The prose style of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth books, especially The Lord of the Rings, is remarkably varied. Commentators have noted that Tolkien selected linguistic registers to suit different peoples, such as simple and modern for Hobbits and more archaic for Dwarves, Elves, and the Rohirrim. This allowed him to use the Hobbits to mediate between the modern reader and the heroic and archaic realm of fantasy. The Orcs, too, are depicted in different voices: the Orc-leader Grishnákh speaks in bullying tones, while the minor functionary Gorbag uses grumbling modern speech.
Tolkien's prose style was attacked by scholars of literature such as Catharine R. Stimpson and Burton Raffel in the 1960s, and by Michael Moorcock in the 1970s. It has more recently been analysed more favourably, both by other novelists such as Ursula Le Guin, and by scholars such as Brian Rosebury and Tom Shippey. Where Stimpson called Tolkien's diction needlessly complex, Rosebury argues that even in the example she chose, Tolkien was as plain and simple as Ernest Hemingway. He analyses a passage where Merry has just helped to kill the Witch-King. Tolkien begins this in plain language, modulating into a higher register to deal with the echoes of ancient and magical history.
Syntax and diction
Hostile literary reception
In his lifetime, J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy writing, especially The Lord of the Rings, became extremely popular with the public, but was rejected by literary figures such as Burton Raffel, partly on stylistic grounds. Catharine R. Stimpson, a scholar of English, wrote in 1969 that Tolkien not only "shun[s] ordinary diction, he also wrenches syntax". She supported her argument by inventing what she asserted were Tolkienistic sentences such as "To an eyot he came." In 1978, the science fiction writer Michael Moorcock, in his essay Epic Pooh, criticized Tolkien for utilizing a comforting and unchallenging writing style reflective of a "conservative misanthropism", and in 2001, The New York Times reviewer Judith Shulevitz criticized his style's "pedantry", saying that he "formulated a high-minded belief in the importance of his mission as a literary preservationist, which turns out to be death to literature itself."
Plain as Hemingway
The scholar of humanities Brian Rosebury systematically replies to each item in Stimpson's attack, showing that Tolkien mostly uses plain modern English. He locates the three places where Tolkien uses "eyot", arguing that "island" could not in these instances be used instead without loss of meaning. In "Still there are dangerous places even before we come there: rocks and stony eyots in the stream", "islands" is possible, he writes, but eyot' more firmly suggests something small enough to be overlooked until one runs aground". All three, Rosebury writes, are unexceptional in 20th century syntax: "Ernest Hemingway could have written them". More recently, Thomas Kullmann and Dirk Siepmann have applied corpus linguistics to analyse his text quantitatively.
Justified grandeur
Rosebury studies several examples of Tolkien's diction in The Lord of the Rings at length, citing passages and analysing them in detail to show what they achieve. One is the moment when the Hobbit Merry has helped to kill the Witch-King, the leader of the Ringwraiths, and finds himself standing alone on the battlefield. Part of the quoted passage runs:
Rosebury writes that this begins with "essentially plain syntax", as if Merry were speaking; but "woven into the clauses" are subtle clues in the syntax, like "heed" rather than "notice", and the Hobbit's full name Meriadoc to stay in touch with the un-Hobbitlike "heroic tonality" of the passage. The first sentence of the second paragraph, he notes, heralds a shift of mood, as does the following "But glad would he have been", with effective use of inversion. Rosebury shows how awkward the uninverted form would have been: "But he who wrought it long ago ... would have been glad to know its fate." The passage ends with a powerfully musical sentence with assonances between "blade", "wield", "dealt" and so on; alliteration with "wield", "wound", "will"; memorable phrases like "unseen sinews"; and the immediacy of the present participles "cleaving...breaking", the implied "and" importantly suppressed. Rosebury states that the wide range of styles could have become an untidy mess, but the narrative is big enough to allow Tolkien to modulate gracefully between low and high.
Incorporating the archaic, even Old English
In his book The Power of Tolkien's Prose, Steve Walker writes that Tolkien's diction incorporates both newly-coined words like "eleventy-first" and "beautifuller", and occasional archaism. He notes that there are only a few actually archaic words, and that Tolkien uses them only rarely, such as "alas", "thou", and "whither". All the same, the diction of The Lord of the Rings "manages to seem in its essence nostalgic, maybe even archaic".
Tolkien goes furthest with the Riders of Rohan, giving them "Anglo-Saxon syntactic patterns" and diction which is "stirring, alliteratively stately, [and] stern". He gives Rohan speakers words "rescued from total obscurity" like "éored", Old English for "a troop of cavalry", "dwimmerlaik", and "mearas". The names of the Rohirrim are straightforwardly Old English: Éomer and Háma (characters in Beowulf), Éowyn ("Horse-joy"), Théoden ("King"). So too is their language, with words like Éothéod ("Horse-people"), Éored ("Troop of cavalry"), and Eorlingas ("people of Eorl", whose name means "[Horse-]lord", cf. Earl), where many words and names begin with the word for "horse", eo[h]. Finally, Tolkien has his Riders of Rohan speak a few phrases directly in Old English, as when Éomer shouts "" ("Long Live Théoden!").
Walker comments, however, that much of the impression of antiquity comes not from Old English but from more recent, more familiar words such as "deem", "moot", and "wight", and that Tolkien combines these with words that are still current like "darkling" and "westering", thus bringing out their "archaic overtones".
Simple but varied
In 2001, the fantasy novelist Ursula Le Guin wrote a sympathetic account of Tolkien's prose style, arguing as Michael Drout writes that "the craftsmanship of The Lord of the Rings is consistent at all levels of construction, from the individual sentence to the macro structure of the journey, a repeated stress and release pattern". Allan Turner called Le Guin's contribution an "insightful though rather impressionistic appraisal"; he demonstrated with examples that Tolkien's style is both generally simple, using parataxis – sentences without subordinate clauses or causal conjunctions – and varied, adapted to the race and standing of the speaker, and using special stylistic effects at key moments in the story.
Turner describes how Tolkien varies his style for the second eucatastrophe in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. At the moment when the horsemen of Rohan are beginning to tire, and the battle is hanging in the balance, their leader, Éomer, realises that he is looking not at the disastrous arrival of an enemy fleet of the Corsairs of Umbar, but at the unlooked-for arrival of Aragorn and Men of southern Gondor in captured ships:
Turner notes that the paratactic style here, with the repeated use of "and" in the manner of the New Testament, is "stylistically marked", indicating something out of the ordinary. The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey calls such deliberate use of the conjunction, avoiding explicit logical connection, "loose semantic fit". Turner writes that readers experience the shift in style as "an impression of exalted register" because of the biblical association, even though Tolkien uses few unusual or archaic words in the passage.
Suggestive, inviting the reader's response
The poet W. H. Auden, reviewing The Lord of the Rings in 1956, wrote that "I rarely remember a book about which I have had such violent arguments." Walker comments that Tolkien has probably been praised more than any other 20th century fiction author, noting that he has been likened to everything from the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Book of Genesis, the Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Prose Edda to the prose of Augustine, Henry James, Joyce, Kafka, and D. H. Lawrence, the poetry of Ariosto, Arnold, Blake, Browning, Chaucer, Coleridge, Dante, Keats, Malory, Spenser, Milton, Shelley, Shakespeare, and Tennyson, or indeed the music of Verdi and Wagner. Walker adds that he has equally been criticised from many directions, the only constant factor being "violent" disagreement on almost every point. He suggests that a cause of this confusion may be the "richness of his art", so complex as to elicit a "kaleidoscopic" variety of reactions. Walker's explanation of Tolkien's success is that Tolkien's writing is "strikingly invitational", relying on suggestion to elicit a vivid and individual response from each reader. The price of this is that responses vary widely, as the critics' comments show.
Characterisation by style
From the 1990s onwards, novelists and scholars began to adopt a more favourable view of Tolkien's place in literature. The 2014 A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien in particular marked Tolkien's acceptance in the literary canon, with essays by major Tolkien scholars on style and many other aspects of his writing. Kullmann and Siepmann observe that characters such as Sam Gamgee and Gollum are marked out by their non-standard speech. Walker comments that Tolkien uses language to expand his readers' imaginations:
And further:
Hobbits as mediators with the heroic
Turner states that The Lord of the Rings makes use of several styles of prose, with discrete linguistic registers for different characters, peoples, and cultures. In his view, Tolkien intentionally creates a contrast between the simple modern style of the Hobbits and more archaizing language for the Dwarves, Elves, and Riders of Rohan. The genre of the work begins with novelistic realism in the Shire, where the down-to-earth Hobbits live, climbing to high romance for the defeat of the Dark Lord Sauron, and descending to realism again for the return to the Shire. Kullmann and Siepmann comment that from the first page of the novel, written from the point of view of the people of Hobbiton, the reader hears a "common-sensical, no-nonsense [Hobbit] perspective, from which fantastic, fairy-tale creatures like dwarves appear 'outlandish'." Further, Turner notes, Tolkien avoids the expression of modern concepts when describing pre-modern cultures.
Tolkien stated that he intentionally changed the speaking style of certain individual characters to suit their interactions with other characters, mentioning that "the more learned and able among the Hobbits", including Frodo, were "quick to note and adopt the style of those whom they met"., Appendix F, "The Languages and Peoples of the Third Age" Shippey explains that the Hobbits serve as mediators between the ordinary modern world and the heroic and archaic fantasy realm, making The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings readily accessible. Such mediation is effected early in The Lord of the Rings by having the Hobbits present the archaic characters in their own way, as when Pippin "attempts a formal register" with the words "O Wise People!", book 1, ch. 3 "Three is Company" on meeting the High Elf Gildor in the woods of the Shire.
Ancient clashing with modern