Language in The Book of Lost Tales

[Elendil3119]

In the Book of Lost Tales, Part I, Tolkien often has tense changes in the middle of a paragraph, or sometimes even a sentence. Why is that? Also, the word "an" is used quite a bit, and it seems to be a substitute for "and"??

[jallan]

The word an appears in late Middle-English for and, especially when and has the meaing ‘if’.

See the Glossary at the end of The Book of Lost Tales 1 (HoME 1).

Tolkien was writing this material in a slightly modernized versin of late Middle English style as found in Le Morte Darthur by Sir Thomas Malory (http://camelot.celtic-twilight.com/malory), for example. In this version the spelling is modernized but not much else. (For the original Middle English spelling see Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse: Le Morte dArthur, Syr Thomas Malory (http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/c/cme/cme-idx?type=header&idno=MaloryWks2).)

This style was popularized again in the nineteenth century fantasy romances of William Morris, of which a good selection can be found here at William Morris: free web books, online (http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/aut/morris_william.html). The House of the Wolfings, though not a fantasy, may especially seem Tolkienish in many parts.

Later fantasy writers and translators and adaptors of medieval tales often used this kind of archaic language, but it it became unpopular in the twentieth century, condemned as unnecessarily artificial.

Tolkien's later writing on the First Age is much less archaic, though still more so than the trends of the time mostly thought acceptable.

The historical present tense is more likely to be used in older written English than in the written English of our own time, though it occurs often enough in spoken narrative.

It would not be unnatural even today in many forms of English to say something like: “I was at the mall yesterday and I see this fellow coming towards me and I think I recognize him.”

But it is very quickly drummed into students heads at school that you are not allowed to write that way.

Why?

Just because.

But, for example, from Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, chapter IX, written in a low Mississippi dialect:Another night when we was up at the head of the island, just before daylight, here comes a frame-house down, on the west side.The historical present makes things more vivid.

[Eledhwen]

Also, the Bible is full of examples of such tense changes. To change to the present tense gives a sense of immediacy and draws the reader right into the story. I sense jallan's frustration at the 'rules' of 'good' grammar stifling expression. The best modern examples of such grammar change can be seen on TV when (for example) a footballer describes a game he was in. His love of the tale brings the event right back into an imagined present; and he slips into the present tense. It's natural, so why not use it?

[Rúmil]

Yes, the surprising elements of Tolkien's style would be archaicisms intended to make the reader feel he was reading, precicely, a 'book of lost tales' out of some remote past.

Tolkien's style in Bolt would be closest to that of the early and early middle 18th century: not exactly medieval, for the real medieval English in which tales like Beowulf were written (Anglo-Saxon, spoken roughly from 600 to 1120) is now wholly unintelligible to modern English speakers who would not have studied it especially, but old enough to give the text a distinct flavour.
It also includes not a few words much more archaic, such as 'weird' in the sense of 'fate', which was already obselete when Shakespeare died, and, even better, words translitterated directly out of Anglo-Saxon, (and never appearing after the 12th century) such as 'dwimmer-crafty' (apperars in Lotrs, the Riders of Rohan), representing AS 'dwimorcræftig' meaning 'learned in the art of magic'.

It is a sad thing that English has been constricted by silly rules such as the ones jallan quotes, it is also very stupid: it strated around the 19th century, when some pedants decided that for some reason English should follow the grammatical rules of Latin — which is rather like playing football according to the rules of hockey. Thus contemporary English was made to lose, in part, its great advantage over romance tongues, which is its great flexibility. Thank goodness for Tolkien fixing that up :)

[jallan]

Rúmil posted: Tolkien's style in Bolt would be closest to that of the early and early middle 18th century: not exactly medieval, for the real medieval English in which tales like Beowulf were written (Anglo-Saxon, spoken roughly from 600 to 1120) is now wholly unintelligible to modern English speakers who would not have studied it especially, but old enough to give the text a distinct flavour. Not exactly. Beowulf is in Old English, dating to what was once described as “Dark Age” Britain but now as “Early Medieval” Britain. It is not medieval.

Late Middle English medieval prose, as found in the 15th century writer Malory, is usually quite readable by moderns, if the spelling is updated, and it is not hard to get used to the odd spellings if it isn’t.

Indeed Shakespeare's late 16th and early 17th century Elizabeth English is probably usually more difficult, because Shakespeare is far more ready to write in a complex way and to use poetic and high-flown Latinate words than earlier writers in prose.

But the King James Bible (often using forms of speech already out of date when it was produced), as well as other old translations of classics, kept archaic English alive as a translation language and a language of high style.

Spenser’s Fairy Queen also purposely recreated and invented an archaic style of English echoing that of the late Middle Ages.

But normal eighteenth century style was very different. See Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/crusoe.html) for an early example. Tolkien never writes in that style.

But there began to grow up an “antiquarian” movement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

Thomas Chatterton had produced his Rowley poems, which he pretended to be actual fifteenth century works that he had unearthed, and he committed suicide at the age of seventeen when they were rightly rejected as forgeries.

For an example see An Excelente Balade of Charitie (http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poem456.html), in which the words are fifteenth century but the style is emphatically not so.

Malory's Le Morte Darthur was finally printed again in 1816 (for the first time since 1634) and then in another edition the following year by the antiquarian Southey. The work proved successful enough to provide a model prose archaic style that was more English in tone than the King James Bible translation.

Popular novelists writing of matters medieval were sometimes influenced by it, but tended in their dialogue to a style now deprecated as Wardour Street English or tushery, a degraded and unauthentic imitation of Walter Scott’s prose in Ivanhoe.

Translations for the classics still tended to look to the King James Bible as well as currenty poetry in archaic style.

But William Morris, at the end of the nineteenth century, knew better, and generally followed Malory and other late medieval authors in his translations and medievalist fiction, only omitting the most obsolete words and the -eth verb endings and showing a stronger preference for words of pure English or Scandinavian origin rather than words from French or Latin.

(Was he the first to write extended prose in this kind of pseudo-archaic language?)

Translators of medieval romance into prose also often followed Malory and Morris. For examples, see Jessie L. Weston’s prose translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight[/i] and [url=http://camelot.celtic-twilight.com/weston/libeaus_desconus/index.htm]SIR Libeaus Desconus (http://camelot.celtic-twilight.com/weston_gagk/index.htm) at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Compare Sebastian Evans’ 1910 translation of the French Perlesvaux which even follows the French source in its common use of the historical present: The High History of the Holy Grail (http://camelot.celtic-twilight.com/hhhg/index.htm).

Howard Pyle at the beginning of the twentieth century also created his own four volume history of King and his knights (http://camelot.celtic-twilight.com/pyle_ka/index.htm) in imitation Malory style.

Early twentieth writers like William Hope Hodgson and E.R. Eddison wrote romances and fantasies in language similar to Morris. Eddison at least was much liked by Tolkien, but Tolkien came to him after Tolkien had written his Unfinished Tales material.

But the artificiality of much archaic prose and the effeteness of archaism in poety led to its general rejection for most of the twentieth century, if one does not count Thor comics.

Tolkien seems to have been ready enough to go along with this trend in part. Some of his Lost Tales prose is perhaps too obviously purposely quaint. and twee and his later revisions in Unfinished Tales and in the latest Silmarillion summaries have much less archaism, theough Tolkien does not drop archaism altogether.

For Tolkien also knew the dangers of false modernity in translation and in story telling and also of attempting to write in a totally timeless style.

A tale of times long ago or times that never were (or times of the far future) cannot be as convincing if presented in purely contemporary idiom as when presented in a dialect that varies somewhat from contemporary use, which does not blindly substitute modern idiom for foreign or ancient idiom.

If slang must appear or common expressions, they should be slang or common expressions that fit the society described, not our own.

[Rúmil]

Originally posted by jallan
Not exactly. Beowulf is in Old English, dating to what was once described as “Dark Age” Britain but now as “Early Medieval” Britain. It is not medieval. Medieval = from 476 to 1492. Old and Middle English are both medieval.


Originally posted by jallan
[B]But normal eighteenth century style was very different. See Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/crusoe.html) for an early example. Tolkien never writes in that style.[B] The idiom is about similar. Differences in style are imputable to difference in genre.




Very good research apart from that, I must say, jallan.

[jallan]

Hm!. I know I have seen Medieval distinguished clearly from Dark Age.

I also know that comparatively recently Dark Age as a term has become more and more deprecated in favor of Early Medieval, which in that case would be contrasted with plain Medieval.

But I now can't find recent who makes the admittedly odd distinction of Early Medieval versus Medieval, though Dark Age used to be contrasted with Medieval, at least by some.

Obviously my classification system has gotten out of synchronization with where the world has moved to.

But I do not think that Tolkien's early prose or Morris' prose differs from eighteenth century prose only because difference in genre. John Ruskn’s very late eighteenth century The King of the Golden River, for example, is mostly contemporary in style.

But Tolkien and Morris use an meaing ‘if’, odd past-participle forms like clomb, exclamations like behold, and use thee and thou which are already obsolete in the earliest eighteenth century writing, other than in possibly deliberately archaic translations or in recording of non-central dialects.

Something happend, and I think it was almost Malory alone and his influence on Morris that created a feeling that there was a rightness in using something close to Malory’s and Spenser's dialects for writing set in the medieval period, or even in “The House of the Wolfings” set in Roman times, though seen from a Germanic viewpoint.

I would not mind learning better, if anyone could point to earlier prose works than those of Morris that emulated that style.

Walter Scott’s tradition of medieval was justified by himself in his introduction to Ivanhoe, somewhat diffidently, as he was reasonably somewhat unsure about the introduction of such archaism into his novel, though he could feel the mere contemporaneous dialogue would not do.

But Scott explicitly rejects the Chatterton approach, which to some degree is what Morris accepted instead, creating something closer to a true imitation of medieval style both in narrative and dialogue, though with a better feel for the rhythms and patterns of the older language than had Chattterton.

The problem with this kind of thing is that the writer really has to know what he is doing.

Walter Scott knew medieval works first hand, and his language accordingly rings true in a way that it does not in later Wardour Street imitators. Tolkien also knows originals at first hand, as did some translators who use archaic style.

I somewhat suspect that Eddison and Hodgson did not know originals, and their language somewhat fails in comparison as often happens to imitators of imitators.

Richard Burton's translation of Arabian Nights (1885–1888) (translations of some of the stories here (http://www.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/ags/ti/personen/mfreeric/m/an/a_index_commented.html)) also make much use of archaic English words and sentence patterns and does it well.

But the result pleases some and displeases others.

I suspect that any writing in dialect ouside of a current standard literary dialect will prove annoying to some readers at least.

[Rúmil]

Yes, admittedly Tolkien's style dores not resemble any actual historical idiom: it is purposely archaic, but not uniformely archaic: it blends more modern expressions with "more archaic" archaicisms, giving the overall an 'out-of-this-world' flavour, just asa his tale is supposed to be.

It annoyed JRRT's contemporary critics to no end (and still continues to annoy a few uneducated pedantic critics) but it now is sort of in fashion again.

[Celebithil]

I found Lost Tales harder to read because of the tense changes and the fact that he contradicts himself a lot of times in the book but its over enjoyable.