Posted: June 13, 1999 at 23:11:16: by RSS
"So even as he wrote the book, Tolkien was thinking in terms of how the peoples SHOULD have spoken and not just in terms of how an English-language reader would receive the dialogues."No he wasn't. He was playing a game of secondary creation, one which he couldn't carry out to the fullest. Tolkien states quite clearly in the prologue to the Lord of the Rings what his intention was: to write a really long, gripping tale. No more. The history, the depth, the meticulous detail: all that is part of Tolkien's brilliance in making the secondary creation believable. But in the end, it's ancillary to the story and the language, which is where the real beauty of the Lord of the Rings is found--not in discussing what kind of armor the Rohirrim wore.
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