User talk:Gamling

Welcome!

Hello Henry, and welcome to Tolkien Gateway! I hope you like the place and choose to join our work. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

• Internal pages:
  • Chat
  • To-do list
  • Standards
  • Council forums
  • Recent changes
• External Wikipedia pages:
  • How to edit a page
  • Editing, policy, conduct, and structure tutorial
  • Picture tutorial
  • How to write a great article

I hope you enjoy editing here and we look forward to your future edits. By the way, you can sign your name on Talk and vote pages using three tildes, like this: ~~~. Four tildes (~~~~) produces your name and the current date. If you have any questions, see the help pages, add a question to the Council forums, join our chat or ask me on my talk page. Keep up the great work!

Welcome

Nice to have you on board! Hope you will enjoy editing on Tolkien Gateway! --Morgan 22:53, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

Seconded! A pleasure to have you around Gamling. I don't suppose you still have any pictures of that scroll? --Hyarion 01:06, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

Well, I still have the scroll but I haven't photographed the whole thing. Perhaps that's a project I ought to do. If I do though the next suggestion will be to post it and I'd need some instructions on how and where to do so. —Unsigned comment by Gamling (talk • contribs).

Just let us know if you need any help, I'm sure there could be a place for images of the scroll here on TG.--Morgan 17:57, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

Welcome from me too! :) If you need any help in getting to grips with using the wiki software feel free to ask me, Hyarion, Morgan, Mith, Ederchil or Amroth. -- KingAragorn  talk  contribs  edits  email  18:21, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

Welcome, hopely you will have a good time here. --Amroth 18:25, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

Letters

Look at all those blue links! I just wanted to congratulate you on all your hard work on those letters. The section is an invaluable addition to TG and I'm sure a great many people will appreciate the time you spent on it. --Hyarion 23:48, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

I second that Sage 08:02, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Great work, Gamling! It'll be interesting to see your next project on TG! --Morgan 10:29, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Nice Work! I actually didn't see that you were already this far. Now people who haven't purchased the letters (I for example) can finally find out what Tolkien wrote in these :) I also second Morgan about your next peolple (I like beer, by the way :P ). --Amroth 15:11, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Referencing HoMe

If possible, it would be great if you could also add page references to the volumes in The History of Middle-earth. All current US/UK editions (save those published by DelRey) have the same pagination. I personally always try to do this, since it's time-consuming to track specific statements in long chapters or sections.--Morgan 01:08, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

Very good, I shall include page number references. I didn't know that all those editions used the same numbering. --Gamling 18:12, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

Current Projects

1. Adding References: I've been doing this for awhile but I'm proceeding a bit more systematically. I've been working through Robert Foster's Complete Guide to Middle-earth alphabetically and checking each entry to see if it has any or sufficient references. In many cases the answer is "no" and I add them. I'm currently in the 'D's.
2. POME Summaries: Very few of the chapters of The Peoples of Middle-earth have summaries. I've written one for "The Prologue" which wasn't even an active page in TG. I am working on the next chapter now but this will be a slowly done project since it takes time to digest and summarize all of the material in each.
3. Contributing to The Hobbit Project: Due to my time off after my wife's death I did not get in at the start on the updates to the most popular articles about the book that are likely to be read when the movies appear. It seems to me that there are plenty of contributors for these articles so I decided to update some of the less visited pieces that may still see a surge of reading-hits after the movies are released. I've updated "Dori" and "Fíli" so far, removing the "needs sources" and "needs expansion" messages.

Queen of Faery

Hello Gamling! We noticed here that TG doesn't have an article for the Queen of Faery (mentioned here) in Smith of Wootton Major. Since I noticed that you've created most of our articles for characters and places in this work, perhaps you'd be interested in creating an article for the Queen of Faery (if you reckon such an article would be useful, and if you have time)? --J.R.R. Tolkien 20:11, 8 June 2012 (UTC)

Feel free, J.R.R. Tolkien, to create the article yourself! --Mith (Talk/Contribs/Edits) 20:35, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

I just returned from a vacation trip; I will put this on my list of things to do. --Gamling 22:54, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

Thank you, Gamling!--Morgan 09:08, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

Grammatical tense in letters

I noticed that you used the past tense when writing the summaries of letters in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (cf. Letter 97 Revision history). Would you agree on changing this to the present tense (which, in my impression, we tend to use for matters appearing in published works)? This if of course not a pressing issue, so I'll will likely only rewrite the tense when there's an occasion to edit a letter.--Morgan 21:27, 8 July 2012 (UTC)

I agree with changing the tense if that's the standard. In our manual of style under "Tense" there is only the rule that in-universe articles should be in the past tense but since nothing was said about other articles I just kept using past tense for the letters. Perhaps the Manual could be expanded on this point. --Gamling 22:44, 8 July 2012 (UTC)

Fourth Age years

For the year S.R. 1422 in Appendix B it says:

With the beginning of this year the Fourth Age began in the count of years in the Shire; but the numbers of the years of Shire Reckoning were continued.
—J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, Appendix B, "Later Events Concerning the Members of the Fellowship of the Ring"

At the end of Appendix E it also says:

This reckoning was in the course of the reign of King Elessar adopted in all his lands except the Shire, where the old calendar was retained and Shire Reckoning was continued. Fourth Age 1 was thus called 1422; and in so far as the Hobbits took any account of the change of Age, they maintained that it began with 2 Yule 1422, and not in the previous March
—J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, Appendix E: Writing and Spelling

This, I think, clearly shows that we can take Fourth Age 1 and Shire Reckoning 1422 to be synonymous. Fourth Age 1 in Gondorian reckoning is, of course, not exactly the same as Shire Reckoning 1422.

I bring this up because I don't think the note that you've been adding to Fourth Age years is accurate. What do you think? Thanks for sorting out the Fourth Age (and other ages too) years by the way, they were in a right state!-- KingAragorn  talk  contribs  edits  email