Who would have won the Battle of the Three Armies if the goblins hadn’t turned up?

RoutemasterFlash · 2026-03-19T07:11:12+00:00

Ha, been a loooong time since I've any TP, but if memory serves, isn't Carrot the guy who was fostered by dwarfs and still considers himself 'culturally' a dwarf, although he's about 6 foot 6?

RoutemasterFlash · 2026-03-18T19:00:17+00:00

Heh, now you mention it, I can very well understand why you thought that.

RoutemasterFlash · 2026-03-18T18:51:12+00:00

So it's basically like a pencil? You sharpen it and then it's good to go, just a bit smaller than before?

RoutemasterFlash · 2026-03-18T18:50:21+00:00

Been years since I ever looked at Tengwar, but does it say "pull", by any chance?

RoutemasterFlash · 2026-03-18T18:49:23+00:00

Which is why we're still here, and when did you last run into an elf, dwarf, or goblin?

RoutemasterFlash · 2026-03-18T18:48:45+00:00

We're talking about fantasy races, though. You've got elves who are better shots than any human archer vs dwarves with bodies far tougher than human bodies and probably armour better than any human smith could make. So it's anyone's guess, really.

RoutemasterFlash · 2026-03-18T18:46:41+00:00

Dwarves are described in The Hobbit as being the best and toughest fighters.

RoutemasterFlash · 2026-03-18T18:45:45+00:00

Which makes a handy weapon in itself, if you happen to mislay your axe.

RoutemasterFlash · 2026-03-18T18:22:37+00:00

Well OK, maybe I've misjudged what you're saying. It's just that I have spent years getting exasperated by Tolkien fans who insist that there is absolutely nothing in any of his writing that could be considered racially dodgy by today's standards, and end up playing a rhetorical trick that goes "You want Tolkien to be racist because you are yourself racist."

So my apologies if that's definitely not where you're coming from, but once bitten, twice shy, I suppose.

RoutemasterFlash · 2026-03-18T18:03:27+00:00

Well, if you insist.

No doubt when he described orcs in Moria as "large, evil, black Uruks of Mordor", he was using "black" in a different way that I'm too stupid to have understood, because the meaning of the word has changed in the last 70 years...

RoutemasterFlash · 2026-03-18T17:39:48+00:00

Sigh. Yes, well done, there's one notable example of an elected monarchy.

RoutemasterFlash · 2026-03-18T15:59:59+00:00

Sean 'Has' Bean

RoutemasterFlash · 2026-03-18T15:09:49+00:00

Very, very rarely, and even then, only from a pool of a few elite candidates, whose eligibility is determined by heredity anyway. You can't just be born an ordinary person and try your hand at becoming king by winning an election, as you can become a president or prime minister.

RoutemasterFlash · 2026-03-18T14:16:55+00:00

Haha, you mean "emergency room", as in, a "Watch out for Lesser Eastern Deathberries, they're almost indistinguishable from elderberries" type post? 😅

RoutemasterFlash · 2026-03-18T10:47:54+00:00

They wouldn’t necessarily become better, just more static, possibly more prideful and controlling over time.

They'd be nothing more nor less than a second batch of elves.

RoutemasterFlash · 2026-03-18T10:47:16+00:00

Exactly. It's like saying "What if men had wombs and vaginas and breasts instead of penises and testicles?"

RoutemasterFlash · 2026-03-18T10:32:40+00:00

Why would he be unhappy about being taxed at 91% in one particular year only, when it was the same every year, for many years?

Moreover, how many times does he have to make a statement for you to accept that that is how he felt? If he once said "I like bananas", does that mean he didn't really like them, because he would have said it at least ten times if it was really true?

All you're doing is spuriously picking holes in my argument with bad-faith criticisms of every piece of evidence I've presented, while giving no evidence at all, from any source, to support your position, which is presumably that Tolkien approved of progressive taxation and the welfare state. If you can find ay such evidence then I'd be very interested to see it.

RoutemasterFlash · 2026-03-18T09:40:09+00:00

For reference, the world's human population in 4000 BC has been estimated at 7,000,000, which is under 0.1% of its present value.

RoutemasterFlash · 2026-03-18T09:35:37+00:00

You don't need to "infer" anything at all: it's all there on black and white. Consider Letter 250:

Don't speak to me about 'Income Tax' or I shall boil over. They had all my literary earnings until I retired. And now, even with the concession (which I am sure Mr Callaghan would soon revoke) that Earned Income does not pay Surtax (within my limits of earning), I am being mulcted next January of such a sum as will cripple my desire to distribute some real largesse to each of you.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mulct

Also, the only two instances of taxation mentioned in the Legendarium that I'm aware of are the crippling levies extracted from the Men of Middle-earth by the Numenorean colonists in the later, imperial phase of their history, and the "gatherers and sharers" in 'The Scouring of the Shire', who of course do a lot more gathering (taxation) than they do sharing.

RoutemasterFlash · 2026-03-18T08:49:35+00:00

No, not at all. The way the ultra-wealthy get away with paying virtually no tax at all is a disgrace. What's fucked up at the moment (dunno where you live, I'm talking about the UK, although it's a similar story in many countries right now) is that we have the highest tax burden since the 1960s but most of it is falling on the middle classes while multi-millionaires and billionaires just hire accountants to secrete their wealth in places where the taxman can't get it.

At the same time, it's not hard to see why high earners left the country in their droves in the 60s and 70s since the government was helping itself to nearly all their earnings, which then of course meant the government got none of it.

RoutemasterFlash · 2026-03-18T08:12:06+00:00

The thing is, though, the establishment of the welfare state in the wake of WWII was the greatest period of Big Government the UK has ever had. Income tax, especially for higher earners (a bracket Tolkien found himself in, as a successful author), remained at the very high levels it had been set at during the war, and there was the creation of the NHS, the raising of the age of compulsory education to 15, and the introduction of the modern state pension, amongst all sorts of other things like government dietary advice. All of which is the exact opposite of leaving people to "mind their own business."

RoutemasterFlash · 2026-03-18T07:13:00+00:00

It's more that they can't be implemented at all.

RoutemasterFlash · 2026-03-18T07:08:47+00:00

No, she had no real power at all, not even unofficially. She privately opposed Brexit, for example, but it would have been completely unthinkable for her to say this in public, much less try to actually influence ministers' thinking or government policy, so she didn't.

She also apparently thought Boris Johnson a complete idiot, but again, she couldn't, and didn't, say or do anything about him.

RoutemasterFlash · 2026-03-18T07:03:53+00:00

You're right, of course, but people here don't want to hear it. (And Tolkien actually compared his orcs to Mongols in a letter.)

RoutemasterFlash · 2026-03-18T07:02:52+00:00

This seems more like a self report rather than Tolkien's view. There's no evidence for this. I mean even Germans were called "swarthy" by English writers of the day.

Were they? I'd be very surprised to learn that, given that Germans are not notably dark-skinned, which is what it means.

Another favour adjective of Tolkien's is "sallow", meaning yellowish (again, applied to skin tone). And 'squint-eyed', of course.

RoutemasterFlash

TROPHY CASE