The Book of Lost Tales Part I: A Readthrough

[Formendacil]

Originally Posted by Tar-Jêx

That may be so, but Tolkien probably wouldn't have thought about every single word he used, probably just a few, or the important ones. Word choice is incredibly important when writing a song, or poem, or a heroic monologue, but not so much with generally less important things, like Treebeard walking slowly.

It strikes me as just a trifle ironic to find an argument on a thread about the HoME suggesting that Tolkien didn't niggle over words; the HoME, especially once you get to the LotR volumes, is full of evidence that Tolkien niggled over details like words.

Now, I want to be quite clear, lest I come across as trying to defend my own over-thinking with regards to this thread thus far: I do not think, with regards to "the wastes of time," that Tolkien agonized a long time over this choice of words, nor do I think that by choosing it he was indicating all the connotations that I, as the reader, found them to open up. There is a very real difference between a (usually limited) meaning directly intended by the author and (all sorts of) the musings that can be extracted from it by a reader.

That said, Tolkien was a known niggler over details. What is more, details like word choice and and the choice of word order are things that define an author. After long practice, they flow from the pen almost without thought, but that "almost" is important--there IS thought and the vocabulary and style they convey are the fingerprint of the author.

I don't think there's any doubt here that Tolkien's style is something we can't discuss as his fans--indeed, as the fans of his writing, we ought to be able to discuss his writing! To do this, we can't just talk about his style or his vocabulary as broad things; you can only talk about them broadly if you've already looked at the individual choices.

And I think this is especially true when we're discussing The Book of Lost Tales, because Tolkien's prose is a major difference between it and the later legendarium. Discussing it here allows us to show how he was a versatile writer, since allows us to add another style to the ones we know from The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and elsewhere. It allows us, possibly, to draw conclusions about his development, because even if the BoLT is a different genre and intended to convey different things than the Silmarillion would, he is speaking of many of the same things in both of them, and his word choice reveals different nuances as he developed as a writer.

In sum, words are the DNA of a text. You have to put them under a microscope to get anything out of them, and in doing so you CAN magnify them out of proportion--but that does not mean it is not worth doing if you wish to study the subject.