Meditations on Middle Earth

EXCERPT Rhythmic Patterning in The Lord of the Rings By Ursula K. LeGuin Since I had three children, I've read Tolkien's trilogy aloud three times. It's a wonderful book to read aloud or (consensus by the children) listen to. Even when the sentences are long, their flow is perfectly clear, and follows the breath; punctuation comes just where you need to pause; the cadences are graceful and inevitable. Like Charles Dickens and Virginia Woolf, Tolkien must have heard what he wrote. The narrative prose of such novelists is like poetry in that it wants the living voice to speak it, to find its full beauty and power, its subtle music, its rhythmic vitality. Woolf's vigorous, highly characteristic sentence-rhythms are purely and exclusively prose: I don't think she ever uses a regular beat. Dickens and Tolkien both occasionally drop into metrics. Dickens's prose in moments of high emotional intensity tends to become iambic, and can even be scanned: "It is a far, far better thing that I do/than I have ever done . . ." The hoity-toity may sneer, but this iambic beat is tremendously effective-particularly when the metric regularity goes unnoticed as such. If Dickens recognized it, it didn't bother him. Like most really great artists, he'd use any trick that worked. Woolf and Dickens wrote no poetry. Tolkien wrote a great deal, mostly narratives and "lays," often in forms taken from the subjects of his scholarly interest. His verse often shows extraordinary intricacy of meter, alliteration, and rhyme, yet is easy and fluent, sometimes excessively so. His prose narratives are frequently interspersed with poems, and once at least in the trilogy he quietly slips from prose into verse without signaling it typographically. Tom Bombadil, in The Fellowship of the Ring, speaks metrically. His name is a drumbeat, and his meter is made up of free, galloping dactyls and trochees, with tremendous forward impetus: Tum tata Tum tata, Tum ta Tum ta . . . . "You let them out again, Old Man Willow! What be you a-thinking of? You should not be waking. Eat earth! Dig deep! Drink water! Go to sleep! Bombadil is talking!" Usually Tom's speech is printed without line breaks, so unwary or careless silent readers may miss the beat until they see it as verse--as song, actually, for when his speech is printed as verse Tom is singing. As Tom is a cheerfully archetypal fellow, profoundly in touch with, indeed representing, the great, natural rhythms of day and night, season, growth and death, it's appropriate that he should talk in rhythm, that his speech should sing itself. And, rather charmingly, it's an infectious beat; it echoes in Goldberry's speech, and Frodo picks it up. "Goldberry!" he cries as they are leaving, "My fair lady, clad all in silver green! We have never said farewell to her, nor seen her since that evening!" If there are other metric passages in the trilogy, I've missed them. The speech of the elves and noble folk such as Aragorn has a dignified, often stately gait, but not a regular stress beat. I suspected King Theoden of iambics, but he only drops into them occasionally, as all measured English speech does. The narrative moves in balanced cadences in passages of epic action, with a majestic sweep reminiscent of epic poetry, but it remains pure prose. Tolkien's ear was too good and too highly trained in prosody to let him drop into meter unknowingly. Stress units-metric feet-are the smallest elements of rhythm in literature, and in prose probably the only quantifiable ones. A while ago I got interested in the ratio of stresses to syllables in prose, and did some counting. In poetry, the normal ratio is about 50 percent: that is, by and large, in poetry, one syllable out of two has a beat on it: Tum ta Tum ta ta Tum Tum ta, etc .... In narrative, that ratio goes down to one beat in two to four: to Tum tatty Tum ta Tum tatatty, etc .... In discursive and technicaHaber, Karen is the author of 'Meditations on Middle Earth' with ISBN 9780312302900 and ISBN 0312302908.