Here is the text that was discussed a few weeks ago:
To this all agreed, but their retreat was now difficult. It might well prove impossible. Only a few paces from the ashes of their fire the snow lay many feet deep, higher than the heads of the hobbits; in places it had been scooped and piled by the wind into great drifts against the cliff.
‘If Gandalf would go before us with a bright flame, he might melt a path for you,’ said Legolas. The storm had troubled him little, and he alone of the Company remained still light of heart.
‘If Elves could fly over mountains, they might fetch the Sun to save us,’ answered Gandalf. ‘But I must have something to work on. I cannot burn snow.’ (The Ring goes South)
The auxiliary ‘
might’ is used three times here. The last two examples are in direct speech and don’t pose a problem whereas in the first paragraph ‘
might’ is used by the narrator who usually uses the past tense – as in the sentences before and after. The use of ‘
might’ in the present tense is, as Professor Olsen pointed out, peculiar, especially as the sentence ‘
It might well prove impossible’ is kind of an addendum or endorsement to the one before: ‘
their retreat was now difficult’.
How then can we read this riddle?
- ‘might’ is (as Professor Olsen suggested) the historic / narrative present, used to bring the reader right into the action.
- ‘might’ is used as past tense the same way Tolkien uses ‘must’ as past tense if speaking about something that is from the point of the narrator at this time still in the future:
- ‘Now let us go!’ he [i.e. Aragorn] said, drawing his eyes away from the South, and looking out west and north to the way that he must tread. (The Departure of Boromir)
- It seemed unfair to have put his friends to all this trouble; and he [i.e. Frodo] wondered again how he was going to break the news to them that he must leave them so soon, indeed at once. (A Conspiracy unmasked)
- ‘might’ is used as simple past of ‘may’.
As Flammifer pointed out, you usually use might / may + present perfect (i.e. it might / may well have proven impossible) to express a past hypothetical, but this would suggest, that the impossible thing, i.e. to go back and down, had already happened. But from the point of view of the narrator at this time it is still in the future, so the use of this tense doesn’t make any sense.
‘Might’ however is used as past tense of ‘may’ in certain circumstances so it might be understood as a past-tense form.
We use might as the past form of may in indirect reports:
‘That may not be true’, she said. She said that it might not be true.
- It may also be that the narrator, probably Frodo, had Gandalf’s words in his head when he reported his adventure:
To this all agreed, but their retreat was now difficult. [Gandalf said] It might well prove impossible.
Maybe there will be some more examples of ‘
might’ in the future text that will shed a clearer light on this.
