paradife-loft:

thearrogantemu:

thearrogantemu:

The monosyllabic
adjectives of the Lord of the Rings:
fair, fell, grim, high, hard, clear, cold, clean, long, swift, dark, great,
deep, tall, grey, keen, etc. They’re
common words, almost simple ones (with a few archaicisms thrown in), but look
at how often they’re used, and of how many things. Any of them might be used to
describe the way things look, or the way they sound, or even the way they feel.
This can occasionally misfire (I believe it was @sumeriasmith who pointed out that
Arwen’s eyes are described as being “grey as a cloudless night”, a color most
people would probably call black) and
the way in which everyone of any note in the Silmarillion is tall does border on the ridiculous
(unless you reason that ‘tall’ is simply a mistranslation for ‘striking’, or,
as @emilyenrose put it, ‘hot’.) But on the whole, the effect is to create a
sort of underlying chromatic rhythm. The words are used so often that they
cease to give the reader information about the things they’re used to describe.
Instead, the things they modify become attributes of them: grey is Gandalf and the Havens and old trees and things at night
and in the distance and in the early morning, dawns and hilltops and eyes and
ashes and shelter in the wasteland and the wasteland itself.

@vardasvapors: #i don’t think the ‘grey as a cloudless night’ is necessarily a misfire tho #that assumes it only means ‘grey as a cloudless night SKY’ which is imo a completely different thing than ‘a cloudless NIGHT’ #the air and the vision and the way things in the night show up #in the ambient starlight and moonlight etc #from the seer’s pov

::jaw drops::

::ears ring::

DAMMIT TOLKIEN YOU DID IT AGAIN. I should have known better than to come at you in the realm of words! Because that’s it, that’s it exactly. The night itself, not just the sky. A darkness that does not wholly conceal, a light that does not wholly reveal. And it’s that middleness that I think is what grey means in Tolkien, going beyond color into a certain position in the world.  A position that is neither pure darkness nor pure light. Middle-Earth is a grey world – it is darkened, but not entirely; it is colored by loss but it is more than the losing.  Not wholly lost or wholly changed, as he says of mankind’s creative capacity in Mythopoeia. 

(Here’s a question: what’s the difference between middleness and bothness?)

Another thing that’s cool about this is that, intentionally or not on Tolkien’s part (and I would suspect a degree of intentionality given who we’re talking about here), these are all very Germanic English words – they have their origins in Old and Middle English, rather than coming from Latin and/or French or Greek or whatnot. (This is a common distinction among at least certain classes of words with Germanic derivation versus Romance, Greek, etc. lineage – whether they’re monosyllabic (and often monomorphemic) or polysyllabic.)

And I think that speaks both to Tolkien’s background as a scholar, and the sort of language in English that’s going to be familiar and natural-sounding to him in this kind of mythological context; and it also forms another dimension of how Arda is an English mythology, down to the very words used to construct it. Very, very cool.