Your reading of the Song of Eärendil distresses me....

I4detail

Member
So, I tend to listen to podcasts while doing other things. Sometimes, it is while out in public and moving through crowds; sometimes it is while I am running through the empty forests around where I live.

I was glad that I was doing the latter while listening to Episode 118, especially the protracted discussion around distressed, as I began shouting out "no, no no!" to the confusion of my dog, who thought he was doing something wrong and perhaps to alert any bears still awake that I was about. (Note my profile picture, which is the arse end of a grizzly running away from my vehicle last year about this time...)

While I don't disagree completely with your reading of the line, it was only near the end, as a concession, that you said that it might have a double meaning. And so, in the spirit of not totally trying to stir things, I shall start there: that it can do both jobs equally well.

For instance, how it would have been interpreted if the rhyme had been such that sea and distressed had been inverted. Maybe

his boat it bore, and by degrees
it made its way across the grey
and long forsaken distressed seas


Terrible substitution, I know. But now, we would not be so sure that the word distressed wasn't modifying seas. In fact, we would be convinced it modified (only) seas. We might then remember that another word for distress is troubled. Hmm. Troubled seas. That is a perfectly valid metaphor. Or maybe we might think about distressed furniture, which is beaten to give it an uneven finish, perhaps like a stormy sea? Or we could think back on earlier usages of the word, which could mean "subject to force" (like a storm, ravaging a sea), or "to abridge the liberty of." Um. Which brings us back to the ship being driven towards Valinor without any recourse or options of turning around.

So it's probably a good thing that Tolkien wrote it the way he did, giving the word the ambiguity to be applied to both. Equally.

I know we've moved on from this, but this episode only dropped on the iTunes feed a couple of days ago. Speaking of which, I've noticed a tendency recently towards having three or four or five episodes build up then drop on the feed all at once. Is that an iTunes thing? Is it just an issue with getting the feed ready? Is there something that an iTune listener could maybe do to help prepare the feed and get it to Apple?
 
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