I enjoyed Shippey's lecture on this as he brought up the idea that many of these sayings are patently absurd, and it was clear that Tolkien himself thought so. I think that there are a few different types of sayings displayed in Tolkien's work.
Proverbs/maxims - these are things which could be said to be truthful; this is where the real lore is preserved. The ideal example would indeed be Ioreth's "The hands of the king are the hands of a healer". This saying has preserved some old lore.
Aphorisms - these at one time may have held some lore but have now become slightly absurb if we think about them logically. Tolkien makes great use of these, reflecting patterns of colloquial speech (and thus providing welcome relief from the high-flown and high-falutin'
), and I think he finds a certain amount of humour in them.
Thinking about "It never rains but it pours", it is quite a meaningless statement; it is similar to the modern day "you wait for a bus, none turn up for thirty minutes and then three come along at once". Yes, this does indeed happen, but hidden behind the statement is that someone has a sinister, underhand intention to irritate us. The statement is illogical.
Again the saying "those who live in glass houses should not throw stones" is quite absurd, as patently those who
do live in glass houses
can throw stones with gleeful abandon, just so long as they don't throw them at their own property.
What such aphorisms hide within their absurdity is an idea, but one that is more colourfully expressed with a pithy statement.
Anti-proverbs - This is when an aphorism is altered to humorous effect. I think that in this respect The Gaffer is a genuine humorist, worthy of his own column in The Shire's version of Private Eye.
There are a few ways of twisting sayings and playing with the words to emphasise the absurdity within, but he always does this to great effect as seen with "where's there's life there's hope, and need of vittles" - you can almost hear the pregnant pause between the two clauses
. Others such as Butterbur seem to get a saying a little muddled unintentionally which is itself great humour.
I enjoy Tolkien's humour with his twisting of such sayings (I wonder if he also enjoyed cryptic crosswords?), and Shippey's lecture brought to mind how funny it can be to mess around with sayings. I remember there being something of a craze for doing this in my 6th form - my favourite was the alteration of "you can't teach your grandmother to suck eggs" to "you can't teach your eggs to suck grandmother".
