quaint

 Quaint and foreign are similar concepts. Quaint is the feeling one gets from something old-fashioned, with a sense of charm. Something can only be old-fashioned after the fact, not in its own original moment. It is a differential feeling, then. Foreign is also foreign to me.  It's not something that is absolute. I fear the appeals to foreigness in translation theory are ideologically charged. We shouldn't talk about foreigners, but about a second language, the same way we talk about learning a second language, not a foreign one.  

I was looking at Arnold's original criticism of Newman's Homer, and Newman's response.  Newman seems to feel that Homer is quaint from the perspective of later antiquity, say 5th century Athens. But why is that the point of comparison?  Homer wasn't quaint in his time period. Old and new are entirely relative concepts. In the year 1000, that was the latest year those people had had so far. They weren't medieval from their own perspective, right? Can you imagine them saying, "Hey, Mom, jump into the 11th century already." 

I guess with Tolkien, the quaintness is baked in. In other words, he wanted his Hobbits to seem quaint from the reader's perspective, rather than living in their own present space.