Style is the defining characteristic of great fantasy. In her 1973 essay ‘From Elfland to Poughkeepsie’, Ursula Le Guin argues that style is not the frosting on the cake of a fantasy novel. It is the cake itself. Remove style, she writes, and all you are left with is a plot synopsis. This is nowhere truer than in Tolkien’s legendarium of Middle-earth. An author’s ability to transport the reader into an entirely novel world is determined by their choice of language and what it communicates. Tolkien’s genius does not lie in phonetic trickery or the written accents of his characters, but in allowing the language itself — through vocabulary, register, cadence, and naming convention — to convey the history of Middle-earth.
Le Guin identifies the central failure of lesser fantasy as a flatness of voice — an absence of differentiation between the way that Elves and Men speak, collapsing the illusion. Tolkien, writing at almost exactly the same moment, had already solved this problem through an instinct Le Guin would have recognised: for him, language was not ornament but identity. Even in introducing the Hobbits, Tolkien begins to weave the individual stories of these characters into the fabric of Middle-earth. The reader does not need footnotes to understand that Frodo is more learned than Sam, it is achieved purely through diction. Ironically, both Merry and Pippin stem from more ‘noble’ families than Frodo, yet his speech is the most eloquent of the four. This reflects that even within the Shire, there is a distinct history behind why the characters act and speak as they do; Frodo’s learnedness is a direct result of his uncle Bilbo’s travels and subsequent knowledge of a world outside the Shire. Letter 164 is evidence of this intentionality, where Tolkien acknowledges that Sam, ‘without his education by Bilbo and his fascination with things Elvish’, would likely have been an unexceptional hobbit, akin to the Gaffer or Cotton family. By the time Frodo leaves the Shire, the reader has been given a glimpse into the world of hobbits, complete with its peculiarities of family nobility and social class.
At the Council of Elrond, Tolkien’s linguistic precision is exposed further. The Council is, on its surface, a chapter in which nothing ‘happens’, twelve speakers gather to talk. And yet it is among the most compelling chapters in the book, precisely because each speaker’s idiom is a portrait. Elrond, immortal and ancient, inverts his subject and verb in a manner that signals his long life. Boromir’s elevated diction reflects a rigid, inherited sense of status. Aragorn’s register shifts between formal and colloquial depending on his interlocutor, hinting at his dual identity as Strider and the heir of Gondor. Particularly striking is Saruman, who speaks in a style that is deliberately modern and politically familiar: abstract nouns, rhetorical balance, hollow qualifiers. He is, as Shippey noted, ‘the most contemporary figure in Middle-earth, both politically and linguistically’, and the most ominous speaker in the chapter. What Le Guin calls the 'lapses' of ordinary human existence are precisely what characters in Elfland, or in this case, Middle-earth, are not supposed to suffer. Their speech is a direct expression of who they are and always have been. Saruman is the exception: his speech signals a character unmoored from history, from fixed identity, from the weight that every other voice in the Council carries. He sounds, disturbingly, like us — and in Middle-earth, that is the most damning thing Tolkien could say about him.
Returning to Elrond, when recounting Isildur’s refusal to destroy the Ring at the fires of Orodruin, he quotes a crucial line:
‘This I will have as wereguild for my father, and my brother.’
Fellowship, Bk.II, Ch.2
Wereguild is an Anglo-Saxon legal concept: a monetary value placed on a person’s life, paid to the victim’s family as compensation, usually to prevent an escalating blood feud. Tolkien did not reach for this word accidentally. It was chosen precisely (much I can imagine, to a casual reader’s chagrin) to tell us something about the race of Men; their sense of justice is bound up with retribution and repayment. They hold grudges and call them honour. This same nature explains the Nazgûl - Men so hungry for dominion and so afraid of death that they traded their wills away, piece by piece, until nothing remained but Sauron’s purpose. Tolkien is not decorating Middle-earth with linguistic style; the style with which he writes is the very fabric of the world.
Divergence between races in Middle-earth is distinguished in how they speak (or refuse to speak) the names of Mordor and its master. Boromir, Faramir, and the Men of Gondor consistently reach for circumlocutions throughout: ‘The Black Land’, ‘The Dark Lord’, ‘The Nameless Enemy’. In doing so, Tolkien introduces a naming taboo into the cultural traits of Men. In speech, the avoidance feels instinctive; as if they had been taught it from a young age. Sauron poured something of himself into his name, and to speak it carelessly is a kind of summoning. Men, who are known as weaker-willed, are hesitant to speak the true names of Mordor because they fear what such speech might invite.
The Elves are different. Galadriel and Elrond are willing to say ‘Sauron’ but are always deliberate when doing so. This distinction reflects something deeper than personal temperament. The elder Elves of the Third Age are firsthand witnesses of the First Age; they knew Morgoth, of whom Sauron was merely lieutenant. They possess, in Tolkien’s scheme, an experiential understanding of what it means for a name to carry its owner’s corrupted will within it. Their restraint is not superstition but lore - an application of knowledge that Men, whose cultural memory is comparatively shallow, cannot fully share. It is worth noting that the Elves have an established practice of using diminishing or enemy-given names rather than true ones. Morgoth itself, meaning ‘Black Enemy’, was coined by Fëanor as a curse, displacing the name Melkor and reflecting a tradition of using nomenclature as resistance. In considering the Dwarves’ attitude towards speaking the names of Mordor and Sauron, their resistant nature prevented the Nine Rings from reducing bearers to wraiths. Furthermore, the profound cultural insularity of Dwarves prevents them from adopting the conventions of other peoples and, as such, observe no such restraint at all.
Finally, one of Tolkien’s most radical stylistic choices was to introduce but almost never deploy a language: The Black Speech. As he himself noted in Letter 144, ‘The Black Speech was only used in Mordor; it only occurs in the Ring inscription, and a sentence uttered by the Orcs of Barad-dûr and in the word Nazgûl. It was never used willingly by any other people, and consequently even the names of places in Mordor are in English (for the C.S.) or Elvish.’ To render Mordor’s place-names in the Black Speech would be to allow that language to propagate - to normalise it within the reader’s imagination. The effect of its near-total suppression is precisely the opposite: the Black Speech becomes, through its very scarcity, a marker of absolute alterity.
The reader encounters it so rarely, and only in contexts of concentrated dread. Familiarity would have domesticated it; restraint preserves its disquieting power. A language confined entirely to Mordor, excluded even from the names of its own geography, is itself a stylistic choice. In Tolkien's legendarium, what is withheld does as much work as what is written.
Le Guin writes that in fantasy, 'there is nothing but the writer's vision of the world; there is no reality upon which to refer back to. The only voice that speaks there is the creator's voice. And every word counts.' No writer took this more seriously than Tolkien. As a philologist, he understood that language is not merely a vehicle for meaning but it’s substance — that the way a person speaks tells you who they are, where they come from, and what they fear. The immersion of Middle-earth is a feat of style: because its people speak with the weight of a history behind them.
- AOL
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