[Bêthberry]

Hello Squatter, Eurytus, Sauce, Essex, Aiwendel, and All others interested here,

Squatter, your quotation from Tolkien's letter actually demonstrates my point rather than refutes it. I had said Tolkien was unable to imagine a modern idiom that could be heroic and his letter suggests that. And I would agree with Eyrutus that is it preposterous to say that only archaic language can be heroic. Language can be anything a good writer makes it.

After all, I am trained as a scholar of English literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; I studied five languages, including Old English; I taught classical rhetoric and oratory as well as public speaking and modern literature as well as medieval. I say this not to set myself up as an authority, but to dismiss the ludicrous notion that my argument disparages antiquity in favour of modernity.

My point is that it is possible to write in a heroic modern style, but that Tolkien did not.

He did not, I suggest, because he could not conceive of heroism in the modern age--it was not only that his ear was attuned to his beloved texts of old.

However, rather than simply say yea or nay in the burgeoning ranks of a controversy, I would like to do two things here. First, I would like to offer examples of modern heroic language, to demonstrate its terseness and its power. Second, I would like to offer a plausible reason why Tolkien was unable to imagine this kind of style.

An address on the battlefield of a monumental slaughter from a war which really was a prelude to modern warfare, Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met here on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But in a larger sense we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled, here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they have, thus far, so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

From an earlier to a subsequent war: some of Winston Churchill's oratory:

We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, What is our policy? I will say; "It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy." You ask, What is our aim? I can answer with one word: Victory - victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival."

to the House of Commons on May 13, 1940 in his first
address as the newly appointed Prime Minister.

"...We shall not flag nor fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France and on the seas and oceans; we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills. We shall never surrender and even if, which I do not for the moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, will carry on the struggle until in God's good time the New World with all its power and might, sets forth to the liberation and rescue of the Old."

And, finally, something a bit more contemporary, John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address:

Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.

All of these examples are terse, all are completely within a modern idiom (all verb forms are modern, all word inflections are modern, only "four score" has an old flavour, since 'score' has fallen into disuse, and all employ stylistic traits of classical Greek rhetoric for their sentence structures, such as inversion. And, all were in their day and remain today examples of heroic calls to action which do not sound archaic, false, or deliberately old fashioned.

Why, then, was Tolkien not able to conceive of a style like this, but felt the need to employ a style of deliberate archaisms? I would point out that he has something in common with the war poets of his generation, men who saw action in WW I and who were devastated by it so that all thoughts of heroic sacrifice were horrible, brutal deceptions. Tolkien's love of the old warrior epics inspired in him a deep respect for the heroic ideal, but his personal experience of war left him mute in the face of contemporary expression.

I am going to post this now and return to edit with some examples of those poets who were Tolkien's contemporaries.

Here is Siegfried Sassoons's poem "Survivors:

No doubt they'll soon get well; the shock and strain
Have caused their stammering, disconnected talk.
Of course they're 'longing to go out again,' ?
These boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk.
They'll soon forget their haunted nights; their cowed
Subjection to the ghosts of friends who died,?
Their dreams that drip with murder; and they'll be proud
Of glorious war that shatter'd all their pride...
Men who went out to battle, grim and glad;
Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad.

Craiglockhart. October, 1917.

And this, Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum est", which probably expresses most succinctly the emotional effect WWI had on people:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!-An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

For me, Essex and Sauce and Aiwendel, this kind of critical analysis is not a ripping apart or to shreds but a movement towards a fuller understanding of what the text means. For me, to think of Tolkien in the context of the English war poets and as affected by war as they were makes LOTR a richer text. Plenitude rather than destruction.

[ November 05, 2003: Message edited by: Bêthberry ]