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Gandolorin
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on: December 16, 2014 12:20
@ itariliel: as I am German but can consider myself a dual native speaker for more than 50 years (Pakistan 1956-1959, India 1959-1966, USA 1966-1975), limiting those who struggle with the books to those from overseas may be too narrow a view.
Tolkien has been described - Tom Shippey is my usual suspect in such things - as an Edwardian. No longer a Victorian, but by 1937, when The Hobbit was published, not necessarily the fashionable world view. Though come to think of it, modernism thought itself "fashionable" at the time - by now also become unfashionable, despite the shrieking protests so common of a former avant-garde who find they have been relegated to the dustbin.
So an Edwardian world view may have still been that of many English; perhaps even the Victorian faction was still larger at this time.
So the language of TH and LoTR is definitely not what you hear on the telly nowadays (and ask an American what a telly is ...).
We're not talking about Beowulf here; nor Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; nor Shakespeare, Milton, ...(?)
But some of the latest newcomers to LoTR in the original may be puzzled, even though current native speakers. Have to ask the grand-parents or so ...
Side note: I read The Children of Húrin in the German translation first, having bought it in a run-of-the-mill bookstore. But with the German translation in hand, I crossed the street to a specialty bookstore to order it in the original. So I basically read translation and original back-to-back. And noticed once again that anything from the Silmarillion is between fiendishly difficult and impossible to translate, into German, anyway.
I read the books before I saw the movie
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I read the books after I saw the movie, and I prefer the movie
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I never read the books
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itariliel
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on: December 17, 2014 05:17
Gandolorin, Though my original post was about whether it was a national/cultural reason some struggle with LOTR, I found what you say sparked a further consideration of the development of language. Thinking further I realised I struggle to read with ease books in English written prior to the late nineteenth century, partly because the prose tends to be a bit tortuous but also because the usage of words has changed so much. Strangely I manage the prose of Jane Austen better than that of Dickens even though Austen is that much earlier, but that is more to do with subject matter possibly.
I was interested that you have the Children of Hurin in translation. I am still trying to read it in the original, though I have had my copy for several years.
I enjoy novels by some of the interwar writers who are seriously dated today, my favourite being Dornford Yates, who was writing about a time that scarcely existed anymore in the '20's and '30's. (he is not very polite about Germany though!). I think many of them would be described as "rattling good yarns".
Good to hear from you.
Gandolorin
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on: December 17, 2014 01:06
I just reread my statement above "And noticed once again that anything from the Silmarillion is between fiendishly difficult and impossible to translate, into German, anyway." Obviously, the story was translated, with hardly any loss of information, if at all. But I still had the feeling after reading the original that something was missing from the translation.

I would guess that part of the difficulty is that ChoH, like most of the Silmarillion, is in a somewhat archaic style (no Hobbits ...). This may present a problem when the more archaic word or phrase in English doe not really have an analogue in similarly archaic German, the modern words having converged in meaning from older words that were further apart.

Or the multiple meanings of some words which perhaps overlap only in one meaning - not necessarily the most common one in both languages. Here perhaps the clearest example I can find are jokes depending on two meanings of a word, the one bland, the other the cause of uproarious laughter. If the other language only has the bland meaning, people expecting a punch line will only respond with blank stares to this untranslatable joke.

An there is JRRT's almost unparalleled skill in the English language, covering centuries of its development from the "Anglo-Saxon" Beowulf until the early 1970s. I'm sure I have not nearly caught every nuance in his writing, and nuance is another aspect that translates badly. Perhaps this example: the upper-crust stiff-upper-lip manner of speaking, tending in situations to become more and more oblique, and thus more and more meaning the opposite of what is said; outside of the very Anglophile city Hamburg, the manner is probably pretty incomprehensible in Germany.
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tarcolan
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on: December 17, 2014 05:41
Ummm... just a reminder this is the Movie forum.
Gandolorin
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on: December 18, 2014 12:01
Very true, tarc - but now I feel compelled to ask the heretical question why this particular thread "Are you a bookie?" exists here? Just "yes" or "no" answers would be quite boring. And playing one of my favorite roles, "Devil's Advocate", this may be a better place to give movie fans who have not read the books a nudge towards reading them than a thread specifically dedicated to pure book discussions that the film fans might never visit? Image
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