geordie
Tol Eressea
Feb 3 2013, 9:47am
Views: 2779
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I think it's a matter of opinion -
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- here's a post from that forum:
 Originally Posted by Callace  Tolkien's style of writing, even at the time, was incredibly old fashioned and dull. He was greatly influenced by poets like William Wordsworth who specialized in pastoral poetry hundreds of years previously. Even in the 1950s, writing that drones on and on about shrubbery and forestry details was viewed as uninteresting. And the reason the LoTR films are better than the books is just that. The story was great, but it was buried in a mountain of long-windedly-bad writing."
to which another poster, Hollowhisp, replies:
"I'd disagree, the attention to detail is what allowed lord of the rings to feel like such a fully fleshed out world. The writing style is meant to appear old, he was paying tribute to the entire catalog of English story telling. You have references to mulitple anglo-saxon poems, Shakespeare, the metaphysical poets, the pastoral epic... the list goes on. "
Now my opinion coincides with that of Hollowhisp, and not at all with that of Callace; not least because Hollowhisp's is an informed opinion and Callaces's is not. There's no evidence that Tolkien was 'influenced' by Wordsworth who, incidentally, was not writing 'hundreds of years previously' to Tolkien, but who would have been regarded by JRR as a modern writer (but then Tolkien regarded Shakespeare as modern).
Like any good writer, Tolkien wrote to his strengths. His prime motivation for writing LotR was, as he said in his Foreword to the 2nd edition, to 'try his hand at a really long story that would hold readers' attention, to excite them and deeply move them'. (paraphrase from memory). He also noted that, from a look at his fanmail, the results were a bit mixed - some of his readers didn't like certain parts of the book, while others found the same parts specially appealing.
I think that his references to the natural world are part of Tolkien's strengths - he loved botany as a child. (in a piece for 'Attacks of Taste' - (a book about which books influenced writers) - he mentions a book on the flowers of the Cape as one of his favourites). Tolkien also enjoyed history as an art - he says in his foreword that he prefers history over allegory; history ' whether true or feigned'. And let's not forget language or, as Tolkien might have written, Language with a capital 'L'. I seem to recall that Tolkien's biographer Humphrey Carpenter summed up JRR as one whose greatest influences in life were his family, his faith and Language. I say, influences in his life; this doesn't necessarily mean that we can dutifully trawl through TH and LotR looking for definite examples of these three; but they are there all the same.
To my mind Tolkien's greatest strength was that he was not a 'Great Writer' - whatever people mean by that. But he was a great story-teller, and also a teller of great stories, from the large and magnificent (LotR) to the small and exquisitely made (Smith of Wootton Major; 'Beorhtnoth' ; and esp. Leaf by Niggle) But that's just my opinion.
(This post was edited by geordie on Feb 3 2013, 9:53am)
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