Bret van den Brink@BretVDB
Alas, no.
“The Lord of the Rings seems to be inflated, overwritten, tendentious, and moralistic in the extreme. Is it not a giant Period Piece? …
But there is still the burden of Tolkien’s style: stiff, false archaic, overwrought, and finally a real hindrance in Volume III, The Return of the King, which I have had trouble rereading. At seventy-seven, I may just be too old, but here is The Return of the King, opened pretty much at random:
‘At the doors of the Houses many were already gathered to see Aragorn, and they followed after him; and when at last he had supped, men came and prayed that he would heal their kinsmen or their friends whose lives were in peril through hurt or wound, or who lay under the Black Shadow. And Aragorn arose and went out, and he sent for the sons of Elrond, and together they labored far into the night. And word went through the city: “The King is come again indeed.” And they named him Elfstone, because of the green stone that he wore, and so the name which it was foretold at his birth that he should bear was chosen for him by his own people.’
I am not able to understand how a skilled and mature reader can absorb about fifteen hundred pages of this quaint stuff. Why ‘hurt or wound’; are they not the same? What justifies the heavy King James Bible influence upon this style? Sometimes, reading Tolkien, I am reminded of the Book of Mormon. Tolkien met a need, particularly in the early days of the counterculture in the later 1960s. Whether he is an author for the duration of the twenty-first century seems to me open to some doubt.”
—Harold Bloom, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings
