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Tolkien's Prose Style and its Literary and Rhetorical Effects

W J.R.R. Tolkien’s prose style in The Lord of the Rings has been both attacked and defended, its details have seldom been analyzed in terms of specific aesthetic effects. This lacuna in Tolkien criticism is certainly understandable, given the perceived necessity of first defending Tolkien’s work as a worthy object of serious literary (rather than sociological or pop-cultural) study: critics have spent much effort countering ill-informed and even logically contradictory claims about Tolkien’s work, and the discussion of writing style has had to be given short shrift in the effort to make the study of Tolkien academically respectable. But the analytical neglect of Tolkien’s prose style has had the unfortunate effect of ceding important ground to Tolkien’s detractors, who, with simple, unanalyzed quotations, point to some word or turn of phrase and, in essence, sniff that such is not the stuff of good literature. I would even contend that a reaction against Tolkien’s non-Modernist prose style is just as influential in the rejection of Tolkien by traditional literary scholars as is Modernist antipathy to the themes of his work, the ostensible political content of The Lord of the Rings, the popularity of the books, or even Tolkien’s position outside the literary mainstream of his day (all of which have been well documented and countered by recent critics). A complete analysis (or justification) of Tolkien’s style is beyond the scope of any one essay, but in this paper I hope to make a start at a criticism of some of the passages most obviously unlike traditional Modernist literature: the battle of Éowyn against the Lord of the Nazgûl and Denethor’s self-immolation. The style of these passages is not, contra some of Tolkien’s most perceptive critics, over-wrought or archaic. Rather, Tolkien produces a tight interweaving of literary references—specifically, links to Shakespeare’s King Lear in both style and thematic substance— with grammatical, syntactic, lexical, and even aural effects. His writing thus achieves a stylistic consistency and communicative economy that rivals his Modernist contemporaries. At the same time his treatment of Lear shows his engagement with ideas (in this case, the problem of pride and despair among the powerful) that have long been considered among the great themes of English literature.