Dumbing down the Books

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

But then, you didn't quote me in your post but someone else so perhaps I should not have replied.

The perils of cross-posting. I would have addressed the more recent posts, particlarly your exploration of the use of language, but they were put up while I was still writing mine (a process that took several hours).

Obviously had I spotted the later post that mentions me by name I should have responded to it. As it happened, though, I was making no attempt to reply to any of your posts (mainly because I agree, particularly on the point that fan fora are too reluctant to criticise Tolkien), so if I've actually managed it, then it's more by luck than judgement.

The examples quoted above demonstrate that modern English is effective in conveying heroism and nobility, but I was never questioning that. What I do find hard to accept without examples is the idea that Tolkien did not believe this, or that his archaism is bad. My point was that archaic English is just another form that an author is entitled to use to create the atmosphere that he wants. It's quite possible that he did so badly, and "If it were so, it was a grievous fault", but it would help those of us with a less than perfect grasp of critical theory if some passages could be quoted, together with explanations of what makes them bad. Hopefully my admission that I find some of the more purple passages in The Lord of the Rings rather appealing will not be too great a cause for lamentation.

I would not agree that there ought to be internal references to the work as a translation. Aside from annotating the whole of The Lord of the Rings with the sort of spurious academic commentary that C.S. Lewis wrote on the Lay of Leithian I fail to see how the presentation of the work as a translated text could be referred to within it without bringing the entire device crashing down. As with a genuine translation, Tolkien offers a translator's note, which is separate from the body of the text. He points out difficulties in the languages with which he was working, and devices that he has used in an attempt to preserve the original feel of the piece. If we bear in mind that he used the same 'translation' plot device in The Hobbit, and that Allen and Unwin had commissioned the larger work as a sequel, it seems perfectly clear to me that The Lord of the Rings is presented as a translation by J.R.R. Tolkien of an earlier text. In my opinion, however unsuccessful was this device, it worked far better than it had when applied to The Hobbit, which reads exactly like a children's book.

As for Tolkien's ability or otherwise to depict heroism in a modern style, I think that too often the exchanges in Mordor during The Two Towers and The Return of the King are overlooked as examples of simple speech elevated to the level of heroic nobility. Frodo and Sam do not suddenly start exchanging 'thee's and 'thou's with one another when they decide to throw away their food and water (a scene in which they relinquish all hope of return), and it becomes clear that it was not a matter simply of showing us when heroic or noble events are afoot by throwing in some medieval or early-modern English. The two Hobbits in Mordor are more important than any of the mythic heroes on the great battlefields, who speak in the manner of saga heroes. The Hobbits are characters from a modern war, doing their best amid forces that are too great for them to influence directly; but Aragorn and other heroes are larger-than-life people, heroes from legend and saga, whose antiquated speech is written precisely to convey to the reader from just how far beyond the normal experience of the smaller protagonists these characters hail.

Returning to the two war poems that you quoted (from sometime collaborative writers Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen), I only see poetic language that reflects their respective literary education. Owen was a great believer that poetry should be beautiful, which for some time prevented him from writing about his war experience at all. He was heavily influenced by Keats, and I think that this shows in his phrasing, although since the Romantics were held as exemplars of poetic style by many at that time, it seems hardly surprising that a poet of the era should adopt that tone. Sassoon tended to adopt a much more personal, familiar style, falling more often into army slang or Edwardian idiom and drawing his reader towards his own anger at the war.

To my mind it is Owen, yoking the traditional style to new scenes and ideas that its originators would have been unable to imagine, who consistently manages to evoke the horrors of his subject. In the example above, he even makes explicit the dreadful gulf between peace experience and war experience that is already implicit in his sometimes violent variance between form and content.

My point is, of course, that this style, effective though it may be, was the result of the writer's education and inclination. This was not a retreat into archaism in an attempt to describe what he saw, but an attempt to describe the things that were happening around him using the literary tools at his disposal. How closely we can compare him with Tolkien is questionable. They came from different families, attended different schools and fought in different regiments. Tolkien was never the soldier that either Sassoon or Owen came to be, and his short time in the lines can in no way be compared with the long stints of his two contemporaries.

Now, this is not to say that the war was no influence on Tolkien at all, but that much of his high-flown poetic writing may simply be a product of his education rather than a deliberate retreat. If he were incapable of facing the grim realities of warfare he could have chosen something else to write about, and if he really did hide behind eccentric modes of expression why is it that possibly the most heroic part of his entire story is written mainly in standard 1940s English? I do think that his war experience had a deep effect on Tolkien: we can see it in the recurrence of themes such as the brevity of victory, the perversion of good intentions and the variance between the reality and depiction of the act of war itself. What I do not believe is that it forever soured Tolkien on the modern idiom's ability to portray universal concepts. It seems to me that he felt that the 'northern heroic spirit' of which he was so fond, which finds its voice mainly in saga and epic, was best expressed in the language of those forms. If anything, Tolkien was far too concerned with the close ties between language, people, myth, land and time, as Seamus Heaney puts it "...bedding the locale in the utterance" so that modern speech becomes for him discordant when it describes ideas or situations in the present tense that are absent from the world in which modern English is spoken.

For me the only valid criticism of Tolkien's style is either that it does not work as he intended or that it is inconsistent enough to introduce a disjointed quality to the narrative. I may be somewhat obtuse, but I have always found Tolkien's style to be most evocative, and any differences between The Fellowship of the Ring and The Return of the King to be entirely supported by the difference in their respective content. In fact for me it is often the use of modern English in a way that completely jars against the atmosphere of the overall work (as in Eddings' Belgariad) that meets with my irritation. Perhaps my ear is also affected, although I have less of an excuse than did Tolkien. Naturally I shall capitulate in shame if a passage can be dredged up from somewhere in the published writings that makes me cringe.

[ November 06, 2003: Message edited by: The Squatter of Amon Rûdh ]