| '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. Ithilean, garden of Gondor now desolate kept still
| dishevelled dryad loveliness.'
This is bad writing because of its use of cliches ('green-fingered' larches, for goodness sake); because of the way it lists facts ('birds were singing') with out really building up a picture, and because of its ham-fisted archaisms. It's one thing to use Latinate reversals when you describing a firey demon on a bridge ('a red sword leaped flaming'); but merely irritating to do so when you are describing the pretty countryside. And what the heck is 'dryad loveliness', anyway?
"Disheveled dryad loveliness" is quite evocative for me. This reminds me of many paintings of the Romantic period, many of which are also celebrations of nothing more than "pretty countryside." Many modern people think of such stuff as pablum, but there are places in the world that can be so beautiful, one's breath is taken away. (One particular brook by Glendalough on a good day, with no one else about, for one example.) If someone has never had this experience, I would feel sorry for them. If one's cultural background in mythology is based on action-oriented computer games, I can see how one might be annoyed by "pretty countryside." In a game, this is the annoying, tedious bit one has to get through for the good parts. In real life, it is a billion times more compelling, complex, and stirring than any game ever written until now could ever hope to be.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think Tolkien is a literary god, but I also doubt this author has the background to fully appreciate where he's coming from.
That quote is a misquote; the prose felt 'off' to me, and yep, grepping for 'dryad' brings up:
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.]
So, after complaining, what do I like about this passage? The hobbits have come through a long journey of increasing trauma and lately are skirting Hell, looking for a way in. They find unexpected beauty in Ithilien, part of a pattern through the whole story of havens after dangers. Here's the full paragraph:
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.
It does get worked up about 'pretty countryside': that last sentence practically wants to go in a poem. (The GARden of GONdor now DESolate... still a dishevelleddryadloveliness.) The 'poetry' caps the paragraph where it fits in the rhythm of the telling. I didn't notice this artifice while reading the book, except insofar as it marked it into memory to bring the scene back from "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.
Line after line of near-perfect iambic pentameter. I don't know if Tolkien consciously hid a Miltonic line in his prose there -- I sort of doubt it -- but I am confident it was more than coincidence that put this longest iambic passage my program found at this moment of the story. Or that it's got more than its share of alliteration.
(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.
And lets compare things like this with some of the other "greats" of literature. Namely, Jules Verne and 20k Leagues Under the Sea. Pages upon pages are used in almost literal fact-listing of the surrounding area, without anywhere near the prose of Tolkien. A large amount of the book reads like a biologists travel journal. I quite enjoy Verne's works, but holy cow can they be dry at times.
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.
Furthermore, in many of the literary traditions Tolkien was building on, formulaic phrases are just the way it’s done. For a well-known example in epic literature, take Homer: the Iliad and the Odyssey are full of repeated wordings which, if you’re being uncharitable, you could call clichés or dead metaphors. It’s simply not the level you look at to appreciate that particular genre, any more than you would look for grand allegories in P. G. Wodehouse.
Anybody complaining that the Iliad and the Odyssey are full of clichés is forgetting that they were written several thousand years ago. The clichés where stolen from Homer, not the other way around!
Sure, but even internally. Like a lot of long oral literature in verse, it has a smallish set of colorful epithets for often-mentioned things. For example, where the rhythm requires it, Ulysses might be called πολύτροπος, resourceful; where there’s less room in the hexameter, he might be δῖος, glorious – over and over and over again.
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.)
In studies of Balkan epic poetry and Irish oral tradition, these are sometimes called stereotypes. (Not to be confused with the modern PC term.) One function is as a sort of compression/mnemonic. Keep in mind that these orations could go on for four entire evenings. Stereotypes let longer passages fit into fewer mental entities.
One function is as a sort of compression/mnemonic.
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.
A few Irish tunes have a somewhat self-similar structure. There are two parts, which are a call/response to each other, and each of the two parts themselves have a call/response structure. Sometimes it goes another level, but then we start getting down to the granular limit of a distinct melodic idea.
I also wonder why the original author says "green-fingered larches" is a cliche? "birds were singing" is a cliche, but the rest of it is reasonably fresh prose.
"Disheveled dryad loveliness" is quite evocative for me. This reminds me of many paintings of the Romantic period, many of which are also celebrations of nothing more than "pretty countryside." Many modern people think of such stuff as pablum, but there are places in the world that can be so beautiful, one's breath is taken away. (One particular brook by Glendalough on a good day, with no one else about, for one example.) If someone has never had this experience, I would feel sorry for them. If one's cultural background in mythology is based on action-oriented computer games, I can see how one might be annoyed by "pretty countryside." In a game, this is the annoying, tedious bit one has to get through for the good parts. In real life, it is a billion times more compelling, complex, and stirring than any game ever written until now could ever hope to be.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think Tolkien is a literary god, but I also doubt this author has the background to fully appreciate where he's coming from.