Dumbing down the Books

[jallanite]

There was a writer who went by the name Mark Twain.

He had good ear for language which he used in a book called Huckleberry Finn that became extraorindarily popular and is generally considered a classic. It is also considered by many to be flawed, but not usually in its language, not any more. Yet even Mark Twain's normal language was often not what was considered good grammar in his own day.

The book purports to be written by an almost illerate boy who writes in very colloquial and low dialect. However we have speeches by others in different dialects. It seems unlikely that Huck could so well present other dialects so different from his own, especially presumably written many months after he heard these speeches. But I don't recall any critic picky enough to criticise that book on that account. The unlikelihood is accepted because the results are so excellent.

The Lord of the Rings in part purports to be Tolkien's very close retelling of an account written mostly by Frodo Baggins about what happened to him and his friends during the period before, during, and after the War of the Ring.

But Tolkien does not claim that he reproduces Frodo's style exactly in all cases. It is ingenuous to find a flaw in the way Frodo tells the tale when it is quite clear that the book claims to be a retelling of Frodo's account by Tolkien.

But let us pretend that Tolkien pretends to attempt to imitate Frodo's style in Tolkien's narration. Tolkien perhaps does pretend to do so, when Tolkien remembers that Tolkien is supposedly adapting a source.

In general the passages in which the style is most archaic are just those in which no Hobbit takes part, the very passages for which Frodo, the supposed orginator, would have had to rely on accounts by others who were not Hobbits.

Lyta_Underhill has already cited Tolkien's account of variations in style of speech and his indication that Frodo had at his command formal 'book-language' when he wished to use it.

The true facts may be that Tolkien tended to drift into more archaic prose when he had no Hobbits to act as a counterweight. But if you need to justify the differences in narrative style then it is simple enough to do so.

I will note also that Mark Twain who wrote Huckleberry Finn also wrote The Prince and the Pauper. A sample from chapter 21:

The rest was lost in inarticulate mutterings. The old man sank upon his knees, his knife in his hand, and bent himself over the moaning boy.

Hark! There was a sound of voices near the cabin--the knife dropped from the hermit's hand; he cast a sheepskin over the boy and started up, trembling. The sounds increased, and presently the voices became rough and angry; then came blows, and cries for help; then a clatter of swift footsteps, retreating. Immediately came a succession of thundering knocks upon the cabin door, followed by--

"Hullo-o-o! Open! And despatch, in the name of all the devils!"

Oh, this was the blessedest sound that had ever made music in the King's ears; for it was Miles Hendon's voice!

The hermit, grinding his teeth in impotent rage, moved swiftly out of the bedchamber, closing the door behind him; and straightway
the King heard a talk, to this effect, proceeding from the 'chapel':--

"Homage and greeting, reverend sir! Where is the boy--MY boy?"

"What boy, friend?"

"What boy! Lie me no lies, sir priest, play me no deceptions!--I am not in the humour for it. Near to this place I caught the scoundrels who I judged did steal him from me, and I made them confess; they said he was at large again, and they had tracked him to your door. They showed me his very footprints. Now palter no more; for look you, holy sir, an' thou produce him not--Where is the boy?"

"O good sir, peradventure you mean the ragged regal vagrant that tarried here the night. If such as you take an interest in such as he, know, then, that I have sent him of an errand. He will be back anon."

"How soon? How soon? Come, waste not the time--cannot I overtake him? How soon will he be back?"

"Thou need'st not stir; he will return quickly."

Perhaps Mark Twain did not know what he was doing?

From Rudyard Kipling's Kim, chapter 9:

'Long and long ago, when Devadatta was King of Benares -let all listen to the Tataka! - an elephant was captured for a time by the king's hunters and ere he broke free, beringed with a grievous legiron. This he strove to remove with hate and frenzy in his heart, and hurrying up and down the forests, besought his brother-elephants to wrench it asunder. One by one, with their strong trunks, they tried and failed. At the last they gave it as their opinion that the ring was not to be broken by any bestial power. And in a thicket, new-born, wet with moisture of birth, lay a day-old calf of the herd whose mother had died. The fettered elephant, forgetting his own agony, said: "If I do not help this suckling it will perish under our feet." So he stood above the young thing, making his legs buttresses against the uneasily moving herd; and he begged milk of a virtuous cow, and the calf throve, and the ringed elephant was the calf's guide and defence. Now the days of an elephant - let all listen to the Tataka! - are thirty-five years to his full strength, and through thirty-five Rains the ringed elephant befriended the younger, and all the while the fetter ate into the flesh.

'Then one day the young elephant saw the half-buried iron, and turning to the elder said: "What is this?" "It is even my sorrow," said he who had befriended him. Then that other put out his trunk and in the twinkling of an eyelash abolished the ring, saying: "The appointed time has come." So the virtuous elephant who had waited temperately and done kind acts was relieved, at the appointed time, by the very calf whom he had turned aside to cherish - let all listen to the Tataka! for the Elephant was Ananda, and the Calf that broke the ring was none other than The Lord Himself...'

Then he would shake his head benignly, and over the ever-clicking rosary point out how free that elephant-calf was from the sin of pride. He was as humble as a chela who, seeing his master sitting in the dust outside the Gates of Learning, over-leapt the gates (though they were locked) and took his master to his heart in the presence of the proud-stomached city. Rich would be the reward of such a master and such a chela when the time came for them to seek freedom together!

Note that much of the the very formal and archaic (and artificial?) style continues past the end of the tale. Did Rudyard Kipling not know what he was doing?

Bêthberry twice attempted to show that Tolkien was grammatically incorrect in the sentence:

Borne upon the wind they heard the howling of wolves.

But A University Grammar of English after stating the rule that Tolkien was supposedly breaking continues:

Commonly, however, this 'attachment rule' is violated

If a rule is commonly violated, then by the principles of descriptive grammar the rule itself must be wrong or incomplete.

That is true descriptive grammar.

I looked into Shakespeare's Hamlet and immediately came upon:

That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once: how the knave jowls it to the ground, as if it were Cain's jaw-bone, that did the first murder!

What did the first murder? The jaw-bone, perhaps, or the ground?

Fie upon such rules of grammar as say that Hamlet speaks wongly!

The task of descriptive grammar is to show us by what rules the utterance is understood properly, not to claim it wrong because it might be misunderstood when in fact it is not.

Grammatical ambiguity is tolerated here because semantics serves as an excellent crutch, and if such crutches occur in speech and occur often then it is the rules that say that the speech is wrong that need to be thrown out, not the speech.

Double negatives were thrown out of English for reasons of logic, though in many other languages (such as French) they occur still and people can reason just as logically (or not).

Speech has context. Save in strict legal jargon and philosophical definition and such matters grammatical ambiguity is correctly tolerated and even embraced where context makes clear.

Good speech and language are too complex to ever be completely captured by rules. But linguists now try to do make the rules fit the language, not the other way around.

Bêthberry wrote:

No form or style of language is regarded as innately holding worth or being more worthy in itself than any other form. The criteria for effectivenss is always the entire range of linguistic interaction between sender and receiver, speaker and audience and context.

Then how should Bêthberry say anything good or bad about Tolkien's language or anyone's language? In fact those who know and use any style of speech will esteem some usage of it better than another because that usage is clearer, or more complex, or more eloquent, or more poetical, or more vigorous, or more soothing. Some will disagree with others on the points of excellence. Some may prefer florid ornamentation and some may prefer statements that are brief and to the point. Some may like both on different occasions.

Bêthberry states:

There are too many fans here for whom Tolkien's works are akin to iconic texts and for whom any kind of questioning brings very defensive feelings.

That may be. But if for some of these it is partly Tolkien's excellent mastery of the English language which draws them and this includes what they feel and perceive as a mastery of archaising English, Bêthberry must deal with it. To us Tolkien's archaic language is effective and one of the things for which we read him. It is a strawman to claim that Tolkien is iconic and therefore his readers must needs accept his language rather than that his readers are enthralled by his language and that is one of the reasons that Tolkien is to some iconic.

I read Howard Pyle's Arthurian retellings as a child in part because of the strange old eloquent language in which they were written. As a child I read other tales which in part or throughout were written in an older English than that of my own day. I read translations written in pseudo-archaic English, some of which I still prefer to more modern translations.

On first reading The Lord of the Rings (at about the age of eighteen) I was much impressed by the feeling of authenticity in the work which partly came from Tolkien's use of language. His archaic language felt right. It still does, though I have since read much else in medieval English and French.

If the language doesn't work for Bêthberry then it doesn't work for Bêthberry. But Bêthberry has yet to explain why it shouldn't work for many others when it obviously does.

Bêthberry wrote:

This, I think, is one reason why many find his use of the antique style for Aragorn and Gondor embarassing--it suggests a moral worth, and this kind of assumption is no longer tenable. (At least, it is not in the fields of linguistics or sociology, or, even, literature.)

Does it suggest a moral worth? To whom?

Gondor is explicity described as being somewhat decayed and its Númenorean nobility too much concerned with past glories and ancestry rather than with the present.

Saruman also speaks in book-language and is a master of language. Sam speaks what would have been considered a low dialect.

But I don't see a hint that Tolkien thought Sam's style indicated moral defficiency or that Saruman's style indicates moral viture or that we are to esteem Denethor morally above Treebeard.

Tolkien obviously likes the rustic language Sam speaks just as Tolkien likes the high style in which Tolkien writes some of the battle scenes and just as Tolkien obviously likes the Orkish Rudyard Kipling Tommy English spoken by the Uruk-hai and just as Tolkien obviously loves Gollum's manner of speech.

This linguistic variation and delight in different kinds of English and the way they play off one another is one of the great pleasures provided by The Lord of the Rings.

That said, of course there is in Tolkien, (taken from medieval romance and general adventure fiction if nothing else) the idea that there is such a thing as gentle birth and breeding though some may fall from their birth and breeding and some may surpass it.

One can quite well reject the entire ideology that Aragorn ought to have any right to rule in Gondor just because two of his ancestors did so. Tolkien probably would also. At least I don't think Tolkien would have approved of a plot to restore the French monarchy or fallen for the Grail bloodline nonsense.

But Tolkien is writing an heroic romance, not a modern novel, and he is using the conventions of that kind of work. Archaic language fits, just as does a broken sword that is reforged and a long-lost heir and battles with lance and sword and bow. If you dislike archaic language then you won't enjoy Tolkien's use of it. If you have bad experiences with hereditary monarchs or start looking crticially at most historic European dynasties then you may not appreciate Aragorn.

But if Tolkien enjoyed archaic English and most of his readers enjoy what he has done with it then those who don't appreciate it have no just cause to blame Tolkien for using it because they are unable to see the attraction.

Similarly those who cannot appreciate James Joyce's Uysses have no cause to blame Joyce for using an artificial kind of English (often not grammatical by standard rules) that obviously does bring great delight to many readers.