We've paused a bit in the discussion of
The Treason of Isengard. Would anyone care to discuss Tolkien's prose, whether in his drafts or in the final versions? Below I paste some passages from a 2012 posting on Tolkien's Prose and Arthur Machen's. I wrote:
For years I have felt there was some affinity between Tolkien's writing, which simply means more to me than that of any other fantasist, and certain passages of Arthur Machen's. I recently managed to complete a second reading, after almost 40 years, of his Hill of Dreams. For me, the best of the book comes right at the beginning, in description of a 12-year-old boy's wanderings in the lanes and hills of his Welsh home region:
-----Then he climbed again, and went up between limestone rocks, higher and higher, till the noise of waters became indistinct, a faint humming of swarming hives in summer. He walked some distance on level ground, till there was a break in the banks and a stile on which he could lean and look out. He found himself, as he had hoped, afar and forlorn; he had strayed into outland and occult territory. From the eminence of the lane, skirting the brow of a hill, he looked down into deep valleys and dingles, and beyond, across the trees, to remoter country, wild bare hills and dark wooded lands meeting the grey still sky. Immediately beneath his feet the ground sloped steep down to the valley, a hillside of close grass patched with dead bracken, and dotted here and there with stunted thorns, and below there were deep oak woods, all still and silent, and lonely as if no one ever passed that way. The grass and bracken and thorns and woods, all were brown and grey beneath the leaden sky, and as Lucian looked he was amazed, as though he were reading a wonderful story, the meaning of which was a little greater than his understanding. Then, like the hero of a fairy-book, he went on and on, catching now and again glimpses of the amazing country into which he had penetrated, and perceiving rather than seeing that as the day waned everything grew more grey and somber. As he advanced he heard the evening sounds of the farms, the low of the cattle, and the barking of the sheepdogs; a faint thin noise from far away. It was growing late, and as the shadows blackened he walked faster, till once more the lane began to descend, there was a sharp turn, and he found himself, with a good deal of relief, and a little disappointment, on familiar ground.----
A few phrases ("like the hero of a fairy-book," etc.) would have to be edited out, but otherwise this seems to me akin, say, to passages in Tolkien's Smith of Wootton Major, etc.
Now how does this kind of prose work? Well, an essay by John Rateliff, from Tolkien Studies #6, seems to me to get closer than about anything else I have seen. Rateliff writes:
....first I want to draw attention to Tolkien’s own description of how his prose works, of what he was trying to achieve. In one of the endnotes appended to “On Fairy-stories,” he includes the following revealing passage setting forth his narrative method, in which he makes clear his goal of writing in such a way as to draw in his readers, making them participate in the creation of the fictional world by encouraging them to draw on their own personal memories when reading one of his evocative passages:
[quoting Tolkien:]..... If a story says “he climbed a hill and saw a river in the valley below,” the illustrator may catch, or nearly catch, his own vision of such a scene; but every hearer of the words will have his own picture, and it will be made out of all the hills and rivers and dales he has ever seen, but specially out of The Hill, The River, The Valley which were for him the first embodiment of the word. ....
Rateliff continues:
Tolkien’s contrast here of a single image presented to the passive viewer with the internal personalized visualization of a reader, who thus participates in the (sub)creation of the work, is of a piece with his championing, in the Foreword of the second edition to The Lord of the Rings, of what he calls applicability: his refusal to impose a single authorial or “allegorical” meaning on a work.8 I would argue that the style in which he chose to write, which he painstakingly developed over several decades until it reached its peak in The Hobbit and Farmer Giles of Ham and The Lord of the Rings and some of the late Silmarillion material, is deliberately crafted to spark reader participation. That many readers do get drawn in is witnessed by the intense investment so many people have in these books, the strong personal connection they form with the story, the almost visceral rejection of illustrations or dramatizations that do not fit their own inner vision of the characters, the returning to reread the books again and again to renew our acquaintance with the imaginary world.
[Rateliff quotes a Tolkien passage and a John Bellairs passage. He comments:]
note that in the passage from Tolkien, he does not describe every detail—what color were the rocks? who was on either side of Frodo as he sat huddled against the bitter cold? But Tolkien does tell us everything we need to know, in general terms with just enough specific detail to bring the scene home, to guide the reader’s imagination, to draw on our own memories of being cold and frozen, exhausted and miserable. We do not need to know what Frodo looked like, because we are looking through his eyes; too much detail would actually limit the applicability......
.....he often describes a scene not as you would experience it but as you would remember it afterwards. That is, his prose assumes the tone of things which have already happened, as they are stored in our memory. Thus the “walking bits,” which have so annoyed impatient readers who are only reading for the plot, do not in fact detail every day of Frodo’s year-long journey but instead are rendered down to a relatively few vivid images, such as would linger in the memory long after the event. After you have read these passages and think back on them, they very strongly resemble your actual memories of similar events (in fact, the very ones that provided the mental images that flashed through your mind when reading them) : a general recollection of where you were and what you were doing anchored by a few sharp, vivid, specific details that stand out. Thus the memory of reading the story gains the associations of events in the reader’s own life, because the one has already drawn upon the other
.....Here, it seems to me, a Tolkien scholar (one of the best) has just about nailed it for me, not just on how Tolkien's prose works, but the best Machen prose (not all of it, that's for sure) too.
For years I have felt there was some affinity between Tolkien's writing, which simply means more to me than that of any other fantasist, and certain passages of Arthur Machen's. I recently managed to complete a second reading, after almost 40 years, of his Hill of Dreams. For me, the best of...
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A way to get at the distinctive qualities of Tolkien's writing (which, of course, isn't always in the same manner!) is to compare and contrast with C. S. Lewis's.
I've been delving into Tolkien's work (unpublished in his lifetime) of the second half of the 1920s and well into the 1930s, and commented on some poems by his friend C. S. Lewis here: http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum/546889-history-of-middle-earth-50-pages-per-month-6.html#post1786676 An...
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But right now I'm rereading Raymond Edwards's underappreciated
Tolkien (2014). As I read page 83, I thought of a notable contrast in their literary creation. Lewis said (in connection with Narnia) "it all began with a
picture" in his mind. But, summarizing remarks of Tolkien's, Tom Shippey refers to "creation from philology" -- that is, "it all began with a
word."
This is not to say that Lewis was not interested in words -- a preposterous notion (cf. his late book
Studies in Words and virtually anything he ever wrote) -- or that Tolkien's writing doesn't appeal to the senses (see Shippey's discussion of the Withywindle passage, in
The Road to Middle-earth). But if handled delicately, this contrast might be a tool that could be useful in discussing the ways in which the two friends went about creating their imagined worlds.
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