Dumbing down the Books

[jallanite]

Eurytus posted:

Almost 2,400 words to argue yet again that Tolkien has no flaws.

Gee! That wasn't my argument as all, not for Tolkien or Mark Twain or Kipling.

I don't believe any of these writers have "no flaws". Never meant it. Never said it.

What I intended to show was that archaic language has been used by others who are usually considered great writers and who had an ear for language. Presumably they enjoyed archaic style. And presumably their readers did and do (largely) consider its use not to be a flaw in their writing.

But tell me, exactly what effect was Tolkien looking for when he translated the words of Frodo who was himself translating the thoughts of a Fox?

Because the effect on me was a bit "Wind in the Willows".

I agree that it was a bit "Wind in the Willows" or beast fable and I think it delightful because of that.

You take the pretence that Tolkien is adapting Frodo's own words very seriously. There are at least two other well-known passages that also present matters hard to justify as what either Frodo or Sam perceived or could have learned from others.

If flaws of this kind bother you, don't ever try reading Melville's Moby **** .

I previously posted:

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.

Bêthberry posted:

The "just cause" I would suggest is the wish to engage in civil and honest debate about an author we all enjoy. To deny anyone the right to express their legitimate and authentic response represents, I would argue, an inflexibility which discredits the Barrow Downs? traditional respect for discussion.

I did here or anywhere speak against your right to post your opinion or against anyone's right to post any opinion.

I asked a question which I think worth asking.

E. R. Eddison wrote his Ouroboros books in very florid Elizabethan language which puts off many, including myself. I find those books unreadable. I suppose I could force myself to read them and on getting through them I might find that I was then able to appreciate that style. Tolkien liked Eddison's writing.

There are people whose taste I generally think good who very much like Eddison's writing and who especially like his wild, high-flown language. Accordingly I don't think my individual response is just cause to call Eddison's style a flaw in his writing because it is currently outside my own range of sympathy when that is obviously the kind of writing Eddison wanted to do and his readers read him especially because of it.

Why should anyone's experience reading Tolkien count for less or not be allowed because it is different from other people's, even the majority's, reading experience?

Strawman argument. It is quite legitimate for you or anyone to speak of their dislike for any author or parts of any author, say, Shakespeare. Tolkien had no great use for Shakespeare.

But from another of your posts:

I think it is an acceptable and legitimate endeavour to try to explain why this happens. And it saddens me when I am told I should not do this because it attacks the professor unfairly. This, I think, it where the cultish aspects of Tolkien fandom come into play.

There is an implication here that someone who attempts to argue that some of what you say is unfair must from "the cultish aspects of Tolkien fandom".

That's rather ad hominem.

It might be that some of your arguments are invalid and some unfair.

You obviously do recognize the relativity of asethetic judgements, that they depend in part on standards that change. You state this explicitly. But you forget this. sometimes.

I am sorry but I don't see where the rule which I offerred from A University Grammar of English says that Hamlet speaks wrongly. In fact, I don't see how the rule applies at all. The sentence I referred to from Tolkien has a completely different grammatical structure; Tolkien's sentence has all the adverbials before the Subject-verb; it is what is called a left-branching sentence and the rule I quoted refers to this kind of sentence only.

I did not claim it was the same error. You read things into my post that are not there. But since you implicately disregard all of Shakespeare as following out-of-date grammar, I turn to Charles Dicken's Oliver Twist Chapter 1. This is the third sentence:

For a long time after it was ushered into this world of sorrow and trouble, by the parish surgeon, it remained a matter of considerable doubt whether the child would survive to bear any name at all; in which case it is somewhat more than probable that these memoirs would never have appeared; or, if they had, that being comprised within a couple of pages, they would have possessed the inestimable merit of being the most concise and faithful specimen of biography, extant in the literature of any age or country.

This seems to me to be close enough to the same construction you consider an error.

From "Night and Day" by Virginia Woolf, beginning of second paragraph:

Considering that the little party had been seated round the tea-table for less than twenty minutes, the animation observable on their
faces, and the amount of sound they were producing collectively, were very creditable to the hostess.

A little later:

With the omnibuses and cabs still running in his head, and his body still tingling with his quick walk along the streets and in and out of traffic and foot-passengers, this drawing-room seemed very remote and still; and the faces of the elderly people were mellowed, at some distance from each other, and had a bloom on them owing to the fact that the air in the drawing-room was thickened by blue grains of
mist.

I found these immediately just searching for Oliver Twist because one might reasonably take it as a standard of good literature and then I searched for anything by Virginia Woolf. I just started at the beginning of each work.

I'm not going to bother to look further.

I discovered in high school that grammar as taught was bogus as a guide to actual usage of many (perhaps all?) of the best authors and that errors according to the traditional prescriptive rules of English grammar could be found almost everywhere.

You might be able to find a literary work that is entirely grammatical according to some set of traditional rules. I'm sure there are authors who did care and do care very much about such things, even anal retentive enough to vary will and shall according to invented distinctions between them.

But that kind of sentence is an isolated feature of his writing. To take the jest so seriously as to want desperately to prove the grammarians wrong and Tolkien right is, I would argue, a tempest in a teacup.)

Prescriptive grammarians or descriptive grammarians? Your own citation indicates the rule is often broken, and accordingly can be a rule only in the sense that it is a norm, not that it defines acceptable utterances.

What I take seriously is what I perceive to be misuse of descriptive grammar as though it were prescriptive grammar and your claim that the sentence was incorrect according to descriptive grammatical rules. It is not a matter of showing that desscriptive grammarians who insist this are wrong (though you don't actually cite any) and that Tolkien is right. It a fact that such constructions are are acceptable in the English language as it exists and as it has long existed, regardless of whether Tolkien does or does not use such constructions regularly.

My point really is to suggest that writers cannot import meaning into their writing by taking a device or feature or style from outside his or her writing and automatically assume that the imported language will have the same valuation or meaning in its new context. Writers cannot assume that, if the words have a particular value elsewhere, they will automatically have the same value if used in the writer's own work. There is no prior value or meaning, no origin that will carry over into the new text. The value of the imported words will always depend upon the way they are used in the new text.

I don't understand this at all.

All understanding is in the reader who must have encountered most of the words used by an author in some context in order to read the text at all intelligently.

It happens often enough that a reader does misunderstand an author, missing subtleties or even the intended meaning of the text altogether.


Do you lay the blame on the reader or the author? I don't think you can necessarily lay it on either. An author cannot know the exact literary and personal experience of every reader that might read his or her work. And the author may not be writing at all for certain kinds of readers. Tolkien, for example, didn't care much about what people who can't stomach fantasy cared about his writing.

Perhaps it is because what I see him suggesting is that I must accept other people's refusal to listen to other points of view. That to me defeats the purpose of a message board like Barrow Downs, which is for discussion.

Can you cite me making such a suggestion? Refute arguments I have made, not ones I did not make.

It is important to distinguish between not listening to other points of view, possibly misunderstanding other points of view, and rejecting with argument other points of view.

But yes, you must accept that some people will sometimes not listen to you. That happens to all of us. There, I've said it.

Thus, it reads to me like an affectation, an old style imported into his work and expected to suggest his purpose.

It reads somewhat like that to me also. But it reads to me like exactly the right kind of affectation.

People bring different experience and different associations to any work.

To me, a writer cannot import a feature of language as used elsewhere and expect it to have the same meaning in his writing. He needs to create his own version of archaic language.

Where exactly is Tolkien importing his language from? It is somewhat like that of William Morris, somewhat like that of Malory, but not quite like either. It is less archaic for one thing. I find it rather distinctive in some ways. At least parts of it are distinctive. Tolkien doesn't use exactly the same archaic language everywhere. It is distinct enough that people often agree that something in another writer sounds like Tolkien.

That seems to me to indicate that Tolkien did create his own variety of archaic English.

Tolkien did not do this for me and I am more interested in trying to understand this than in, as Mr.Underhill suggests other fans may do, smoothing over problem areas.

Problem areas most likely come from differences in aethetics, such as my inability to appreciate Eddison's prose.

Eddison might have reached me and also a wider audience had he used a less florid and bombastic style. On the other hand the enthusiasts who love his work do so partly for that same unique prose.

I don't see that creating a unique archaic style or not creating a unique archaic style is an issue at all. Twain could handle general Walter Scott Wardour Street excellently. He didn't create his own style in The Prince and the Pauper.

However, as you yourself have suggested, this thread is foundering on shoals of personal opinion and feeling. I consider it beached.

So far your linguistic arguments seem to me to be only attempts to justify your own personal opinion and feeling.

They seem to me, so far as I can understand them, to be rationalization. They aren't objective statements about what Tolkien has done.

I do not mean that your taste is intrinsically wrong. But your attempts to use modern linguistics and general principles of taste to explain the problem with Tolkien's archaism fail because a large readership don't respond the way you do and, I think, because you are trying to use them in areas where they are irrelevant.

What you do want from Tolkien in the way of archaism is not clear. And if Tolkien had given you exactly what you wanted, it is quite possible that there would now be some other person on this site claming that the style which worked for you did not work for him or her and attempting to justify it by linguistics.

It is even possible that if the archaic style used had been exactly suited to your particular sensibility that the books would not have been as popular because their style would not have been so obstinately (and for you infuriatingly) Tolkien.

(And it is possible they would have been more pouplar. We cannot know.)

Compare Mark Twain's heart-felt deprecation of almost every aspect of Fennimore Cooper's writing in Fenimoore Cooper's Literary Offenses. Yet Fennimore Cooper still sells, even though many of Twain's remarks are dead on. And the artificial melodrama of Cooper's language which Twain so greatly disliked is one of the things that many readers love in Cooper.