“Thee” and “thou” in “The Lord of the Rings”

[Bêthberry]

Wow, I'm away from teh interwebs for a few days and a great discussion breaks out! Feels like the old days. Thanks, Esty, for a marvellous thread, and All you Downers for interesting replies. (I can't help but recall that refrain from Monty Python, "Bring out your Dead".

Originally Posted by Rumil

Very interesting Esty,

I'd not clocked the significance in Aragorn/Eowyn exchanges.

As I remember it thee and thine etc are archaic, and therefore bring to mind legendary romances (Tristan and Isolde etc) but also archaic in that they bring to mind great leaders of old.

The major contrast here is between the hobbits' modern usage of you and yours and the 'heroic types' use of thee and thine. However the romantic use is a very telling sub-set of usage.

Also that the Fellowship are 'you and yours'-ers generally, perhaps tying in with (Denethor's?) comment that Pippin uses a strange idiom. Were the Fellowship (Gimli, Legolas, Aragorn, Boromir) using the modern forms as a more every-day form of speech?

Also backing up Selmo in that Oop North number of these archaic forms are still part of regonal dialect.

In addition to Rumil's point about the archaic use in the old romances, the verse translation of the Kalevala which Tolkien knew so well also uses the older forms.

Originally Posted by WF Kirby, trans

Wherefore at thy heart's desire
Should I not thy flesh devour,
And drink up thy blood so evil?
I who guiltless flesh had eaten
Drank the blood of those who sinned not?

This is the sword's reply when Kullervo asks if it is willing to kill him.

Romance and myth were a strong pull for Tolkien.

[Pitchwife]

Sorry, Miggy, I got you wrong then - I thought you meant what I said about Sam. My bad.

Anyway, Sam isn't the only one with that peculiar usage. The Gaffer calls the miller du, Herr Sandigmann, with a good deal of irony, but both he and Farmer Cotton address Frodo as du, Herr Frodo and du, Herr Beutlin, respectively. Apparently, this is the proper way among hobbits in the Carroux translation. It makes Shire society feel more egalitarian and pre- or non-bourgeois than it may have been meant to be, and it also makes Frodo's Ihr to Maggot stand out all the more - he still seems to have been kind of in awe of the farmer.

[OT]

Originally Posted by Esty

*When romantic novels are translated from English to German, for example, the translator has to find a place to insert the switch from formal to familiar - when do the lovers stop saying "Sie" and start saying "Du"?!

Some never do - like Sartre and Beauvoir, who I think vouvoyed each other all their lives. But then they were French, and the French are weird in that respect anyway - they even talk to God like that.[/OT]

Thanks for the Kalevala quote, Bêthberry! I knew Kullervo was one of Tolkien's models for the Túrin story, but had forgotten how closely Túrin's dialogue with Gurthang is modelled on this passage.

Which reminds me, I was told that the formal pronoun is becoming rare in Finnish, and the Kalevala, on the other hand, only uses the informal forms in the original...*hopes for a Finn to chime in here about the Finnish LotR translation*

[Faramir Jones]

I was very interested in your comment, Pitchwife, about the usage by a particular French couple of the formal 'vous' between each other, rather than the intimate 'tu':

Originally Posted by Pitchwife

Some never do - like Sartre and Beauvoir, who I think vouvoyed each other all their lives. But then they were French, and the French are weird in that respect anyway - they even talk to God like that.

There's a excellent example I've come up against, that I've used to explain to non-French speakers the difference in usage between 'tu' and 'vous'. Napoleon Bonaparte, general and future First Consul and Emperor of the French, married as his first wife, Josephine de Beauharnais. He was passionately in love with her, she far less with him. When he was fighting in Italy in 1796, he sent her frequent and passionate letters; hers were far less frequent and passionate. What particularly angered him was her insistence in refering to him with the formal 'vous'. In one letter, he said the following:


If I rise to work in the middle of the night, it is because this may hasten by a matter of days the arrival of my sweet love.

Yet in your letter of the 23rd, and 26th. Ventose, you call me vous. Vous yourself!

Ah! wretch, how could you have written this letter? How cold it is?

And then there are those four days between the 23rd, and the 26th.; what were you doing that you failed to write to your husband? ...

Ah, my love, that vous, those four days made me long for my former indifference. Woe to the person responsible!

May he as punishment and penalty, experience what my convictions and the evidence (which is in your friend's favor) would make me experience!

Hell has no torments great enough! Nor do the Furies have serpents enough! Vous! Vous!