Puns by Tolkien

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by Rune Son of Bjarne

This passage always seemed a bit cheery to me, considering they are in mortal danger.

I agree. It appears to come out of nowhere, the seeming camaraderie of two in competition to make the most unlikely thing to say.

I think Tom Shippey put his finger on what Tolkien might be doing here when he told the story of how his fellow team mates competed to make the greatest joke about his broken tibia and fibula after an accident in a rugby game. (One offered a very low price for his ticket to the evening dance. The other berated him for not passing the ball as he went down.) A school boy attempt to make him laugh in the moment of pain. (These were all boys at Tolkien's King Edward School and it struck me very much as schoolboy humour, which misses the modern programming not to laugh at other's or even one's own pain.) (This is in Shippey's Forward to Laughter in Middle-earth,p. 4. He is not discussing this passage, but the orcs' humour.)

To require this kind of external context seems to me to reflect a problem with the original text. I suppose there are several examples of competing egos between Boromir and Aragorn, particularly with their historical roles of Steward heir apparent and king, but I think Tolkien could have done a better job making this a more fitting competition between the two.