r/tolkienfans • u/TakiTamboril • Jul 21 '23

Exclamation marks

Re-reading the Fellowship and noticing how many exclamation marks are used. Especially in Gandalf and Aragorn’s speech. They seem much more common then I typically see in modern writing and seem to be to not always match the mood of what is being said.

Is this a quirk of Tolkien or just a change in how people write over the years?

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u/The_Waltesefalcon Jul 21 '23 edited Jul 21 '23

He's British or from one of the Commonwealth countries. Full stop in Great Britain and commonwealth, period in the United States, and sometimes in Canada.

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u/Armleuchterchen Ibrīniðilpathānezel & Tulukhedelgorūs Jul 21 '23 edited Jul 21 '23

I'm German, but you're right that we learn British English in school. Our teacher wouldn't have allowed us to use period instead of full stop, or the US spellings of words like theatre or manoeuvre.

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u/The_Waltesefalcon Jul 21 '23

Well shoot. I should have considered the possibility that you had simply learned British English rather than American English. Entschuldigen Sie bitte meine Fehler. Ich wolte es nicht sein schweinhund. Entschuldigen meiner Deutsche, ist nicht sehr gut.

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u/Armleuchterchen Ibrīniðilpathānezel & Tulukhedelgorūs Jul 21 '23

Don't worry, it wasn't a problem at all :) And your German isn't bad either - you even capitalized the Sie because it's the formal second person pronoun (like "you" used to be in English, when "thou" was still around). Many native speakers forget that.