Quote:
Originally Posted by Formendacil
I'm not trying to argue that Tolkien is doing anything particularly scientifictional. Mostly, I wanted to remark on the coolness of a phrase that caught my eye as I was reading. And then, before I wrote anything, I figured I'd think the phrase through--and double-check the definitions of "wastes"--and the fact that it's normally applied to space rather than time struck me as an appropriate encapsulation of Tolkien's way of doing things: it's a very archaic-sounding phrase, and indeed it is an older, less-freqent use of the word to refer to dimensions of space, but it's still a twentieth-century image that it creates, substituting time for space.
Not that I'm saying Tolkien was necessarily thinking about all this--he may have just been having Rúmil make a subtle joke about "wasting time."  |
In a forum where we're known for over-analyzing things, I'm pretty sure we're over analyzing it. I bet it just would've been a sentence that sounded pretty cool and Tolkien thought, 'Hey, this sentence sounds just right. I like the way the words fit. No point in ever editing it.'