LotR -- Book 4 - Chapter 10 - The Choices of Master Samwise

[Lalwendë]

Shakespeare at times seems to 'hear' inside a word or phrase the history of its future echoes.

This is a fanciful. It does not seek to understand what the author intended, it simply notes odd word usage and makes links to today's language. It is about curiosities of linguistics, about changes in language, not about what the author intended. We can go looking through older texts for odd turns of phrase which have different meanings today and we could find them by the score, and that's interesting. But it tells us nothing about what the author meant when he or she used that word or phrase. It satisifes our own interpretations, but that's as far as it goes.

This is why I do not like much literary criticism or analysis, as it seems to me that the critic is simply pulling apart a text to find what they want to find. I want to know what the author intended, I don't want to reconstruct a text for myself, for my own meaning.

There are many echoes in Tolkien's work, but it is also important to bear in mind what Tolkien himself may have learned, experienced or thought about. If it was simply not possible that he could consider a matter then it is not possible it could pass into his writing, and when I come across an odd word or phrase which seems to have alternate meanings I stop to consider if that could be the case. It's often interesting to bring up such alternate and arresting meanings and consider them, but ultimately it is unsatisfying as to getting towards the deeper meaning. Sometimes what we find in a text says more about us than it does about the author.