[Fordim Hedgethistle]

Originally Posted by Feanor of the Peredhil

My teacher has all the patience in the world for creative writing (although he's not much a fantasy fan), but he's got a 10-point list that my classmates love to hate. If you misuse any word on the list, you automatically get 10 points docked from your grade. If he sees anything you did outside of class where you misuse a word, he docks 10 points from your most recent assignment. Examples of the words are 'there' versus 'they're' and 'their', 'to', 'two', and 'too', etcetera. He picks words that students commonly screw up and gets downright mean about it.

Good for him. I hope that improper use of an apostrophe is on the list too. When I see my students getting "its" and "it's" confused I go ballistic.

But to get this off Mars and back on topic. . .while I too find the anachronistic language of LotR (particularly of RotK) distracting and even stilted at points, I think that it has an important function. Tolkien wanted his story to be consistent, perhaps even evocative of his Christian faith, but he avoided all direct allegorical representations or allusions. Neither Aragorn nor Frodo are Christ-figures; Galadriel is not Mary; there is no direct representation of communion etc.

I think what Tolkien did instead was to use a language that is highly reminiscent -- in its "heightened" moments -- of the language that we find in the King James Bible or (more appropriate for Tolk) the Latin Vulgate. By having his characters speak at times in this rather artificed (but not necessarily artificial way) he is able to evoke the tone and 'feel' of Biblical narrative without having to constrain his story or shackle particular events to particular allusions.

For example, when the Witch-King casts down the gates of Minas Tirith and enters, there is that incredible passage:

Gandalf did not move. And in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard of the City, a cock crowed. Shrill and clear he crowed, recking nothing of wizardry or war, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn.

And as if in answer there came from far away another note. Horns, horns, horns. In dark Mindolluin's sides they dimly echoed. Great horns of the North wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last.

There are a number of things here that are decidely biblical, in terms of the passage's style: the brief sentences, some of which repeat each other; sentences that begin with "and" as the action accrues and grows; alliteration ("wizardry or war, welcoming"; "death. . .dawn"; "dark. . .dimly"); even biblical kinds of imagery (a crowing cock, blowing horns, "shadows of death"). The ultimate effect of this is to make this moment evocative of the Bible without maknig a direct one-to-one reference: there is no story from the Bible that I can think of which mirrors the coming of the Rohirrim; but the passage sure sounds biblical!