a companion to j. r. r. tolkien || style and intertextual echoes

A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee.© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Style and Intertextual Echoes

Allan Turner

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When literary critics refer to an author’s style, they usually mean recognizable pat-terns, some conventional and some personal, in the selection of syntactic and lexical features, although they do not always agree on what counts as a good choice. In the case of Tolkien, his choices have come in for frequent and often contradictory criti-cism. Catharine Stimpson claims that “shunning ordinary diction, he also wrenches syntax” and even invents parodistic sentences such as “To an eyot he came,” which she thinks he would have written in preference to “He came to an island in the middle of the river” (Stimpson 1969, 29). Burton Raffel, on the other hand, believes that Tolkien’s style is so simple and lacking in conventional novelistic textures that The Lord of the Rings cannot be considered “literature” at all, even though he admits that it is a good adventure story (Raffel 1968). However, in spite of giving examples of writing that they find unsatisfactory, neither of these critics manages to explain clearly and concisely exactly what it is that they object to, but both seem to assume that the reason for their conclusions will be evident to the reader; that is to say, the stylistic criteria are implicit rather than explicit.

In spite of the contrary reactions, there have been few critical works which have dealt with Tolkien’s style in depth, as opposed to offering passing comments in dis-cussions of other literary aspects of his works. Two major studies which give insight into the topic are the monographs by Shippey (2000 and 2005), which are particularly concerned to show how Tolkien, the professional philologist, was able to bring to twentieth-century literary discourse the influences of over a thousand years of the history of the English language and its study. A typical example is his exegesis of how

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different persons are characterized by the differences between older and modern word order at the Council of Elrond (Shippey 2000, 69ff.). Another in-depth analysis is given by Rosebury (2003), who is concerned to show the aspects of Tolkien’s writing which are typical of the mid-twentieth century. Walker (2009) exposes many of the contradictions of previous critics, and also assembles a large collection of examples of how Tolkien gains his effect as the creator of a credible Secondary World through his use of language, although his analysis is not always linguistically rigorous. An insight-ful though rather impressionistic appraisal by a practicing novelist of the rhythmic quality of Tolkien’s prose can be found in Le Guin (2001).

In a short overview such as this, there is no space for a stylistic analysis of all Tolkien’s output from first principles. Fortunately that is not necessary, since we can use as a starting point the small body of stylistic criticism mentioned above, together with Tolkien’s own statements about his writing. To avoid the trap of unclear or implicit criteria, we shall attempt to describe the chosen linguistic features as accurately as possible at the levels of phonology (the sounds of words), lexis (the choice of words), syntax (their grammatical arrangement to form sentences), and semantics (the meaning of the text that is produced). The most general level of analysis will be the sociolinguistic or cultural level, which places language in the context of the world view of a particular group of users. By looking at the interaction between these different levels, we can recognize different linguistic registers, that is subsets of language which are used in specific situations. At the same time we shall outline the rationale which seems to govern his choices. Given the wide range of posthumous publications, we shall restrict ourselves to the works which appeared in Tolkien’s lifetime and were therefore completed to his satisfaction, plus Roverandom, which was publishable with only minimal emendation, and The Silmarillion, which was edited by Christopher Tolkien but was nevertheless collated from his father’s actual texts. However, most consideration must be given to The Lord of the Rings, which displays Tolkien’s stylistic variety in its most developed form.

Simple Style and Word-play: The Shorter Works

The early tales, which were originally told to Tolkien’s children, are characterized by the use of parataxis, that is predominantly main clauses, combined where necessary with coordinating conjunctions such as and and but, just as in informal everyday speech. For example, the first page of Roverandom contains 11 sentences, some of which extend over several lines and include direct speech, but there are only two subordinate clauses. The later stories “Leaf by Niggle” and Smith of Wootton Major, which each have a roughly similar proportion of parataxis in their first two paragraphs, were not composed for oral delivery to children but were nevertheless conceived as fairy-tales or parables, which are typical genres of oral literature.

In Roverandom and the faux-naïf tale Farmer Giles of Ham, a typical feature is the frequent word-play, which introduces an element of semantic complexity to balance

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the lack of syntactic variety. This regularly consists of exploiting an obvious linguistic ambiguity, such as the tension between the meaning of a prepositional verb and the literal meaning of its parts, as in the comment of Giles’s wife: “There was no getting round Queen Agatha – at least it was a long walk” (Tolkien 2008e, 162). In Roveran-dom the word-play often takes the form of an oblique reference to a conventional expression, for example “The only thing he did like a fish was to drink,” which is a pseudo-cleft of the conventional simile “to drink like a fish,” as the editors do not quite point out in their endnote (Tolkien 1998a, 104).

The word-play at the beginning of The Hobbit, which also had oral origins (Letters 215), includes references to children’s knowledge of the politeness formulae employed by adults, underlining the difference between the narrow semantic meaning and their conventionalized use as indirect speech acts. In the first chapter, Gandalf interrogates the different functions of the phatic phrase good morning as if it were a piece of meaningful information: “Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?” (H 15). He also exposes Bilbo’s unthinking use of the expression as an indirect speech act to indicate that he wants to end the conversation (H 16), just as he does a page later when Bilbo uses “I beg your pardon” as a similar conversation structuring device (for further examples, see Shippey 2005, 83ff.).

A similar jocular exploitation of ambiguity can be seen in the early chapters of The Lord of the Rings, where Tolkien is again establishing the tone of bourgeois Hobbit banter. It is seldom seen as the narrative progresses, except as an occasional comic touch from Sam, as when he remarks while trying to fall asleep in the boughs of a tree, “And the less said, the sooner I’ll drop off, if you take my meaning” (FR, II, vi, 448), again with the mismatch between the phrasal meaning and the literal meaning. However, Gandalf is made to use word-play for a more serious purpose. When he deconstructs Frodo’s unconsidered conventional phrase regretting that Bilbo had spared Gollum’s life, it reveals the deeper significance underlying the surface form of the words, emphasized by the use of the capital: “What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature” . . . “It was Pity that stayed his hand” (FR, I, ii, 78). From being a mere source of humor, the uncovering of ambiguity makes a moral point, but it also shows Tolkien the historical linguist rescuing the “true” meaning of words from the encrustation of convention. Stylistic features are on their way to becoming a means of distinguishing not only between different characters but also different cultural and ethical outlooks. This will be seen in a more detailed analysis of Tolkien’s best-known books, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Contrasting Styles: The Hobbit

The language of The Hobbit has attracted less critical notice, perhaps because of its status as a children’s book, in which the style is regarded as less important than the

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plot. Here we will consider it firstly as a work in its own right though in a somewhat different genre, but also as a significant forerunner of the later and much more complex sequel.

Its oral origins noted above are reflected in the stylistic features to be examined here, namely narrative voice, and the contrast between colloquial and formal language, in addition to the word-play mentioned above. These derive from Tolkien’s own inter-est in language and are clearly designed to appeal to children’s delight in exploring and playing with its conventions, while the narrative voice exploits the interaction between the storyteller and his audience. The narrator regularly breaks off to address the assumed young reader directly, as in the description of Elrond’s house: “I wish I had time to tell you even a few of the tales or one or two of the things that they heard in that house” (H 50). There are also asides such as “trolls, as you probably know, must be underground before dawn, or they go back to the stuff of the mountains they are made of” (H 41). These have the effect of presenting the material of fantasy as if it were common knowledge in the primary world, and so increasing the sense of veri-similitude (cf. Shippey 2005, 84f.).

On the cultural level, much humorous use is made of the incongruity of child-like characters cast in adult situations, particularly in the first half of the story. Bilbo, comically out of his depth in a world that is a size too big for him, is nevertheless regularly referred to as Mr. Baggins, while the Dwarves, in spite of their pompous language, are often depicted in a scarcely less ludicrous manner. There are also a number of verbal jokes intended to appeal to a childish sense of humour, such as the incongruous juxtaposition of civilized and savage values in “Trolls simply detest the very sight of dwarves (uncooked)” (H 37).

It was noted above that The Hobbit creates humor by the deconstruction of adult language. Perhaps most significant for the development of Tolkien’s contrastive use of style is the parodying of a formal, public-speaking register such as Thorin’s address in Chapter I:

Gandalf, dwarves and Mr. Baggins! We are met together in the house of our friend and fellow conspirator, this most excellent and audacious hobbit – may the hair on his toes never fall out! . . . We are met to discuss our plans, our ways, means, policy and devices. (H 17)

The comical honorific compliment to Bilbo and the redundant piling up of near-synonyms which are so vague as to be practically meaningless are immediately under-mined by the intrusive narrator’s comment:

This was Thorin’s style. He was an important dwarf. If he had been allowed, he would probably have gone on like this until he was out of breath, without telling any one there anything that was not known already. (H 17)

Bilbo’s reply shortly afterwards is similarly deflated by the narrator: “[T]his is what he called being on his dignity” (H 19).


This element of parody decreases as the story progresses, until it almost disappears in the final third of the book. This is part of a more fundamental shift of tone char-acterized thus by C. S. Lewis: “As the humour and homeliness of the early chapters, the sheer ‘Hobbitry’, dies away we pass insensibly into the world of the epic” (quoted in Ryan 2009). Ryan traces a linguistic feature which helps to underline this change, namely the increasing number of compound nouns which recreate the effect of litera-ture from the age of Beowulf, when English made much greater use of this Germanic pattern of word-formation. Many of his examples are normal lexical items or coinings showing little originality, but others point to Tolkien’s increasing confidence in the creation of an epic secondary world different from our own: mountain-gates (H 179), lake-town (182), dwarf-lord (259), Elvenking (268) arrow-storm (230), as well as names like Arkenstone (253), Ravenhill (264), and the epithets Ringwinner, Luckwearer, and Barrelrider (208), made up for himself by Bilbo in his archaic riddling dialogue with the dragon Smaug. As Ryan (2009, 126) remarks, “The Beowulfian proper names or synonym names, if they are not as grand as in the epic, show well the origins and thought involved in their creation.”

The contrast between informal and mock-formal is replaced by what is probably the most significant stylistic feature for the development of Tolkien’s prose style, his use of different linguistic registers to characterize different peoples. Bilbo usually speaks informal mid-twentieth-century English, whereas the Dwarves, these repre-sentatives of an epic, pre-modern society, speak in an elevated register. Gone is the comic pomposity of Thorin’s speech; Shippey (2005, 98, emphasis original) points out that by the end of the book “even the two linguistic styles have become invulner-able to each other’s ironies”:

“Good-bye and good luck, wherever you fare!” said Balin at last. “If ever you visit us again, when our halls are made fair once more, then the feast shall indeed be splendid!”

“If ever you are passing my way,” said Bilbo, “don’t wait to knock! Tea is at four; but any of you are welcome at any time!” (H 269)

This juxtaposition of registers becomes a salient feature in the depiction of the much more complex secondary world of The Lord of the Rings.

Complexity and Archaism: The Lord of the Rings

Just as in The Hobbit the first part of the tale forms a gradual transition from the homely beginning to the epic world, so in its much longer and more serious sequel the first few chapters lead almost imperceptibly from the cozier world of The Hobbit to that of high romance. The intrusive narratorial voice is no longer used; Thomas (2000) traces the stages through Tolkien’s drafts for the first chapter in which this relic of the more juvenile concept is progressively eliminated, never to reappear.

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An outline of Tolkien’s use of linguistic styles can be found in the entry “Prose Style” in the J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia (Turner 2007). To summarize an already compressed article, we may extract the following points:

1. The Lord of the Rings is written not in a single, unified style but in a number of different styles.

2. Different linguistic registers are used to characterize not only individuals but also whole peoples and cultures.

3. There is a deliberate contrast between the Hobbits, who are represented in a plain, modern style, and other, more archaic peoples (Elves, Dwarves, Rohirrim, etc.), for whom archaizing language is frequently used.

4. The narrative takes the form of an “asymmetrical stylistic arch” which reflects a shift in genre, from the normal everyday novelistic realism of the Shire, up to the climax in the high romance of the defeat of Sauron, and down again.

5. Where pre-modern cultures are depicted, language which expresses markedly modern concepts is deliberately avoided.

Point 5 is an extremely important one which is fundamental in any attempt to explain why Tolkien’s world is for many readers more convincing than the secondary worlds invented by many of his imitators. However, since it is difficult to demonstrate a negative in the small space that is available here, we will leave it aside to focus on the remaining issues, concentrating on cultural differentiation and Tolkien’s use of archaizing language.

The clearest explanation of contrastive styles in The Lord of the Rings is that of Shippey (2000, 48; 2005, 259), based on Tolkien’s comments in his letters and the hints given by the editor/translator persona in Appendix F. To a much greater degree than the simple contrast between Bilbo Baggins and the Dwarves as seen above, Tolkien’s special creation, the Hobbits, act as mediators between the modern, post-Enlightenment world of the reader and its cultural-historical other, the more archaic world of heroic epic. With their postmen and umbrellas, Hobbits represent a cozy, idealized England of a pre-technological age (see ch. 24); Tolkien wrote to his pub-lisher that the Shire “is more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of the Diamond Jubilee” (the 60th anniversary of Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne, celebrated in 1897; Letters 230). Hobbits are stolidly unheroic, but they have a streak of deep-seated courage which enables them to take on responsibilities greater than their physical stature would suggest, allowing them to lead the modern reader into contact with traditional heroic attitudes and situations which might otherwise seem completely alien.

This means that the author is faced with the problem of representing two types of culture, one of which is sufficiently familiar for the contemporary reader to identify with it to some extent, while the other has to appear noticeably unfamiliar. This is not peculiar to Tolkienian fantasy, but is a difficulty which frequently occurs when a story is set in a place or time which might not be well known to the current


readership, such as an earlier historical period in the primary world. In Scott’s Rob Roy the unwitting hero, Francis Osbaldistone, represents the familiar English world of the reader, while the more archaic Scottish society, in which he finds himself embroiled and which has to be explained to him (and the reader), is characterized by the use of dialect. Tolkien’s approach is broadly similar: the presence of the inexperi-enced Hobbits allows for explicit lectures on the history of Middle-earth, while the unfamiliar, epic world is characterized linguistically by the use of a register of English often designated archaic or archaizing; that is to say, through the inclusion of lexical and syntactic features associated with an earlier period of English, it is distinguished from the everyday language of the present.

As in any novel, individuals are characterized by their manner of speech; for example, the servant Sam is notable for his use of dialect forms. Characters also adapt their language to suit different situations just like in real life, as explained in Appen-dix F:

It will be noticed that Hobbits such as Frodo, and other persons such as Gandalf and Aragorn, do not always use the same style. This is intentional. The more learned and able among the Hobbits . . . were quick to note and adopt the style of those whom they met. (RK, Appendix F, 1490).

For example, Pippin attempts a formal register when he meets Gildor and the Elves in the Woody End, addressing them as “O Wise People!” (FR, I, iii, 105), which is reminiscent of some of the honorifics in The Hobbit. But the fundamental contrast is between cultures and settings which appear recognizable to the reader and those which appear exotic. Tolkien claimed that his work represented “the theme of the relation of ordinary life (breathing, eating, working, begetting) and quests, sacrifices, causes” (Letters 161). The distinction noted above between the familiar outlook of the Hobbits and the archaic world into which Frodo’s quest takes them is conveyed as much by the language in which places and events are described as by those places and events themselves. Therefore it is to be expected that there will be considerable stylistic dif-ferences between Books I, IV, and a large part of VI, in which Hobbits are often alone together, and Books III and V, in which the majority of the actors are Men of Rohan and Gondor, or even more exotic beings such as Ents. The action is more epic, and the genre turns increasingly from the familiar one of the “realistic” novel to that of the heroic romance.

It needs to be stressed that archaism is understood here purely from a linguistic point of view. The question of whether its use is appropriate in any given literary text is an aesthetic one that can be answered only by literary critics, who may disap-prove because the indiscriminate use of language of this kind came to be a cliché of historical adventure stories in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. It is treated here as a register of the contemporary English language which can be understood and used by most native speakers with a conventional education, although individuals will naturally vary in experience and skill. This can be compared with the ability of

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most English people to imitate an Irish or Yorkshire accent when telling an anecdote; the result need not be dialectologically accurate, but it will display certain typical phonological, lexical, and syntactic features. Many components of a “stand-ard” archaizing register are derived from Early Modern English, which is usually encountered in schools through the works of Shakespeare. Furthermore, until relatively recently most people would have become familiar in their childhood with the language of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer or other forms of religious language derived from them, so that they could attempt a short speech or prayer using this register. Tolkien described the version that he used as “moder-ated or watered archaism” and demonstrated that a more philologically accurate form could be produced while still using “only words that are still used or known to the educated” (Letters 225). This is the same principle that he advocated in his essay “On Translating Beowulf” as a means of preserving for this ancient poem a tone which would preserve it from trivialization through too many modern connotations, but would also avoid any antiquarian obscurity (MC 49–71). As an expert in the history of the English language he could probably have given an accurate reproduction of any period that he had chosen, but the question of historical accuracy is not of primary importance for our investigation of his literary style. The important thing is to recognize how this register can be used as a form of linguistic differentiation. The following illustrations from the text will give some very selective samples of how Tolkien used stylistic variation.

We can start with an investigation of the overall narrative style. Rosebury, refuting Stimpson’s criticism, demonstrates that much of the narrative is written in a normal, straightforward style. He analyzes a substantial extract from the chapter “At the Sign of The Prancing Pony,” a description of Bree and the Hobbits’ arrival there. Bree is not far from the Shire, which acts as an indicator of normality. We can take a short section of Rosebury’s long quotation to show in greater linguistic detail how the straightforward narrative is constructed:

The hobbits rode on up a gentle slope, passing a few detached houses, and drew up outside the inn. The houses looked dark and strange to them. Sam stared up at the inn with its three stories and many windows, and felt his heart sink. He had imagined himself meeting giants taller than trees, and other creatures even more terrifying, some time or other in the course of his journey; but at the moment he was finding his first sight of Men and their tall houses quite enough, indeed too much at the end of a tiring day. (FR, I, ix, 199)

This demonstrates Tolkien’s typical use of parataxis, as in the shorter works. There are two participial phrases (“passing a few detached houses,” “meeting giants”), but there are no subordinate clauses. Syntactically these three sentences are very simple and ordinary. The longest sentence, the last one looking into Sam’s private thoughts, contains several adverbial phrases and two postmodifying adjective phrases (“taller than trees,” “even more terrifying”), but essentially its length is made up by


coordination. In many novels, passages dealing with the workings of the characters’ minds can involve a great deal of complexity, but it is a commonplace of Tolkien criticism that he shows characterization through actions rather than psychological introspection, which is borne out by the syntax here. The lexis is all of an everyday nature, with the possible exception of “giants,” which nevertheless belongs to a commonplace fairy-tale register.

Not all of Tolkien’s structures are so syntactically simple; many sentences are varied with temporal and relative clauses. Nevertheless, on most pages, however intense the narrative, it is easy to find many sentences which are predominantly paratactic. The degree of coordination even increases in the romance sections as the stylistic arch reaches its height at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, with the eucatastrophe of Aragorn’s unexpected arrival:

And then wonder took him, and a great joy, and he cast his sword up in the sunlight and sang as he caught it. And all eyes followed his gaze, and behold! upon the foremost ship a great standard broke, and the wind displayed it as she turned towards the Harlond. (RK, V, vi, 1109)

Passages such as this are stylistically marked, that is to say they are not perceived as ordinary; the language is drawing attention to itself. Since “and” simply joins ideas without showing a logical connection between them as is usual in modern analytical texts, its frequent use may be seen as representing a feature of medieval or pre-modern discourse, what Shippey (2005, 203) calls “loose semantic fit.” This parataxis is often associated with the language of the Bible:

And they departed into a desert place by ship privately. And the people saw them departing, and many knew him, and ran afoot thither out of all cities, and outwent them, and came together unto him. And Jesus, when he came out, saw much people, and was moved with compassion toward them, because they were as sheep not having a shepherd: and he began to teach them many things. (Mark 6:32–34, King James Bible)

Note that there is only one conjunction here which shows a causal connection: “because.” Of course the New Testament was originally written in Greek, and the coordinating conjunctions are a means of translating Greek linking particles, but in practice most non-specialist readers treat the Bible as an original text with its own characteristic style. So even though it uses no words that could be considered archaic or even unusual, except possibly “cast” and “behold,” Tolkien’s language gains an impression of exalted register through its intertextual association with a high-status religious text.

However, for Tolkien this would have been the syntax not only of the Bible, but also of the Old English and Old Norse texts which constituted his specialist study. The Old Norse sagas, which he knew well and which form one of the earliest and most extensive realistic literatures in Europe, are written in a terse style with lots of

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action and little analysis, and often in a paratactic style that resembles Tolkien’s heroic passages. The characters express themselves through short, laconic comments, similar to the veiled threat of Sauron’s messenger to the Dwarves, “Refuse, and things will not seem so well” and Dáin’s proverb-like reply, “The time of my thought is my own to spend” (FR, II, ii, 314). The syntactic structure of a lot of Old English prose is similar (e.g., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle), while the poem Beowulf, on which Tolkien regularly lectured, is also constructed in balanced phrases with loose grammatical connections.

For a more detailed examination of Tolkien’s archaizing style, we can take a part of the text portraying the Rohirrim, since they are intended to represent a simple heroic society with strong similarities to the historical Anglo-Saxons and the early Germanic world of Beowulf. Tolkien was an expert in this field, and therefore, as critics such as Tinkler (1968) and Shippey (2005) have pointed out, uniquely able to achieve local and temporal color by including a high proportion of intertextual references to older literatures. Although the full extent of it may not be clear to readers who have not studied at least some Old English or Old Norse, it is sufficiently differentiated from normal English to represent a very different, pre-modern culture. To keep our sample to a manageable size, we will concentrate on the chapter “The King of the Golden Hall” (TT, III, vi). We can divide our analysis into three different linguistic levels: lexis, syntax, and sociolinguistics/culture.

Many readers immediately associate archaism with individual words, but in fact the amount of archaic lexis in our chapter is small. Just 11 words are marked in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as either archaic or obsolete in the way in which they are used in our text: doorward (666), louver (668), sooth (669), verily (674), helm (675), sister-son (676), ere (677), nigh (677), leechcraft (678), cunning (=skillful) (679), and behold! (683). Sister-daughter (672) does not have a separate entry but may be consid-ered archaic on the analogy of sister-son. Finally there is witless (514), which is labeled “literary and somewhat archaic.” In addition there are eight words which have a sty-listic marker such as “poetic or rhetorical”: fell (adj.) (664), hail (interjection) (666), slain (669), sundering (674), league (674), board (=table) (677), froward (681), and steed (681). Stair (683), used in the singular, is said to be very rare in England but normal in Scotland. There is one example of the use of the old pronoun thee (682), which is nowadays restricted to poetic and religious contexts.

There are five further words which in the subjective opinion of this writer could be considered unusual, although they are not stylistically marked in the OED: blazoned (665), bade (666), wit (=skill) (674), aught (681), and hearken (685).

Twenty-eight words, most of which occur only once, out of a chapter of 19 pages is not a high proportion. Several others refer to obsolete artifacts such as weapons, which will be familiar to anyone who has read something about medieval history. Here the OED is inconsistent, since although helm is marked as archaic, other terms such as corslet, mail, hauberk, and quiver are not. But the essential point is that there is relatively little here, with the possible exception of leechcraft and louver, which would not be found in the linguistic registers of a moderately well-read person. However, it


will be noted that some of these words, such as leechcraft, doorward, and sister-son, are compounds, helping to confirm Ryan’s thesis that an increased use of compounding gives the impression of a more heroic culture (see above).

On the syntactic level there is more to consider. The chapter affords many examples of fronting, the moving of an object, complement or adverbial to the beginning of the sentence. This is a perfectly usual structure in English in sentences such as “Round the corner came a big red bus” or “That much I know already.” In Tolkien it is a regular stylistic feature which presumably provoked Stimpson’s parodistic sentence “To an eyot they came,” where the adverbial “to an eyot” is moved forward from its normal position after the verb.

Two examples similar to those given above are: “There dwells Théoden son of Thengel . . .” (661) and “Thus spoke a forgotten poet long ago in Rohan . . .” (663). This is simply a presentational device to put new information at the end of the sen-tence, creating a small amount of suspense in the reader. In the first example it avoids the imbalance that would be caused by a long subject followed by a short predicate, such as “Théoden son of Thengel, King of the Mark of Rohan lives there.” The struc-ture is typical of narrative rather than conversation or explanation, but is otherwise not stylistically marked.

Similar to this is the linking function of fronting, in which the fronted item refers back to a topic mentioned previously: “But on one form the sunlight fell” (668; the narrator is describing the interior of Meduseld) and “for better help you will not find (671; Gandalf has just offered assistance). Again this is not unusual in literary writing. However, our chapter contains many more examples which have a formulaic character, as in the following cases of naming: “Láthspell I name you, Ill-news” (669) and “Edoras those courts are called . . . and Meduseld is that golden hall” (661). Here the language draws attention to itself, in the first sentence because the insulting nickname Láthspell is separated from the explanation of its meaning, and in the second one by the parallelism that is produced by the two frontings one after another. A similar effect, though less concentrated, is found in Legolas’s comment on the time that has passed since the building of the hall: “Five hundred times have the red leaves fallen in Mirkwood . . . and but a little while does that seem to us” (662). Since the same stylistically marked structure is used several times in succession, it suggests that the author is attempting to achieve a particular effect. In fact on this one page there are no less than eight examples of stylistically marked fronting, in contrast to the first page of the chapter, which consists of a series of simple sentences straightforwardly recounting the stages of an overnight ride. It is as if the introduc-tion of a new culture, that of Rohan, is stylistically underlined by the use of complex verbal patterning.

In some cases there is a parallelism between fronting and the normal word order, forming a chiasmus, the crossing over of elements in parallel constructions:

. . . it is thatched with gold. . . . Golden, too, are the posts of its doors. (661)Swords you do not need, but there are helms and coats of mail . . . (681–682)

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Very fair was her face, and her long hair was like a river of gold. (672)Old and weary you seem now, and yet you are fell and grim beneath . . . (664)

Although we can describe them as strongly stylistically marked, there is nothing about any of these structures that is specifically archaic. It would be more accurate to say that they belong to an elevated register which is perfectly accessible to modern authors and readers, although in the mid-twentieth century few writers made use of it as a reaction against what was seen as Victorian excess. It relies on the realization that in earlier periods English word order was more flexible than it is in the much more analytical modern language, so that the effect is rather of a distancing from ordinary, everyday language. When read in context with the untranslated words of Old English that occur in the chapter, such as Éomer’s salutation “Westu Théoden hál!” (676), these passages of verbal patterning can convey to the experienced reader a clear echo of the parallelisms of Old English alliterative verse.

This is underlined on the phonological level by the frequent use of alliteration throughout the romance sections of the narrative, as in the description of Éowyn at her first meeting with Aragorn: “strong she seemed and stern as steel . . . still as stone she stood” (672). The similes may appear at first sight merely conventional, but the important feature is the heavy alliterating monosyllables. This, like the description of Edoras, works as an epic set piece, a short poem in prose set within the narrative.

The sociolinguistic/cultural level is the one which is hardest to locate, and can be dealt with here only very briefly. It is best illustrated by an example which Tolkien himself chose (Letters 226) in replying to charges of “tushery,” that is, a clichéd use of bogus archaism. He points to the passage where Théoden says, “I myself will go to war, to fall in the front of the battle, if it must be. Thus shall I sleep better” (677). Tolkien points out that if he had wanted to use a more modern idiom, we would have written, “I shall go to the war in person, even if I have to be one of the first casual-ties.” His point, to bring it even more up to date, is that this would betray a sanitized, euphemistic way of talking about war in which “casualties” are synonymous with “collateral damage” and which would be totally foreign to the society of the Rohirrim as depicted here. Conversely, if a modern writer were to talk of sleeping in the grave, they could mean it only as a metaphor in view of modern beliefs about what happens to the body after death, so that it might sound like insincerity. However, the use of the expression by Théoden may remind the reader, even subconsciously, that in the pre-modern world a person might indeed have felt the “sleep” of death as a metaphor and a reality at the same time, so the phrase contributes to the local color of the passage. In this way the use of a linguistic form assists in the creation of a textual culture.

Although this linguistic evocation of a pre-modern culture is carefully built up over long stretches, it is regularly balanced by more familiar and homely Hobbit style, as in the meeting of Théoden with Merry and Pippin at Isengard:


“I will come with you,” said Théoden. “Farewell, my hobbits! May we meet again in my house! There you shall sit beside me and tell me all that your hearts desire: the deeds of your grandsires, as far as you can reckon them; and we will speak also of Tobold the Old and his herb-lore. Farewell.”

The hobbits bowed low. “So that is the King of Rohan!” said Pippin in an undertone. “A fine old fellow. Very polite.” (TT, III, viii, 729)

As in the dialogue between Bilbo and Balin, the juxtaposition of discourse styles frames the effect of the more expansive archaizing speech with its echoes of a remote time, and brings the reader once more into contact with contemporary forms of thought and expression. It would not be an exaggeration to say that through the selective use of language, two different genres are brought into contact at this point. However, there is scope for much more research into the finer stylistic gradations which can be found throughout the work.

Annalistic Compression: The Silmarillion

The Lord of the Rings consists not only of well over a thousand pages of main narrative, but also of a lengthy paratextual frame structure: a Foreword, a Prologue, and six Appendices. The longest part of this is Appendix A, “Annals of the Kings and Rulers,” which is stylistically distinct from the main narrative. In fact it has some variation in style since it is divided into sections with different narrative perspectives, but some common features can be established.

The syntax is still largely paratactic, but the information structure is more com-pressed than in the main narrative: it consists of a densely packed series of events and facts covering a long time-span, with practically no lengthy descriptions or details conveying local and temporal color. Direct speech is seldom used, and then more as utterances in isolation than as protracted dialogue. The register can therefore be identified with that of factual texts such as histories or chronicles, which differentiates it from the more expansive, novelistic information structure of the main narrative. In short, it is clearly intended to give the impression of a set of documents.

This style can be compared with that of The Silmarillion, which is a much longer and more complex work than the Appendix, but nevertheless also gives a sense of compression and documentation. In general there is a concentration on events rather than description, there is very little personal focalization, and dialogue is compara-tively rare. Individual chapters vary in density of information; “Of Túrin Turambar” has a more extensive structure and there are regular passages of direct speech, so that individual characters appear more rounded (although it recounts events that are pre-sented at several times the length in The Children of Húrin, while even there the nar-rative still appears taut and sparse), while “Of Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin” is reduced to little more than an outline. As in The Lord of the Rings, there is regular use

402 Allan Turner

of archaizing lexis and syntax which maintains an elevated register, but the sense of variation brought about by contrast with an everyday, informal register is lacking: there is no Hobbit point of view to give scope for the culturally based stylistic dif-ferentiation that we have seen above and which serves to mediate between the reader and an unfamiliar, more antique world. Consequently The Silmarillion is often felt to be a difficult book which requires a special effort from the reader; the deliberate avoid-ance of stylistic features associated with storytelling makes the text-world appear remote and difficult to approach.

Conclusion

This brief stylistic analysis cannot possibly demonstrate the whole range of Tolkien’s lexical and syntactic usage, particularly as it appears in its most highly developed form in The Lord of the Rings; for example, nothing has been said about the linguistic characterization of Elves, Dwarves, or Men of Gondor. In particular it is important to add that in looking carefully about how Tolkien uses language for literary purposes we are not making a statement about quality; it is not the purpose of stylistics to say whether a text is good or bad, merely to analyze its characteristics. In establishing that some passages may be reminiscent of epic or biblical style, we cannot estimate its effect on the individual reader. There are certainly people who do not like the language of either epic poetry or the King James Bible, or find its use by Tolkien either inappropriate or excessive. It certainly would not be possible to claim that a trite expression never occurs; in a work of over 1100 pages, it would be strange if occasionally a particular turn of phrase was not felt to fall flat. However, the analysis should be sufficient to show that here at least there is nothing to suggest that Tolkien “wrenches” the syntax, whatever that is meant to mean. Nor is it possible to sustain Raffel’s objection that the narrative style is too ordinary and one-dimensional to be artistic; in fact it displays careful differentiation and poetic structure.

So are we finally in a position to refute Raffel’s assertion that The Lord of the Rings is not literature? The answer to that is no, since it lies outside the range of questions that a stylistic analysis can answer. In particular it depends on a definition of literature, which is the province of literary theorists. However, any qualitative judgment about style needs to be based on a careful consideration of the details of the text as sketched out here, and not on the unsubstantiated prejudice of the critic.

Le Guin, Ursula. 2001. “Rhythmic Pattern in The Lord of the Rings.” In Meditations on Middle-earth, edited by Karen Haber, 101–116. London: Simon & Schuster.

Raffel, Burton. 1968. “The Lord of the Rings as Literature.” In Tolkien and the Critics, edited by Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo, 218–246. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

References


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Ryan, J. S. 2009. Tolkien’s View: Windows into his World. Zurich and Jena: Walking Tree Publishers.

Shippey, Tom. 2000. J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. London: HarperCollins.

Shippey, Tom. 2005. The Road to Middle-earth. Rev. and expanded edn. London: HarperCollins.

Stimpson, Catharine R. 1969. J. R. R. Tolkien. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter, 161–181. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Tinkler, John. 1968. “Old English in Rohan.” In Tolkien and the Critics, edited by Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo, 164–169. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Turner, Allan. 2007. “Prose Style.” In J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia, edited by Michael Drout, 545–546. London: Routledge.

Walker, Steve. 2009. The Power of Tolkien’s Prose. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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