This is fun. I never was a fan of Tolkien, but that caught my eye.
This reminds Celsius to Fahrenheit conversion formula.
Shift, multiply and shift again.
Indeed, Tolkien's books can be seen as different scales!
Other popular books published at different times can be seen as scales too.
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NOTE ON REFERENCES
There is a certain amount of cross-referencing among the questions
on both the FAQ and the LessFAQ lists. Any questions so referred to are
specified by the list, section, and question number. Thus, the first
question in the Hobbit section of the FAQ, "Were Hobbits a sub-group of
Humans?" would be referenced as (FAQ, Hobbits, 1). Note that the
section "Tolkien And His Work" is referred to merely as "Tolkien" and
the section "General History of Middle-earth" is referred to merely as
"General". E.g. the question "Who was J.R.R. Tolkien anyway?" is (FAQ,
Tolkien, 1) and the question "What exactly happened at the end of the
First Age?" is (LessFAQ, General, 1).
Sources for quotations have been provided in the form of volume
and page numbers; the specific editions utilized are listed in the next
paragraph. For those occasions when the proper edition is not available
(and the conversion table below is not applicable) the page numbers have
been roughly located according to chapter, sub-section, or appendix,
whichever is appropriate. For example, RK, 57-59 (V, 2) refers to
pages 57-59 of Return of the King and further locates the pages in
chapter 2 of Book V. PLEASE NOTE the distinction in the case of _Lord
of the Rings_ between *Volumes* and *Books*. LotR is comprised of three
Volumes (FR, TT, and RK) and of six Books (I - VI), which are the more
natural divisions of the story into six roughly equal parts. There are
two Books in each of the Volumes. Other sample references are below.
References to _The Hobbit_ are from the Ballantine paperback (the
pagination has been the same since the 60's. All other references are
to the HM hardcovers. Sample references follow:
Hobbit, 83 (Ch V) == Hobbit, chapter V
RK, 408 (App F, I, "Of Men", "Of Hobbits") ==
p 408 in Part I of Appendix F, the sections
entitled "Of Men" and "Of Hobbits"
Silm, 57 (Ch V) == Silmarillion, chapter V (BoLT and _The
Annotated Hobbit_ treated similarly)
UT, 351 (Three, IV, iii) == Unfinished Tales, Part Three,
Chapter IV, sub-section iii
(the Biography treated similarly)
Letters, 230 (#178) == letter number 178.
RtMe, 53-54 (3, "Creative anachronisms") ==
The Road to Middle-earth, in Chapter 3,
sub-section "Creative anachronisms"
CONVERSION TABLE
In _The Atlas of Middle-earth_, Karen Wynn Fonstad provided a
Houghton-Mifflin-to-Ballantine conversion table, which is reproduced
below. The "table" is actually a set of formulae by which HM page
numbers may be converted to Ballantine page numbers via arithmetic
involving some empirically determined constants. Since these are
discrete rather than continuous functions the results may be off by
a page or so.
[NOTE: in the Fall of 1993, Ballantine issued a new edition of the mass
market paperback of LotR in which the text has been re-set, thereby
changing the page on which any given quote is located. Thus, the
following table will no longer work with the latest printings, which may
be identified by the change in the color of the covers (the pictures are
unaltered): in the previous set of printings all the covers were black;
in the new set FR is green, TT is purple, and RK is red.]
HM Page Subtract Divide By Add
------------- -------- --------- -------
FR 10 to 423 9 .818 18
TT 15 to 352 14 .778 16
RK 19 to 311 18 .797 18
RK 313 to 416 312 .781 386
H 9 to 317 8 1.140 14
Silm 15 to 365 14 .773 2
Reference: Atlas, p. 191 (first edtion), p. 192 (revised edtion)
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