Encaitare said:
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But still, I have to wonder how many of the things we must analyze in school were actually done intentionally.
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Well, I think that quite a lot of them probably were. One of the wonderful things about fiction (as opposed to journalism) is that in a work of fiction, absolutely everything is there because the author put it there. The author has total control over his/her world--if the main character has red hair, it's because the author wanted it that way. S/he's not bound by some external reality of blond or brown hair, and doesn't in fact have to tell the reader anything about hair color at all. So I think that we must approach literature with the assumption that anything the author chose to include is in the story on purpose, because that author always had the option of working any element in an infinite number of different ways, or of leaving it out altogether.
Which brings me to...
Fordim, I agree with you that LotR is not a novel at all, and I don't think it was ever intended as such--it's supposed, after all, to be a transcription of the Red Book, which would not have been written by the hobbits in the form of a novel. This would be because the hobbits, unlike my imaginary author above, were bound by the objective reality of what happened. They couldn't tighten up the plot by leaving out Bombadil and the Barrow-Downs, because those things happened to them. Galadriel has golden hair not for any kind of literary effect, but because Frodo saw here and that's the color her hair was. Even the inconsistencies Rimbaud rightly points out can be attributed to this device--think of Le Morte d'Arthur, another very long story with changes in style throughout, for much the same reason--Malory wasn't thinking in terms of a modern novel, but was rather sitting down to transcribe a story that already existed. I realize that I'm giving Tolkien rather a free pass here, but I've always thought that the meandering of the exposition and the long, long denouement, as well as the inconsistencies of tone and the unusual structure of The Two Towers, in fact powerfully supported Tolkien's premise that the work was not an original novel but a scholarly translation.