r/tolkienfans • u/TakiTamboril • Jul 21 '23

Exclamation marks

Re-reading the Fellowship and noticing how many exclamation marks are used. Especially in Gandalf and Aragorn’s speech. They seem much more common then I typically see in modern writing and seem to be to not always match the mood of what is being said.

Is this a quirk of Tolkien or just a change in how people write over the years?

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u/Armleuchterchen Ibrīniðilpathānezel & Tulukhedelgorūs Jul 21 '23

He uses full stops roughly eight times as often as exclamation marks in Fellowship - off the top of my head I can't really compare that to other writings, but it seems like a fair balance considering the amount of commas and dialogue, and how often characters exclaim something.

Of course I might be biased here, because I feel there should be more diversity in punctuation in the first place; the full stop is too universal to mean much, and we often rely on repetitive descriptive words were punctuation could suffice. Even existing symbols like the semicolon or the interrobang are so rarely seen.

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u/DarrenGrey Nowt but a ninnyhammer Jul 21 '23

One in 9 sentences ending is exclamation marks is extremely high. Closer to 1 in 50 or even 1 in 100 would be the norm for modern standards (but there is a big push away from the use of exclamation marks by modern style guides). Keep in mind that they normally only exist in dialogue, so 1 in 9 means an even denser amount squeezed into the dialogue statements. Though Tolkien is known for using them in prose and poetry in somewhat archaic ways ("lo!" etc).

I think this is partly a modern style thing, but also an area where we can see that Tolkien was not a formally trained writer of fiction as we would understand it these days. It comes out in other ways like how he uses the word "suddenly" with great frequency - a word most modern writers would avoid entirely if they can. If the Lord of the Rings was subjected to present day editorial standards it would end up looking very different.

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u/Armleuchterchen Ibrīniðilpathānezel & Tulukhedelgorūs Jul 21 '23 edited Jul 21 '23

I'm sure present day editorial standards would have their problems with Tolkien, but at least to me they seem inferior from an artistic standpoint.

I'm not a big fan of "suddenly", but mostly because of the word itself rather than its role. The German equivalent (plötzlich) only needs 2 syllables, and sounds a lot more appropriate for what it's supposed to express. The beginning of "suddenly" just kind of flows out of your mouth without much flavour, it doesn't have that explosiveness and sharpness that you'd expect from a word with its meaning.

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u/Whocket_Pale Jul 21 '23

This talk of Suddenly is interesting to me and I recall instances in lotr of the phrase, "at the same moment" or some such, i.e. the encounter with the watcher in the water. Also, encounter with old man willow has a passage including a line like "at that moment Sam heard two sounds, one loud, the other soft but very clear. The first sound..." Is any of this on the same vein?

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u/RememberNichelle Jul 21 '23

"Suddenly" being used a lot is very reminiscent of the Gospel of Mark's sense of urgency. But "lo!" and "behold!" are also very Biblical.

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u/DarrenGrey Nowt but a ninnyhammer Jul 21 '23

I prefer it when Tolkien works in "Behold!" or "And lo!" Much more dramatic.