Tolkien's Wargs

Dan Rabin · 25 Jan 2001, 21:53 · from urth-v0030.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: Dan Rabin <wolfe-lists at danrabin.com>
Subject: (urth) Tolkien's Wargs
Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2001 21:53:21
Message-ID: <urth-v0030-0263 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0030/0263.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

I happened to be flipping through my copy of _The Annotated Hobbit_,=20
just now, and ran across the following citation from a letter by=20
J.R.R. Tolkien that addresses the etymology of "warg", the name that=20
Tolkien gives to the ferocious wild wolves who menace the=20
protagonists:

     It is an old word for wolf, which also
     had a sense of an outlaw or hunted
     criminal.  This is its usual sense in
     surviving texts.  I adopted the word, which
     had a good sound for the meaning, as a name
     for this particular brand of demonic wolf
     in the story.

Editor Douglas A. Anderson continues by noting that "Tolkien derived=20
the word from Old English _wearg-_, Old High German _warg-_, Old=20
Norse _varg-r_ (also =3D "wolf", especially of a legendary kind)."

The letter in question was written in 1966 to one Gene Wolfe.

Editor Daniel E. Rabin comments that this shows Wolfe's early concern=20
with words, especially those bearing on his surname (contributors to=20
this mailing list have noted several cases of his literary plays on=20
"Wolfe").  The letter also pleases said editor in that it shows a=20
meaningful connection between his two favorite authors.

Perhaps this is not as remarkable in the grand sweep of things as the=20
fact that Gandhi corresponded with Tolstoy, but it's Definitely Up=20
There.

The note is on page 111, for those of you following along at home.

   -- Dan Rabin

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net