Dumbing down the Books

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

I utterly disagree with the opinion that archaic English can somehow express things of a nobler quality than modern English. Modern English can express anything its author puts their mind to, if the author is good enough.

That means nothing, nor is it what I have been trying to say. If an author is good enough he can write his entire story in the manner of Robert Burns and still get his point across. However, couching an entire 100,000 word book in Highland dialect might not give the work quite the voice that this hypothetical author intended. Nothing can be better expressed in archaic English, but it can be expressed differently, and in a manner that is both more appealing to the writer and more expressive of his thoughts and intentions. In the case of The Lord of the Rings these were complicated and multifarious, as one might expect: Tolkien wanted to portray a wide range of characters of massively variant ages, races and what we might loosely term nationalities, but who use a common tongue. At the same time he wanted his work to appear to have been written by some of its protagonists after the fact and then translated by the actual author at a much later date. Although this technique falls down in places, it retains the great advantage that it explains dichotomies of style even better than the idea of the final work having different authors. Basically by presenting himself as the translator of an existing work, Tolkien makes himself a minor and peripheral character within his own story; and his own linguistic preferences find their way into the text because a translator will naturally use whichever English words he thinks best express the sense of those that he is trying to translate. This is all covered in the notes on translation at the end of The Lord of the Rings, but consider the fact that Westron follows the Romance convention of having formal and informal versions of the second person of the personal pronoun. Translating this into English, what would you do? English has no equivalent of a formal 'you', but since most people are familiar with the archaic 'thee', 'thou', 'thy' and so forth from the Bible (hardly the most informal work to be printed in English), it does not seem to me such a great leap of the imagination to use those to translate the idea, however imperfectly. How else could one contrast Pippin's mode of speech with that of Denethor in a manner that is instantly apparent to English-speaking readers? In German, or in the Romance languages it would be simple, but modern English simply does not have the same concept, just as it lacks the Old-Norse and Old-English duals of the personal pronoun that allow 'we two' to become a single word.

Is this a cop-out? Possibly, but Tolkien does mention in his letters that the point of writing his original stories was to provide a narrative framework for his languages, and that The Lord of the Rings was written to provide a context in which elen sila lumenn' omentielvo would be a recognisable greeting. If this is the case, and I see no reason to assume that it is not, then it does not seem so unrealistic to consider that Tolkien was writing The Lord of the Rings as a translation from the Westron from the very beginning, and that at least some of the oddities of style were included deliberately. This could just as easily be an elaborate explanation dreamed up during the composition of the appendices, but since Tolkien was very pressed for space when compiling these it seems odd that he would have chosen to waste so many words on a rebuttal for pedants.

Of course there are variations in style between the opening chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring and the conclusion of the book, and although this can be put down to literary technique I don't think that we can discount the fact that the former were written in the late 1930s and the latter were written in the mid to late 1940s. So many years are a long time to spend writing a large and detailed story, but if that time includes the most hectic and violent years of the century, with increased pressure of work and an uncertain future, it is not at all conducive to narrative consistency. However, it seems to me that the voice of the earlier chapters, light-hearted and bantering as it is, perfectly matches the spirit in which those chapters are presented, just as the more distant, less familiar and more difficult archaism in later chapters supports themes of inadequacy, of suddenly being a very small part of something inexpressibly huge and strange. Along with the Hobbits, the reader is learning that there are creatures alive who learned their language before the Shire even existed. How would a man born in 1550 speak if he were alive today? Would he adapt to suit modern parlance or would he revert to the mode of speech of his youth, much as someone might revert to their native language in moments of stress? What of someone who is more than a thousand years old? How would they speak? From the structure of some conversations it is clear that Tolkien had considered all of this, and used different flavours of archaism to suggest differing modes of Westron that would otherwise become invisible in the great all-enveloping cloak of modern English.

That isn't to say that Tolkien was perfect. far from it, he was pedantic and a niggler, who seemed either to write pieces in one sitting or to revise them endlessly; but I do not believe that his use of the language that he taught merits such vehement criticism. Nor do I believe that he deserves veiled implications that he was not a good enough writer to use a modern idiom, as though a modern idiom were the only voice that English can afford. I doubt that anyone would get very far these days suggesting that dialect and patois are not valid forms of communication, and yet it is considered that an academic or an archaic style, both of which can be almost painful in their adherence to the rules of English grammar, is no longer acceptable. Personally, I am rather fond of dialect, slang, archaism and other permutations of English. I find that they provide a refreshing break from the dreadful tedium that is the everyday vocabulary, so for me the very points of language for which some criticise Tolkien are points in his favour. Clearly that is a personal and not an academic opinion, but so is the opinion that Tolkien's use of archaism is annoying and misplaced. If it were I would have been the first to turn the full force of my pedantry upon it.

Just as with his voice, so with Tolkien's works. I consider those works of his that do not concern Middle-earth to be very readable. The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth is a moving yet ironic look at the aftermath of a battle, told in the style of an epic poem. The contrast of young Torhthelm's poetic idealism, which finds expression in his use of the high-flown language of the court poets, with the hard-headed practicality of the aged Tídwald makes for some amusing moments that nonetheless make very valid points about the portrayal and reality of warfare. Leaf by Niggle is a poignant little allegory that explores themes of personal fulfillment versus social duty, of the uncertainty of earthly posterity and of the way in which we view one another. I could go on, but although Tolkien wrote few books he left quite enough material that an attempt to pot all of his works here would be longer than the Midgard Serpent and about as friendly. Suffice it to say that Tolkien adopted a style that not everybody likes for some of his works, but it is neither a bad style nor the wrong style, just as it is not wrong for Iain Banks suddenly to begin narrating in Glaswegian dialect in The Bridge. If the author is no longer allowed to choose his own voice, what future is there for writing? More importantly, what is the future of a language that insists on forgetting half of its vocabulary every five-hundred years? George Orwell's little foray into linguistic invention can provide an answer, although it is hardly a satisfactory one.

[ November 05, 2003: Message edited by: The Squatter of Amon Rûdh ]