"Take the heart of me?" You can just say, "my heart."

July 15, 2009 5:00 PM

In Return of the King, Aragorn says: "I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me." What precisely does he mean by this? My confusion is with the phrase "take the heart of me." Is this a standard idiom?
posted by Busoni to Writing & Language (15 answers total)

Best answer: I wouldn't say that it's a standard idiom…but Tolkein is known for inventing his own. I understand it as translating to something like "I see in your eyes the same fear that nearly overwhelmed me" or "…should've overwhelmed me."
posted by LMGM at 5:03 PM on July 15, 2009 [2 favorites]

Best answer: The modern version would be "take the heart out of me". "Heart" is sometimes used to mean courage or drive.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 5:06 PM on July 15, 2009

"Heart" is sometimes used to mean courage

from the French derivation of "courage", yes . . .
posted by @troy at 5:09 PM on July 15, 2009

It's "take my heart", really, in a stretched kind of poetic/archaic genitive, or one you might get from an over-literal translation.

It reminds me of Cole Porter: "Night and day / Under the hide of me" -- discussed here, with a Ring Lardner parody.
posted by holgate at 5:10 PM on July 15, 2009

Best answer: Not a standard idiom, no.

I think that Tolkien was looking for a medieval-sounding equivalent of "unman me" or "deprive me of my courage."

It may also be a reference to the Old English epic, The Battle of Maldon, the language of which portrays mod (spirit/courage/intelligent competence/soul/integrity/various other positive qualities) almost as a physical object.

So Aragorn is saying "fear would take the heart of me" and echoing the structure of lines from Maldon like:

"Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre,
mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað

which Tolkien translated as
""Will shall be the sterner, heart the bolder,
spirit the greater as our strength lessens."
posted by Sidhedevil at 5:13 PM on July 15, 2009 [3 favorites]

@troy also makes a good point: if I recall correctly, Tolkien went out of his way to have his Dúnedain characters use Anglo-Saxon English, not post-Norman English. So "heart" here may just be a direct translation of "courage".
posted by Sidhedevil at 5:35 PM on July 15, 2009

Best answer: I've just grepped, and that's not in the book. It's from the movie.
posted by zadcat at 6:10 PM on July 15, 2009 [3 favorites]

LMGM has a different interpretation from that of Chocolate Pickle and the rest of the thread. Just wanted to highlight the distinction and say I think LMGM's reading is much more natural.
posted by grobstein at 6:18 PM on July 15, 2009

Yes, this kind of language is not Tolkien. It is a clumsy attempt at a Tolkien-style archaism. There are quite a few of them in the movies. ("Give up the halfling, she-elf!")
posted by stammer at 6:23 PM on July 15, 2009 [2 favorites]

I've just grepped, and that's not in the book. It's from the movie.

I knew that didn't sound right at all.
posted by frobozz at 7:14 PM on July 15, 2009

Definitely a Fran Walsh line. I'll never forgive her for cutting off Eowyn's balls, either.
posted by rokusan at 7:35 PM on July 15, 2009 [3 favorites]

I would say that, in that idiom, faked-up or not, the "would" part means something like "wants to" or "would like to", i.e. he's personifying the fear and saying the fear would like to take his heart/courage.

In modern English you use "would" in conditionals like "I would have some beer, if there was any left", but this "would" means "want to". "I would have some beer!".
posted by AmbroseChapel at 10:50 PM on July 15, 2009

It sounds to me like someone wanted to "fancy up" the speech Aragorn gives by using circumlocution of relatively common words like "dishearten".
posted by PontifexPrimus at 2:52 AM on July 16, 2009

Lionhearted means courageous (Richard Coer De Lion, for example), therefore it would be a reasonable opposite that having no heart means having no courage. Thus to take the heart in this line would mean to lose courage through fear.

Sidhedevil makes a good point about Old English being a heavy influence on Tolkein.
posted by Coobeastie at 3:31 AM on July 16, 2009

Best answer: The scriptwriter may not have known this, but: in archaic English, "of" can sometimes mean "from": e.g. "Take this of me" = "Take this from me."
posted by Pallas Athena at 5:17 AM on July 16, 2009