How hard and long was it, Aragorn?

[Guinevere]

I never heard about "hendyadis", but I agree with Formendacil about the emphasis.

Originally Posted by alatar

Just one question, Guinevere: Is there any other utterance of Aragorn's or others that is so...well...different (and odd to these ears)? Why (to me) just the one?

Well, I am hardly competent to point out any peculiarites to an native English speaker! As I said, to me it didn't seem odd at all (you could say it like that even in my Swissgerman dialect), so I can't tell what else would sound odd to you.

What I notice are the many cases of inversion (as Squatter pointed out, Tolkien often used these to emphasize key words)
e.g. "whence it came, we did not at first perceive" (Gloin speaking of the shadow of disquiet) or "too deep we delved there" "Only to the north did these tidings come" (Elrond) and Aragorn begins his answer to Boromir with "Little do I resemble the figures of Elendil and Isildur as they stand carven in their majesty..."
But I think these inversions seem less unusual to me, because in German the order of the words is much less fixed than in modern English.

Frodo tells Strider already in Bree:" You began to talk to me like the Bree folk, but your voice has changed ." And really, even then Aragorn uses "cannot" instead of "can't", "do not" instead of "don't", "let us" instead of "let's", "I will" instead of "I'll" "I think not" instead of "I don't think so" "have I not?" instead of "haven't I?" (In fact, only Hobbits and Bree-folk speak like that)

To me all this makes his speech sound more noble and ancient, and not commonplace.
Another example that comes to my mind is Faramir asking "Whence come you?" when first seeing Pippin in Minas Tirith. This is unusual in English, but the word order is exactly like in German!

(In letter #171 that Squatter quoted Tolkien gives an example of what Theoden said and of how it would sound in colloquial English. But I'd have to look that up.)