Dumbing down the Books

[Aiwendil]

Eurytus wrote:

Well if that were the case would anyone like to explain why the same style of writing and language is not used to describe the realm of Lorien or Rivendell, both of which are far older than the people in Gondor.

First of all, it must be said that we are talking about two different things here. There is on the one hand the style in which the book is written, Tolkien's style, the narrative style. Then there is the style in which the characters speak. They needn't have anything to do with each other (though they needn't be unrelated either).

The charge you are making (specifically) here, then, is not against the use of archaism, or against the quality of Tolkien's prose, or the change in his style, or anything like that; it is about the believability within Middle-earth that the Elves of Rivendell and Lothlorien speak in a certain style and the humans of Gondor in a certain other style.

But I simply can't find the stylistic discrepancy you refer to. In Elrond's speech can be found all the same sorts of devices and patterns of phrasing used by the Gondorians. The same is true for the speech of Galadriel and Celeborn. Certainly the more common Elves speak in slightly less elevated tones, but then so do the few Gondorians we encounter that are not of high station (like Ioreth).

To the extent that I am wrong and there is such a difference, I suppose it is a flaw in the book. But it is certainly a minor one compared with the oft-made accusation that Tolkien's writing style is poor (and it is also a completely different kind of flaw).

Bethberry wrote:

This is his use of moral terms of evaluation for language. This is most pronounced in his description of the speech of Orcs and Trolls as 'degraded and filthy', "dreary and repetitive with hatred and contempt, too long removed from good to retain even verbal vigour, save in the ears of those to whom only the squalid sounds strong."

Of course it is not appropriate to use moral terms in the study of language, just as it is not appropriate to use them in any science. But The Lord of the Rings is not a philological study. When we step into the conceptual scheme of Arda, we must accept its morality and its system of truths.

I do not think these are strictly moral terms, by the way; they are subjective evaluations of a slightly different (through related) sort.

But surely it is possible for a person, or even a group of people, to find a particular language "ugly" or "queer" or "rustic". Provided adequate definitions, it is perfectly correct to use these terms. Of course, it may be undesirable to use them (since they may offend people or be interpreted as intended to describe speakers of the language rather than the language itself).

Tolkien thought Gaelic was uglier than Welsh. So what? He didn't take this as the basis for any scientific conclusions, and he didn't mean that Welsh people were superior to Irish or Scottish people. He thought that the Black Speech was uglier than Quenya. There's nothing wrong with that.

One could consider a language queer if it exhibits features that are markedly different from related languages, or from most languages. One could consider a language rustic if it tends to spoken in rural areas and retains certain archaic vocabulary that has been dropped in more populated areas. One could call a language "dreary and repetitive" if it has a limited vocabulary, if it has few roots and thus many very similar words, or if it has an especially restricted phonology. "Lacking verbal vigour" would seem to mean something like being "dreary and repetitive" - not having many roots or word.

The language of Trolls and Orcs is filled with "hatred and contempt" because Trolls and Orcs are filled with those things. And it would seem to be the simple fact within Arda that these languages have been "too long removed from the good".

The upshot of all of this is that while I agree that all such subjective evaluations should be kept out of real linguistics and philology, they have every right to be made within Arda, by Tolkien, and (perhaps most importantly) by the Elves and humans of the West who are supposed to have written the histories.

You have misinterpeted Quirk and Greenbaum's statement, "If the subject is not actually expressed in a non-finite or verbless clause, it is assumed to be identical with the subject of the superordinate clause." Your reading makes it identical with theobject of the superordinate clause.

Ah. I'm sorry. I was misled because in both of the examples that they offer, the sentence suffers from a far more immediate problem: the subject of the subordinate clause is not even expressed in the superordinate clause.

But I still don't see why that rule must be true based solely on the logical structure of this kind of sentence. Indeed, it seems to me (though I confess I am not a linguist) that such a rule could not possibly be true based solely on the logic of the grammar, for there are languages that are quite free with their placement of such clauses. One could formulate a version of English in which the rule was modified to: if the subject of the subordinate clause is not expressed, it is assumed to be the direct object of the verb in the superordinate clause. This would be an odd system, but it is self-consistent logically. So (it seems to me) is the system wherein there is no rule about which noun becomes the subject of a noun-less clause.

Another way of seeing what I mean is this: if the sentence as presented is logically incorrect, why would "They heard the howling of wolves borne upon the wind" be correct? It seems to have exactly the same logical structure.

Is there something I'm missing perhaps in the difference between subordination and modification? That is, in the sentence as I presented it above, is the relation of "borne on the wind" with "the howling of wolves" modification rather than subordination? Does "They heard the howling of wolves borne upon the wind" have a different grammatical structure from "They heard the howling of wolves, borne upon the wind"?

I can see how it might, though (not being a linguist) I may of course be quite wrong. But if I'm not, then the problem would seem to be not one concerning the placement of the words in the sentence, but concerning only the relation between "borne upon the wind" and "the howling of wolves". Then the critical difference for the "inverted" sentence would seem to be whether or not there is a comma between "Borne upon the wind" and "they heard the howling of wolves".

Of course, I may be completely misunderstanding the difference between subordination and modification. But I'm eager to learn.