Board Thread:Suggestions forum/@comment-28338712-20160815083005/@comment-27340559-20160907123858

Lord Epicus! wrote:

Forten wrote:

Celeborn of Lothlorien wrote: Were-worms are heard of... There's tunnels deep underneath khazad-dûm that according to Gandalf "were most certainly not dug by the dwarves" Which to me sounds like there's some kind of giant tunneling creatures that live under the misty mountains... Where is the evidence that were-worms had anything to do with digging? 'Worm' was a term commonly applied to dragons. According to Hobbit folklore they lived in the far east anyway. How do they know anything accurate about a region so far away? They are traditionally stay-at-home people, the only way they would have heard such wildly exaggerated tales is through mouth-to-mouth rumour. And back to the sea serpents... It's the same thing. Most hobbits dislike the sea. Some might feel at home on rivers and lakes, but the big, wide, immeasurable, angry sea? Most hobbits are simply afraid of it. They would have got an exaggerated account from a drunken ex-sailor, sampling the local liquor and trying to impress. Dragons were mostly called wyrms. But why are you limiting this to hobbits only? Surely the Elves saw a sea serpent a long time ago. Or maybe the numenoreans I simply disagree with the wyrm thing. Is there a widely-held rule dictating what 'wyrm', and 'worm' mean? You could say that in the absence of a strict rule, there are generally-known ones. However the fantasy tendencies of today don't help much in helping us understand how Tolkien might have used those words. In the confusion and general chaos of the English language (especially its spelling), how is some small thing like a slightly-more-fantasy-looking-'y' supposed to have a seperate and definite meaning to the 'o'? I think the words 'worm' and 'wyrm' can easily mean the exact same thing.