"Subcreators Gone Wild"

Atît de multe teorii,
Atît de multe profeţii
De ce avem nevoie
Acum i-un schimb de idei
Atunci cînd ne e frică
Ne ascundem în reverii
Schimb de idei, schimb de idei
De ce avem nevoie
Acum i-un schimb de idei.

 

"It's time for another style-moment"

 Prof. Corey Olsen:

1.

two passages:

A)  But she had disowned her Master, desiring to be mistress of her own lust, taking all things to herself to feed her emptiness; and she fled to the south, escaping the assaults of the Valar and the hunters of Oromë, for their vigilance had ever been to the north, and the south was long unheeded. Thence she had crept towards the light of the Blessed Realm; for she hungered for light and hated it.
In a ravine she lived, and took shape as a spider of monstrous form, weaving her black webs in a cleft of the mountains. There she sucked up all light that she could find, and spun it forth again in dark nets of strangling gloom, until no light more could come to her abode; and she was famished.

B) Then the Unlight of Ungoliant rose up even to the roots of the Trees, and Melkor sprang upon the mound; and with his black spear he smote each Tree to its core, wounded them deep, and their sap poured forth as it were their blood, and was spilled upon the ground. But Ungoliant sucked it up, and going then from Tree to Tree she set her black beak to their wounds, till they were drained; and the poison of Death that was in her went into their tissues and withered them, root, branch, and leaf; and they died. And still she thirsted, and going to the Wells of Varda she drank them dry; but Ungoliant belched forth black vapours as she drank, and swelled to a shape so vast and hideous that Melkor was afraid.

One of my favourite stylistic techniques that Tolkien does, and he does it on several occasions is where he has a long sentence and then he ends it with a final, simple clause, like "and she was famished." Just like how he describes the fell beast in the Battle of Pellenor Fields and he ends the long flowery description with "and it stank."

The great shadow descended like a falling cloud. And behold! it was a winged creature: if bird, then greater than all other birds, and it was naked, and neither quill nor feather did it bear, and its vast pinions were as webs of hide between horned fingers; and it stank.

I love the way he punctuates that. I believe it's one of the things about The Silmarillion and its style that works so well in audio performance because so much of it is rhythm. Notice how he does the exact same thing with the Trees: "and the poison of Death that was in her went into their tissues and withered them, root, branch, and leaf; and they died." We get those clear "ok, breathe now"-moments. In Medieval manuscripts you don't get punctuation - you don't NEED punctuation if you're writing properly.

That strangeness of style is one of the things that makes the Silmarillion so re-readable; it is such an obstacle at first to so many readers and it becomes something which is such an essential part of the beauty later on, and it's so elegant and so strange to our normal speech that it makes it really easy to savour it again and again.

2.

That scene of the attack of the Trees is terrific and a couple of things that you notice around that scene in terms of Tolkien describing the sounds before and after the attack. He describes the Teleri singing upon the shores before the attack:

Now it was a time of festival, as Melkor knew well. [...] and at each first gathering of fruits Manwë made a high feast for the praising of Eru, when all the peoples of Valinor poured forth their joy in music and song upon Taniquetil. [...] There came the Vanyar, and there came the Noldor of Tirion, and the Maiar were gathered together, and the Valar were arrayed in their beauty and majesty; and they sang before Manwë and Varda in their lofty halls, or danced upon the green slopes of the Mountain that looked west towards the Trees. In that day the streets of Valmar were empty, and the stairs of Tirion were silent; and all the land lay sleeping in peace.
Only the Teleri beyond the mountains still sang upon the shores of the sea; for they recked little of seasons or times, and gave no thought to the cares of the Rulers of Arda, or the shadow that had fallen on Valinor, for it had not touched them, as yet.

and the after the attack he describes that the only sound was the sounds of them wailing in the darkness:

Soon the Holy Mountain stood alone, a last island in a world that was drowned. All song ceased. There was silence in Valinor, and no sound could be heard, save only from afar there came on the wind through the pass of the mountains the wailing of the Teleri like the cold cry of gulls.

3.
One other thing I would point out: when we're talking about Ungoliant's relationship with light "for she hungered for light and hated it." Does that sound like anybody we know? Gollum. It's exactly like Gollum's relationship with The Ring.