If you never read The Lord of the Rings you should do it no matter whether you are only ten or thirty, whether you are a housewife or an academic. The only essential feature you ought to possess to understand Tolkien’s books is a bit of ingenuity and true belief in goodness. Tolkien is thrilling, exciting, captiviting and extremely unpredictable; he is mysterious and charming; he is British to the backbone and international at the same time. Unlike the majority of modern writers he has never tried to thrust his oppinion and tastes upon other people, never spoken in the name of the whole generation. Tolkien plunges us into a world fresh and pure as if just created. That does not mean that there is no evil there, but the evil can be defeated if you are honest and courageous, if you have friends and believe that the dark would never overshadow the light. The book, written in a simple manner of an old-fashioned fairy-tale, has become, in the most inscrutable way, the symbol of the generation of the 60`s.

“The Lord of the Rings and its prologue, The Hobbit, belong, in my experience, to a small group of books and poems and songs that I have truly shared with other people”

, says Peter Beagle, the compiler of the collection The Tolkien Reader.

“The strangest strangers turn to know it, and we talk about Gandalf and mad Gollum, and the bridge of Khazad-dum while the party or the classroom or the train rattles about unheard… Something of ourselves has gone into it, and so it belongs to us. ” [10]

In 1959 The Lord of the Rings was translated into Dutch, then into Swedish, Danish, German, Polish, Finnish, Norwegian and other languages. In 1960 Majory Weith, a linguist from the University of Illinois, presented her thesis on Tolkien’s works. Within the last 30 years only in English about half a hundred monographs were issued. Among them are books on mythology, antropology, geography of Middle-earth, symbolism and religion studies, even Tolkien’s bestiary not mentioning Tolkien’s biographies proper. But nevertheless the linguistic aspect of his books can hardly be called thoroughly studied for too few works deal with the problem of stylistic analysis or the sound system, word-building and etymology of the artificial languages represented in The Lord of the Rings. The language itself still remains an unploughed soil for any linguistic research. The subject of this paper is the language in The Lord of the Rings: its peculiarities, its style and poetry. Our aim is to prove that the trilogy is an entirely unique work due to its genre and inner structure. We will also try to consider the poetry as a part of the narrative and prove its importance as a stylistic device that helps the author expose the inner world of his characters and reveal the nature of tribes and races which inhabit the fairy country called Middle-earth. For this purpose we will analize a number of songs and pieces of poetry belonging to different folks according to their language tradition, history and place among Tolkien’s creation. We will consider the difference between the tongues of Middle-earth, their origin and relations between each other.

The paper falls into two distinct parts. The first one is devoted to the languages represented in the book, their peculiarities and place in the narrative, Tolkien’s style particularly. The second part, which is based upon an investigation conducted by the author, comprises the results of stylistic analysis of several verses included in the trilogy in order to demonstrate that poetry is an integral part of the book’s conception and its style.

Having woven a fairy-tale, an epic, a poem and an adventure story into one, Tolkien thus invented an entirely new literary genre – fantasy (and still remains one of the most popular authors). The purpose of fantasy according to Tolkien, is to help the reader rediscover his own world from a new and fresh perspective. Reading about Middle-earth invites him to see places and events in nature with a renewed sense of wonder. C.S.Lewis, Tolkien’s close friend and a member of the Inklings, said about him

that he had illuminated the consciousness of millions like a flash of a lightning illumunates the sky instantly making the surrounding landscape visible.

Tolkien saw the fantasy writer as a ‘subcreator’ who invents a secondary world differing from our primary world but enhancing its meaning for us. For his own world of Middle-earth he provided a complete history, mythology, geography, several races of rational beings and several disparate languages. There were several attempts to imitate Tolkien’s style or to write a story according to the same pattern and the same genre as The Lord of the Rings. One of them, written in Russian and published in 1994 belongs to Nik Perumov. The book, called In the Circle of Darkness, is obviously based upon Tolkien’s story. The author claims it to be the sequel of The Lord of the Rings, and the action of his novel takes place three hundred years after the War of the Ring. Using familiar names and setting he tells us rather a gloomy and even tragic story of the events that followed the Downfall of the Dark Lord. Unlike Tolkien he seems to doubt the celebration of fairness and goodness in this world, which is represented as a kingdom of cruel, greedy and heartless Men seeking power for power’s sake and not caring for the fates of Middle-earth. The already mentioned C.S. Lewis has also tried to create his secondary world of a fantasy story the way Tolkien did. But his book about a fairy land of Narnia should sooner be called a children’s tale rather than fantasy.

Of course, Tolkien was not the first storyteller in the world literature, but he has managed to turn a fairy-tale into an epic. Creating his secondary world he leant not upon his own abstract ideas of noble princes and wicked dragons, but European mythology and followed its traditions while writing The Lord of the Rings. According to the Medieval tradition Tolkien has included a great number of songs, verses and ballads into The Lord of the Rings, for we cannot imagine Nibelungenlied or Beowulf, without their poetically organized form. Tolkien’s characters are also very typical of an epic: elves dwarves, goblins, dragons and wizards. The book is full of singing. Ballads and rhymes of lore belong to the daily lives of the peoples of Middle-earth. Language varies from high fustian to low table-songs. Each of different tribes, except the nasty creatures of Mordor, has its own tradition of song – from the Elvish patterns of rhyming to the proud chanting of Dwarves and the musical tunes of Hobbits. “Tolkien realized the importance of poetic forms for myth that was often traditionally told in a fixed meter. In fact the entire Lord of the Rings exhibits a poet’s exhaustive care in choice of words, rhythm and connotation. Tolkien used different rhymeschemes as he used different languages, ranging from chants for occasions of deep emotions, to intricate forms for ancient lore, to simple songs purely for enjoyment. “[13]

More than fifty verses are included into the trilogy. They are employed not only to fill out pauses in the narrative but to make characters round, alive. They tell us of the past and foretell the future, ask riddles and bemoan the lost. Prose and poetry here are closely interwoven and should be considered of equal importance.

Next: The Lord Of The Rings – Prehistory.