“Thee” and “thou” in “The Lord of the Rings”

[Pitchwife]

Originally Posted by Guinevere

Well, what is interesting is that beside the familiar "Du" Carroux used only "Ihr" - the archaic form of polite address; wheras Krege uses both "Ihr" and "Sie" - apparently to distinguish between the 20th century hobbits of the Shire and the archaic world of Middle-Earth.

I get his motive for that to some degree, but still, this sounds horribly wrong to me in a fantasy setting. I think it would be palatable in an urban fantasy set in modern times, but in Tolkien, yuck.

Originally Posted by Guinevere

Btw, "Ihr" as a polite address is still in use today in the Swiss dialect of Kanton Bern.

Not only there. I vividly remember my mother addressing her sister's elderly mother-in-law as "Ihr" in my early childhood (around 1970), because it struck me as archaic even then - but then, that was probably a rural as well as dialectal usage.

Originally Posted by Guinevere

Complicated business!! it's so much easier calling everybody "You"!

But so much less fun with interlingual jokes. Wasn't it our former Bundespräsident Heinrich Lübke who addressed a visiting anglophone statesman with the immortal words "You can say you to me"?