“Good Morning!” said Bilbo, and he meant it. The sun was shining, and the grass was very green. But Gandalf looked at him from under long bushy eyebrows that stuck out further than the brim of his shady hat.
“What do you mean?” he said. “Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?”
“All of them at once,” said Bilbo.
....
“Good morning!” he said at last. “We don’t want any adventures here, thank you. You might try over The Hill or across The Water.” By this he meant that the conversation was at an end.
“What a lot of things you do use Good morning for!” said Gandalf. “Now you mean that you want to get rid of me, and that it won’t be good till I move off.”
“Not at all, not at all, my dear sir! Let me see, I don’t think I know your name?”
“Yes, yes, my dear sir—and I do know your name, Mr. Bilbo Baggins. And you do know my name, though you don’t remember that I belong to it. I am Gandalf, and Gandalf means me! To think that I should have lived to be good-morninged by Belladonna Took’s son, as if I was selling buttons at the door!”
Italics mine.
As a child, I thought that this was just Gandalf being gently sarcastic about Bilbo's social niceties. Now that I know more about Tolkien, I see the author-as-OED-writer avatar in full flow, teasing out five different meanings from a phrase, then casually verbing it at the end.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if this was Tolkien's way of explaining to his children what he did as a job; or perhaps this was typical of the Tolkiens' conversation over breakfast?
Thanks for commenting, Clive. I am glad you're here.
ReplyDeleteHappy New Year, Tom!
ReplyDeleteThe likely source of both the Good morning and the beg your pardon to come: https://archive.org/details/dli.bengal.10689.9325/page/n33/mode/2up?view=theater (Otto Jespersen, 1924; under Free Expressions).
Happy New Year to you, Simon. Thanks for reminding me of Jespersen. I was thinking more along the lines of an author saying something that has far more to say than he meant it to say. Tolkien was of course well aware that this was the often the case. There's been so much gatekeeping vitriol spattered about in the last few years by people claiming to know what Tolkien meant when Tolkien himself continually found new meanings in his work that he admitted he had not put there consciously. But happy new year.
ReplyDeleteHappy new year, again! There is no contradiction. 'Good morning' is the prototype fairy element, which queer idioms have precisely the characteristic of meaning far more than the speaker-writer meant to say (which is implicit to Jespersen's account of formulas, such that their meaning is not discoverable by analysis).
ReplyDelete