Like many, I have just read The Hobbit again, which I hadn’t done since reading it to Veronica as a girl. Even when solemn, Tolkien knows what he is doing with language. It was at his most relaxed that he could be careless, as in the early pages where he too often repeats dreadful (in its modern sense). But he does not employ the ‘Wardour Street’ fake antique that Fowler complained of in others: words like anent, trow, ween, whilom or wot. As a professional philologist he knew the history of every word he used.
Some of the words that give a feeling of antiquity to The Hobbit end with –en. This suffix is used in six different ways in English, and I won’t go through them all. Tolkien uses one kind twice in a single line of the song sung while the barrels are being rolled from the cellars of the Elvenking.
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