I was perusing my copy of the JRRT encyclopedia: Scholarship and critical assessment the other day (a great book, all JRRT ubergeeks should own a copy), when I ran across their article on the Norman Conquest (scroll up 1 page to 458).
I was struck by Dr. Foys’ assertion:
Interesting…
Any other inveterate JRRT readers notice this? I went back and scanned a few pages of SIL and LOTR, and I must admit I didn’t find a lot of english words which I considered to be derived from the Romance language family. But I’m hardly a language scholar.
Would JRRT’s writing have been improved if he’d added a certain je ne sais quoi via romanticized english? Or to those who would condemn him for that style, should we just say honi soit qui mal y pense?
Another related question: How odd was it for JRRT to still be upset with the French over the Norman Conquest? It had happened over 8 centuries before his birth, after all.
Does your source book say anything about an underlying musical structure in Tolkien, such as three “movements” to parts of the story or to the ages the story covers, or musical structural forms in the way plots are organized and spin off of one another, almost like musical themes developing, answering one another, and uniting to become some third theme?
As I recall, a musical piece was used expressly by Tolkien to represent the original plan of the universe as proposed by the Creator; it was answered by the challenging musical counterpoint of a lesser being; the Creator’s reply was the final, overwhelming piece encompassing both versions and setting the final plan of the universe. You might argue there is a lot of musical structure in Tolkien’s work: counterpoint, balancing of forces and events, etc, in the plotting of history, and in the storyline. Like this, in broad brushstroke:
In the Silmarillion, it is evil which has taken something rightly belonging to good. Good must struggle to get it back. In the Ring trilogy (three movements), it is good that has taken something from evil and evil is trying to recover it. See the symmetry? It has a musical “feel” to it, and this seems to me more than coincidence.
So far, I’ve been too lazy to research this–and I know squat about music so serious research is what it would take. If this is right, though, someone, somewhere must have got on to it already. Is there anything on a musical-structure sub-theme in your source book?
wei ji, the encyclopedia has an article by Brad Eden about “music in Middle Earth” and references a more in-depth scholarly work by the same Brad Eden, entitled “The Music of the Spheres: Relationships between Tolkien’s Silmarillion and Medieval Cosmological and Religious Theory”. It may be found the the publication “Tolkien the Medievalist”, edited by Jane Chance. Published by Routledge, NY 2003.
I’d disagree with your assertion that “evil has taken something rightly belonging to good. Good must struggle to get it back”. JRRT’s overarching theme in both books is about the transcendence of good via eucatastrophe, and that evil, while still evil, was good to have been. But that’s a topic for a whole 'nuther thread.
JRRT was a language scholar (and even did work for “Q” in the OED).
This is just a WAG, but since the Shire existed in a time far off (before 1066, say) might he be enough of a purist (or a nitpicker) to keep even the language reflective to the period?
Oh I’m sure he was wanting to try for proper ‘purity’, he struggled with about 7 different names for Mrs. Sackville-Baggins before settling on Lobelia, based on “appropriate linguistic principles”. But I’d never heard of someone trying to speak or write in English while purging it of as much of its French or Latin words as possible.
Tolkien was a language scholar; after World War I his first job was at the Oxford English Dictionary. He worked on “W”. So he would likely know which words derive from the Romance, Hellenic, ect. - and which words derive from Middle Engish, Old English, ect.
He also understood finnish, welsh, old irish, hebrew, old high german, old norse, and old Mercian. Tolkien once said he’d like to speak old Mercian all the time. Most Rohirian (not Rohirric) words were actually old Mercian.
Interesting. I glanced at a few random pages of LoTR on Amazon, and sure enough, I didn’t see many Latin or French based words, which gives the text an interesting feel. I did notice one Romance-language word used fairly frequently - “Precious.”
You all might be interested in Poul Anderson’s article about Atomic theory with almost all the non-Germanic words replaced with Germanic equivalents - “Atomic Theory” is “Uncleftish Beholding” in this language Uncleftish Beholding - Wikipedia
Koxmik you are correct. You made me head for the bookshelf for Simon Winchesters “The Meaning of Everything (The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary).”
Indeed, he worked on W.
What followed was interesting, too.
W was always in any case reckoned an interesting letter – there are essentially no Greek or Latin derivatives that begin with W, and its words are generally taken, as Bradley put it, ‘from the oldest strata of the language’.
Interestingly enough, the first W word I thought of was “wine”. But “wife”, “water”, and “work” all work. And now that I type that sentence, I’m not sure of “word” or “was” (is “word” related to “verbum”?).
This makes sense…and explains why I never could read my Frech copy of The Hobbit. Reading it in French felt “wrong” to me, but reading LOTR in Swedish feels “right”. Reading it in Finnish doesn’t provoke such strong feelings either way.
why peg latin to the norman conquest? england used to be a roman province. doesn’t the british crown have some sort of a confirmation of roman ancestry? i understood the eldar language (in araman) to be JRRT’s latin equivalent.
