In a November 1956 letter to Terence Tiller, producer of the BBC’s adaptation of Lord of the Rings (letter 193), J.R.R. Tolkien attempted to explain how and why the particular accents of the characters of Middle-Earth crucial essential to the story. “I have no doubt that, if this 'history' were real, all users of the C[ommon] Speech would reveal themselves by their accent, differing in place, people, and rank, but that cannot be represented when C. S. is turned into English - and is not (I think) necessary. I paid great attention to such linguistic differentiation as was possible: in diction, idiom, and so on.” He recognized that the adaptation had to reflect the linguistic choices he had made that distinguished the various races of Middle-Earth from one another, so the Rohirrim did not sound like the Gondorians even when both spoke in an archaic style. Both in his construction of prose and poetry, Tolkien uses this style to make his characters and peoples distinct from one another and bring the readers into the world, where they feel it is internally consistent and real. They reflect the care and attention Tolkien put into all of his characters and their world to make them seem believable, as if they are part of a longer history that stretches beyond the moment that Tolkien presents in Lord of the Rings.
In a letter to Hugh Brogan in September 1955 (letter 171), Tolkien remarked on the way that authors seek to use a fake medieval style to give their work additional authenticity, “in an age where almost all auctorial manhandling of English is permitted (especially if disruptive) in the name of art or ‘personal expression’ [authors] immediately [dismiss] out of court deliberate ‘archaism.’... But a real archaic English is far more terse than modern; also many of things said could not be said in our slack and often frivolous idiom.” He calls on Bogan to “shake yourself out of this parochialism of time! Also (not to be too donnish) learn to discriminate between the bogus and genuine antique - as you would if you hoped not to be cheated by a dealer!” This echoes what Ursula Le Guin writes in “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie” regarding the importance of prose style in constructing “a world where no voice has ever spoken before; where the act of speech is the act of creation. The only voice that speaks there is the creator's voice.” As a result, authors who indulge in hacky archaism or do not even bother (the Poughkeepsie style, as she calls it) are undermining the world they are attempting to create in their story.
It may seem that Tolkien eschewing a deliberately anachronistic manner in his word choices would make his work seem like the Poughkeepsie style that Le Guin is criticizing here. But there is a difference between that and the prose stylings of Tolkien. The former is a style similar to journalism, where a “language intended to express the immediate and the trivial is applied to the remote and the elemental,” to which Le Guin objects because its indistinct and flat prose does nothing to bring the world to life. By contrast, Tolkien “writes a plain, clear English. Its outstanding virtue is its flexibility, its variety. It ranges easily from the commonplace to the stately.” He does not need to use words like ichor, eldrich, and tenebrous that worse authors use to give their sentences that archaic quality. Instead, it is through his command of grammar that he is able to subtly avoid modern speech while at the same time ensuring the reader can fully understand.
In his analysis of the Council of Elrond, Tom Shippey identifies the particular elements of Tolkien’s prose that allows him to write in this archaic style without words like ichor, that Shippey describes as “the first resort of the amateur medievalist.” Instead, as in Elrond’s dialogue, Tolkien uses flexible word order like inverting subjects and verbs (‘Fruitless did I call the victory of the Last Alliance?’) while remaining within the bounds of colloquial English. Boromir’s speech is quite similar, as befitting his Númenorian heritage. The speech of Gloin, by contrast, is marked by leaving out causal connections between sentences and oblique statements, both of which are within colloquial English but still suggest his archaic manner. All of this shows the attention with which Tolkien sought to make his characters feel grounded in a premodern world.
At the same time, Tolkien takes effort to make the races of Middle-Earth feel distinct from one another in their speaking style. Elrond’s archaic manner “serves to distinguish his speech from that of the others; to act as a continual reminder of his age; and to make a link with the similarly archaic speech of Isildur, when Gandalf also comes to quote this later on.” Gandalf speaks similarly, which makes sense given that he is a Maiar and similarly wise. Gloin’s old speech “creates strong characterization for the whole dwarvish race: stubborn, secretive, concealing their intentions,” which then plays into Gimli’s portrayal later in the book. Aragorn and Boromir are contrasted through their language, where both are similarly capable of the archaic tone but Boromir, wanting to show his status as a high-born Gondorian, uses it all the time while Aragorn is more confident in his position and willing to speak plainly when he must. This in turn informs the reader of Boromir’s hubris which leads to his demise, while Aragorn leads a successful war effort and becomes king as he knew he would. All of these choices serve as crucial characterizations that help the reader understand all of the new characters that he introduces.
Tolkien similarly constructs the poetry appearing intermittently through the book in a similar way to give the sense that each race has their own literary tradition that has lasted for hundreds or thousands of years with its own character as a genre. Hobbit poetry is so distinct from Elven lays in form and style as to clearly indicate their separation. When Frodo sings his nursery rhyme in the Prancing Pony, it indicates their relatively childish nature compared to the other peoples of Middle-Earth, yet with an innocent joy. The lays of Beren and Luthien sung by Aragorn are in an epic tradition that reflects their clear memory of days past. The Dwarf ballad of Gimli about Moria has a tragic yet mythic quality of half-remembered times past, which are no longer with them, that mourns what was once great and mighty. The Rohirrim poem is reflective of their society centering around the horse, with a wistful mood that harkens back to the glory of their ancestors, intended to sound like the Old English verse that Tolkien studied. All of these help to reveal something about the peoples who wrote them, inserted at such a point to help the reader understand their particular place in Middle-Earth. They are crucial to providing that sense of realism to the world, in showing these are real peoples with their own unique artistic tradition that had developed through the ages and influenced their self-understanding. More than the archaic manner of the prose, poetry emphasizes the depth to Tolkien’s work that makes it impossible to think of it as anything like Poughkeepsie.
- IAG
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