In their essay, "Tom Shippey's J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century and a Look back at Tolkien Criticism since 1982," Michael D. C. Drout and Hilary Wynne argue that the "biggest failing in Tolkien criticism ... is its lack of discussion of Tolkien's style, his sentence-level writing, his word choice and syntax" (123). The irony of this situation lies in the context, in the extent to which formalist and aesthetic methodologies of literary criticism have given way in the last few decades to the perceived dominance of what Drout and Wynne call the methodology of "political exegesis." Despite the downplaying of aesthetics in contemporary literary studies, modernist and post-modernist critics still tend to base their dismissal of Tolkien's work as unworthy of study on his supposedly "poor writing" (123). As Drout has argued in "Tolkien's Prose Style and its Literary and Rhetorical Effects," the result of Tolkienists ignoring the question of 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" (137). The existing stylistic or applied linguistic scholarship on Tolkien's novel is limited, although there is a strong sub-field of Tolkien linguists who study Tolkien's invented languages. Linguistic methodology covers a range of approaches, from intensely specialized philological work on the development of modern English from Old English, to a focus on the meanings of words (historical or contemporary). Most Tolkien linguists are primarily interested in the invented languages, but literature scholars with an interest in rhetoric, semiotics, or other linguistic theories and fields have published scholarship on Tolkien's style of writing, primarily but not exclusively on The Lord of the Rings. The stylistic scholarship consists primarily of monographs by Verlyn Flieger, Brian Rosebury, and Tom Shippey. (1) A handful of articles have also been published, ranging from Burton Raffel's dismissal of The Lord of the Rings as not being literature to the more useful linguistic work of Elizabeth Kirk and Drout on Tolkien's style that draw similar conclusions about what Drout calls the "appropriateness, elegance, and power" (124) of Tolkien's stylistic choices. (2) One reason for the persistent stylistic gap in Tolkien scholarship may be found in the historical episode that Shippey describes in The Road to Middle-earth: the Lit and Lang battle that took place in American and British universities during the years between the two World Wars (6-8, 24-7). As faculty members in languages, Tolkien and Shippey participated in this conflict but tailed to shape the literature curriculum to include philology, or linguistics, whether historical or contemporary, and to institutionalize the language study of Anglo Saxon as part of the required curriculum. The curricular principle that won focuses literary studies on publications from Shakespeare forward, that is, texts produced in modern English. The Lit and Lang battle resulted in literature and literary study becoming a separate discipline from linguistics during much of the twentieth century. As a consequence, the majority of academics trained in literary study during most of the 20th century did not receive any training in linguistics. The decision not to teach any systemic methodology of analyzing style to those who would become professional literary critics has a direct bearing on the prevailing scholarly evaluation of Tolkien's work by most modernists and post-modernists. While claiming to analyze style, most seem to be instead responding to a type of subject matter or genre deemed by Modernism to be unworthy of serious literary treatment. (3) Stylistics, the application of linguistic theories to literary texts, however, does exist as one approach among many in literary studies and has, in recent years, begun to grow, especially with the advent of computer programs to assist in data collection and analysis. …

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/style.43.4.517

Mythology and History: A Stylistic Analysis of the Lord of the Rings

The Magic of Humour: Comic Effects in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings

Tolkien’s Language

/pdf/structural-polarities-in-j-r-r-tolkien-s-the-lord-of-the-1h63p9ksle.pdf

Structural Polarities In J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings

This study explores the manyVfunctions of a particularly noticeable part of J.R.R. Tolkien's famous work The Lord of the Rings, namely the many instances of verse which are to be found in it. Its thesis is,' simply that the many instances and various kinds of rhymed and metrical language are more than ends in themselves, and much more than generally ignorable impediments to the narratives They serve to enrich the work in many ways: they amplify, emphasize or r.emind us of central themes in thefc trilogy, and they also provide lyric or comic relief, or express a mood that contrasts with the surrounding prose, often setting up ironic reverberations. The verses make literary contributions by expressing the various characters' states of mind differently and more effectively than prose does, and by contributing to their characterization by the various styles of poetry they sing. Of course the poems also have a very simple function—they operate at plot level to convey messages, warn people and work magic. One of the most important ways the verse functions in Lord of the Rings is not literary. The various types and styles of poetry are manifestations of the different cultural voices of the inhabitants of Middle Earth, and as such serve to indicate some of their diverse racial and cultural characteristics. They show clearly Tolkien's concern with the important role of language in society. Finally, Tolkien created Lord of the Rings as an epic and the poetry helps make the work what C.S. Lewis calls secondary epic, by contributing to the completeness and complexity of the world of Middle Earth. It is this completeness and complexity of Middle Earth that is the important product of the many verses. To make Middle Earth live, and to fill it believably with different kinds of people and creatures, Tolkien created for Elf, Hobbit, Ent and Man a special voice of verse and song.

The function of verse in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.

That a three-volume novel by a distinguished medievalist should be as popular as J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings may be a little odd. That it should be popular with people who paint "Frodo lives!" on walls and wear pins that say "Go! Go! Gandalf" in elf script; with people who have never seen an English pub or walked more than two miles consecutively; with artists of the stature of W. H. Auden; and with respected critics who compare it to Malory, Spenser and Ariosto; and that it should achieve this with six appendixes and no sex is an event Aristotle would banish from any plot as an "improbable possible." That the trilogy should be a novel at least in being "a piece of prose fiction of a certain length" and yet show itself so different in kind from the literature on which our current tools for understanding and evaluating aesthetic experiences work best, makes the riddle one of real concern to the critic of fiction. An admirer of the trilogy is inevitably haunted by the ghost of Ossian-or rather, by the fantasm of some urbane critic of the twenty-first century who will find our response to it as self-evidently ludicrous as we find the mid-eighteenth century's enthusiasm for Macpherson's pseudo-epics. We cannot even be sure that he will laugh at our enthusiasm rather than at our prudishness about admitting it. One way or the other, he will find in our behavior infallible symptoms of cultural malnutrition. But whether our response to Tolkien merely reveals, as the Ossian phenomenon did, an age's craving for a category of experience of which it is discovering itself to be deprived, or whether it shows the euphoria of discovering something intrinsically good which will go on appealing to audiences who come to it from widely differing experiences, we can certainly ask ourselves what sort of experience reading the Trilogy actually is. When we do, we see that it is as different from what happens to us in reading a novel, whether of the nineteenth century or of our own, as it is from most fantasy and most "escape" literature. Tolkien himself has made it peculiarly difficult for his admirers to save face. The manifest discrepancy between the subject and manner of the trilogy and the works we take seriously as "literature" might be glossed over if we could interpret it allegorically and find that it is about everything it appears not to be about. But Tolkien has repeatedly insisted that the trilogy is not allegorical. Recently, in a preface to the paperback edition, he has gone so far as to admit that such a story may have "applicability" to other situations where related issues are involved, but he insists that his book "is neither allegorical nor topical.... I cor-

Elizabeth D. Kirk

Papers

"I Would Rather Have Written in Elvish": Language, Fiction and "The Lord of the Rings"