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From: Miller.pasa@Xerox.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: Re: Tolkien's dwarf names
Message-ID: <3492@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU>
Date: Fri, 30-Aug-85 15:13:19 EDT
Article-I.D.: topaz.3492
Posted: Fri Aug 30 15:13:19 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 31-Aug-85 09:01:16 EDT
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Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
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From: Miller.pasa@Xerox.ARPA

Tolkien was a philologist-- a student of the structure and history of
language.  As such, it wouldn't surprise me at all to find that he was
well aware of the differences between oral and written story telling
styles.  Much of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings and almost all of
The Silmarillion has the "feel" of oral history about it-- the type of
thing that the bard, sage, or historian might tell in the feasting hall
after the mead had been passed around.  Furthermore, the I know nothing
about it, but the Icelandic (?? I've deleted the original message) tale
that the dwarves' names were derrived from sounds as if it were
originally an oral history that only later got written down for
posterity.  The rhythmic, rhyming "flow" of names is a  device found
frequently in stories from an oral tradition and  most probably serves
as a mneumonic device to aid in preserving the names in memory.  It is
just another indicator of the differences between our cultures that
these lists of names seem 

> silly and invented for their alliteration and
>rhyming 

to us.

I might also add that in taking these characters from an earlier story
and building a new story around them ( a sort of "further adventures of
Thorin and the Dwarf gang") Tolkien was doing something that was VERY
traditional for creative oral storytellers to do-- an idea that probably
amused him quite a bit.

Finally, from some biography or other on Tolkien, I remember that The
Hobbit was originally designed to be a story for Tolkien's children and
was initially published as a children's book.  In fact, he had some
trouble with TLOTR when he went to publish it because it WASN'T a
children's book.

I think it's a tribute to the man's greatness that his books tend to
work both verbally and in written form, and appeal to both very young
children and to very profound adults.  Hey, is this ART, or what??

--Chris

Miller.pasa@Xerox.ARPA