Kat,
You are most definitely not alone. There are aspects of Tolkien’s writing that are unbelievably ghastly, particularly the “poetry,” and my God, why does it all take so long to get nowhere. A friend wanted LOTR and
the Hobbit as a gift; I got them for him, but I felt I wasn’t doing him any favors. After he tried to read them, he thought so, too.
I disagree with Alex, by the way. I think the professor is right, after all: a story must have a pattern, and it is important that in a novel we see each event of the novel as correctly placed. A poor author let’s the rat out of the bag by putting things in that are unecessary (Tolkein to the max) and contribute nothing to the plot , by failing to have a clear idea of the order of events (see foregoing comment), and by failure to have a consistent point of view.* In Tolkein, the latter problem is evident in stylistic switches that are unjustified by changes in pace or character. And the diction? How far will T not go to find a archaic word or derivation. No Alex, it;’s not the professor’s remarks that are “pretentious waffle.” It’s Tolkein.
”We're talking about a children's fairy story.” Yeah, we are. But talk about child abuse. I think children should be protected from badly concieved and written pieces of literary doggerel like LOTR. The whole enterprise is like Johnson’s leg of mutton: “It is as bad as bad can be: it is ill-fed, ill-killed, ill-kept, and ill-drest.”
Lee
*A great example of this sort of thing is when an author in first person narrative describes things that person could not know, as when a young woman enters the room and he describes the back of her dress. I can’t recall whether Tolkein is guilty of such solecisms. I certainly wouldn’t doubt it, but I’d have to reread some, which is beyond the call of duty.
P.S. A word in the interests of full disclosure. I was trained in literary criticism by formalists at the U of Chicago, which was at one time the center of “Aristotelian” criticism. I guess I could be a tad defensive.