so Shire-talk is canonically a very different dialect of Westron than what Gondorians or Elves or whatever speak and some of the hobbits can code switch between the two and it’s extremely interesting to see how Tolkien portrays it
I’ve just gotten to the part where Frodo meets Faramir, and the difference between how he talks to Faramir and how he talks to Sam, for instance, is v noticable
with Sam he’s a lot more casual and even slightly more modern (for the value of 1954, not 2017) vs with Faramir where he switches to this very formal, quite archaic to our ears (“seven companions we had”)
and then Sam himself doesn’t seem comfortable speaking this prestige dialect (his style includes rather more general “vernacular” features common across regional nonliterary English dialects) – probably bc unlike Frodo he was not given the type of education that would lend itself to learning how to speak it comfortably – so there’s this clash between how Faramir talks to them and how Sam talks back
there’s also the bit where Theoden meets Merry and Pippin, and Merry greets him in very high formality, Pippin addresses Gimli casually bc they’re friends, then turns to Theoden and switches to the formal style, they both talk some more to him, and then after he’s gone Pippin turns to Merry and says Theoden was a “fine old fellow, very polite” (in the more casual style)
In that one scene you have a lot of style switching depending on the person they’re addressing and their status and relationship to the hobbits, but, for instance, Gimli’s sentence structure sounds more like the formal dialect even when he’s happily berating them and calling them villains, probably because he doesn’t use Shire-talk
basically: you can tell this dude was a linguist
I don’t think you realize, I don’t think any of us realize, the force, the daimonic force that the great myths and legends have. From the profundity of the emotions and perceptions that begot them, and from the multiplication of them in many minds – and each mind, mark you, an engine of obscured but unmeasured energy. They are like an explosive: it may slowly yield a steady warmth to living minds, but if suddenly detonated, it might go off with a crash: yes: might produce a disturbance in the real primary world.
J.R.R. Tolkien The Notion Club Papers
Just been in the process of rereading The Notion Club Papers and it really amazes me how much Tolkien really comes off here as a SF writer.
We have a story set in the future (1987!) and a plot reminiscent of the very interesting (at least to me) 1998 SF movie Sphere, only without the sphere, just with apparently telepathic human minds, in all their awesomeness, as places where imagination and memory bring out the Real Past and shape the present. So really, SF!Tolkien.
The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of
beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an
enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords.
tolkien: dwarves aren’t so bad (as long as u dont expect too much of them)…. i mean they are definitively Not The Heroes but i suppose they have a right to exist??
me: anyway im constructing a museum to commemorate dwarvish culture bc they’re Better Than Elves and i would marry every single one of them.
I hate the fact that “married in the elven way” is just Middle Earth’s version of “know someone in the biblical sense”. Elf marriage is just two body being united carnally. Just that. It sounds so pretty but it’s just saying “HEY THESE TWO FUCKED”
ALSO other Elves can see when an Elf just got married from the way they walk or act. Imagine an Elf family reunion in which one of the elders gazes upon one of his nephews and comments “ah! I see that Maríl finally got some solid dick. I hope it brings them happiness.”
Am I the only person who thought this was really fucking funny
A lot of the really funny moments in Lord of the Rings come from Tolkien playing with language like this, where we have relatively formal, archaic, “high” language responded to with informal, modern, “low” language.
another hilarious example:
Tolkien does this an interesting amount, it was actually a topic in the Tolkien course I took. For the most part, he seems to write and think like a displaced epic poet from the Dark Ages, a time period he clearly holds dear. But he can’t resist jabbing these little barbs of self-mockery or sarcasm at the high concepts of his own works, in a manner which is very Modern (or perhaps post-modern?) in a literary sense. Even during Aragorn’s coronation, Ioreth the old woman from the House of Healing is chattering on about the significance of the event in a way that’s very comedic given its solemnity. For all that we think of Tolkien as a fairly serious writer, he actually has a great deal of comedy woven throughout his works.
jrr tolkien: i really love my wife. i will make her into a beautiful, unearthly half-angel princess who beat satan almost single-handedly and won an argument with the keeper of the halls of the dead
jrr tolkien: i really love my best friend. i will make him into a grumpy old tree who never gets to the point
George R.R. Martin: dragons are huge ferocious beasts who answer to a master
Tolkien: dragons are annoying, talking assholes
One interesting thought on this:
Fairy tale dragons? They’re like Smaug. They’re arrogant, talkative, they hoard treasure, they eat virgins. They’re amoral rather than evil, but they are intelligent monsters.
The dragon in Voyage Of The Dawn Treader, the one indirectly responsible for Eustace’s draconic curse is along the same lines.
At that time that is what a dragon was. There was a general consensus in western literature that dragons were, well, that.
In Medieval stories, dragons are to be killed by brave men. Gawain fights “wyrms” – a kind of wingless dragon. St. George slays a dragon. So does Beowulf. So does King Arthur. To be a worthwhile myth hero you have, at some point, to slay a dragon.
Early modern and nineteenth century dragons – we see one counter example – Faustus chariot is drawn by dragons in “Doctor Faustus.” The first really solid “friendly dragon” story is The Reluctant Dragon, which became a 1941 Disney film. That is the first story I can find about a dragon that befriends a human – but it’s friendship, not “human masters dragon.”
The second friendly dragon is E. Nesbit’s “The Last of the Dragons” who decides he’d rather hang out with the princess than fight the prince (the first example of subversion of the dragons eat maidens trope that I can find).
But they’re the minority.
In the 1930s, when Lewis and Tolkien were writing, dragons were the bad guys. The rare exceptions were dragons deciding not to act like dragons.
Then something happened.
That something probably started with a 1948 children’s book called “My Father’s Dragon – about a kid who runs away to Wild Island and rescues a baby dragon. Heard of it? If you’ve studied kid lit, sure, it won a ton of awards. Otherwise…nope, and certainly in Dawn Treader, written in 1950, dragons were still bad.
In the 1960s we start to see a couple more “good” dragons. But it’s almost always the same thing. Dragons are bad, except this one. This is a special dragon.
Then in 1967 John Campbell ran a story in Analog named Weyr Search. Heard of that one? Yup.
It was part of a novel called Dragonsflight, written by Grand Master Anne McCaffrey.
And she completely changed what dragons were.
Anne’s dragons were gentle, genetically engineered protectors who bonded to a human rider at birth and were “mastered” by that rider – the dragons offered instinct, but the reason came from the humans.
Anne McCaffrey was one of the first female authors to write science fiction by women about women – and while she had a number of flaws and was honestly a better worldbuilder than writer she inspired a lot of people.
And changed our view of dragons as a fantasy trope.
Since then most fantasy writers that include dragons have them as friendly and willing to be ridden by humans. Even the “good” dragons in the DragonLance novels.
In other words: In the space between Tolkein and Martin, who’s first short story collection was published in 1976, almost a decade after Weyr Search Anne McCaffrey turned dragons on their head.
Daenerys’ dragons owe more in their lineage to Ramoth than they do to Grendel, the dragon slain by Beowulf.
(In other words, literary evolution is fascinating).
Did… did people not assume Daenerys’ dragons came from the lineage of Anne McCaffrey’s dragons (and indeed fire lizards)?
My instinct is that this also correlates to some extent with the
broader
shift (courtesy of increasing urbanization, in part) in cultural views of predators, from “nasty beasts to be extirpated” to “wild & majestic frands,” though of course I couldn’t prove it. Credit to McCaffrey, though, for sure.
The shift is observable in microcosm in Le Guin’s Earthsea series: in “The Rule of Names” (1964) and A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) the dragon is Smaug-ish, whereas by The Farthest Shore (’72) Orm Embar and Kalessin are powerful allies, and by The Other Wind (2001) dragons are not just friends, but family. I dunno whether Le Guin would cop to being influenced by McCaffrey, though; maybe she had in mind that dragons would become family all along.
Avelera 