Amon Lhaw: [Letter responding to Entmoot #1, including an passage in Elven letters]

[page 3] BANKS MEBANE, 6901 Strathmore St., Chevy Chase, Md. 20015 I got a copy of ENTMOOT at the Midwestcon, and it interested me considerably, since I'm a Tolkien fan. I can't say much in favor of the repro on this first issue, but I have hopes for future issues after reading your and Dave's comments. Harry Warner's thoughts about music for the Tolkien poems caused me to examine my own feelings on the matter, and I find that I had been unconsciously thinking of the Hobbit songs in terms of German drinking songs, and equating the Elven ballads with Schubert _lieder_ --all of which reflects my rather schmaltzy musical taste. I know I was shocked when I first heard George Heap's folk-song setting of Gilder's "Snowwhite! Snow white!", although I later came to like it, but the initial shock must have come from my unformulated Schubert pre-conception. The alphabetical names Gina Clarke mentioned were: Elessar (LSR) , Eowyn (EON) , and Arwen (RN). The idea of publishing passages in the elven letters is interesting, and I'm all for it, but I have a few quibbles this time around. The passage is _not_ in Sindarin, as you say: it is in English, transliterated into the elven letters according to the Westron mode, somewhat adapted. Also you have only written it semi-phonetically, in places following, as Tolkien says, "the traditional spelling of English", most notably in the use of <Sindarin letter that resembles a lowercase b> for both voiceless and voiced "th" and in the retention of unpronounced double consonants, as in "all". In the passage below I have tried to be more phonetic, although I haven't worked as hard at it as I should, and the tehtar are very poorly adapted to English vowels. <Tolkien Language> And I haven't been very neat about writing them myself, have I? Wex @We@ all need training in elvish penmanship. I have a major criticism of your "Elven Saga". If you are going to make up events in Middle-Earth, they should be consistent with the history that Tolkien has created. The breaking of Thangorodrim took [page 4] place at the end of the First Age, and Gondor was not founded until near the end of the Second Age, which makes your verse an anachronistic mish-mash, as if you had written about a war between Julius Caesar and Adolf Hitler which resulted in the sack of Tenochtitlan. Please let's be consistant. Sorry to do so much much carping, but I'm sure you wanted something other than indescriminate @indiscriminate@ praise. Regards, Banks Mebane