Musings on The Lord of the Rings. I

I have been leisurely reading through The Lord of the Rings. This marks my 19th, or perhaps 20th reading. (It isn’t a contest, but to those of you who read it yearly, relax. I humbly yield.) One would imagine that at some point a certain degree of unforced memorization would occur, preventing the reader from noticing anything new. Well, not new: it was always there. Rather, let me say, something heretofore brushed over by the reader, not given due consideration.

In reading about the aftermath of the battle of Helm’s Deep, the following phrase caught my attention. “But all the others, all that were not hurt or wounded, began a great labour…” The redundancy of “hurt or wounded” gave me pause. Was it merely a pleasing expression, was it a purposeful pleonasm? Or did Tolkien mean to differentiate between wounded and hurt?

Given his battlefield experiences, he would almost certainly have come across cases of shell shock. The notion that men could be hurt without displaying any visible mark of damage would, I think, feel natural enough to him.

The battle of Helm’s Deep is vividly written, marked by horrors. The survivors would certainly have been exposed to trauma. Go back and re-read it yourself. You’ll find plenty of examples.

So Tolkien may well have written “hurt” to deliberately distinguish some from the physically wounded; mentally scarred men who could in fact benefit from the labor involved as a way of taking their minds from the terrible events they’d just endured.

I don’t know. It is just a notion. What do you think?

Now, without a smooth segue, on to commercial matters. Cesar the Bravo is available for purchase. And I believe the publisher has the print edition on sale at 20% off through Christmas. Christmas. Discount. Presents. Look at all those concepts in conjunction.

Until next week, Cheers.