an attempt to solve’. But a creative writer cannot resolve those incompatible assumptions
about the nature of language and linguistic function. The following passages throw some
light on this difference:
The glade in the ring of trees was evidently a meeting-place of the wolves ...in the
middle of the circle was a great grey wolf. He spoke to them in the dreadful
language of the Wargs. Gandalf understood it. Bilbo did not, but it sounded terrible
to him, and as if all their talk was about cruel and wicked things, as it was.
The Hobbit, Tolkien 1937/1987:91Charlie did not know much about ice... The only piece he had known came from a
refrigerated boat, and was left on the wharf, cloudy white, not clear, not even very
clean. Charlie had waited until the boat went with its load of lamb carcasses, and
then gone for it. By then it had melted. There was a puddle, a wisp of lambswool,
and nothing more.
He did not even think this was the same stuff. He did not think this place was
part of the world. He thought it was the mouth of some other existence coming up
from the ground, being drilled through the rock. The pieces coming away were like
the fragments from the bit of the carpentry brace Papa used for setting up shelves.
An iron thing would come from the ground, Charlie thought, and another Papa would
blow through the hole to make it clear. Last time all the dust had gone into
Charlie’s eye, because he was still looking through. Papa had thought him such a
fool.
Low Tide, Mayne 1992:163–164The Tolkien and Mayne passages represent a principal character at a moment of
incomprehension: Bilbo hears a foreign language, and has no actual referents for the
verbal signs; Charlie perceives a physical phenomenon (the point at which pieces of ice
break from a glacier into a river, though glacier is not introduced for two more
paragraphs) and struggles with the socio-linguistic resources at his disposal to find
meaning in it. A significant difference between the two is the implication that the Wargs’
language communicates meanings beyond sense. On a simple level, this is to say no
more than that it is obvious what the sounds made by a nasty horde of wolves signify.
But Tolkien directly raises the question of comprehension—‘Gandalf understood it’—and
uses his overt, controlling narrative voice to confirm that Bilbo comprehends something
which is a linguistic essential: the language is inherently ‘dreadful’ (presumably in the
fuller sense of ‘inspiring dread’); and the ‘as it was’ confirms the principle that ‘the
meaning is innate to its sound’ suggested by the lexical set ‘terrible, wicked and cruel’.
Mayne focuses on the other side of the sign/thing relationship, in effect posing a
question often posed in his novels: can a phenomenon be understood if it cannot be
signified in language? Tolkien’s shifts between narration and Bilbo’s focalisation are
clearly marked; Mayne slips much more ambiguously between these modes, a strategy
which serves to emphasise the gap between phenomena and language. The first
paragraph is a retrospective narration of Charlie’s single relevant empirical experience,
but because that ice then differed in colour and form (‘cloudy white’, ‘a puddle’) the past
THEORY AND CRITICAL APPROACHES 59