The "Rule of Threes" As a Structural Principle in Tolkien

[Rivendell_librarian]

I believe church sermons are supposed to be in three parts.

 

[Ent]

church sermons

there are many that teach according to that theory, and books written on doing it so.
i did not (and do not) adhere to it in my teaching...

But it is to be remembered too, that much of 'church teaching, classroom style, and sermonizing' has been taken directly from the educational practices of the later years of our 'history'. That is, 'borrowed from the secular educational systems'.

It was done very differently in earlier history.. especially much earlier history.

'church' today is by and large the invention of man outside the teachings given. (But I dare not go any further with this here... wrong place, wrong time, wrong thread.)

 

[Deimos]

I believe church sermons are supposed to be in three parts.

....'church' today is by and large the invention of man outside the teachings given. (But I dare not go any further with this here... wrong place, wrong time, wrong thread.)

Let me help you out....
Those lectures --- that were/are delivered in a building that typically had steeply pitched roof with a steeple and a bell (or three) in the steeple , along with not a few bats, and inside had rows of benches and also a podium--- were supposed to be in three parts.

 

[Ugluk]

I would suggest that, rather than Tolkien deliberately choosing rules of three (or whatever) for structural reasons he did so because of the innate rightness of doing so to someone so deeply steeped in literature, especially myth and saga.

 

[Squint-eyed Southerner]

Yes, I did mention the idea earlier. However, the two needn't be mutually exclusive; the structural principle appears to be inherent in literature. That it shows up in the kind of romance Tolkien wrote should come as no surprise.

 

[Rivendell_librarian]

there are many that teach according to that theory, and books written on doing it so.
i did not (and do not) adhere to it in my teaching...

But it is to be remembered too, that much of 'church teaching, classroom style, and sermonizing' has been taken directly from the educational practices of the later years of our 'history'. That is, 'borrowed from the secular educational systems'.

It was done very differently in earlier history.. especially much earlier history.

'church' today is by and large the invention of man outside the teachings given. (But I dare not go any further with this here... wrong place, wrong time, wrong thread.)

After all these words my original post still remains valid

 

[Squint-eyed Southerner]

Perhaps I should have included "in Tolkien" in the thread title. 😄

Edit: I did. 😉

 

[Olorgando]

Out of foggy and dusty memory crawls a ... can't have been more of a hypothesis, unless the originators were out to make fools of themselves ... that very early human counting was rather limited. This must have been hypothesized to have been the case so long before the first rudiments of writing that the fog of pre-history must be many times thicker than even my memory of the ...

Anyway, supposedly at some time in the "somethinglithic" period counting was limited to "one, two, three ... more".

 

[Squint-eyed Southerner]

I hope to drag this thread back on topic at some point, but for now will say that it's usually framed as "one, two, three, many" -- though Discworld trolls advanced to "one, two, three, many, lots".