Detecting the Hand of the 'Translator' in The Lord of the Rings

Yesterday in my effort to catch up to Corey Olsen in Exploring the Lord of the Rings, I was listening to him talk about detecting the hand of the translator in The Lord of the Rings. Not the translator who turns Tolkien's English into German or French or Japanese, but the one who took the "original" Westron text and rendered it into English. According to the runes and tengwar on the title page, this is Tolkien himself of course. 

Corey was rightly noting that certain touches are obvious. For example, in Gandalf's pyrotechnic dragon which passes overhead 'like an express train' at Bilbo's party (FR 1.i.28), we encounter a simile that would have no meaning whatsoever to the inhabitants of Middle-earth. So clearly it is meant to communicate with us by the translator who is trying to get the meaning of the original across the language gap in a way in which a more 'faithful' and direct translation could not do.

I would like to suggest a few other types of clues. 

1. If you hear an echo of the Bible, that reveals the hand of the translator. 
2. If you hear an echo of Shakespeare or Chaucer or any writer of the Primary World, that reveals the hand of the translator.
3. If you meet an image or symbol that has meaning in the Primary World, but for which none can be discerned in the Secondary World, that reveals the hand of the translator. 

Let's take a quick look at a few examples. 

In Shelob's Lair we learn of Gollum's relationship with Shelob in a phrase that seems to evoke the words of the 23rd psalm, in a nightmarish antithesis:

• '...and the darkness of her evil will walked through all the ways of his weariness beside him, cutting him off from light and regret...' (TT 4.ix.723).
•  'yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou are with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.'

In The Shadow of the Past the allusion to Chaucer is obvious:

• 'there were several meals at which it snowed food and rained drink, as hobbits say.' (FR 1.ii.42)
• 'It snewed in his hous of mete and drink' (Cantebury Tales, General Prologue line 345).

'Mete' in Chaucer just means 'food.' Tolkien also adds to the humor by claiming the phrase as the hobbits' own. (Of course Chaucer may have been a hobbit. Do we have any idea how tall he was?)

In The Stairs of Cirith Ungol a nod to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar warns us (as if we needed the warning at this point) that Gollum is no one to be trusted even in the moment in which he comes closest to repenting of his plan to betray Frodo and Sam.

• 'A strange expression passed over his lean hungry face' (TT 4.viii.714).
• 'Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look' (Julius Caesar 1.ii.195).

Anyone who knows Macbeth will easily think of quite a few others which I won't detail here.

The two references Frodo makes to 'the wheel of fire' he sees in his mind I have discussed at length elsewhere. The image has many connections in the Primary World, but none at all in the legendarium.

There's a lot of ground to be explored here.