Tolkien taking a moment in the introduction to LOTR to explain that the authorities eventually ruled that OBVIOUSLY, that's not a riddle, and Gollum would have been fully within his rights to reject it, but BECAUSE he answered it, he accepted it as valid, is one of his funnier moments.
X-Men Red issue 3 Girl who always wins games as her ultimate power, flirts with twenty something boy for he flattered her, so they do a game of innuendo and wordplay Twenty something boy then escalates the stakes, and in the process of past wordplay, forces the girl to unconsciously
(maybe?) warp reality so two different people play their game a certain way. And in the process since the two other people were people fighting to death in the colosseum, the girl accidentally kills her lover, for her ultimate power is to never lose any game she starts playing.
I thought that was in the Hobbit? /pedant but yeah, Tolkien’s sense of humour really shines through!
(I’m on holiday otherwise I would, of course, scuttle off to my bookcase and check- instead I am using my holiday to split hairs about Tolkien online)
Look once the next snap happens you can’t go back to use your challenge flag. Everyone knows that
Essentially yes. Though I don't know how you adjudicate the riddle contest anyway given that there are TWO contradictory versions of events extant anyway!
Oh yeah mister "literature peaked in AD 1100" absolutely loved his little Nabokovian games.
Like if you've only READ it in English (rather than taking the time to work through the Westron like @beijingpalmer.bsky.social ) you don't even know all the Hobbits' REAL names! That's hilarious.
So I thought I was pretty on top of my Tolkien lore and I know Westron is meant to be the language it was translated from "in universe," but are you telling me there's a full version he wrote in Westron as well?
:whispers: they're joking
That would make sense, I could just see Tolkien being the kind of guy to actually write the book in his fake language since he was already the kind of person to create multiple fake languages.
But instead he wrote a whole pseudo-scholarly apparatus for LOTR about the various “translation” choices he had to make (and famously what some of the “original” character names were). It’s quite the thing. We’re just playing along out of admiration and fun.
There is a gobsmackingly silly and unfunny "British dad joke" about Sam Gamgee's name that haunts me to this day and I leave it as an exercise for the reader.
And isn't there a bit in that LOTR intro about all the smoking, too? Like "YES I REALIZE IT'S A NEW WORLD PLANT YOU MANIACS just use your imagination, it's clearly something *related* to tobacco"
Are dragons, elves, etc "old world" species???
Duh
Wizards aren’t tho
Does he address the Potato Question?
There’s a few others foods too, some only in the first edition of the hobbit
Never seen it, but reputedly it referenced China. I wonder in what context.
hobbits no longer eat guacamole after the revision, very sad
Lol i think it was tomatoes but I’d have to check
Okah yeah it was tomatoes, then changed to pickles in the revised edition
The thing is, Gondorian expeditions to the "new lands in the West" that arose after the sinking of Numenor are actually established in-text, so it is totally plausible that the Hobbits would have access to New World crops like tobacco and potatoes.
wait
This all implies that capsicums are native to the undying lands and elf cuisine should be full of them.
Elves also traveled from tol eressea *to* numenor
Seriously was just talking about this and I couldn't remember if they had tomatoes or not.
Ha yeah I talk a good game but have NEVER actually had the original text in my hand so there's plenty I don't know! So, like, pizza was retconned too? The ring induced Bilbo to lie about guac and pizza?
potatoes were brought to Middle Earth by the Elves
bsky.app/profile/toms...
not widely known but they were cultivated originally from the fruit of the Two Trees and that is why they are so tasty and versatile
lembas actually made from potato starch
Which is why the grow Eyes, the long to see the Light of the Trees
*they long drat
Historians call this the "Galadrian Exchange"
(potatoes were imported by the eagles, who had a lot of free time given that they weren’t carrying the ring to Mordor)
Clearly potatoes are an not-particularly sweet variety of sweet-potatoes, aka yams. (Yes, I know all the ways this is nonsense; I also know how fans fix-up inconsistencies in canon.)
Pipeweed has been cultivate in India for millennia!
Good thing this didn't happen in Rome, Cicero would have torn that Baggin ass open in court
Obviously the real referee was the ring, & the ring had already chosen its master
You can tell the hobbit is a kids bedtime story because the hobbit has evil spiders who become very angry when you insult them in sing-song rhymes, vs lotr has an evil spider that descends from generations of historic evil spiders and is defeated in a lore compliant way