Cellar Door
Tolkien's use of English in The Lord of the Rings
As it is the fiftieth anniversary of J.R.R. Tolkien’s death, I thought it might be a nice idea to write a little something about an aspect of his work that has long interested me, especially as I have been meaning to write more about Tolkien - whose work, as anyone who knows me well will know, has been immensely important to me since childhood. This aspect is Tolkien’s use of the English language, which, I feel, is rarely given the interest and credit that it deserves. There is a perception that Tolkien’s prose was ornate, over-wrought and solemn to the point of being turgid. The opposite is true: Tolkien wrote in a classical English prose-style that emphasized clarity and directness over decoration. His tempo was typically slow, but never plodding and his command of the language was sufficient that he was able to change the mode and register of his writing seamlessly depending on what best suited the narrative at any given moment.
The Lord of the Rings is novel in which landscape features as prominently as the characters, and much of the text is concerned with carefully painting a landscape in the mind of the reader as vivid and as real as it must have been for Tolkien himself. Characteristic of Tolkien’s landscape writing is his combination of a rather austere though never minimalist prose-style with a poetic sensibility, as can be seen in this description of the Barrow Downs:
Their way wound along the floor of the hollow, and round the green feet of a steep hill into another deeper and broader valley, and then over the shoulders of further hills, and down their long limbs, and up their smooth sides again, up on to new hill-tops and down into new valleys. There was no tree nor any visible water: it was a country of grass and short springy turf, silent except for the whisper of the air over the edges of the land, and the high cries of strange birds. As they journeyed the sun mounted, and grew hot. Each time they climbed a ridge the breeze seemed to have grown less. When they caught a glimpse of the country westward the distant Forest seemed to be smoking, as if the fallen rain was steaming up again from leaf and root and mould. A shadow now lay round the edge of sight, a dark haze above which the upper sky was like a blue cap, hot and heavy.1
Much of the effectiveness of this passage stems from Tolkien’s use of the sounds of particular words and groups of words in order to create firm depictions with an economy of description. Anyone who knows either the moorlands of North Staffordshire or the hill country of South Shropshire - the obvious inspirations for the Barrow Downs - will immediately recognize the sort of landscape being described, and anyone who is not would surely do once shown a photograph afterwards. More subtle, and again characteristic of the rest of the book, is the use of a long sentence to track the movement of characters over difficult terrain, up and down and up again, and then a series of short sentences to describe details. Tolkien did not just want his readers to ‘see’ what his characters did; he wanted them to ‘feel’ their movements as well. It is this combination that accounts for much of the immersive quality of The Lord of the Rings.
Another essential element of Tolkien’s writing is his sense of the eerie and uncanny. Magic, in Tolkien’s world, is nothing short of the manipulation of the physical stuff of the Earth, and descriptions of it and its effects are often saturated with an elemental terror that is no less haunting for its subtlety, as can be seen in the famous passage when Frodo describes the ghostly faces of the Dead Marshes to Sam:
‘I don’t know’, said Frodo in a dreamlike voice. ‘But I have seen them too. In the pools when the candles were lit. They lie in all the pools, pale faces, deep deep under the dark water. I saw them: grim faces and evil, and noble faces and sad. Many faces proud and fair, and weeds in their silver hair. But all foul, all rotting, all dead. A fell light is in them.’2
The passage is deeply unsettling, and, once again, relies on a careful choice of words, with alliteration, an understated bit of rhyme and contrasting descriptive terms all building up to a conclusion as disturbing to the reader as to the characters: there is an echo there of something very real in this description of necromancy, and the informed reader cannot help but note on coming across it that Tolkien was a veteran of the Battle of the Somme.
Tolkien had other means at his disposal with which to scare readers, and was fond of switching to a distinctively Gothic mode of writing when it seemed appropriate, which, in a world so densely populated with monsters and demons, was often:
The sound of hoofs stopped. As Frodo watched he saw something dark pass across the lighter space between two trees, and then halt. It looked like the black shade of a horse led by a smaller black shadow. The black shadow stood close to the point where they had left path, and it swayed from side to side. Frodo thought he heard the sound of snuffling. The shadow bent towards the ground, and then began to crawl towards him.3
This nightmarish passage - which I will admit frightened me when I first read it as a child a quarter of a century ago - is pure M.R. James, and is as essential a feature of Tolkien’s writing as the consciously epic mode that has been the subject of constant imitation (usually rather poor) and frequent misunderstanding since The Lord of the Rings was first published. Far from being impenetrably dense, these passages are also striking for their economic use of words and, unusually for Tolkien, a very rapid tempo:
His golden shield was uncovered, and lo! it shone like an image of the Sun, and the grass flamed into green about the white feet of his steed. For morning came, morning and a wind from the sea; and darkness was removed, and the hosts of Mordor wailed, and terror took them, and they fled, and died, and the hoofs of wrath rode over them.4
They are also short. The great charge of the Rohirrim, from which the above extract is taken, is described in slightly less than a full page of text. The ensuing chapter describing the Battle of the Pelennor Fields is just ten pages long. Tolkien’s imitation of the epic modes of Germanic and Classical texts is impressive, but he took care never to overindulge in the form: like a good conductor he understood that passages with a fast tempo are more effective if limited and consciously contrasted with the rest of the work, even as they also complement and complete them.
Finally, Tolkien was also capable of writing in a drily amusing tone, as he often did when describing the Shire and its inhabitants:
For DORA BAGGINS in memory of a LONG correspondence, with love from Bilbo; on a large waste-paper basket. Dora was Drogo’s sister and the eldest surviving female relative of Bilbo and Frodo; she was ninety-nine and had written reams of good advice for more than half a century.5
The sardonically funny side of Tolkien should never be discounted as unimportant and such passages should not be dismissed as being jarring and out of place. Quite the contrary: after all, the dramatic climax of The Lord of the Rings is reached not through the thunderously epic, but through black farce when Gollum misses his step while dancing a jig of triumph on the edge of Mount Doom’s lava chamber. V.S. Naipaul, the most distinguished of Tolkien’s many distinguished pupils, once observed that writers can be divided into two fundamental types: those that are funny and those that are not. Tolkien, like his pupil, was firmly and happily in the former camp.
The Lord of the Rings, p. 136.
ibid, p. 628.
ibid, p. 78.
ibid, p. 838.
ibid, p. 37.