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Message: <blockquote data-quote="PHATsakk43" data-source="post: 9540908" data-attributes="member: 7041071">which honestly sounds pretty distinct from “k”.I did decide to dig into my Tolkien source theory a bit last night and I’m actually leaning more toward that than I was originally expecting.The biggest thing was that I found out how much influence Tolkien had on Gygax, which is somewhat odd since most of what I had read suggested that Gygax wasn’t a very big fan of Tolkien. Come to find out, that the one thing that you should not take Gary Gygax seriously about was any opinions he had of himself.Gygax famously stated he didn’t take much influence from Tolkien and his inspiration was more pulp and HP Lovecraft. This never really made much sense given that all the window dressing of D&D was ripped from Tolkien. Granted, much of his public comments on the subject are after a 1977 C&D issued by the Tolkien Estate over the use of specific terms as well as publishing a third-party wargame entitled "Battle of Five Armies." He used the same verbiage for dwarves and elves as Tolkien, had several icons of D&D exclusively Tolkien (orcs, & half-orcs and elves), and D&D elves were definitely Tolkien elves and not the “normal” ones of the era which were more akin to fairies or associated with Santa or forest based baking (the Keebler Elves were created in 1968) than the depiction in D&D.The whole thing got me thinking, so I decided to see what the timing was between the release of The Silmarillion and Gary writing the G-D-Q stuff where drow were introduced. Well, it was rather interesting as the book was published in 1977 and the adventures released shortly after with the Drow portion conceived in the 78-79 time. Well, other than the coincidence, there was nothing actually linking Gary with The Silmarillion and the closest contemporary stuff by Gary stating he didn’t find much influence from Tolkien.That said, the trail actually points towards Gary playing down his own Tolkien influence likely as part of Gary being Gary. In fact, in addition to the previously mentioned obvious Tolkien derivation, comes to find out Gary was quite invested in what really is Tolkien fan-fiction. It just seems that prior to the 1977 C&D, Mr. Gygax appears to be taking significant inspiration from Tolkien and then being extremely adamant afterwards that it was the opposite.Some of the earliest published works by Gary are in a Diplomacy zine from 1968 named “Thangorodrim”—itself a rather obscure reference from LotR that would be much more well known after The Silmarillion—where Gary describes the expanded dragons for Middle-Earth using colors to describe such creatures in an article series named “Grate Wourms”. <a href="http://Here is a link to the third in the series where he describes a green dragon breathing chlorine gas." target="_blank">Here is a link to the third in the series where he describes a green dragon breathing chlorine gas.</a> It appears that these articles which describe red, green, blue, and white dragons as well as the old D&D standby of Purple Worms, were the genesis of the chromatic dragons we all know and love today.Given all this, my guess is the concept of drow and especially Lloth’s association with chaos, evil, & spiders as well as her feminine gendering is directly from Tolkien. The way they manifested in D&D was all Gary. After all, this would have been around the time that Gary was forced to retcon his other appropriated concepts due to the Tolkien Estate C&D, such as ents becoming treants, balrogs becoming balor, & hobbits becoming halflings. Then that was expanded—poorly IMHO—by Bob Salvatore and then with the WotC folks who really leaned into edgy.As for the pronunciation, I have always said it rhyming with cow. Dragon Magazine stated that was the “correct” way in the early 1990s (or at least Skip Williams said that). The reference Gygax stated he used doesn’t exist, but a reference that is somewhat similar in title lists a “trow” with alternate spelling of “drow” as an underground troll. It also says that this trow rhymes with “row” as in what one does with a boat.</blockquote>

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