I don't wish to turn this into an "I said/you said" argument which does not move the discussion forward, but I do want to clarify a point. I didn't say,
Lalwendë that
you personally used the Redbook as a handy recourse. The pronoun I used was
we and I choose it deliberately (is there a BD 'we' as well as a royal we?
), for this point has been used in the past by many others (myself included I bet), at least as I recall some of the many discussions in my time here, so I wasn't so much stating something about your argument, as the general tendency "we" have here.
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Originally Posted by Lalwendë
I only notice it now because it has been brought to my attention by other readers.
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Does that mean that we can't learn new things from our discussion here but must always return to our own first readings? Is something invalidated if we didn't notice it in our first flush of love reading? And what if someone noticed it on first reading/reading in the context of abandonment to story? Does that make it irrelevant if one person sees it and others don't?
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Originally Posted by davem
One could make a stab at an explanation along these lines...
Tolkien has set up in the foreword the conceit of LotR being a translatioon of the Red Book. It is a work with two main narrators - Frodo & Sam, but we are also told that the accounts have been 'supplimented by the learning of the wise'. We are also informed that the book from which Tolkien 'translated' the story was not the original book but a copy. He even includes an aside by Findegil the King's copyist.
What we seem to have then, is a version of the original work, which has been 'supplimented' through various copies & finally translated[ by an Oxford Don in the 1940's.
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This kind of point is why I suggested a thread might be interesting, to see how far this conceit can be taken in the text itself.
As a general theory or a good stab, I think you have stated how it could possibly work,
davem. However, I think for it truely to exist in the text to justify the stylistic differences, we would have to see far more evidence of its workings.
We would, I think, have to have the kind of text similar to the Bible, which is very much a heterogeneous text. We could see things like the incomplete collation of the two creation stories in Genesis. We would have the story 'interrupted' by ritual prescriptions and laws, as Leviticus interrupts the story of Exodus. (I am not stating this literally, but as an example of the kind of variation.) We could be swept away by various kinds of story elements, symbolic as well as prophetic, and by various types of narrators. We could have psalms and the Song of Solomon beside narrative. We could see how various chapters are dependent on previous ones for their story elements, as occurs in the New Testament. This is just an example for elucidating what I would think might appear in such a 'handed down' text. And I'm sure other old narratives would offer their unique elements of textual tradition. I'm not saying this is the only one. Nor am I discounting the possibility that Tolkien could use the conceit in his own unique way.
However, I think we would see far more variation in the style, in the story elements, in the narrators' voices than we have at the moment. Right now, I think the conceit of the Redbook and the translations of various authors is just a conceit, nothing more. I don't think Tolkien 'built it into' the story. It is a bookend piece, part of the delightful story elements, but I don't think it plays a part in the story proper. Thus, I don't think it can really account for the variations of style.
I think a thread about this might be interesting, so this thread can remain devoted to
littlemanpoet's topic. And his example, which is sitll unremarked upon.