The Lord of the Rings Online Book 13 Interview

Eurogamer offers an interview executive producer Jeffrey Steefel about the book 13 update of LotRO.

Eurogamer: Where does the idea of Forochel come from? The actual language we’ve seen describing it so far features lots of Finnish names, and the screenshots seem to show Eskimos.

Jeffrey Steefel: It’s actually mentioned in the books, just in one paragaph that describes it as a barren icy waste where an imporant shipwreck happens. As normal, we took what was talked about there and extrapolated from it. Tolkien also talks very briefly about the Lossoth, the indigenous types who help the shipwrecked. We took that as new faction for reputation, created their infrastructure, and decided they were like eskimos of the northern wastes here. On top of that, we looked at their language and thought, “What would Tolkien do?” He was a linguist who used lots of Nordic and Finnish influences when he created Elvish, and he was very knowledgeable about most languages; he looked at about 3-4 regions beyond 14-15th century English, and they were mainly from the nordic region, which is where words like Orc came from. Had he written more about the Lossoth, we felt he’d be Finnish-inspired, so that’s why all the naming and stuff is like that.