TIW: [Letter discussing potential casting for a Lord of the Rings film, as well as what music of Tolkien's created cultures might sound like, and wondering about the charactesr of Elrond and Earendil, with in-line commentary from Greg Shaw]

[page 15] _PETER SLOMAN_, Dol Guldur, 625 Baseline Rd. , Claremont , Calif. 91711 Good show! Stout fellow! At last there is a fanzine which is not a pain to read. -/I take it you haven't seen many fanzines, Peter./-I agree with Fräulein Rolfe -/Frau/- that _Entmoot_ is less ambitious and pretentious than most, and I hope it stays that way. In the interests of continuity, I enclose my own feeble scrivenings. I did this poem the evening of the Liston-Clay fight. I have been thinking for some time of a way to get ten million dollars to produce a movie of TLOFTR, lest Uncle Walt do it first. I have even figured out the cast, though some of them don't sound quite right. But how about Basil Rathbone for Saruman? -/ok/- Or John Carradine as Denethor? -/maybe/- Possibly Leo G. Carroll as Gandalf? -/ I can't picture Leo as being capable of being as active as Gandalf sometimes is. Kathleen Huber's casting of Boris Karloff in the role of Gandalf is, I think, much more apt./- For the most evil part in the Books, whatever it may be (the Mouth of Sauron?) there must be the most evil-looking man in the world, Martin Landau. Has anyone ever considered doing a Wagnerian Opera based on the Books? It might work. As for music, I know little about Irish or English folksongs, but they sound about right. I think of the Rohirrim as a combination of [page 16] the Anglo-Saxons and the Cossacks, and if it weren't for the Beowulfian quality of their songs, they should be put to Russian tunes, e.g. _Stanka Razin_, _Meadowland_, etc. -/I too have often wished Tolkien was more familiar with Russian customs and history./- I play the recorder, a rather primitive-type instrument, and if anyone can supply me with suitable music, I shall be eternally grateful. Why all the fuss over the "proper" way of using the Tengwar? As I recall, Tolkien said, that the Elves were not bound by hard and fast rules of usage, but used anything which got the sounds and meaning across. -/So they did, as did most ancient people. Elvish, however, is not our native tongue nor is Tengwar our native script. The few of us who have been able to communicate with the Tengwar by use of a standardized set of values for the letters would be lucky indeed to understand one another's writing without it./- I keep wondering about Elrond and Earendil. The latter was the father of the former, and Earendil was supposedly placed in the sky. (At least, his Star was.) It seems weird, to say the least, then, for anybody to be able to point out his father as being a constellation. If Aragorn is about eighty years old when the War of the Ring takes place, should we then think of him as looking old, or does the longevity of the Numenoreans apply to aging of features as well as bodies?