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From The Hobbit, first chapter:

“Confusticate and bebother these dwarves!” he said aloud. “Why don’t they come and lend a hand?” Lo and behold! there stood Balin and Dwalin at the door of the kitchen, and Fili and Kili behind them, and before he could say knife they had whisked the trays and a couple of small tables into the parlour and set out everything afresh.

"Lo and behold! there stood..." should be "Lo and behold! There stood...", no?

“Bless me!” said Thorin, “haven’t you got a map? and didn’t you hear our song? and haven’t we been talking about all this for hours?”

Shouldn't this be:

“Bless me!” said Thorin, “haven’t you got a map? And didn’t you hear our song? And haven’t we been talking about all this for hours?”

?

N Z
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    He's not starting a new sentence. He's using an exclamation mark in the middle of a sentence: see the answers to this question. There is a similar question about question marks mid-sentence. – Stuart F Mar 13 '22 at 13:17
  • @StuartF What I find frustrating about your comment is that I would never object to the examples the person gives in your linked-to question. Those examples he gives seem entirely natural to me. The ones I provide are completely different in nature to me. – N Z Mar 13 '22 at 13:30
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    We look to our classics to define our standards, so Can you really start? gets a yes. And Shouldn't this be capitalized also gets a yes. Probably best to use the lowercase only for shock value. – Yosef Baskin Mar 13 '22 at 14:44
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    Google Books has many different contexts featuring the sequence *lo and behold there stood*. Glancing at the first couple of dozen, the only one that capitalises *There* seems to be a TEFL text authored by people with non-Anglophone looking names, who apparently *arbitrarily* "corrected" Tolkien's usage as cited here. – FumbleFingers Mar 13 '22 at 15:19
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    (Imho, true Anglophones would know better than to take issue with Tolkien's orthography, of all writers! :) – FumbleFingers Mar 13 '22 at 15:20
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    Tolkien was a linguist and everything he did, including his punctuation, was done on purpose. So there isn't any Shouldn't this be...? for a published best-selling author who was also an authority on language and writing. If you want bad examples, read a newspaper. If Tolkien didn't follow the rules you've been taught, the conclusion to draw is that you've been taught the wrong rules. – John Lawler Mar 13 '22 at 15:32

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