“Furlong” is fun to say, and Professor Tolkien liked to say “furlong” as much as anyone else. He got it into LotR 14 times, one of which occurs as the Fellowship (and the Prancing Pony Podcast) approaches the artificial lake in front of Moria.
I don’t know if this is common, but the use of “furlong” that stuck in my mind as a child was this one:
Almost forgetting for the moment all thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed at the most wondrous phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind. A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-colour, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach. No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life.
-Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ch.59
Given what’s under the water of that lake, I wonder if Professor Tolkien stuck “furlongs” there on purpose.
Kate Neville
I must say I’ve also always liked ‘furlong’ of for no other reason than the thought that a tired traveler once answered a question with “I been walkin’ fur long time.”
Daniel Stride
Furlong doesn’t strike me as ominous, but it does strike me as delightfully archaic and alien. Rather like league.
Metres and Kilometres are out (French Revolution hasn’t happened in Tolkien), and yards and miles are too mundane. For my own worldbuilding, I ran with centifurlongs (about 2 metres) because it is inherently ludicrous.