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Philology in the Lord of the Rings
Philology in the technical sense, is obviously a precise science that observes the evolution of languages and formulates 'laws' that describe them. They do not explain why a given combination of circumstances produced a certain result or no result at all." [l4]
As it has already been mentioned above, The Lord of the Rings is an entirely unique phenomenon due to its style, structure and language. "The story is a simple one : the quest of the hobbit Frodo Baggins to take the One Ring of Power at the Mount Orodruin where alone it can be unmade and destroy it and the threat of its power and corruption. But in the land of Middle-earth this Quest lies interwoven into fates of other persons and peoples. The quest theme is primary, but another major theme is the war agaist Sauron, who seeks to dominate Middle-earth and would be victorious if he could recover the ruling ring he lost in an ancient war. For their different reasons, all peoples are drawn into the struggle, on one or the other side. Tolkien's main story thus involves many stories, all more or less independent yet linked at many points and occuring more or less simultaneously."[8]
Burton Raffel, one of Tolkien's devoted critics says of the trilogy the following : "The Lord of the Rings is a magnificent performance full of charm, excitement and affection, but it is not - at least as I am here using this term - literature. It would be foolish to say that Tolkien does not write well. He does, he writes admirably, whether his prose is discursive, scholarly or imaginative, but prose is not autoteic, and if Tolkien writes admirably one still must ask, to what purpose? That is, his prose may do admirably just what he wants it to do and what he wants it to may be - and in fact is - very much worth doing. But if his objectives are limited and basically exclude what I here term literature, then his purpose must be limited either. I think it is. I repeat: it does not denigrate Tolkien or his superb book to assert and try to prove this. I would hope that Tolkien himself would prefer not to be praised for what he has neither tried to do nor succeeded in doing. The Lord of the Rings is not only not The Illiad or The Odyssey, neither is it Beowulf or Paradise Lost or The Great Gatsby." [6]
Comparison with The Great Gatsby may obviously seem senseless as well as the statement that The Lord of the Rings is not literature. To what purpose did Tokien write The Book of the Lost Tales or The Adventures of Tom Bombadil? Did he do it on any purpose at all? Our oppinion is this: the professor did it out of pure curiosity, so to say for fun, and never expected his invention to be taken seriously. He had gone so far with his invention before he discovered that every language presupposes mythology and at once began to fill in the mythology presupposed by the Elvish. In Tolkien's world languages, their inner structure and phonation fully determine the fates of Middle-earth as speech had existed long before the first children of Eru-Iluvatar awoke by the waters of Cuivienen. "Therefore I say: Ea! Let these things Be! And I will send forth into the Void the Flame Imperishable, and it shall be at the heart of the World, and the World shall Be! " [2]
Where else in the world literature can we find examples of words giving birth to a whole universe? There is much in common with Wilde's pure art conception in the following Tolkien's words, which correspond to a motto 'Linguistics for linguistics' sake'. "The invention of the language is the foundation. The stories were made to provide a world for the languages rather than reverse. I should have preferred to write in Elvish. It is not about anything but itself. Certainly it has no allegorical intentions, general, particular or topical, moral, religious or political. "
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