Dumbing down the Books

[Aiwendil]

Squatter of Amon Rudh wrote:

Nothing can be better expressed in archaic English, but it can be expressed differently, and in a manner that is both more appealing to the writer and more expressive of his thoughts and intentions.

Well said.

I expressed myself somewhat poorly when I said that archaic English has a "terser, nobler" quality. I did not mean that noble actions or noble ideas cannot be conveyed by a more modern idiom. I was not referring at all to the content of the language. I was trying to express what I find to be the peculiar flavor, as it were, of archaic English. "Noble" fails, I suppose, to convey it. "Terse" certainly does get part of it, but not the whole. But it doesn't really matter. The point is that different styles of writing do, undeniably, have different flavors. And, as Squatter points out, this flavor is part of the experience of one reading the book; and thus different styles may be used to achieve different effects. I find the style of The Lord of the Rings to be one of its great attractions.

Bethberry wrote:

Really, the issue is whether we think Tolkien's use of archaism is successful as writing or not.

Some of us think he dipped too strongly into purple ink and, instead of helping to convey heroic characters or elevated thought and feeling, rather wrote embarassingly overwrought passages which detract from the story and the characters. There, I've said it. It is bad archaic language. Horrors. Tolkien is not untouchable.

Ah! This is something different. You are simply saying that Tolkien wrote poorly. This kind of criticism is perfectly valid (though it is certainly possible to disagree with it - and yet not be an uncritical, unthinking fan).

It is only when the charge becomes "his writing is poor because it is archaic" rather than "his archaic writing happens to be poor" that the criticism begins to suffer, a priori, from all the faults which I and others have attributed to it. Perhaps you are not making this charge. But others have done so, often enough, and unless I am mistaken (and please correct me if I am), Eurytus has made it.