Starting Again:
Tolkien took a great deal of time in shaping the characters of the book. That could be the reason why the book is so good. He took great care select the names of his characters and the roles they played. It seems he took a scientific approach in selecting the course of events as they happened in the book and the names to be given to characters and tested each of these choices as hypotheses. Tolkien later proved or disproved these hypotheses in order to be able to finally achieve the chronology of events in the books as the story is written. It is intriguing to know that Tolkien had no idea of what he was doing mostly throughout writing this book but ended up writing one the great works of literature even though it is not considered so by academia.
Back-tracking:
In this section one learns about Tolkien ability to take the ordinary places and locations of his area of residence and transform those into a prehistoric mystic land in which extraordinary beings lived alongside men. He searched for the deeper meaning in the names villages, rivers, towns among other in so doing found the history in the names that predated his ancestors. Shippey is right when says, “Most people do not think much about names, but accepts them as they are given but not Tolkein (p57).
You also learn in this section that all though Tolkien did not know what he was doing when he started writing Lord of the Rings, he has a lot of resources to rely on. Most of these sources were his earlier works of literature. He used information from the Hobbit, Silmarillion, some earlier poems and stories he had written. In doing this Tolkien created continuity between all the books such that he gave the books a starting point and no ending point in order to create the illusion that his world continued after the books. He was able to lead the reader to think that he was only narrating the course of events that took place in the history/past of Middle earth. Tolkien is able to lead the reader to believe that present Middle earth has its own story which would be told in the future.
The Council of Elrond; character revealed:
In case, Tolkien uses language as a means to distinguish races in the novel. Tolkien does this effectively using the many languages and the derivatives of the English language he had developed for some of the races in Middle Earth. This helps greatly in the council of Elrond. The different dialects and languages alert the reader to know who is making a contribution to the issues discussed at the council and what their race is. Tolkien is able to develop dialects of each of these languages in order to be able relate to the reader the idea of age. Individuals of different generations used different dialects: an older version of a language which has almost become its own dialects as compared to the one spoken at the present time was spoken by elderly in that race.
Trudy Antwi October 22, 2008, at 08:38 PM
