The other day on episode 193of the The Prancing Pony Podcast Alan and Shawn were discussing Treebeard's statement to Merry and Pippin in TT 3.4.
There are Ents and Ents, you know; or there are Ents and things that look like Ents but ain't, as you might say.
I think there's a bit more wordplay going on here than the simple charming slant rhyme of 'Ents but ain't'. Paradoxically, I caught the wordplay because of Philip Pullman, well known for being no fan of Tolkien. In chapter 7 of The Golden Compass, for example, Lyra says:
'I en't never deceived anyone!'
Lyra uses 'en't' for 'ain't repeatedly, as do other characters. Even without an electronic copy of the text, examples abound. According to the OED, 'en't' and 'ent' are but two of many regional and nonstandard variations on 'ain't'. Lyra is of course also a native of Oxford, brought up in one of its many colleges, but her world is not quite ours. So there, 'en't' seems more common than here.
But it's common enough here for Tolkien to pun on it.
(I just wanted to dash off a quick post here. I would welcome any further information on the use of 'ent' and en't', particularly around Oxford.
Ha! On my recent Pullman kick, the "en't" indeed made me think of Ents... but I did NOT remember Treebeard's use of "ain't" when talking about things that ent Ents.
ReplyDelete(On a bit of a tangent, the sentiment reminds me a little of Mr. Beaver in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, expressing skepticism about "anything that's going to be human and isn't yet, or used to be human once and isn't now, or ought to be human and isn't." I wonder if Lewis may have felt a pedagogical constraint to avoid using "ain't" in his first-ever children's book.)
Very limited data here, but can confirm that at least in 1966/1967, when I lived in Oxford & went to a working-class State primary school, the accent I picked up differed considerably from the one my brother acquired at an infants' school on the right side of the tracks. Our house was near the site of the infamous Cutteslowe Walls, a bit of which still remained: brick & topped with revolving spikes, built in the 1930s to separate the residents of a housing estate (where my school was) from the genteel homeowners nearby (where we lived -- near the border but safely middle class, as was my brother's school). The working-class Oxford accent resembled Cockney -- even the odd dropped h -- & "ain't" was indeed "en't." ("Ennit" for "ain't it" was used more -- "Ao, ennit orful" -- than "en't" alone; when I came home with that one, my parents were horrified. Good early training in code-switching.) So perhaps Lyra's "en't" would have come from Roger.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much. I suspected that something like that might be the case.
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