[Bêthberry]

Normally here at the Barrow Downs we frown upon consecutive posts. I hope, however, I will be allowed to do this, as my response to Aiwendil's post really requires some extensive development which would make my previous post far too long.

I am sorry, Aiwendil, that my post on language was unclear and so liable to misinterpretation. Perhaps I can do a better job here.

First, when you quote me on the areas of sentence inversion and passive voiced verbs and older verb forms, you omitted the last sentence of my paragraph. Here is my paragraph in its entirety, with the final sentence now placed in bold font.

With Tolkien, I see a habit, in parts of LOTR, which foregrounds (uses repeatedly) particular traits of the English language. I see a very high rate of inverted sentence structure (clauses rearranged out of the 'conventional' pattern), a tendency towards using passive voiced verbs and verb forms which are not temporal, and a vocabulary that challenges temporal expectations. None of this is inherently wrong to my mind.

It is not the simple presence in itself of these traits which ruins my enjoyment of LOTR--and this is my wish here, not to nitpick and find fault but to understand why the magic evaporates for me at certain points. Let me backtrack for a minute.

When I offerred the model of how we make sense of language, derived from linguistics, I had not meant to imply that conformity to a normative pattern is the criterion for quality. Linguistics, as I said, is descriptive, not prescriptive. In attempting to keep a long post from becoming even longer, I did acknowledge great varieties in language--social, cultural, economic, etc.

The point is that language is meaningful because it is based on perceived patterns--and this can include the absence of those patterns and the deviations from those patterns. I am talking here not just in terms of lexis or meaning of words but of the structure of sentences and words.

One understanding of literary language, which is a very special use of language, depends upon this pattern-making aspect. Literary language is language which intensifies this pattern-making. And it is language which often challenges the more normative habits of language in other contexts (social, professional, intimate, formal, etc.). Literary language is more intense, more compressed, has a more self-conscious historical sense (particularly about genre), is more particular about formatting, uses figurative language more densely and more allusively. It is aware of itself as language in a way that our 'regular speech' tends not to be.

So, what I was attempting to do, when examining passages which for me 'don't ring true' (I put this in italics for I don't wish to make this definitive but simply descriptive of my reading), was examine the patterns here.
This is a standard method in both literary and linguistic analysis.

It is similar to the question asked about the novel Jane Eyre: there is a famous passage in chapter XII where Jane is wandering around unhappy with her lot. Often the passage is taken as a ringing defense of women's need for intellectual stimulation. Yet, once we ask why Jane's rumination--"It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity"--is immediately interrupted by her hearing the weird laughter of Rochester's mad wife (whose existence Jane does not yet know of), we can begin to see some sort of narrative comment or stricture on Jane's thoughts. That is, we can begin to see a pattern which conflicts with the claims of the first person narrator so that, ultimately, we can see that to read the novel we need to go beyond sympathetic acceptance of Jane's words alone.

Such an activity 'ruins' the novel as an uncomplicated feminist endorsement of female liberation. Yet it leads to a more complex (for me and others) appreciation of the novel.

So, when I come to places which ruin the magic for me, I step back and ask why? What is see is a use of language which is, if I can be allowed a word with a special, particular meaning, precious. The repetition of a collocation of language traits draws attention to the language traits themselves, rather simply functioning to present the characters or the events.

This is often done in literary language, of course, to greater effect. It is also often done in weaker writing where the effect detracts from the work. (What I mean can best be considered in bad poetry, where the regularity of rhythm and rhyme draws attention to itself rather than to the overall work.)

For Squatter, the effect is to create stronger characterization for the characters. For me, I am reminded of language which attempts to sound authentically archaic but which is not. Have I read more old literature than Squatter? I wouldn't think so.

My point in drawing a comparison with Owen is not to set his style up as the standard, but to point to another writer where I do not feel the use of archaic language detracts from the overall work. My intent was comparative and descriptive, again, not prescriptive.


As to your point that standards change, well, yes, they do. Or perhaps I should say enjoyment. My post to Liriodendron listed writers who works have undergone changes in evaluation over time. Even in my own reading, I have found that a rereading of an author, in a different context or several years later, changes my understanding and appreciation of that author. Belin Ibaimendi and I talked about this in chat last week, where we were mentioning Byron.


As for this paragraph:

It would seem quite absurd to suggest that a book written in English is inherently better than a book written in Finnish. It would likewise seem quite absurd to suggest that a book written in Modern English is inherently better than a book written in Old English. It seems equally absurd to me to suggest that a book written in a modern style is inherently better than one written in an archaic style. And it doesn't seem that it should matter where or when the book was written. If someone wrote a great work of literature in Finnish, would it matter whether he wrote it in Finland or the United States? So if someone writes a great work of literature in a somewhat archaic style, why should it matter that he writes it now rather than in the past?

Again, my point is not that I think the use of archaic language is wrong-minded, but that when it is emphasised as Tolkien uses it, it works counter to a significant meaning.

And, for me, comparing Tolkien with Owen opened up worlds of new understanding of Tolkien. That's why davem's post about the new Tolkien biography was so interesting to me. Thinking about what Tolkien did with archaic language and what Owen did with Latin made me rethink what the war meant to Tolkien. Perhaps for those of you who like the archaic language, this is not plenitude. But for me it is. I feel I have a better understand of Tolkien.