AtPhantom

Compare the size of Mount Everest to the size of Asia and you'll get roughly the same thing. Beleriand is effing huge. Hell, the maps of Beleriand doesn't even cover Thangorodrim, it is that far north.

I never said Ancalagon wasn't huge. But saying he's freaking mountain sized is just a tad bit silly.

The mountain range which, if the crushing mountains hypothesis is correct, was just annihilated.

The other factor being Armageddon.

It doesn't even make sense. Thangorodrim were three mountains to the very north and completely minute in the grand map of Beleriand. It's like saying Africa sunk because someone blew up Kilimanjaro. It doesn't work like that.

Hell, we don't even know if Ancalagon was what did that . The book in all its vague glory only says that he fell and destroyed the "towers of Thangorodrim." So what, were those supposed to be the peaks themselves, or did Morgoth build actual towers upon the mountains. I'd go far as to say the second is the more plausible one.

In fact, we know that Angband itself survived the Ancalagon's fall because Eonwe and the host had to later physically enter it and drag Morgoth out of the pit he was hiding in. That doesn't sound like a damn mountain collapsed on top of it.

He didn't break Beleriand for crying out loud. The Host of the Valar did that. He also didn't drive the Host of the Valar back by himself. He had a huge-ass army behind him as well.

We also don't know if there were any actual Valar in the Host of the Valar.

Did you miss the slew of moons named after Shakespeare? There's a moon called Ophelia. :D

Like I said, the word for Earth -in any language- far predates the concept of gods. As it should - Earth is a basic and immediate idea that needs to be defined long before we start thinking about cosmology. Earth, Terra, Gaea, Zemlja, Erde, Jord, or in any language you'd like, they're all nouns that describe the same basic concept: That Big Thing That We All Live On. If you want an actual name, name it Planet Bob or something.

The same thing goes for the Moon and the Sun. In fact, in those two cases I'd say that you're looking at things backwards. There are no moons, there are satellites, and Earth's satellite is the Moon. It is only by association with our Moon that we have come to call other satellites moons as well. Likewise, there are no suns in other solar systems, there are stars, and our star is the Sun. But then astronomers digged the terms 'suns' and 'moons' when describing celestial objects, and the names stuck. Languages are finicky like that, which doesn't mean we have to suddenly drop the names which we have been using since before the invention of writing in order to indulge the new trend.

@jonny_anonymous: Only the planets are actually named after Roman gods. The moons of Mars are named after Ares' children in Greek mythology. Jupiter's moons are named after Zeus' lovers, Uranus' are named after characters from Shakespeare's plays and Neptune's after minor water deities in Greek myth. Saturn's moons were named after titans until they ran out of titans, and then they moved to Gaelic, Norse and Inuit deities. Pluto's moon is named after the ferryman of the underworld. Of the five dwarf planets, two are named after Greek gods, two after Hawaiian gods, and the fifth is Pluto.

But it's the same as the article I linked in my next post.

Oh Palpatine. The only thing bleaker than your heart is your sense of humor.

That's pretty much what I said. Except for the books before the 1950ies part, but I'm not sure what that has to do with anything. Rules change, and astronomy was just becoming important around that time.

Your Mom joke sense. Tingling. Must. Not. Give in!

The words have existed far longer than the religions that spawned around them, unlike the other planets which were discovered far later and named after the deities. The ancients believed in the anthropomorphized personifications of Earth and such, but that's different from a God in charge of a certain concept like Jupiter or Athena or what have you. Just because you believe the ground is alive and judging you doesn't change the fact that it's still the ground. Likewise for the sun, the moon, the ocean etc.

Here's what I found on capitalization:

When the nounearth refers to our planet, it is capitalized only when it’s a proper noun (meaning it acts like a name and is not preceded by the—for example, everything on Earth). The word is not capitalized when it is a common noun (meaning it does not act like a name and is preceded by the—e.g., everything on the earth).

And of course, earth is sometimes used to mean the soft part of land (synonymous with dirt or soil), in which case it does not need to be capitalized. It can also mean the land surface of the world or the realm of mortal existence without becoming a proper noun.

Because Terra, Luna and Sol literally just mean Earth, Moon and Sun in another language. They're not names either and they mean the same thing in Latin. Also, I'm pretty sure Earth, as in the planet, is always capitalized.