"Genuine fairy-story" ?

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

Originally Posted by Lalwendë

Of course Tolkien made great use of language, its origins and meanings, and this is a great interpretation of Recovery, but you've spoiled it now by saying that this appreciation of language is 'lamentably absent today' as that's just wrong! You could have a whole army of modern writers after your blood, and in the front line would be the poets with their pitchforks, closely followed by a lot of other writers of the most unlikely kind. For example the copywriters who bend, twist and turn words to get the exact phrase which will both catch the eye and be deep with alternate meanings. I've written speeches and believe me, those words are not used as 'coal-carts', every single word and where it is placed counts, and I mean seriously counts; the top speech writers are cherished as finding a brilliant one is like finding moondust.

Ah, but my dear Lal, you are rather proving my thesis! Of the instances you cite above I would argue that the overwhelming majority attitude (I would never say "all") is of a decidedly un-Tolkienian type. There are, of course (as in every era) wonderful wordsmiths who craft elegant and beautiful language. But it's that very attitude toward writing as a "craft" which I was talking about -- the presumption amongst most modern writers is that words are objects which they can use instrumentally. The two examples you cite give the full spectrum of what this means:

The current dominant attitude in poetry is that language is an object in and of itself that can be played with, worked upon, abused and generally "used". Words are themselves the things that poets play with, resulting in such extraordinarily wonderful works like Eunoia by Canada's own Christian Bok. This book is composed of five chapters, with each chapter devoted to a single vowel -- meaning, in each chapter there is a series of poems in which only one vowel may be used. To cite just one example:

Whenever Helen needs effervescent refreshments, she tells her expert brewer: ‘brew me the best beer ever brewed.’ Whenever she lets her fermenters ferment the perfect beer, revellers wreck the kegs, then feed themselves the lees. Retchers retch; belchers belch. Jesters express extreme glee. Wenches then sell these lewd perverts sex

(If anyone wants to see the whole collection there’s a wonderful hypertext edition available free.)

The "meaning" of words is contained by the play and craft of the poet -- words are rendered meaningful through the process of poetic articulation.

The other example of speechwriters is akin to this. There are superb speech writers and I do not look down upon their ability, but the sense of language there is that there is a "message" which needs to be appropriately "packaged" and "delivered" to an audience. The coal-car metaphor is entirely apt -- the speech writer finds the perfect words with which to bear meaning from the hidden mine to the light of audience understanding. The purpose of said communication is not to unlock the intrinsic meanings of the words themselves but, like the poets, to use the words for some other purpose.

With Tolkien, the attitude could not be more different. He does not simply see language as important, he sees words themselves as harbingers and bearers of meaning that is to be unlocked (recovered) by story. This is the reverse of the modern way of thinking: now, we use words to tell stories; Tolkien used stories to recover for words their full meaning. Remember Treebeard's discourse upon the world "hill" -- for him, language, history and story are one and the same. To speak the word of something is to tell you all about that something. Gandalf is much the same on a moral plane: he tells Frodo at the beginning of their journey that "pity" is important, and then there is a 1200 page novel to elaborate upon (recover) a much richer and fuller sense of the word than exists today ("pity" from pieta, the divine grace which comes to humans for their suffering; the reflection in the temporal realm in relations between self and other of the beneficent nature of the universe in which God's grace and revelation is manifest in His Pity for the world when he sent himself/his son to die for our sins -- I do not sermonise, I merely elaborate upon what pity "really" means in the fullest etymological and philological sense, not as we have it today).

For the contemporary poet, "pity" is an interesting object-formation that can be organised and played with and deployed in an imaginative process of meaning-creation; for the speech-writer, "pity" is a useful word that can be appropriately used to convey a particular meaning with specific polemical and rhetorical effect. For Tolkien, "pity" is a word that unlocks and reveals an entire history of struggle, sacrifice and redemption -- a story that he finds necessary to recover a sense of the word utterly lost by the first two modes.