@farmerman,
Quote:Tolkiens series loses after the Hobbit, IMHO. It becomes unnecessarily repetitious for several events. I dont know whether that was because Tolkien didnt trust his readers or because he was getting senile.
I agree, and that was why i said it was stilted. But i don't think that was the product of senility--rather, his interest was always from the point of view of the linguist. Old Germanic literature, especially Anglo-Saxon (Norse, less so, but still noticeably) depends heavily on repetition. I think that probably came from an oral tradition, in which the ability to "correctly" recite names, titles, relationships and deeds was jealously scrutinized by other skalds or bards, and so the oral version of a story quickly became very repetitious. Tolkien's earliest scholarly works were about Anglo-Saxon "heroic poetry," and the Anglo-Saxons were even more noticeably repetitious. This survives to this day, in expression such as "it is fitting and proper."
I suspect that he wrote
The Hobbit to entertain his son, Christopher, and that's why it's a much better book, whether for children or adults. But
The Lord of the Rings and
The Silmarillion he wrote to please himself. I would also note that he may have written
The Lord of the Rings to exorcise his own demons. In the introduction to the second edition, he notes a tendency of reviewers to see a greater influence in events common to their experience and that of the author than were justified--he says that in the context of denying that
The Lord of the Rings was about the Second World War. Then, immediately afterward, he comments that all but one of his close friends were dead by 1918. The unremitting gloom of
The Lord of the Rings is to me redolent of the discouraged fatalism of the infantry officer in the Great War--cf Sassoon's
Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and
Sherston's Progress.
