Eowyn's Thee and Thou

So, in my early days of reading, and re-reading, and re-re-reading THE LORD OF THE RINGS over and over again, I used to be puzzled by the scene in which Eowyn begs Aragorn to take her with him when he takes the Paths of the Dead. Not by the content of their exchange but the style. Why, I wondered, did she suddenly switch to formal, archaic English (Bible-speak) at such a time?

wilt thou go?

wilt thou not let me ride . . . ?

I beg thee!

Years later, when I was no longer thirteen and had studied grammar* and gained some fluency in reading archaic speech (like the time in college when I read the entire FAERIE QUEENE between waiting on customers at the local drive in),** I came to realize that there are, or were, two usages of these archaic pronouns in English (thou, thy, thine, thee). The first and by far most dominant is its association with formal, remote speech, like in the King James Bible. The second, forgotten by just about everybody who wasn't a Quaker or historian of the language, was for intimate use: this is how you refer to people you are close to. Thus it was to add an extra layer to Eowyn's laying bare her feelings in this brief exchange.

So there's a disconnect here: Tolkien is trying for one effect and instead achieving another.  I suspect this was less of a problem when Tolkien was writing this scene (circa 1946) than it is now because over the course of the last century we've lost 'poetic diction', despite Owen Barfield's best efforts on its behalf. Ezra Pound announced its doom as far back as 1911, but there were many hold-outs among traditionalists for a generation or so.

Tolkien did make judicious use of these archaic pronouns in other contexts, particularly in THE SILMARILLION, as in Cirdan's words to Gandalf in OF THE RINGS OF POWER AND THE THIRD AGE (Silm.304) and in the exchanges between God and the angels (or, if you prefer, Eru and the Valar) in the AINULINDALE (cf. Silm. 15, 17, 19).  I strongly suspect that this is what those early reviewers of THE SILMARILLION when it first came out meant when they complained that it 'read like the Bible', and I strongly suspect that this is the only part of THE SILMARILLION read by those critics.


Tolkien also used deliberately archaic language in most of his translations as an essential part of his goal of making medieval works understandable to a reader unversed in the original language (Old English, Middle English, medieval Welsh) without making it sound as if it'd been written by a modern-day author -- but more on this later.

--John R.
--at the end of week three in Milwaukee.


*and picked up smatterings of Spanish, French, and Old English

**alas for The Rocket, Magnolia Arkansas's drive-in theatre, long gone.