, although those are still rare because they cast doubt on the accuracy of everything else in the book.
If something in a book is weird or garbled, it may be a mistake but it is never a copyright trap.
If Sam was frowning, I’d guess that he either didn’t like the look of the weather being described or didn’t trust it, if it was clearing. So you’ve got a pretty sky and then the reaction of a character to seeing that sky. Since it was Sam, it would be a very practical assessment of that sky.
Every author has the occasional sentence that misfires. You’re happily reading along and all of a sudden – speed bump. There’s a sentence that just makes no sense – maybe the author was trying to hint at something, but didn’t give the reader quite enough context. Perhaps it was a sentence where the author thought “Ah, that’s a place holder – I’ll get back to it”, and never did. Or maybe it’s just a stylistic misfire that sits amongst the rest of the work like cat sick in the middle of the living room carpet.
Considering how * very many* sentences The Lord of the Rings trilogy has, I guess we consider ourselves lucky to only step in cat puke on a very occasional basis.
For what it's worth, I'd guess that Sam was looking at the moon and thinking "Time's awasting. We should probably get this Ring thing finished already."