Here Spring was already busy about them: fronds pierced moss and mould, larches were green-fingered, small flowers were opening in the turf, birds were singing. Ithilien, the garden of Gondor now desolate kept still a dishevelled dryad loveliness.

Comma, Spring, colon, Ithilien, 'a'. I think the essay's author has a bit of a tin ear, from this. Tolkien had great prose style, particularly fine at description, as here -- here's a UChicago writing instructor in agreement, listing him among other "superlative writers of description": http://writing-program.uchicago.edu/courses/index.htm

[I've only glanced through the OP; this misquote just caught my attention.]

  Day was opening in the sky, and they saw that the mountains were now
  much further off, receding eastward in a long curve that was lost in
  the distance. Before them, as they turned west, gentle slopes ran down
  into dim hazes far below. All about them were small woods of resinous
  trees, fir and cedar and cypress, and other kinds unknown in the
  Shire, with wide glades among them; and everywhere there was a wealth
  of sweet-smelling herbs and shrubs. The long journey from Rivendell
  had brought them far south of their own land, but not until now in
  this more sheltered region had the hobbits felt the change of
  clime. Here Spring was already busy about them: fronds pierced moss
  and mould, larches were green-fingered, small flowers were opening in
  the turf, birds were singing. Ithilien, the garden of Gondor now
  desolate kept still a dishevelled dryad loveliness.

I can't resist sharing another bit of found poetry, found by a program of mine at http://github.com/darius/versecop -- at the climax of all the action, Sam stands on Mount Doom and sees Sauron's works fall to ruin:

  ... A brief vision he had   Of swirling cloud, and in the midst of it   Towers and battlements, tall as hills,   Founded upon a mighty mountain-throne   Above immeasurable pits; great courts   And dungeons, eyeless prisons sheer as cliffs,   And gaping gates of steel and adamant:   And then all passed.

(Running the same program over the works of Jane Austen brought up only a few passages of two or three lines. Austen is great, just very different.)

Back to the first paragraph, "day was opening in the sky" -- "mountains receding eastward in a long curve" -- "Spring was already busy about them" -- "fronds pierced moss and mould" -- "Ithilien... kept still a dishelleved dryad loveliness". It's an awfully animate sort of landscape in these words, though not obtrusively so. I think that's another way the scene's brought to life.

There are nine and ninety ways to write, but I gotta say this is one of them.

I've got a fair number of authors I like considerably better than Tolkien, but he's quite good right now, and surprisingly more enjoyable and approachable than many authors from the same time period.

It’s not just that we don’t think of “rosy-fingered dawn” as being fresh because we know Homer used it: it’s that even if you’ve never heard it before, it will have lost its freshness halfway through the Odyssey.

So word-by-word freshness is usually not a useful or fun thing to look for in epic literature. While people can criticize Tolkien for a lack of eye-kicks (as I think I remember William Gibson calling phrase-scale fireworks in cyberpunk), a tree can be green-fingered twenty times without it being a violation of the rules of the game he’s trying to play.

(Also, for all we know, Homer might have stolen all his clichés.)

Bingo. I think this is very important insight from CS to this kind of literature. You might enjoy Robert Bringhurst’s discussion of Haida myths, where he calls them fractal in a way that doesn’t set my teeth on edge (the way most non-rigorous uses of that word do).

This is the kind of thing that makes me sad about the two cultures problem. The few scholarly discussions of oral literature that I’ve read seem to be groping for this kind of concept, while a lot of hackers I know are dismissive of the idea that there’s anything of real interest in fields like anthropology. Everyone loses if we can’t find ways to say things like “self-similar structures compress well” across fields.

Edit to self-link: I tried to make this kind of idea engaging to some of my friends at http://basecase.org/env/time-and-myth . The book where Bringhurst talks about this: http://books.google.com/books?id=QhMkb1HOjz4C .