[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by Lachwen

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).

I think we need to be very careful here about our terminology and our references. For instance, LotR incorporates a rather wide range of styles. There is common agreement that the hobbits' dialogue is a much more colloquial style than that used by, say, Gimli and Legolas, later in the book. (In fact, the style of their dialogue changes from Book I to Book III.) This can be demonstrated both by lexical means (the register and tone of the words used) and syntactical analysis.

The point which intrigued me about Fordim's observation of the archaic aspects of the style (and not all of it is archaic, and we probably ought to explain more precisely what we mean by archaic) has to do with the comments made above by several people about Tolkien's use of 'and' and coordinated sentences.

This is a style of syntax which is associated with the Old Testament. Gerald Hammond, who wrote The Making of the English Bible, says in an essay on English translations of the Bible the following:

Old Testament narrative is characterised by its almost exclusive use of the conjunction waw to link virtually every clause and sentence. Right from the beginnings English translators of the Bible were happy to rend these links with "and", so that their narratives sometimes consist entirely of coordinate clauses. It is probable that this practice was something natural to early sixteenth-century writers of English prose, inheritors of a tradition going back to Anglo-Saxon's repeated use of ond. But this is distinctive to English, in contrast to the more sophisticated syntax of the Vulgate, and even of Luther's German. And that the English translators appreciated this harmony between Hebrew and English is borne out by the successive versions' increasing use of it through the century--despite the growing felxibility of English prose during this period. ... The Authorised Version's translators, rather than reducing the percentage of coordination, actually intensified it

(He gives a compa5rison of a passage from Tyndale, the King James, the Jerusalem. and the New International, but that leads away from my point, except that the King James is more consistent with the sytax of the original, of the lot.)

One other stylistic example of the Renaissance translators was to use what Harmond calls "a formulaic rendering of common words." This is less deadly than it sounds! He means simply that these translators did not substitute synonums for words but instead reimployed the same words in passages. They relied on keywords economically to link, for example, three meanings of "know" in Genesis (the shame of the truit of the tree of knowledge, God's knowledge, and sexuality). Is this something Tolkien does? We would be well to examine his style to see if he does.

Here's another passage from Tolkien which uses coordination extensively (among other traits of 'old rhetorical styel':

The Captains bowed their heads; and when they looked up again, behold! their enemies were flying and the power of Mordor was scattering like dust in the wind. As when death smites the swollen brooding thing that inhabits their crawling hill and holds them all in sway, ants will wander witless and purposeless and then feebly die, so the creatures ofSauron, orc or troll or beast spell-enslaved, ran hither and thither mindless; and some slew themselves, or cast themselves in pits or fled wailing back to hide in holds and dark lightless places far from hope.
The Field of Cormallen

This is not to deny traits consistent with the nordic epics Tolkien loved or with Anglo Saxon poetry. But simply to suggest that Tolkien incorporates a great many different styles in LotR, from many sources.