Tolkien's development as a writer of alliterative poetry in modern English (original) (raw)

Tolkien and Old English: An Annotated Bibliography

An annotated, alphabetized bibliography of all primary and secondary scholarly sources on J.R.R. Tolkien's relationship with, and use of, Old English language and literature in his academic and popular works, of which I am aware. The list is current as of 2017.

The Lord of The Rings: Linguistic Aesthetics and a Mirror to the Past

2020

A short essay on Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" tracing the more specific concept of lámatyáve (phonetic fitness) as seen in the languages of Middle Earth, and the more genetic concept of language as a window to the historical past, as seen in Tolkien's pseudo-history of linguistic development of Middle-Earth's languages.

Translator and Language Change: On J.R.R. TolkiennS Translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2015

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an English poem written in the latter half of the 14 th century, constitutes an important part of Tolkien's life as a scholar and translator. The complex language of the poem attracted his attention from the moment Tolkien first encountered it as the Gawain-poet used some native words that were characteristic of Old and Middle English alliterative poetry. On the other hand, more than one third of his vocabulary is not derived from Old English: approximately one tenth of a total of 2650 words has Scandinavian etymologies (although at the time they were no longer considered borrowings, but rather northern dialect words) and about a third is of French origin. In his translation of the poem, Tolkien was primarily interested in special verse words, which resulted in his use of archaic diction such as capadoce 'a short cape' or carl 'man'. However, this study focuses on the second important feature of the vocabulary of the poem: the combination of French and dialect (Scandinavian) words, which are not distributed evenly in the original text. As the author uses the stylistic contrasts between borrowed and native words; he carefully loads some of his lines with French loanwords while others are devoid of them. This paper discusses the stylistic effect thus created by the Gawain-poet and whether Tolkien managed to preserve it in his translation. JEL Classification: Z.

Tolkien's Prose Style and its Literary and Rhetorical Effects

Tolkien Studies, 2004

W hile J.R.R. Tolkien's prose style in The Lord of the Rings has been both attacked and defended, its details have seldom been analyzed in terms of specific aesthetic effects. 1 This lacuna in Tolkien criticism is certainly understandable, given the perceived necessity of first defending Tolkien's work as a worthy object of serious literary (rather than sociological or pop-cultural) study: critics have spent much effort countering ill-informed and even logically contradictory claims about Tolkien's work, and the discussion of writing style has had to be given short shrift in the effort to make the study of Tolkien academically respectable. 2 But the analytical neglect of Tolkien's prose style has had the unfortunate effect of ceding important ground to Tolkien's detractors, who, with simple, unanalyzed quotations, point to some word or turn of phrase and, in essence, sniff that such is not the stuff of good literature. 3 I would even contend that a reaction against Tolkien's non-Modernist prose style is just as influential in the rejection of Tolkien by traditional literary scholars as is Modernist antipathy to the themes of his work, the ostensible political content of The Lord of the Rings, the popularity of the books, or even Tolkien's position outside the literary mainstream of his day (all of which have been well documented and countered by recent critics). 4 A complete analysis (or justification) of Tolkien's style is beyond the scope of any one essay, but in this paper I hope to make a start at a criticism of some of the passages most obviously unlike traditional Modernist literature: the battle of Éowyn against the Lord of the Nazgûl and Denethor's self-immolation. The style of these passages is not, contra some of Tolkien's most perceptive critics, over-wrought or archaic. Rather, Tolkien produces a tight interweaving of literary references-specifically, links to Shakespeare's King Lear in both style and thematic substancewith grammatical, syntactic, lexical, and even aural effects. His writing thus achieves a stylistic consistency and communicative economy that rivals his Modernist contemporaries. At the same time his treatment of Lear shows his engagement with ideas (in this case, the problem of pride and despair among the powerful) that have long been considered among the great themes of English literature.

An Analysis of Purpose and Relative Distance among J.R.R. Tolkien's invented languages

2020

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien did not create his many fictional languages so that his fiction may live, but rather created the fictional stories so that his languages may live. It could then be argued that his Middle-Earth saga is predominantly a language study. Deeming it thus, the question I pose is whether the languages Tolkien created for his series of novels are intrinsically related to the language of the common speech, English, and if so, how does this common speech affect the development of the fictional languages? If we regard the language of the Rohirrim as a linguistic mutation of English, how might it be crafted for, say, a French audience with French as the common speech? This dissertation will investigate the extent to which Tolkien's mother tongue influenced the creation of his series of fictitious languages. We shall see how each of his invented languages relates to the language in which the books are written. Examining and disputing some of the findings of other Tolkien scholars, we will discover the purpose of his languages and how translation of the books ought to see translation of the fictional languages. This will lead us to the conclusion that his languages were created first with Middle-earth having been created to give the former somewhere to exist. Pursuing equivalent effect, a translation without altering Elvish et al. will not see this brought to fruition.