His Breath Was Taken Away: Tolkien, Barfield and Elvish Diction

Abstract

His Breath Was Taken Away:Tolkien, Barfield and Elvish Diction Christopher Gilson (bio) We all recall the scene in The Hobbit where Bilbo steals into the lair of the dragon and sees Smaug lying asleep on his treasure. Of his reaction we are told: To say that Bilbo's breath was taken away is no description at all. There are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful (H, xii, 221). In this paper I will examine what this remark implies about Elves and Men in the context of J.R.R. Tolkien's private mythology and how it may relate to the evolution of his invented languages. To begin with we have his own comments on this passage. When The Hobbit was published in 1937, the blurb on the dust-jacket flap included a comparison with Alice in Wonderland, and the statement: "Here again a professor of an abstruse subject is at play." In reaction to this Tolkien pointed out that, although Philology may be abstruse, its only example in the book is the passage cited above, which is "an odd mythological way of referring to linguistic philosophy, and a point that will (happily) be missed by any who have not read Barfield (few have), and probably by those who have" (Letters 20–22, 435). The influence of Owen Barfield's linguistic philosophy on Tolkien's writing has been thoroughly explored by Verlyn Flieger in Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien's World. But his prediction that readers will miss the point of this passage is borne out by some discussions of it. Douglas A. Anderson offers a speculation in The Annotated Hobbit, where he attributes to Flieger the suggestion: that Tolkien's letter refers to Barfield's thesis that language in its original state was premetaphoric—that there was once an ancient semantic unity of word and thing, and words therefore referred to realities. Language is now, however, no longer concrete and literal. Hence in referring to this passage in The Hobbit, Tolkien meant that Bilbo's breath was actually taken away, in a literal sense, not a metaphoric one (271). [End Page 33] But what Tolkien asserts in the text is that saying "Bilbo's breath was taken away" would not be a description, something it presumably would be if it were true in a literal sense. John D. Rateliff in The History of The Hobbit offers the opinion that Tolkien's "use of the nonstandard 'staggerment' does draw attention to the passage and suggests the essential point: that Bilbo cannot put what he feels at the moment into words. Quite literally words fail him, falling short of the reality of the experience" (535). But this is not what Bilbo's breath was taken away means in particular—words can be breath, but breath is not necessarily words. One might take the qualification of the phrase as hyperbole, a claim that it is inadequate to describe Bilbo's emotional reaction. But given Tolkien's later appeal to philology we should consider how this wording is more strictly non-descriptive in a philological sense. Syntactically the phrase is comparable to a passive sentence like My plate was taken away, expressible actively as Someone took my plate away; so "Bilbo's breath was taken away" in context is equivalent to: Something (namely the sight of Smaug and his treasure) took Bilbo's breath away. And this is figurative rather than descriptive, even if Bilbo did stop breathing for a moment, because no one literally took anything from him. To describe an experience, especially an emotional or mental one, by personification of that experience is a commonplace of our language: he was struck by a thought; a noise distracted her; or that prospect pleases me. What is philologically interesting about the usage of such verbs, whose passive form normally takes a person as its subject, while the active form has a thing or abstraction as its subject, is that the constructions are all fairly recent additions to English, most having entered the language in the last three or four centuries. This...