squire
Half-elven
Feb 5 2013, 9:10pm
Views: 3363
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Martinez is a clever man.
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I see his point about the last-minute addition of the Petty-Dwarves to the legends of the Naugrim, as being Tolkien's attempt to square the circle of legendary Dwarf-Elf hostility coexisting with millennia of Dwarf-Elf cooperation. But I don't think it really improves things - it messes them up. The Petty-Dwarves concept annoyingly overlaps with that of the "tame savages" Druedain, who were also redeveloped for the First Age legends following the writing of The Lord of the Rings, and in no very useful fashion either. I feel that way about a lot of Tolkien's output in the last decade of so of his writings about Middle-earth. He suspected as much, too, I think. I have never had any problem keeping the Elf-King in The Hobbit separate from Thingol in my head, even though I'm aware that the former was certainly originally modeled on the latter. The latter-day attempts at achieving total consistency among all his legends seems to have crippled Tolkien, and it hasn't done us fans much good either in my opinion. The stories belong together, obviously, but loosely, as it were. There's really no need for it all to be rejiggered until it meets the requirements of a Master Plan that was only devised after the facts of the writings.
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