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Originally Posted by Morthoron
I can't get past the phrasing of your question, Al.  |
Indeed, I've wondered as well whether Aragorn was implying anything about his long betrothal to Arwen here. 38 years, poor guy... I'm sure it could get pretty hard at times.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Galadriel55
I sometimes oppose to close-reading novels for litte details as such, because I have the feeling that half the time all these little bums and holes in the wording were put without intention by the author, and we are trying to make odds and ends out of them.
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D'accord, if you mean that the author probably didn't ponder consciously about the wording and rhythm of every little phrase. But great writers, I think, have that kind of stuff at the tip of their little fingers and do it most of the time without having to think about it - it just
feels right: like a painter knowing by intuition that a painting needs a touch of green in this precise part of the canvas, or a good guitar player bending exactly the right note in a solo. Which doesn't mean that we can't think about it and try to learn
why it feels right.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Galadriel55
It could have been about rhythm, but there are so many other ways to say it with a rhythm but without the awkward phrasing (like, "My LIFE was HARD and LONG" - iambic rhythm, but rhythm nonetheless).
So it is probably the second thing that you said.
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Well, rhythm as I understand it here isn't about putting a phrase in any old metre to make it sound more dignified or whatever, it's about finding the
right rhythm that complements and emphasizes the meaning. The two things I said are actually two aspects of the same thing.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Galadriel55
But then, the beginning of the sentence is also a bit awkward: "I have had a hard life and a long". Why "have had", and not just one or the other, or a different word altogether (like "lead")?
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Don't they teach you the proper use of perfect and imperfect in school nowadays?
He could say "I
have a hard life", but then he couldn't add "and a long", because then he'd be making a general statement about his entire life, and he can't foresee how long it's going to be in the end.
If he said "I
had a hard life and a long", he would be near the end of his life and looking back on the whole.
But what he's doing here, at a turning point in his life, is summing up his life
so far, up to and including the present, and what it has made him:
Quote:
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"I have had a hard life and a long [and it has left its traces on me; so don't you wonder, Boromir, that I don't quite look like your mental image of Isildur's heir]."
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Not awkward or odd at all.