It’s Lord of the flings!
QUESTION Are there any female orcs in The Lord Of The Rings?
Though it is by no means made obvious that there are female orcs in Middle Earth, the consensus among Tolkien scholars is that orcs were born by conventional means.
According to The Silmarillion — the work that described Tolkien’s universe — the orcs were once elves from Cuivienen who were enslaved by Morgoth, the first Dark Lord and tortured and twisted to his diabolical will.
‘They were elves once. Taken by the Dark Powers . . . tortured and mutilated . . . a ruined and terrible form of life.’
They were the foot soldiers of the Dark Lords’ armies, the weakest and most numerous of their servants.
Tolkien writes: ‘For the orcs had life and multiplied after the manner of the Children of Iluvatar,’ which were elves and humans, the two races created by the supreme being of the universe, Eru Iluvatar.
he confirmed this in a detailed letter of october 21, 1963, addressed to a Mrs Munby in response to a number of questions posed by her son Stephen about The Lord of The Rings.
‘There must have been orc women. But in stories that seldom, if ever, see the orcs except as soldiers of armies in the service of the evil lords, we naturally would not learn much about their lives. Not much was known,’ Tolkien wrote.
Arran Murray, Stirling.
QUESTION What role did rabbits play in World War I?
BEFoRE the war, rabbits were an important food for the poor, with demand supplied by wild rabbits and ostend rabbits imported from Belgium.
At the outbreak of war, imports ceased and rabbit trappers were enlisted. The subsequent shortage resulted in Parliamentary debates, with the price of rabbits being fixed by the Food Controller.
There were government discussions on the ‘disappearing rabbit’ as price-fixing caused them to vanish from the market.
By the end of 1916, as german submarines destroyed merchant ships, food was becoming scarcer and increasing numbers of rabbits were bred for the table in backyard hutches. When rationing was introduced early in 1918, home-bred rabbits were ‘off ration’.
The government actively promoted keeping rabbits and a Rabbit Club was set up at Buckingham Palace, presided over by the King. however, there was a shortage of breeding stock as rabbit fanciers had sold off their animals upon enlisting.
Feeding hutch-bred rabbits was hard. hay and oats were scarce, as they were sent to supply Army horses in France, and rabbits died when given greens alone.
under the Defence of the Realm Act, it was a crime to feed food fit for humans to animals. Consequently, the National Rabbit Scheme had limited success.
Frozen Australian rabbits were imported to feed the troops, making a welcome change from bully beef and hard biscuits.
Pictures in the Imperial War Museum show rabbits were also mascots in all branches of the Armed Forces, even in the trenches of the Western Front and on submarines. Dr Lesley Hordon, author of War Rabbits, Leeds.
QUESTION Did the Ottoman Empire ban the printing press?
ThE ability to mass produce books began in the mid-1400s, when german goldsmith Johannes gutenberg introduced typecasting using a matrix.
his printing press spread across Europe within a couple of decades, but wasn’t welcomed when it reached the eastern Mediterranean in 1492, which was dominated by the ottoman Empire.
Professional manuscript scribes who were paid considerable sums to copy books by hand were violently against it. Muslim clerics also considered pressing and squeezing together sacred books to be an act of impiety.
Despite this, it’s not entirely clear whether the printing press was actually banned. The first person to claim this was French Franciscan priest Andre Thevet. he said that in 1483, Sultan Bajazet II decreed that anyone caught with a printing press would be executed. Thevet added that this was confirmed by the sultan’s son, Selim I, in 1515.
When comparing the invention and adoption of printing in Europe to the absence of the technology in the East, Thevet wrote in 1580: ‘What I know for sure is that the greeks, Armenians, Mingrelians (Mingrelias), Abyssinians, Turks, Persians, Moors, Arabs and Tartars do not write their books except by hand . . . the Turks are constrained by the ordinance of . . . their emperor.’
But Thevet’s testimony contradicts other early modern European reports.
Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, who had first-hand dealings with the ottomans for 20 years, wrote in a book about the military: ‘The Turks, it is true, do not print their books at all. But this is not, as is commonly believed, because they are prohibited to print or because their books are unworthy of printing.
‘They do not wish to prevent so many copyists, to the number of 86,000 when I was at Constantinople, from earning a living, and it is this that the Turks have said themselves to Christians and to Jews who wished to introduce printing into the empire to make a profit.’
Jews had fled to ottoman lands after King Ferdinand of Spain expelled them in 1492. They were allowed to establish private printing presses during the 1500s to educate their own people.
Taking this into consideration, it’s more likely that the ottoman Empire didn’t ban the printing press — it’s just that for a long time the majority of Muslims wanted nothing to do with it.
Emilie Lamplough, Trowbridge, Wilts.
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