1. Tolkien's Usage of "Thou" and "Thee" I. Thou, Thee I grew up
in a religiously conservative environment, of the Protestant
sort. As this was some decades ago, the preferred Bible version
was, of course, the King James. By reading and studying the
Bible, and memorizing parts of it, I acquired an intuitive
familiarity with the archaic language in use 500 years ago,
before I ever read The Lord of the Rings, or heard of Tolkien. I
say "intuitive", because I absorbed the proper grammatical usage
without understanding. As "Thou" and "Thee" were used mostly for
God, and often capitalized, to boot, I associated them with
formal usage, and "you, you" with ordinary usage. When I first
read LOTR, and dived into the appendices, at about age thirteen,
I was quite puzzled by Tolkien's reference to "thou, thee" as
familiar as opposed to the formal "you, you". It was only when I
took high school German, and later Spanish and French, that I
realized "thou, thee" were cognates for "du, dich", "tu, ti",
"tu, te", all of which