[Břicho]

I know it's no crime, but I feel a little weird resurrecting such an ancient thread, but I'm new 'round here and haven't read a lot of these threads til now...


Anyway, I have considered the possibility-- that(within the "conceit") some of the chapters were not necessarily directly written by the hobbits: In particular "the Battle of the Pelennor", parts of "the Ride of the Rohirrim" and parts of "the Field of Cormallen" and "the Steward and the King" in which the style is radically different, far more heightened, stiffer, more like a Medieval text than the more "modern" styles employd by the hobbits. Tolkien does say that the Westron of the Gondor was a more archaic and heightened dialect than the "rustic" dialect of the Shire--and that indeed the actual differences between the dialects were greater than has been represented in the books.

Consider that the "Red Book" that Tolkien-the-fake-translator translated was NOT the original Red Book but a version that had been copied by a scribe of Gondor, who added various accounts from annals of Rohan and Gondor(mostly to the Tale of Years.) as well as the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen. I thought that the battle of the Pelennor reads more like the "official Gondor account" then the story told by the Hobbits themslves. This applies also to the various alliterative "Rohirric" songs recorded in this chapter and the chapter before, as they are explicitly noted in the text as having been written many years later. While it's possible that Merry himself, at the end of his life, may have heard these songs and added them to his copy of the Red Book, I thought that at that point the story seems to be narrated as not as having been just recently completed but actually a very long time after the fact.(I have no evidence for this but the FEELING I get from reading the texts in these parts.)

AS far as the more playful tone in the beginning of the FOTR, couldn't it be that the more jovial Bilbo wrote those chapters, but didn't get any further as he was growing more interested in sleep than writing; and that the more sober, more mature Frodo wrote most of the rest of the book(with the exceptions of the heightened language "official records" passages in a few passages/chapters of ROTK that might have been added by an unnamed Gondorian scribe?)