Oxonmoot 2024

In The Hobbit’s “Riddles in the Dark”, we are told "the riddle-game was sacred and of immense antiquity", and "that last question had not been a genuine riddle according to the ancient laws". Further, in the Prologue of The Fellowship of the Ring, we also learn that “[t]he Authorities, it is true, differ whether this last question was a mere ‘question’ and not a ‘riddle’ according to the strict rules of the Game”.  An attempt to answer who these Authorities are leads to a fun, in-depth exploration of decades of inferences and connections between secondary reference works and multiple unpublished letters from Tolkien himself.