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Re:Is Tolkien Actually Any Good? (2003) by gcv on Saturday May 29, 2010 @08:11PM (#1389539)
I found the critique misleading. It doesn't make sense to disparage Tolkien's Middle Earth writing without taking his background into account. He was a scholar of Anglo-Saxon legends and literature written in Old Saxon, Old Norse, and Old English. He was also a linguist who worked on the Oxford English Dictionary for two years. He was an expert on Beowulf; one of his most celebrated scholarly works is "Beowulf and the Monster Critics".

The writing in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion echoes the style of the work he studied and taught. I understand that many modern readers find the style and language alien; after all, the English language and English literature evolved considerably since Beowulf. Tellingly, the author of the critique compares Tolkien to much later authors, all of whom use ordinary 20th-century (American) English. Tolkien is a modern writer who consciously adopted an older cadence, and the author of the critique does not seem to understand this.

(It's worth noting that The Hobbit and the first chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring use a whimsical, less-grandiose style. I don't have a good explanation for this, except to guess that they originated in bedtime stories for Tolkien's children.)

Re:Is Tolkien Actually Any Good? (2003) by stcredzero on Saturday May 29, 2010 @10:37PM (#1389772)
I found the critique misleading. It doesn't make sense to disparage Tolkien's Middle Earth writing without taking his background into account. He was a scholar of Anglo-Saxon legends and literature written in Old Saxon, Old Norse, and Old English.

I just found the critique to be ignorant.

Re:Is Tolkien Actually Any Good? (2003) by crux on Sunday May 30, 2010 @11:55AM (#1390635)
The author of this critique, more than once, refers to specific Tolkien passages and mentions which specific historical styles or texts these are pastiche of. Why do you think he doesn't understand Tolkien's field of study?
Re:Is Tolkien Actually Any Good? (2003) by gcv on Sunday May 30, 2010 @04:18PM (#1391049)
Because he repeatedly used the words "bad writing" without providing any support for the assertion. He just provided sample texts — sample texts which read to me like translations of Old Saxon and Old Norse. This implied to me that he was saying that Anglo-Saxon texts are inherently "bad writing."