Back to school!

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

I would say, Bethberry, that it is none of these things. To my mind, Tolkien's statement in this remarkable lecture has to do with the very nature of the bond between thought and language. Tolkien is positing a theory that may be observed in many strands of modern philosophy, which is that language places restrictions on the mind; that human thought must be shoe-horned into language in order to make it communicable to others. It is an idea that Orwell uses to great effect in Nineteen Eighty-Four with the grimly inexpressive Newspeak, and it must be remembered that Orwell's dark distopian fantasy was published during Tolkien's lifetime, in fact while work was in progress on The Lord of the Rings. I think it likely that Tolkien was at least aware of the work, even if he had not read it.

If you will forgive a computer scientist for drawing comparisons between men and machines, computer hardware runs along the same lines: a computer has its own internal language, which only it and its designers can understand. On top of that are placed numerous layers of other code, the scripts at each more comprehensible to humans than those below, until we reach the high-level languages with which I work. These languages make the computer run less efficiently: they take time to compile and they take up space in data storage, yet without them two machines manufactured by different companies would be unable to run the same software. Tolkien's argument appears to be that English, French, German and Chinese are thus not so very different from C++, COBOL, PERL and Visual Basic, although they are much more complicated and expressive: they make it more difficult for us to express our feelings, yet without them it would be impossible for large groups of people to share their ideas.

Tolkien's comments about contact with other languages become much more transparent when we see them in this light. He is saying that our internal language begins to flourish when it comes into contact with other tongues. Therefore by learning other languages we come closer to an understanding, not only of the "cradle tongues" spoken in the countries of our birth, but also of that deeply personal "native language" that is unique to each individual. As Wheelock wrote in the same paragraph from which I lifted my quotation above, "Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts seiner eigenen." ("He who does not know a foreign language does not know his own" - Goethe). Within the context of Tolkien's argument this would not necessarily have to mean the language of one's native country.

Remaining on the subject of translations, the following seems pertinent to another thread on this board:

No defence is usually offered for translating Beowulf. Yet the making, or at any rate the publishing, of a modern English rendering needs defence: especially the presentation of a translation into plain prose of what is in fact a poem, a work of skilled and close-wrought metre (to say no more). The process has its dangers. Too many people are willing to form, and even to print, opinions of this greatest of the surviving works of ancient English poetic art after reading only such a translation, or indeed after reading only a bare 'argument', such as appears in the present book. On the strength of a nodding acquaintance of this sort (it may be supposed), one famous critic informed his public that Beowulf was 'only small beer'. Yet if beer at all, it is a drink dark and bitter: a solemn funeral-ale with the taste of death. But this is an age of potted criticism and pre-digested literary opinion; and in the making of these cheap substitutes for food translations unfortunately are too often used.

To use a prose translation for this purpose is, none the less, an abuse. Beowulf is not merely in verse, it is a great poem; and the plain fact that no attempt can be made to represent its metre, while little of its other specially poetic qualities can be caught in such a medium, should be enough to show that 'Clark Hall', revised or unrevised, is not offered as a means of judging the original, or as a substitute for reading the poem itself. The proper purpose of a prose translation is to provide an aid to study.

Those words were taken from 'On Translating Beowulf', submitted by Tolkien as 'Prefatory Remarks on Prose Translation of "Beowulf"' to the 1940 edition by Professor C.L. Wrenn of Beowulf and the Finnesburg Fragment, A Translation into Modern English Prose by John R. Clark Hall (1911).

[EDIT] I didn't know that the quotation in German was from Goethe. My thanks to Estelyn for passing that on, and for correcting my translation.