Written by JRR Tolkien, “The Hobbit” was first published on September 21st, 1937, 80 years ago today.
Then something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick.
Am I the only person who thought this was really fucking funny
A lot of the really funny moments in Lord of the Rings come from Tolkien playing with language like this, where we have relatively formal, archaic, “high” language responded to with informal, modern, “low” language.
another hilarious example:
my absolute favorite example of tolkien switching registers in this way is
The Minas Tirith Archives Department probably had strict rules about proper record keeping procedures too, but try telling Gandalf anything and you’d probably get some form of “I do what I want.”
Eh, I’m gonna quibble with “the Minas Tirith Archives Department probably has strict rules about proper record keeping procedures”, given that we see Gandalf being shown into a poorly lit room full of jumbled stacks of books and loose papers that was clearly a disaster before he arrived. Maybe they did have good standards at one point, but Denethor cut the library budget and they had to downsize their storage space, let go of some staff, you know how it is.
