Hello, I was just curious about something, in The Hobbit some of the names are spelled Thror, Dain, Oin, and Gloin, I was just wondering if anyone knew why in the Lord of the Rings, Thrór, Dáin, Óin, and Glóin were spelled with diacritics. Is this just the different stages of the language development or something else? Thank you for your time.

<R>

Well, the names with the diacritics would be "correct" as far as all the language books and articles I've read. This could be because they're using the more modern versions of the Dwarven language because there is more writing by Tolkien on the subject. Other than that I'd say there are three posibilities:

1) Tolkien left out the diacritics because the Hobbit was geared toward children when it was released and he didn't want to make it too difficult to pronounce.

2) Tolkien's language, either the "real" language he had been creating or the fantasy language as seen in the books, had not evolved into using the diacritics.

3) That version of the Hobbit did not include them (I haven't read it in a long time, but you might check other copies of the book) because sometimes publishers leave things like that due to a certain creature called an "editor."

fnord