ANSWER: To the best of my knowledge, no one has yet published any text or
reference to a text that provides any detail about the life of Valandur. He was
the eighth High King of Arnor and according to the genealogy given in The Lord
of the Rings [...]
Q: Why Did the Bree-land Survive the Decline of Eriador?
ANSWER: I think most readers understand that when the Witch-realm of Angmar
overran Arthedain/Arnor in Third Age year 1974 that every settlement was
destroyed. Fornost Erain, last of Arnor's great cities, was captured. The Shire
was overrun and many of its inhabitants fled into [...]
ANSWER: There are at least two references to Northmen settling in Gondor before
Cirion ceded the province of Calenardhon to Eorl and the Éothéod. According to
Appendix A in The Lord of the Rings, Minalcar brought many Northmen to Gondor
after his victory over the Easterlings in [...]
Sun Tzu points out the wisdom of the "divide and conquer" strategy, but he also
advocated the use of massive, overwhelming, superior force whenever it was
available. The art of war is indeed an art, for both sides in any given war have
the potential to learn and adapt. One of the notable [...]
ANSWER: J.R.R. Tolkien seems never to have explained the why of the founding of
the Buckland, but its existence as a distant and separate Hobbit community or
land goes back to an early draft of The Lord of the Rings. The Brandybuck name
itself was an early [...]
Q: How Much Was Tolkien Influenced by Irish Mythology?
ANSWER: Not being that well-versed in Irish mythology I have never felt
qualified to answer this question. Nonetheless, it appears that people
occasionally ask how much influence Irish mythology had on Tolkien.
This topic drew my attention again after I reviewed my Q-and-A article about
whether Dorwinion [...]
ANSWER: This is one of those questions that requires some temporal
qualification. That is, there were fewer Riders in Eorl's host in Third Age year
2510 than Theoden could have assembled in a full muster in 3018/9.
There is (so far as I know) only 1 book that [...]
Q: Did Vidugavia Live in a Fortified Town or Burg?
ANSWER: Vidugavia is the most ancient name Tolkien gave for any of the Northmen
in Middle-earth, and it is a Latinized form of ancient Gothic Widu-gauja, which
Christopher Tolkien translates as "wood (forest) dweller" although it might be
better to use "denizen" or "citizen" to translate [...]
