Board Thread:Fun and Games/@comment-32865299-20171016172126/@comment-33169548-20171018035541

(This is going to be very long. Please forgive me.)

I don't know if this will shed much light on the subject, but there are two occasions in which the phrase "Eat all the world" appears in the source texts for the lyrics used in the Lord of the Rings movie soundtracks.

A Sindarin version of the first source text, written by Philippa Boyens, is used during the scene of the siege of Gondor from The Return of the King in which the Ringwraiths attack Minas Tirith. The English version is given below: Shreds of shadow Torn from life Borne aloft By fell winds.

The Nine have come. Death has taken wing.

He will eat it all, Eat all the world.

The second source text was intended to be used for two scenes in The Fellowship of the Ring: the scene with Saruman and the palantír and the scene when the Orcs of Isengard are pursuing the Fellowship along the banks of the Anduin, but it didn't make it into the final version of the score of either scene. Here is the English version: There is no life In the cold, in the dark Here - in the void Only death. I can smell your blood I shall devour it Eat it all -  Eat all the world

Quite dark. The book where I got this information from (The Music of the Lord of the Rings Films by Doug Adams) says that the English text for the second source is by J.R.R. Tolkien, adapted by Philippa Boyens. The first four lines of the text do sound a bit familiar from The Lord of the Rings (sounds to me like something either the Witch-king or the Barrow-wight might have said, but as my brother who lives five hours away from me is currently borrowing my copy of the trilogy, I can't check at the moment). I'm not sure where the last four lines of the text came from, though, and rather suspect that they came from Philippa Boyens and not from Tolkien.

I think that in the soundtracks, the phrase "Eat all the world" was meant to be a vivid image of the destruction of the world that would be caused by the forces of Sauron and/or Saruman if they were able to gain power. And I agree with Catfishperson that the story of Fenrir devouring the world probably influenced Tolkien's story of the Dagor Dagorath, as the Second Prophecy of Mandos states that Morgoth would destroy the Sun and the Moon at that time, as Fenrir did at Ragnarok.