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Old 01-02-2005, 06:42 PM   #10
littlemanpoet
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Location: The Edge of Faerie
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littlemanpoet is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.littlemanpoet is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.
Tolkien

Helen, I was going to give davem precisely the same answer to precisely the same quote. By Jorje, I think you've got it! (sorry, folks, inside joke)

The unities you pointed out are on target, and reminded me of yet another (I'm watching the extended dvd of all three right now, and it's like reading Cliff's notes, if you know what I mean). Gollum can't stand the Elven rope or Lembas. He's tortured by the former and chokes on the latter. This tells the reader/viewer that Gollum is so corrupted that he cannot abide that which is uncorrupted, or to use a less indirect word, holy. We would do well to recall another unity: the relation between holy and [/i]whole[/i].

davem, your comments about language remind me of a comparison between Norman-derived English vocabulary and Anglo-Saxon-derived English vocabulary. Or, for that matter, Latin-derived, and Greek-derived. Anglo-Saxon words are the heart of the language. Norman words are at one remove. Thus we have words like beef and pork standing in for cow and hog. We eat the one and raise the other, but it's an artificial distinction that removes us one step away from the concrete reality that we kill in order to eat; the process has been sanitized. French-, Latin-, and Greek- borrowings into English are at an even greater remove from the concrete.

Related to this is that writers often give their villains the most latinate forms of speech. Thus, the Black Speech functions somewhat like Latin does in English. I would not at all be suprised if this is an aspect of why Tokien so deplored the Norman conquest.
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