Exploring "Hall"-marks of Tolkien's Style/s

     Looking over the previous posts on this topic, it appears that many of my predecessors have written in the vein of Shippey and of Le Guin’s earlier examples, with a focus on dialogue and the character revealed therein. I am interested in the expression of style through prose. In this response, I will see what conclusions can be drawn from a comparison of excerpts from Tolkien’s various works.

     I will look at three halls, and I hope you will forgive the long passages since I did not want to give extremely cherry-picked phrases to support my point. First, Meduseld as described in “The King of the Golden Hall” (LOTR bk. III ch. 6):

At length they came to the crown of the hill. There stood a high platform above a green terrace, at the foot of which a bright spring gushed from a stone carved in the likeness of a horse's head; beneath was a wide basin from which the water spilled and fed the falling stream. Up the green terrace went a stair of stone, high and broad, and on either side of the topmost step were stone-hewn seats. There sat other guards, with drawn swords laid upon their knees. Their golden hair was braided on their shoulders the sun was blazoned upon their green shields, their long corslets were burnished bright, and when they rose taller they seemed than mortal men.
…
Inside … the hall was long and wide and filled with shadows and half lights; mighty pillars upheld its lofty roof. But here and there bright sunbeams fell in glimmering shafts from the eastern windows, high under the deep eaves. Through the louver in the roof, above the thin wisps of issuing smoke, the sky showed pale and blue. As their eyes changed, the travellers perceived that the floor was paved with stones of many hues; branching runes and strange devices intertwined beneath their feet. They saw now that the pillars were richly carved, gleaming dully with gold and half-seen colours. Many woven cloths were hung upon the walls, and over their wide spaces marched figures of ancient legend, some dim with years, some darkling in the shade.

Second, the hall of Beorn in “Queer Lodgings” (The Hobbit ch. 7):

After a while they came to a belt of tall and very ancient oaks, and beyond these to a high thorn-hedge through which you could neither see nor scramble.
…
They soon came to a wooden gate, high and broad, beyond which they could see gardens and a cluster of low wooden buildings, some thatched and made of unshaped logs: barns, stables, sheds, and a long low wooden house. Inside on the southward side of the great hedge were rows and rows of hives with bell-shaped tops made of straw.
…
Soon they reached a courtyard, three walls of which were formed by the wooden house and its two long wings. In the middle there was lying a great oak-trunk with many lopped branches beside it. Standing near was a huge man with a thick black beard and hair, and great bare arms and legs with knotted muscles. He was clothed in a tunic of wool down to his knees, and was leaning on a large axe.
…
Following him they found themselves in a wide hall with a fire-place in the middle. Though it was summer there was a wood-fire burning and the smoke was rising to the blackened rafters in search of the way out through an opening in the roof. They passed through this dim hall, lit only by the fire and the hole above it, and came through another smaller door into a sort of veranda propped on wooden posts made of single tree-trunks.

Lastly, the halls of Elu Thingol in “Of The Sindar” (The Silmarillion ch. 10):

There rose in the midst of the forest a rocky hill, and the river ran at its feet. There they made the gates of the hall of Thingol, and they built a bridge of stone over the river, by which alone the gates could be entered. Beyond the gates wide passages ran down to high halls and chambers far below that were hewn in the living stone, so many and so great that that dwelling was named Menegroth, the Thousand Caves.
But the Elves also had part in that labour, and Elves and Dwarves together, each with their own skill, there wrought out the visions of Melian, images of the wonder and beauty of Valinor beyond the Sea. The pillars of Menegroth were hewn in the likeness of the beeches of Oromë, stock, bough, and leaf, and they were lit with lanterns of gold. The nightingales sang there as in the gardens of Lórien; and there were fountains of silver, and basins of marble, and floors of many-coloured stones. Carven figures of beasts and birds there ran upon the walls, or climbed upon the pillars, or peered among the branches entwined with many flowers. And as the years passed Melian and her maidens filled the halls with woven hangings wherein could be read the deeds of the Valar, and many things that had befallen in Arda since its beginning, and shadows of things that were yet to be. That was the fairest dwelling of any king that has ever been east of the Sea.

At first glance, these three passages do not seem too different. They all display language characteristic of Tolkien, such as simple adjectives and what Shippey calls “inverted” sentences (e.g. there stood a platform, up the terrace went stairs, inside the hedge were hives, standing near was a man, there rose a hill). I selected the unifying theme of halls because the passages share imagery too: carved pillars and tapestries, dim wooden halls with holes for smoke in the roof, men standing guard. But I think that these passages alone, without any prior knowledge of the three sources, immediately reveal what sorts of books they are. They define a spectrum between character-based and world-based. In the part from The Hobbit, a lot of the sentences begin with what “they” (Gandalf and Bilbo, in this case) are doing; we see things when our main characters see them. Then in The Two Towers, we get fewer mentions of “them.” We observe the whole moment at once, which includes what the characters are doing but also pure scenery. On the other hand, the description of Menegroth is timeless. It has few references to individuals and tells us only of the place as it eventually appeared.

     Thus, The Hobbit is definitely a novel because it has a clear story that follows clear characters, and I argue that The Lord of the Rings is as well for the same reasons. It is a novel that employs grander prose, as we have said aiming to inform readers that the story is part of a larger world, but it is still situated in precise time and place driven by actions. The absence of that is probably what makes so many people struggle with The Silmarillion – I have often heard it described, and at times myself have described it, as a history book. The passage I quoted above does not even mention guards, as the Meduseld passage does! At least they would be living parts of the description, if static. The book seems dense because the ratio of specific storylines like Beren and Luthien, Turin, and even the battles, to sweeping descriptions of locations and chronicles of years is so heavily skewed towards the latter compared to the other two books. (I assume this is also part of the reason that Beren and Luthien, The Children of Hurin, and The Fall of Gondolin have since been published as their own books.)

     Now that I am thinking about The Silmarillion’s genre, I am led back to our discussion about the purpose of poetry. Dialogue is sparse in this tome, but quickly flipping through I saw absolutely no poems. Why might this be? Perhaps because the poems in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are almost all said by someone, as an entertaining song or to deliver a message or sometimes, as with “Where now the horse and the rider” or Namárië, in a sudden outpouring of emotion. It appears that the impersonal and textbook-like style of The Silmarillion does not allow room for poetry. I will note that the other books have exactly two poems attributed to some later poet instead of a character present in the scene, “From dark Dunharrow in the dim morning” and the Song of the Mounds of Mundburg, but The Silmarillion does not even have poems of this sort. If a main purpose of the poems is to bring Middle-Earth to life, to give the characters and the world depth and dimension through involvement in the oral tradition of legends, then the lack of poetry is surely a cause for readers’ disengagement with The Silmarillion.

     To draw even more texts into my discussion, I want to bring up “Roverandom” and I need to address The Lays of Beleriand. Here Roverandom is visiting the mer-kings palace:

Soon before him he saw the gate of a great palace, made it seemed of pink and white stone that shone with a pale light coming through it; and through the many windows lights of green and blue shone clear. All round the walls huge sea-trees grew, taller than the domes of the palace that swelled up vast, gleaming in the dark water. The great indiarubber trunks of the trees bent and swayed like grasses, and the shadow of their endless branches was thronged with goldfish, and silverfish, and redfish, and bluefish, and phosphorescent fish like birds. But the fishes did not sing. The mermaids sang inside the palace. How they sang! And all the sea-fairies sang in chorus, and the music floated out of the windows, hundreds of mer-folk playing on horns and pipes and conches of shell.

As might be expected from a story composed for Tolkien’s children, the style of this passage is like The Hobbit. It has no inversions, but it has elements that certainly seem childlike to me – all the fish colors, for one, and for some reason the phrases “huge sea-trees grew, taller than the domes” and “But the fish did not sing.” Especially startling is the use of an exclamation mark, which offsets this text from the more serious The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. To give one more very out-of-context quote, “Then the shark bit the only thing it could reach at the moment, which was the shark in front; and that shark bit the next one; and so on, until the last of the seven, seeing nothing else to bite - bless me! the idiot, if he did not go and bite the Sea-serpent's tail!” Things like this, which also appear in The Hobbit (e.g. “through which you could neither see nor scramble”), put them in a separate subclass of novel from The Lord of the Rings. Their style gives them the guise of a spoken tale, not a read novel. And it is this I want to say about the Lay of the Children of Hurin and the Lay of Leithian, which could be brought up as counterexamples to The Silmarillion. Presented as lays, they are implicitly composed by some historical figure and sung by someone whose audience we are allowed to join by reading the poems. These two works fill in the gaps of the book by personalizing their stories and breathing life into history in a way that textbook prose never can.

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 Note: I realized as an afterthought that the lack of poetry in The Silmarillion may be attributable to Christopher Tolkien’s editing and compilation process. Perhaps if JRRT had made the published book himself he would have inserted some poetry. To be honest, I have no clue how much of the words in The Silmarillion are actually JRRT’s or how much it was really written by his son based on previous ideas and manuscripts.