Old Testament like

The Lost Tales are much better. (Of course, that could just be because I read them first, and never got used to all this new-fangled terminology--like calling Melko, Melkor. ;)

TWS Garrison, I had the exact reverse problem. I read The Silmarillion waaaaaaaaay before Lost Tales (and I have Unfinished Tales too). I have a "First American Edition" Silmarillion. Of course, since it took so long for the book to come out in paperback, my first edition probably isn't worth much because it's been trashed!

Where do giants come from? Giants (distinct from trolls) are mentioned in _The Hobbit_, but their origins have been left out of the Valaquenta. They don't seem to be creatures of Melkor, because Gandalf speaks of finding "a more or less decent giant" to block up goblin passes, and we've never heard of any goblin, hobgoblin, orc, troll, dragon, Balrog, or other Melkorite ever being more or less decent.

Hobbits (halflings, holbytan, whatever) are also missing, but that's in accord with the info we get in LOTR.

Specifically, The Hobbit also refers to "Stone-Giants" (tossing rocks).

Oooooh! Oooooh! Here's a good one! And it fits right into the "Religious Musings" board...

Where did Durin and the other six fathers of the Dwarves find their mates? As far as I can tell from "Of Aule and Yavanna", Aule only made the Seven Fathers. Where did the dwarves not of Durin's line come from (and Bifur, Bofur, and Bombur are specifically listed as not being of Durin's line).

Also, have the other seven houses died out in the Third Age? We never hear of any of them (though the dwarves of the Blue Mountains [Ered Luin] might be descendants of Nogrod and Belegost).

Actually, I believe an earlier version of the story refers to the mates as well.

But then why did Durin "walk alone" (as Gimli's song in Moria puts it)? Perhaps Durin II, III et al. were clones? ;-)

I also have a First American Edition Silm. OK, it's actually my mom's, and I've co-opted it. :-)

Haven't read the Lost Tales yet, though I read the Unfinished Tales, and really liked it. Especially the long version of the Narn i Hin Hurin.

According to the illustrated Tolkien Encyopedia (Which lists Hobbit names for creatures) says that giants would be Ents, Trolls, Urks, or just Hobbit Fancy. My guess would be Gandalf let out a "Valar Secret" accidentally. (Notice how none of the Valar have ever had children.)

The four lost Houses of dwarves. I would guess that they were 1. Hidden deep under the earth, 2. Beyond the Sea of Rhun. 3. In Harad or Far Harad or beyond. 4. In the Sun Lands. 5. Living in Aule's part of Aman 5. Under the Sea. 6. a myth

Where are their mates? I remember something being mentioned about that. But have We ever seen a female dwaft. I think they a just a myth. Dwarves just carve their sons from rock, bless them, and claim a small portion of their people are women. It's not like their not secretive in the first place.

DON'T READ THE LOST ROAD.

(Notice how none of the Valar have ever had children.)

I think that Melian would beg to differ with you...

Where do you come up with the idea that four houses were lost? The Seven Houses existed in Middle-Earth (not Aman) at c. 1600 S.A., because there were Seven Rings (one for each house). Gandalf says at the Council of Elrond that the Seven were either taken or destroyed.

Female Dwarves are not a myth. The lineage of Durin's folk given in one of the appendices to Return of the King lists Sif. The same appendix notes that female dwarves are rarely seen, and usually indistinguishable from male dwarves by the casual observer.

The frightening thing is that I did this entire post from memory.

Melian was a Maia not a Vala. None of the 15 Valar ever had any children recorded by the Elves.
(And I count Melkor as a Valar for biological reasons)
I think the number of rings was symbolic of the Houses of the Dwaves. After all Belgost and Norgord were under the Ice Bay of Fonchel, and a ring was in posession of Erbor, the Grey mountians and several other Dwaves.

She Dwaves- They are very mysterious and secretive.

No, Nogrod and Belegost were not under the Ice Bay of Forochel, they were in the Blue Mountains.
Thror had the Ring of Durin's house. I don't remember the exact location where it's mentioned, but I believe somewhere it's stated that there was one Ring for each House.

The dwarves of the Grey Mountains those of Durin's house. I can't find my copy of The Return of the King, but I believe that Thrain I founded Erebor in 1999, after the expulsion from Moria, and sometime after that, the line moved to the Grey Mountains, and then later returned to Erebor, where Smaug evicted them, until the Battle of the Five Armies.

Female Dwarves are not a myth. The lineage of Durin's folk given in one of the appendices to Return of the King lists Sif. The same appendix notes that female dwarves are rarely seen, and usually indistinguishable from male dwarves by the casual observer.

It also mentions Dis, sister of Thorin Oakenshield and mother of Fili and Kili.

Hobbits (halflings, holbytan, whatever) are also missing, but that's in accord with the info we get in LOTR.

Right. Aren't Hobbits basically offshoots of Men anyway?

Thank you. I meant Dis, not Sif. Sif is, of course, a Norse goddess.

The Ice Bay is where Beleriland sunk. They were their it was a joke

No, the Ice bay is north of there. Lindon is the remnants of Beleriand.

I have an "evolution of Arda" map. Norgord and Belgost were in Beleriand. it sunk.

Scott's right: Beleriand was west of the Blue Mountains.

It's rather scary that I know to what all these names refer.

Oh, and I have Lea and Scott beat. I have a First British Edition of The Silmarillion, in fairly good condition. (It has the colourful emblem of the Luthien on the front, and those of Fingolfin, Earendil, Idril Celebrindal, Elwe, and Feanor on the back.

Well, if I'd taken the Concorde to London when I was 15, I'd have a First British Edition, too! :-P

Well, I don't know precisely where my copy came from. I just found it on my grandparents' bookshelf several years ago. I don't think either of them took the Concorde to London, though :-)

Actually Hobbits are more CLOSELY related to
Men than either Elves or Dwarves,but they are
not an offshoot of Men.

The Silmarilion doesn't talk about Hobbits until
the final chapter since they didn't play that big
a part in the first Three Ages.

BTW:Check the genealogy in the Silmarilion,it shows Galadriel as the daugther of Finarfin.

In THE TWO TOWERS Sam encourages Frodo by talking
about the story of Beren,Beren's story is one of
the main parts of The Silmarilion.

"According to the illustrated Tolkien Encyopedia (Which lists Hobbit names for creatures) says that giants would be Ents, Trolls, Urks, or just Hobbit Fancy."

I'd buy that, Pesti, but... Gandalf is the one who mentions the Stone Giants. On two occasions. They are distinct from Trolls-- whom Gandalf knows how to recognize, Uruks-- whom Gandalf also know how to resognize, and Ents. Who ever heard of a Stone Ent?

I'm trying to figure out who is being depicted in the picture on the cover of Unfinished Tales. There's a dark, hooded figure, sitting on a throne of some kind, petting a wolf. Behind him on his right (our left ) is a large, tatooed faced man, and to his left, being our right, is a snake, I think. OK, who is this guy? My first thought was that it could be Sauron, seeing as how it was mentioned somewhere that he was a lord of werewolves, and this guy is petting a wolf. Plus, he is a really dark guy, and Sauron is a Dark Lord. But really, this guy seems way too scrawny to be Sauron, and therefore I'm even less inclined to believe he could possibly be Morgoth (besides, no iron crown...) So assuming it is Sauron, who's this tatooed guy? Does anyone have any ideas?

The werewolf makes me think it is supposed to be Morgoth petting Beren in wolf form. Sure he's scrawny and missing his accessories, but just look at that awful goblin they have on the cover of The Hobbit. Nobody ever said cover art has to be accurate!

Hmmm. I'll just stick to my second theory. It's Darth Sidious on the throne with Darth Maul behind him...

I guess that would make the other two Darth Slytherin and Darth Lupin?

I think that Goblin is Goulum on the cover of the Hobbit. The Unfinished tales cover is Morgoth.

Yeah, I think that's Gollum, myself, if we're talking about the cover where Bilbo looks a bit like Fred Flintstone.

I suppose that throne guy could be Morgoth. I guess that would make the guy behind him Sauron, seeing as how he's wearing one of those Viking helmets like he did at the beginning of the animated Lord of the Rings, or maybe it's just one of those knights who say "Nee!"

Stone Giants seems to me to be no more than another word for trolls. Giants made out of stone.

Did anybody find that the story of Turin (if that was the guy who slept with his sister) had a certain resemblance to the Greek Oedipus tale?

Also, I'd be really interested in knowing some of Tolkien's sources, as he obviously made use of legends for his works. For example, in the German Nibelungen Saga, the dwarf king has a magic cap that makes him invisible. This story also features a ring of power (owned by Odin, I think).

Also, when Sauron put on his ring, saying "One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them" and was overheard by Celebrimbor, I was reminded very much of Rumpelstiltskin!

Norse mythology was one of his main sources.

Well, my knowledge of the Nibelungenlied is filtered through Wagner, but here goes.

The Turin story is a lot like the story of Siegmund and Sieglinde, who were siblings and didn't know it. Their son Siegfried later goes on to seize the Ring and the Rheingold for himself by killing Fafner, the former giant-turned-dragon. For a while after Siegfried hangs out with a dwarf, Mime (like Mim in Turin's story), who he eventually has enough of and kills.

So, these are the similarities that survive in Wagner's treatment (which Tolkien despised). I expect there are more similarities between The Silmarillion and the original legends.

The Giants. Two more theories.
1. Orcs and Trolls are evil by nurture, not nature. Perhaps a few rouge Trolls threw off evil, made friends with Gandalf and Elrond, and did them service in the not so distant past. I know there’s little to support Trolls not in league with Dark Powers, or doing good, but Middle Earth lore is not complete by any means. (Half Elves not related to Aragon et al.)
2. It fits with the Singing Elves in Rivendell and the smart trolls in the book. The Hobbit was published in 1936, the Lord of the Rings about twenty years latter and the unfinished Similarrlion 20 years after that. A man can change his mind over the course of 40 years.

Two comments about theory 2:

1) This is real-world inter-textual Nitpickers don't deal in real-world inter-textual. (In other words an acceptable theory would need to be fictional-world inter-textual: the theory should be about the world of Middle-Earth, not the workings of Tolkien's mind)

2)[Notwithstanding my comment above] Although it was never finished, The Silmarillion is older than the other two. The Hobbit originally had no connection with Middle-Earth, except that both Middle-Earth and the world of The Hobbit had elves and dwarves. It was after his publisher asked for a sequel to The Hobbit that he started incorporated more and more elements from his unpublished manuscript. While he needed to include the three stoned trolls and Elrond's Rivendell, since they were major plot devices of The Hobbit, more incidental details that were incompatible with Middle-Earth were quietly dropped.

You are most certianly correct. Nitpickers do not deal in reality. Then the orignal manuscript for "There and Back Again" was completed several decades before it and "The Downfall of the Lord of the Rings and the Return of the King" were incorporated into the Red Book of Westmarch. No doubt Quenta Silmarillion was included in Bilbo's "Translations from the Elvish." So basically, the offical history of the elves is going to be slightly different than hobbits' memoirs.

No better place to put this I suppose, but Christopher Tolkien has finished editing together a complete version of the Narn i Chîn Húrin (Tale of the Children of Húrin) for publication early next year. Pieces of the Narn were seen in the Silmarillion, the Unfinished Tales, and the Lays of Beleriand.

This is exciting news. Unlike Brian Herbert, Christopher Tolkien has been extremely respectful and careful with his father's work. I expect this new one to be completely in the spirit of J.R.R. Tolkien. The story of Turin is one of two major First Age sagas that would make for a good complete work - the other being, of course, the Lay of Leithian. (Please!!!)

In several places (possibly in LoTR rather than The Silmarillion), Telperion is referred to as "Eldest of Trees". Yet there are clearly trees that predate Telperion.

During the Spring of Arda, when Middle-Earth was lit by Ormal and Illuin, there were forests. Telperion wasn't made until after the fall of the Lamps, and the Valar had fled Almaren and gone to Aman.