Hazards of writing Tolkien fic

[nineveh_uk]

Realising that you have been inconsistent in your use of the second person pronoun in an annoying way.

Also, what on earth am I going to call it? Tennyson would work, but is unsuitable. Suspect I shall fall back on some sort of 'extract from the Tale of Years' theme. Of the need for a summary, I shall not speak.

Comments

[azdak]

A mix of thous and yous?

[nineveh_uk]

Yup. Which is OK within a conversation for a good reason* but I'd come up with different lines at different times, so I'd had the same person, in the same context, thou-ing in one paragraph and you-ing in another. I have gone with mostly you in the end, which is what Tolkien seems to.

*Top example: Eowyn and the Lord of the Nazgul, in which she uses you, he thous, and it demonstrates how to use thee and thy correctly as well.

[azdak]

My years of sitting through high Anglican church services as a kid have left me devoid of religious beliefs but with an excellent command of thee and thou (and thy and thine) but semantically I can't help interpreting it as the appropriate mode of address for an awful (in the high Anglican sense) God rather than the English equivalent of "du". Which buggers up the effect Tolkien was aiming for (and, indeed, much of "Kim").

[sam_t]

Not to mention the theological point of addressing God as 'tu'/'du'. Me too, on all of the above (except that most of the services weren't high as such, just occasionally BCP, and people had a tendency to use whatever Lord's Prayer they'd learned first, wherever was printed in front of them).

[azdak]

Yes, thou certainly never made me feel on more intimate terms with God. It was all very ritualistic and formal.

[nineveh_uk]

Alas, Mrs Green's primary school assemblies (Good News Bible) and occasional church parade with Methodist Brownies were excellent for jolly hymns, but absolutely rubbish in terms of the language of the KJV/BCP.

I found Kim rather stilted for the same reason.