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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9047073" data-attributes="member: 6790260">So...it's very frustrating that you say these things, because you're arguing against points I didn't make in several cases. If you have examples of "elf" meaning beautiful humanoids prior to Tolkien, I'd love to see them; I've never seen any myself, and have heard that from numerous sources before. Knowing that I was wrong, and having good evidence thereof, would be useful to me.I never said orc didn't have antecedents. In fact, I explicitly said it DID! I said it wasn't used in Middle English. It is etymologically related to Orcus, yes, and as you say it is an OLD English word, but not a MIDDLE or MODERN English word before Tolkien, which is the actual argument I made. Tolkien revived a word that was essentially dead. Same with "dwimmer," a Middle English word that had essentially gone extinct by Shakespeare's time and which Tolkien used, resulting in its partial revival (Gygax favored the "dweomer" spelling.)"Warg," on the other hand, is only attested as a (variably-spelled) borrowing of the Old Norse vargr prior to Tolkien's use, which as I said is a blend of the Old Norse word and an Old English word (wearh, sometimes spelled wearg.) Its use, to mean a particularly monstrous and intelligent wolf, really does derive from Tolkien in modern English. It's thus extremely difficult to believe that Poul Anderson, a physicist by trade, would have re-introduced a random Old Norse word that hadn't been used in English for hundreds of years other than by Tolkien.Unfortunately, I can't find any PDFs of the original magazine serial version of Three Hearts and Three Lions, so it's hard to be absolutely sure that the word "warg" was, in fact, used there. But whatever Mr. Anderson may have said, it's pretty hard to argue that there was no influence whatsoever from Tolkien going on. Is Tolkien the end-all, be-all of the fantasy genre's foundation? HELL no! Absolutely not! Not even close, but his long shadow often causes others--like Mr. Anderson--to get forgotten. I don't want to contribute to that erasure. I just want to not turn "don't erase the others!" into "Tolkien really didn't make a big difference." I'm reminded of the threads we've had on here, duelling over whether Gygax is over- or under-rated in his influence on the game, and whether Arneson gets appropriate recognition or continuously short shrift.Poul Anderson contributed enormously to what we now consider D&D, and the high fantasy genre, and does not get as much credit as he should. But I stand by the notion that, IN ADDITION to that lack of deserved credit, he ALSO was advancing and spreading key ideas already built up--quite recently--by other authors, and Tolkien was foremost among those authors.</blockquote>

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