Fëanor: while I can kind of understand where your teacher is coming from, docking points for a word misused
outside of his class is a bit much. I would complain to the principal or the head of the department at that point.
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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.
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I disagree. Tolkien's writing is reminiscent more of the Norse sagas (or a good translation of Beowulf) than the much more formal language of the King James Bible. Tolkien was, after all, writing his own saga, and pulled much of his linguistic inspiration from cultures that passed on most of their history in sagas and epic poems (Anglo-saxon, Finnish, etc.). Latin does not have much of an influence in Lord of the Rings because it is more closely related to Quenya than any of the other languages in Middle-earth; and Quenya does not appear very often in Lord of the Rings. Only four times in real quantity, in fact: Frodo's greeting of Gildor, Galadriel's farewell song in Lórien, Treebeard's musings on the Golden Wood, and Aragorn's little coronation speech. As was stated earlier, The Lord of the Rings was supposed to be a transcription of the Red Book, which was written by Hobbits; they would not have used highly formal language because they were really quite unfamiliar with it (Tolkien addresses this in Appendix F, Section I,
Of Hobbits).