The night before Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas met the Riders of Rohan, they watched the sun set from the top of a hill. They could see no signs of the Orcs or their captives, and decided they must rest until the morning. Legolas and Gimli had the following exchange:
‘And ere morning it [the wind] will be in the East,’ said Legolas. ‘But rest, if you must. Yet do not cast all hope away. Tomorrow is unknown. Rede oft is found at the rising of the Sun.’
‘Three suns already have risen on our chase and brought no counsel,’ said Gimli.
The Two Towers, The Riders of Rohan
Normally, this is the place where people start talking about the word rede. But that isn’t what interests me today. I am more interested in the phrase “three suns”. There is only one Sun in Middle-earth. Legolas even says “the Sun”, the one uniquely known Sun. What’s going on here?
Let me rephrase Gimli’s observation to try to clarify his meaning and the issue. “Three times the Sun already has risen on our chase and brought no counsel.” Gimli is not referencing three different celestial orbs, he is counting each rising of the sun as if they are a “different sun”.
There’s a couple ways you could look at this. A lexicographical approach might say that in this case, sun means “day”. “Three suns” is “three days”. Tolkien does use sun to mean “day” or “period of sunlight”, in other places. For example, when Frodo first saw the Argonath, they are described as:
Giants they seemed to him, vast grey figures silent but threatening. Then he saw that they were indeed shaped and fashioned: the craft and power of old had wrought upon them, and still they preserved through the suns and rains of forgotten years the mighty likenesses in which they had been hewn.
The Fellowship of the Ring, The Great River
In this passage, “the suns” is a poetical way of talking about the passage of time. But it isn’t a simple substitution, sun = day. Tolkien is talking about time via some of the conditions that might cause a stone statue to weather and erode. He is talking about periods of time that can be characterized chiefly by the presence of the sun and the rain.
But I don’t think that is what Gimli is doing here. In the passage about the Argonath, Tolkien uses other words that often accompany time expressions. “Through the suns and rains” parallels expression like “through the weeks and months”. In Gimli’s line, he is talking about the sun rising up. The sun isn’t representing time, the entire action of the sun rising is representing time. The sun is just the sun.
Rather, Gimli is using a peculiar grammatical pattern of English, where plurality of action can be expressed by plurality of the subject performing the action. I know. That’s a mouthful. Let’s look at another example.
When this is discussed in linguistics, the most commonly used example is: “An occasional soldier walked by.” This does not mean that there is a person who is occasionally a soldier, and this person walked by. Instead, there is occasionally an occurrence of a soldier walking by. “Occasional” is an adjective modifying “soldier”, but its contribution to the sentence is to tell us about the frequency of “walked by”. We could paraphrase this as: “Occasionally a soldier walked by.”
Gimli is using the same grammatical pattern. He isn’t counting suns. He is counting the number of times there has been a rising of the sun. He is expressing that count via an adjective, rather than an adverbial phrase like “three times” for his own stylistic reasons. As Galadriel said, he is quite skilled with his words.
A Hobby for the Tome 