Subject: That middle one...
Author:
Posted on: 2014-04-11 14:16:00 UTC

Oh my. The islands could actually be canonical, just about - dragons originated in Angband, and Tol Fuin - Dorthonion-that-was - still exists, and is definitely to the west.

Oh, no, never mind. Chapter 2 says Katharos is circular, and too large to be Himling or Tol Morwen (or the Meneltarma) - though the other island, Arthen, with the deformed trees, would be a good fit for Tol Fuin. Certainly the orcs of Angband didn't come from (current) Middle-earth - they came from Beleriand. So maybe Katharos is the western end of old Dorthonion, and Arthen the eastern?

The story places the islands 26 hours from Middle-earth by dragon... but I'm dubious about the dragon's speed. They're flying below cloud-level - there are 'white little specks of clouds here and there', which sounds like cirrus clouds, at about 5000m. She also claims 'if you focused hard enough you could see small shadows swimming in the water'. If we assume that's the shadow of her dragon, which we can guess at... oh, 10m long?

A young person with excellent vision can have a visual acuity of 2, which is defined as 1/'gap size' in arc minutes, where 'gap size' is the smallest thing you can discern. So the gap size is 0.5 arc minutes, or 1/120 degrees. Said angle can be estimated using the formula tan(V) = S/D. Since V is 1/120 degrees, and S is 10m... if I'm mathsing this right, she might be flying at about 1000m up. That would still let cirrus clouds look like 'sky', so let's go with that.

With that in mind, she takes ten hours to pass out of sight of her starting point. Taking my standard sample mountain (Rainier) as the basis for her country, that means she's gone about 330 kilometers in ten hours; in other words, her dragon moves at 20mph, about 2/3 of the average flight speed of a golden eagle.

Er... basically, her dragon sucks.

hS

PS: And yes, I think it's Greek. The prologue translated 'unknown' as 'agnosto', which has obvious etymological connections to 'agnostic'. I could have used Google Translate, but that's boring. ;) And at least some of her Sindarin is from Real Elvish.net. Not quite all of it, but a lot. ~hS

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