Stylistics and Tolkien

I have mentioned stylistics as a methodology before in this journal, in relation to the work I'm doing on Racefail 09 and the discourses surround it, but I first learned stylistics in literature courses since it's a method that a few people have been arguing should be used in literary studies, especially since people tend to talk about "good" and "bad" writing (styles) without training or consistent criteria. (Long history here of how 'lit and language' wars in which Tolkien participated ended up with linguistics going into its own discipline and (English) literature its own with a major focus on literary texts from Shakespeare on (i.e. English majors are not required to learn Old and Middle English, as Tolkien would have required!).  (I'm not saying that's bad, but it's good to keep the history in mind--I'm also not sure how other national literatures are taught in the university systems, but that's a topic for another day).

Anyhow, I've been doing stylistics work on Tolkien's LOTR for a while, and now am starting to branch out to the Silmarillion, in a presentation I'm giving at Kalamazoo (gulp) a couple of weeks from now.  I figure I can post some of the stylistics analysis I'm doing as a sample of how the method looks in action.

My main sources for this work:  the single best argument/rationale for stylistics was made years ago by Roger Fowler in Linguistics Criticism  www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Linguistics/LiteraryStylistics/. 

The nuts and bolts of the linguistic work I use is M. A. K. Halliday's Introduction to Functional Grammar:  www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Linguistics/TheoreticalDescriptiveLinguistic/

Here's a Functional Grammar website:  folk.uio.no/hhasselg/systemic/index.html

Stylistics is basically application of linguistic methodology to written texts (originally focusing on literature, but it's since expanded to include any type of written text).

I have published before on the "grammar" of Middle-earth--how Tolkien's writing gives Middle-earth what I call an animistic agency in LOTR.

So now I'm pulling some excerpts from The Silmarillion to do a stylistic analysis of them. 

My first surprise was how hard it is to find descriptions of the world/lands in this work, but I guess I shouldn't have been (long descriptions of the natural world are not a conventional feature of myth, even myths about the creation of the world!). I found a few passages to work with (given behind the cut).

As with my earlier stylistic work, this project is an exploration, a pilot project, not meant to be comprehensive (in order to develop a more comprehensive analysis, I'll have to work with larger amounts of text); however, this sort of exploratory attempt can show what approaches might be useful to use in developing a fuller analysis.

What's behind the cut are the excerpts in a format that shows clause structure (the clause is the main unit of either written or spoken English--the written form uses sentences (marked with capital letter and full stop), but sentences can include anything from a single word to multiple clauses, so Halliday's work focuses on the clause).  

A CLAUSE consists of one more more GROUPS; a GROUP consists of one or more WORDS; a WORD consists of one or more MORPHEMES.

It's possible to link ("bind") multiple clauses--that's called a CLAUSE COMPLEX. 

It's possible to do linguistic analysis at every rank level noted above in either written or spoken language utterances (and spoken forms can be in either audio format or transcriptions).  My  new colleague does sound and intonation, for example. 

The first level of functional grammatical analysis of a written text is to identify the clause patterns. Then you can analyze the metafunctions and structures.

So here's the clause breakdown (independent clauses are numbered with 1, 2, and 3; dependent clauses with i) ii) iii).

The words in [square brackets] are ones that are in the deep structure of the clause but not written in the surface text (but which the reader supplies to create meaning]. A stylistic analysis 'counts' those elements as well.

( Anulindale )

( Quenta Chapter 1 )

( Quenta CHapter 14 )

( Akallabeth )