Talk:List of Middle-earth characters

message: When we have pages on nonfictional characters whose native name is not in the Latin alphabet we usually include the name written out. Should we, for example, write "Elbereth" out in Tengwar as well as the Latin alphabet? Marnanel (talk) 21:03, 8 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: That would result in unending strife, as not only are there several scripts used in parallel by the peoples of Middle-earth, which therefore would have to be represented. But there are also many different ways and modes which can be used to write a single script: just take your example of Tengwar. And on top of that, like the languges, all of this also has a story-internal history: which scripts are used by whom, at which point in history, how and for what purpose, creating a multitude of ways to write something, all of which are valid. ~ 141.2.187.123 (talk) 11:54, 4 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Names in Tengwar etc 

message: A request for comments has been started that could affect the inclusion 
or exclusion of episode and character, as well as other fiction articles. Please 
visit the discussion at 
Wikipedia_talk:Notability_(fiction)#Final_adoption_as_a_guideline. Ikip (talk) 11:19, 3 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Request for comment on articles for individual television episodes and characters

message: This article seems to be of the same subject as List of Middle-earth peoples.  I don't believe both are needed.  I believe characters is a better term than peoples, to reinforce the fact that these are are works of fiction.TheGrimme (talk) 15:17, 13 September 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Not at all. This article deals with individual characters but the other one lists peoples as in ethnic groups, not "people" as in several persons. De728631 (talk) 18:47, 13 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Duplicate: List of Middle-Earth Peoples 

message: It would seem preferable to list Hobbits by their firstnames rather than surnames. Some change their surname, e.g. by marriage, or Sam's family Gamwich > Gamgee > Gardner. Some have no known surnames, e.g. Nob, Marcho & Blanco. What do others think? Jungleboy63 (talk) 10:29, 17 November 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hobbit names 

message: An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Thuringwethil. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so.  ―Susmuffin Talk 07:59, 1 December 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Thuringwethil" listed at [[Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion|Redirects for discussion]] 

message: At present, this page is . At the same time, many Middle-earth character articles are being deleted for notability reasons (see here). Per the policy on alternatives to deletion, some editors might find it desirable to merge or redirect non-notable Middle-earth characters to this page. However, this would be more useful if we loosened the inclusion criteria to allow non-notable characters a list entry.
As an example, Rían (a woman of the First House of the Edain in the First Age) used to have her own article. After being proposed for deletion, it was instead redirected here. But unfortunately, this redirect does help users as Rían does not have an entry on this list. An entry on Rían would preserve the content from the old article, and make the redirect useful.
In my opinion, simply loosening the inclusion criteria to all characters would be appropriate. But I'd love to hear other resolutions. Pinging users from some previous discussions  opinions?
BenKuykendall (talk) 23:46, 7 January 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree about the pointless redirects. The same is occurring at Middle-earth#Geography. However, I don't think that WP:PRESERVE applies. With Rian and her kinsfolk, it has been decided they don't belong in an encyclopedia. I don't understand the point of this list in any form. This list has recently changed from an index of articles to an index of articles with a brief description (thanks to Hog Farm). I think if a character is notable enough to have her or his own page and doesn't appear in the plot summary of any of the books etc, then she or he is too minor to include in an encyclopedia. To include all Middle-earth characters would be inappropriate. This would include everyone mentioned in The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, its appendices, The Silmarillion, and all the other posthumous publications that keep being published. This could snowball into an astronomical load of fancruft, hundreds and hundreds of characters — I can't estimate how many. Tolkien had a tendency to name every character, like Ohtar, Isildur's esquire, and to elaborate on characters that were only mentioned in passing in his original novels. To make this work, I think you would need a criteria below WP notability but above being all inclusive, but I can't suggest one.--Jack Upland (talk) 02:07, 8 January 2020 (UTC)

text: I worked on this mess into this form mostly because there was a row at AfD of people wanting to redirect the various figures and there was no obvious place to redirect.  After seeing the results of reworking this page, I'm starting to think that suggesting this as a redirect point was a bad idea.  This article doesn't really serve any point besides being a fancruft list.  The scope's too broad, and there's no obvious criteria for inclusion.  Tolkien names literally thousands of figures in his works.  Like Jack Upland's example, Ohtar, the guy who is mentioned as carrying a broken sword around once and not mentioned again to the rest of my knowledge.  Or the several-thousand years of genealogies referenced in the appendix to The Return of the King, where scores (maybe hundreds, I haven't counted) of figures are referenced once and then never mentioned again.  I can't come up with an obvious criteria for inclusion.  It would be pointless to mention everybody, as the list would become way too long, and creating a standard of notability would eliminate the people that would get redirected here.  The closest thing to a solution that I can come up with is to make the standard at this list notability.  For the redirects,  the idea should be to redirect the figure to the section of the plot summary of the work in which he or she appears.  And if the character is not mentioned in any plot summary, then RfD should probably be the fate of that redirect.  I think that solution works better than the idea I originally had for this list.  As for Middle-earth#Geography, I will admit that part of the redirect problem is my fault, as I have voted to redirect several of those articles.  Either the section needs a detailed expansion (honestly, that option would probably cross the fancruft line), or there needs to be a culling of the redirects.  My instinct is to cut down on the redirects, either through retargeting a few, or RfD.  Baranduin would be better off redirecting to The Shire, List of Middle-earth rivers would probably be better off being eliminated.  So, in short, I think that the threshold for this list should be notability, and the redirects should either be retargeted to the works the figures appear in, or if the figure is so minor that they are not mentioned in the plot summaries, deleted at RfD. . Hog Farm (talk) 02:43, 8 January 2020 (UTC)

text: thanks for the feedback! I am fairly convinced by the argument that, without a requirement for notability, this list would become unreasonably large. Moving forward, I guess the solution is to push for deletion of truly non-notable characters and locations, or merge/redirect to pages that actually discuss the topic. Per the existing redirects, I see a fairly strong case to delete 15 irrelevant redirects to List of Middle-earth characters. But for related pages, I'm not sure what should be deleted. There are a whopping 374 redirects to Middle-earth, and surely most of them are not mentioned in the article. Then, List of Middle-earth Elves, which seems headed for deletion or merger has 85 redirects. I know cleaning up redirects is fairly low priority, but it seems odd to have so many unhelpful redirects to a few pages. BenKuykendall (talk) 03:10, 8 January 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  I'm starting on the Middle-earth redirects right now.  There seems to be three types of redirects there: redirects to terms actually mentioned in other articles, which I've been working on redirecting to the applicable articles, legitimate redirects, and redirects to be deleted.  The RfD people are probably gonna hate me by the time I'm done. Hog Farm (talk) 03:14, 8 January 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: I think these kind of problems were inevitable given the scale of the Scouring of Wikipedia. Another thing on Ohtar before he's forgotten. He does have in-universe notability in that without him Aragorn would never have got the broken sword. Those kind of arguments have been used in the past. So, unfortunately, I think if we lowered the threshold we would get a deluge.--Jack Upland (talk) 04:42, 8 January 2020 (UTC)

text: I think the redirects were done badly, and I think it was sight unseen. It would be better to have no redirect than a redirect that leads to something irrelevant.--Jack Upland (talk) 09:27, 15 January 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  Yes, we need to lose the in-universe nonsense, replacing it with short and simple plot or character summaries. For the places, much of it can be coped with far better with maps; it's both more Tolkienian, and more encyclopedic, as one map can replace many paragraphs of this-is-just-to-the-southwest-of-that-next-to-the-other-feature, which is unreadable anyway. I'll have a go at one or two to see how it may work out without too much fancy cartography. The stricture to "go through all the surviving articles" is a great deal of work and will take time to do properly. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:29, 15 January 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  I think usage of maps would be good, if they could be created in a way that doesn't infringe copyright.  I'm also very unsure about all these genealogical charts.  At the moment, those genealogies are used as an excuse not to include content, rather than an aid to understanding the content.  I'd almost rather see a brief references to any notable relationships of characters (relationships that have a bearing on the character, the fact that Elrond is Arwen's is important, the fact that Finwë and Celebrimbor are related is not) than having extremely detailed charts at every elf or half-elf's page.  Maybe other editors feel differently, but I think there are better ways to present the familial ties in ME that are actually relevant to the plot than those tables. Hog Farm (talk) 20:56, 15 January 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: The problem is that the notable Elves and Aragorn are more or less related to each other through the events of the First Age. In fact, Arwen is Aragorn's cousin many times removed since he is a descendant of Elrond's brother. Elrond in turn is related to all three houses of the Eldar which is an important element in the legendarium as notable elves (other than Glorfindel or the Mirkwood "royals") will almost always be more or less closely related to the man who eventually takes over the free world. So to understand these complicated relationships, I think the family trees are quite helpful. De728631 (talk) 22:03, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

text: The past tense plot summaries are based on a consensus that was reached years ago at the Middle-earth WikiProject. The main reasoning for using past tense instead of present was that Tokien intended his works to be a legendary past of the real world, a mythology of England if you will. And per WP:FICTENSE, "discussion of history is usually written in the past tense and thus 'fictional history' may be presented in that way as well." De728631 (talk) 19:50, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

text: *Saying that a "main" character has a "major role" is tautological. I think it's hard to make that determination. For example, in LOTR, Butterbur appears twice and is mentioned at the Council of Elrond. He has a pivotal role because he fails to deliver a letter. Radagast is only mentioned at the Council and briefly afterwards. I think Arwen only appears twice and has very little dialogue. Lobelia Sackville-Baggins appears more often, I think.--Jack Upland (talk) 17:02, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Inclusion criteria 

message: An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Angamaitë. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so.  BenKuykendall (talk) 19:26, 11 January 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Angamaitë" listed at [[Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion|Redirects for discussion]] 

message: An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Gamil Zirak. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so.  Hog Farm (talk) 05:00, 25 January 2020 (UTC)
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message: An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Fror. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so.  BenKuykendall (talk) 20:33, 25 January 2020 (UTC)
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message: An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Narvi (Middle-earth). Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so.  Hog Farm (talk) 15:49, 29 January 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Narvi (Middle-earth)" listed at [[Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion|Redirects for discussion]] 

message: An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Khîm. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so.  Hog Farm (talk) 20:36, 29 January 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Khîm" listed at [[Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion|Redirects for discussion]] 

message: An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Nár. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so.  BenKuykendall (talk) 19:24, 31 January 2020 (UTC)
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message: An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Frerin. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so.  BenKuykendall (talk) 19:26, 31 January 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Frerin" listed at [[Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion|Redirects for discussion]] 

message: Instead of undoing each-other's changers, can we decide on a uniform way to deal with two character articles like Eärendil and Elwing and Galadriel and Celeborn? I am of the opinion that such articles should have two entries in the list, one for each character. This fits with the alphabetical organization of the page: if you are looking for Celeborn, you aren't going to be looking under G. What is the case for combining the list entries? BenKuykendall (talk) 05:01, 7 February 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Two character articles 

message: An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Dírhael. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so.  Hog Farm (talk) 23:37, 14 April 2020 (UTC)
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message: An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Arathorn, son of Arador. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so.  Hog Farm (talk) 23:38, 14 April 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Arathorn, son of Arador" listed at [[Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion|Redirects for discussion]]