Bethberry wrote:
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There is one final passage I find particularly intriguing. It begins the description of Bilbo's coming under the spell of the treasure hoard.
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One interesting note on the bit you quoted - Douglas Anderson (editor of
The Annotated Hobbit) speculates that this passage might relate to Owen Barfield's notion of "ancient semantic unity", with which Tolkien was quite impressed. To put it briefly, Barfield's idea is that over the course of history and linguistic evolution, there has been a fragmentation of concepts in human thought. He claims that, for example, the word
spiritus in Latin was not a single word with various meanings (breath, air, spirit), but rather that the various meanings that we now distinguish were not then distinguished - so to the Romans "breath" and "spirit" were the same concept. So certain uses of words that we now see as metaphorical were not originally so; language, he claims had a pre-metaphorical stage.
Tolkien's statement that:
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To say that Bilbo's breath was taken away is no description at all. There are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful.
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. . . could then mean that his breath was
literally taken away, but that this is something that cannot be said anymore, since the statement "his breath was taken away" is now (post-fragmentation) automatically assumed to be metaphorical.