Comments on: Yo Pod, a request for more Tolkien guidance

By: podrock

podrock — Fri, 20 Apr 2018 02:53:54 +0000

My high school English teacher had us memorize lines of Chaucer in the original pronunciation: http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/gp1-18.wav One of the things I really like about books and the film adaptations is how Galadriel and Celeborn speak in the common speak. Exactly like it is not their native language. I've watched the movies with people who don't understand this. "If they are so smart, why do they talk that way?" A very subtle literary trick from JRRT!

By: ER

ER — Fri, 20 Apr 2018 00:36:31 +0000

We like to think of these as medieval English, but they’re not. They are Elizabethan English, Renaissance English, Shakespeare’s English, a culture more advanced and technological than that of Gondor. The English of the Middle Ages would have been unintelligible to us, Old and Middle English were basically Anglo-Saxon–like reading Beowulf in the original. It wasn’t till after the 13th century, due to the Norman French influence and Chaucer’s wide acceptance as a writer and poet, that anything resembling what we speak today became common in England. Chaucer spoke spoke and wrote the Common Tongue of the London area, while French was the language of the Court and Latin that of Scholarship. And of course there were regional and ethnic languages that continued to be spoken for centuries after, the Gaelic tongues of Scotland and Wales, Cornish, and so on.

After the Norman Conquest (1066), Anglo-Saxon was spoken by the peasantry, and the aristocracy spoke French. These two eventually merged into the English we know today. Of course, this was Tolkien’s area of expertise, he would have known this. Why he shifted to this stylized speech was no doubt planned, but I can only speculate why.

As for the dragging, depressing pace of Book Four, I can only guess that it was the influence of Gollum and the increasing isolation and fatigue of the Hobbits–the burden of the Ring. Its not fun reading, but perhaps it is necessary. The film also captures this very well, I wanted to strangle Gollum myself long before it was over.

I will comment more on this after I read that part.

By: podrock

podrock — Thu, 19 Apr 2018 21:31:46 +0000

For me, the language of Return of the King is grander, more “biblical, than the earlier volumes. Before I knew the history of the writing, I thought it was because Gondor was a more regal kingdom than rustic Rohan or the almost foreign Elvish lands the Hobbits visit. In Gondor the people use older English terms: verily, thee, plight their troth…

I ask you to look for this change and your opinion. Was Tolkien deliberate in using this higher language to represent the ancientness of the land, harkening back to the Númenóreans or was it post pause in the writing?

I too notice the difficulty in reading the final half of Two Towers as the ring approaches Mordor – it’s the hardest part for me to read. Is it the setting, the syntax, the pacing? I’m not sure, so your thoughts as you read it will be appreciated.