thepioden:

sunspotpony:

violent-darts:

owl-song:

tuulikki:

worldflower:

with-all-my-woes:

zarekthelordofthefries:

It sure is convenient that all these songs that ostensibly weren’t written in English all rhyme when translated into English, isn’t it, Mr. Tolkien?

yknow what really bothered me for some reason??
he used ‘loud as a train’ or smth similar to describe the balrog’s roar. like, no ok so y’know if this is supposed to have been ‘translated’ like you tell us, then wouldn’t it have been smth other than a train, like a waterfall?
idk it just really bothers me

Clearly he was talking about the train of Glorfindel’s robes which as everyone knows are covered in bells and jingle

1. I mean, he invented the languages he was going to translate, so if a rhyme didn’t work he could change the whole language if he wanted to. But actually, it’s not uncommon for translations (particularly older translations) to try to preserve or at least recreate rhyme schemes. For example, Tolkien translated “Pearl” into rhyming Modern English.

2. The train thing! It’s actually related to how Tolkien presents the hobbits as essentially “modern” characters who then go out and have adventures in the old heroic culture of myth and legend. As Tolkien says, “[The Shire] is in fact more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of the Diamond Jubilee…” (Letters, 230, #178). It’s very deliberately a part of the language. Think of all the modern, non-medieval things the hobbits have. It’s always a contrast between Modern English (Shire) and Old English (rest of Middle Earth). Even though Tolkien changed some foreign names to make them seem English, the hobbits still have

• tobacco (pipeweed), a New World crop
• drink tea in the modern English way
• potatoes, another New World crop, made more English-sounding as “taters”
• rabbits/coneys, which were imported to England in the 13th century
• a regular postal service
• mantelpiece clocks!

It was a deliberate choice that gave readers us a group of characters who can serve as tour guides to a mythical medieval adventure. Tom Shippey explains it better than I ever could:

…There is one very evident obstacle to recreating the ancient world
of heroic legend for modern readers, and that lies in the nature of
heroes. These are not acceptable any more, and tend very strongly to be
treated with irony: the modern view of Beowulf is John Gardner’s novel Grendel
(1971). Tolkien did not want to be ironic about heroes, and yet he
could not eliminate modern reactions. His response to the difficulty is
Bilbo Baggins, the hobbit, the anachronism, a character whose initial
role at least is very strongly that of mediator. He represents and often
voices modern opinions, modern incapacities: he has no impulses towards
revenge or self-conscious heroism, cannot ‘hoot twice like a barn-owl
and once like a screech-owl’ as the dwarves suggest, knows almost
nothing about Wilderland and cannot even skin a rabbit, being used to
having his meat ‘delivered by the butcher ready to cook’. Yet he has a
place in the ancient world too, and there is a hint that (just like us)
all his efforts cannot keep him entirely separate from the past.

…

Bilbo’s behaviour is solidly anachronistic, for he is wearing a jacket, relying on a written contract, drawing a careful distinction between gain and profit, and proposing a compromise which would see Bard’s claim as running expenses (almost tax deductible). Where Bard and Thorin used archaic words (‘Hail!’, ‘foes’, ‘hoard’, ‘kindred’, ‘slain’), he uses modern ones: ‘profit’, never used in English until 1604, and then only in Aberdeen; ‘deduct’, recorded in 1524 but then indistinguishable from ‘subtract’ and not given its commercial sense till much later; ‘total’, not used as here till 1557; ‘claim’, ‘interest’, ‘affair’, ‘matter’, all French or Latin imports not adopted fully into English till well after the Norman Conquest. It is fair to say that no character from epic or saga could even begin to think or talk like Bilbo.

Basically, if Tolkien does a thing with words, there’s always a very good chance that the professor was having fun with language, and doing it very consciously (see: Mount Doom, name of).

And furthermore, the entire conceit behind the books is that they’re translated into English from the “original” Westron of the Red Book, meaning that a ‘modern’ translator could do whatever he wanted with the language to make it work for the equally modern audience while preserving the same feel/meaning.  Heck, even the characters aren’t named what you think they are (Merry, for instance).

LotR is actually the story of Maura Labingi, Banazîr Galbasi, Ranazur Tûk and Kalimac Brandagamba. Maura lived at Laban-nec, but left Haubyltalan and Sûza altogether, first aiming for a hill-town just outside Sûza but eventually for Karnigul (or, in Elvish, Imladris). Maura’s older cousin and dearest friend (in one person) Bilba Labingi lived in Karnigul at that point. 

The extent to which Tolkien goes to present LotR as an edited mediaeval text is actually DELIGHTFUL and also ABSURDLY GREAT; the prologue is actually a provenance and edition litany, explaining which recension of The Red Book he was working from in order to explain its likely oddities and inclusions (or exclusions). 

I have often actually wanted an edition with all known or reasonably extrapolated Westron put back in, because I’m really curious how it would read. 

@thepioden

It’s actually very cool how things were translated into what modern Anglophonic readers would parse as “normal” fantasy-names as opposed to like. Aragorn, or Thranduil, or Ecthelion, or Elbereth Gilthoniel. The untranslated names of the Hobbits fit much more neatly into the phonetic flavor of the Adûnaic that becomes the ‘Common Speech’ or ‘Westron’ in the Third Age (and which gives us names like ‘Tar-Minyatur’ and ‘Ar-Pharazôn’ and ‘Akallabêth’), but those names would be tonally jarring in an otherwise translated text. 

That’s also why the Dwarves have names like ‘Dwalin’ and the Rohirrim… have… pretty much any names at all. Since the Professor was translating the affect of the Hobbit names into modern English and was also a linguistics nerd, he preserved the linguistic relationship between Westron, Dalish, and Rohirric by translating them as the equally-ish related Modern English, Old Norse, and Old English (not that literally anyone but him would probably actually notice, but.)