I don't think this "rebellion" is quite as revolutionary as the guy makes it out to be, especially after the "rebellion" is explained.
Saturday, August 09, 2025
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Well that certainly was much ado about nothing.
ReplyDeleteI will admit that I was not favorably disposed toward this guy from the very start. He's an adult and he's just now reading LOTR for the first time? He doesn't know how to properly pronounce "Sauron"? Yeah, I think two strikes is enough. Is that snobbish? Damn straight it is.
He sounds like someone who just discovered something that everyone has known for ages now and is super excited about it--which, I guess, is exactly what's going on. Maybe it's cool if you've never read Tolkien before. (And I will admit that, my snobbish disdain aside, I do think it is cool that people are still discovering and falling in love with Tolkien's writing.)
All that being said, I agree with you that this is perhaps not the "rebellion" that he thinks it is (although I don't know if he ever used that word). For starters, Tolkien wasn't a professional writer, but he was a philologist, so he was very sensitive to issues of language in written and oral texts. He often did things differently just because they sounded better that way. Before Tolkien, for example, the adjectival form of "elf" was "elfin." Tolkien was the one who decided it should be spelled "elven" (and who also lost his shit when his editors and proofreaders changed it back to "elfin"). I would also argue that Tolkien was being consistent here, since the pronoun is always capitalized in Gollum's speech.
Oh, and as recovering CW major, I can tell you do not learn things like consistent punctuation in writing classes. It's kind of assumed that you know this stuff by the time you get to writing class. And the preference for active voice over passive voice is not a "rule" in the same way that grammatical rules are. Yes, I am nitpicking now.
Sorry you had to watch that.
DeleteI was left thinking that anyone who's ever read a Bible has encountered the capitalization talked about here. It's neither strange nor rebellious.
Yeah, like I said--little kid discovering something completely normal and getting way too excited about it. If I didn't know any better, I might think it was a parody of YT video essays.
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