Archaic words in the novel “The lord of the rings: the fellowship of the ring” as an element of J.R.R Tolkien's individual style

Statement of the problem. The vocabulary of a particular language is constantly updated, getting rid of redundant words, and simultaneously, enriching with new lexical units. The process of word obsolescence is a complex phenomenon, the result of which may be its gradual disappearance. Apart from sporadic cases of reactivation of passive vocabulary, most of the words from the obsolete vocabulary are gradually forgotten, eventually becoming completely incomprehensible to native speakers. Archaic words belong to the field of vocabulary, which is characterized by mobility and changeable sphere of use in any language. The most vivid manifestation of author’s style is in deviation from the literary norm of the language when the writer actively searches for the new linguistic forms or reinterprets archaic ones. One of the urgent problems in modern linguistics is the writer’s influence on the language he uses as the most important element of his individual style. The language of a literary work as a way of conveying content, is not only correlated, but also connected with this content; the lexicon depends on the content and on the author’s attitude towards it. The purpose of the article is to identify the role of archaisms in the formation of the individual J.R.R. Tolkien’s style on the example of the novel “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring”. Methodology is as follows: method of linguistic description, component analysis method, methods of lexicographic and contextual analysis. Conclusion. The modern trend of studying individual style of a writer is based on the principle that every literary work has certain specific features which characterize the writer’s style. The analysis of the language material reveals the fact that J. R. R. Tolkien’s individual style dictionary includes a large number of obsolete words as a hallmark of his individual style. The suggested passages clearly show how the writer uses morphological features in combination with poetic and archaic vocabulary to model the represented reality. The motivated selection of certain lexical units is dictated by the content and genre of the work and includes the use of archaizing syntactic structures, the entire spectrum of obsolete vocabulary, poetic words, author’s neologisms.