Comments on the Epilogue to LotR

I’d never read the Epilogue to The Lord of the Rings, until the Mythgard Academy class. A few scattered comments:

Elanor

Although I generally agree with the Inklings’ decision to veto the Epilogue from the published text of LotR, I do kind of regret the loss of teen-age Elanor.  She’s smart, quick-witted, and can tie Sam into a knot if he tries to get around her. She would have been a fan favorite. Cutting out the Epilogue reduced by 25% the number of LotR characters who my girlfriends in college wished they could be.

Sunset

Sam, about the end of Faërie after the Elves leave Middle-earth: “things don’t really end sharp like that. It’s more like a winter sunset.”  The class had quite a bit of discussion about this line, which omitted the obvious.  As usual here at Idiosophy, we assume JRRT meant what he wrote literally, and only after that’s squared away can we look for symbolic meanings.  This is a perfect example.  When it’s rising or setting in summer, the sun crosses the horizon close to perpendicularly.  (On Midsummer at the Tropic of Cancer, it’s exactly perpendicular.) Sunset is the time from the time the sun’s disk touches the horizon until it’s entirely below.  Twilight is similarly defined (since we’re talking about elves) by the time it takes the sun to descend a certain number of degrees below the horizon.  Both are shortest in summer.  In winter, the sun crosses the horizon at a shallower angle, so it takes longer for the disk to descend the same number of degrees. (These are easiest to see in the extreme: Above the arctic circle, the horizon-crossing angle is so shallow that the top edge of the sun’s disk doesn’t even rise into view at midday.) For any fixed latitude, the length of time that we call “sunset” is longer in the winter than in the summer.  That’s important to a gardener, because it determines your quitting time for the day.

Perhail, Lanhail, and Panthail

Aragorn’s finesse at translating Sam’s name into Sindarin may have been my favorite part. “Samwise” of course wouldn’t sound like good-natured raillery in Elvish, so Aragorn had to suggest a diplomatic change.  In the first draft, the King changed “halfwise” to “plain-wise”.  In the second, he changed it to “full-wise”. I agree with Prof. Olsen that “plain-wise” would have been better, because the two meanings of “plain” in English make it an excellent double entendre. Which is the problem: “Plein” in French means “full”, so if JRRT had left “plain-wise” in the text he might have left himself open to accusations of a French pun. This was obviously unacceptable, so he changed it to “full” in English and Elvish.  Pure cowardice, if anyone should ever ask me.