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Old 11-24-2010, 12:54 PM   #13
Mnemosyne
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Take a look at the prologue to LotR and Appendix F, specifically the part that's called "On Translation". Bilbo, Frodo*, et al. didn't speak English. They spoke Westron,** which Tolkien translated from copies of the Red Book of Westmarch. Languages that were truly foreign to the hobbits were retained in their untranslated form (i.e., Quenya, Sindarin, Entish, Black Speech), but those that were related enough to feel akin to Westron were translated into whatever their equivalent relationship to modern English would be. Hence the Rohirrim speaking Anglo-Saxon in LotR, even though in the Red Book they spoke Rohirric.

And of course I should add that as we know the original Red Book did not survive to Tolkien, it is quite likely that any illustrative drawings like the Moria sketch were either corrupted or (more likely) lost, as many Greek texts that had illustrations lost them during the medieval period.

So in response to your question, Galadriel55, a translation had to do with EVERYTHING as this is how we received LotR from the source material.

*And those weren't even their actual names, but also translations of the Westron.
**Yes, I know, they didn't speak anything because they didn't exist, but within the secondary world this is what was supposed to happen.
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