When is Greenland not a Greenland?
26 March 2022 | Sacnoth’s Scriptorium | John D. Rateliff
So, following on from the previous post, in the second of two odd points arising from the hastily jotted thoughts that appear in the HoMe series as Plot Notes F, Frodo and Sam return home to find the Shire ‘spoilt’. So they do not stay there. Instead
They go west and set sail to Greenland.
Christopher Tolkien points out the oddity of this but makes clear that the form isn’t a misreading. That is, Tolkien didn’t actually write green land or Green Land but ran it together as one word, beginning with a capital.…
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So, following on from the previous post, in the second of two odd points arising from the hastily jotted thoughts that appear in the HME series as Plot Notes F, Frodo and Sam return home to find the Shire ‘spoilt’. So they do not stay there. Instead
They go west and set sail to Greenland.
Christopher Tolkien points out the oddity of this but makes clear that the form isn’t a misreading. That is, Tolkien didn’t actually write green land or Green Land but ran it together as one word, beginning with a capital.
Despite which it seems clear that here he was not talking about the island between Iceland and Newfoundland, the real world’s Greenland, but the ‘fair green land’ Frodo (and, presumably, later Sam) catches a glimpse of a fair green land as he sails off into the West.
This example is tricky because it seems to be one of those rare times when we can tell what Tolkien meant but it does not seem to agree with what he actually wrote.
–John R.
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