Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost (For Words): On Tolkien's Usage of Style

    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

On Desiring Lúthien: Why are Curufin and Morgoth So Creepy?

 In the Lay of Leithian, there are three beings who are described as having desire for Lúthien: Beren, Curufin, and Morgoth. Interestingly, this desire is expressed similarly across the three characters, for each falls first under Lúthien’s enchantment or entrapment before their desire for her is awoken: Beren is “enchanted dumb, yet filled with fire / of such a wonder and desire” (lines 545-6) and “bound and fettered” (line 548) by her magic; Curufin is “enchained” (line 2404) by the sight of her before he regards her “with hot desire” (line 2473); and all of Angband falls under Lúthien’s “theme of sleep and slumbering” (line 3979) before “[i]n [Morgoth’s] eyes the fire to flame was fanned, / and forth he stretched his brazen hand” (lines 4044-5). Yet as the tale progresses, only Beren’s desire for Lúthien seems most like love and admiration. Curufin and Morgoth’s desire seem twisted and disturbing. I argue that this dichotomy is a result of the interplay between the characters’ intentions towards Lúthien and the manifestation of those intentions through the content, the manner, and the syntactic construction of their spoken dialogue such that Beren’s transparent speech highlights his goodwill, while Curufin and Morgoth deliberately manipulate their speech to conceal their ill intentions.  

Both Curufin and Morgoth express a desire to possess Lúthien against her will. Curufin falsely promises Lúthen that he and his brother will aid in her rescue of Beren from Tol-in-Gaurhoth (lines 2454-63) if she returns with them to Nargothrond. Instead, he and his brother escort her back to Nargothrond to keep her “in bond” (line 2493) in order to prevent her from rescuing Beren and to allow Curufin to pursue her (though he is foiled by Huan (lines 2530-3)). Morgoth tries to “‘take’” (line 4043) her by force, but Lúthien escapes him (line 4046). Beren, in contrast, is against both actions: he criticizes Thingol’s price for Lúthien’s hand and for his treatment of his daughter as a good to be sold in a transaction (“‘For little price do elven-kings / their daughters sell’” (lines 1164-5)), and he begs Lúthien not to follow him to Angband, as he does not want to bring her harm (“‘but never to that outer fear, / that darkest mansion of all dread, / shall thy most blissful light be led’” (lines 2979-81)). In rebuffing Thingol’s transactional view of his daughter, Beren acknowledges Lúthien’s agency as an individual and not an object, and because he views her as an individual, his desire to not see her harmed thus appears to be motivated by respect and not from a wish to deprive her of her agency like Curufin and Morgoth intend to do.

The ill intentions that Curufin and Morgoth have for Lúthien are made more potent by the indirect manner in which Curufin and Morgoth convey them. Curufin’s indirect manner stems from two sources: first, Curufin uses his brother Celegorm as his mouthpiece when speaking with her: “and other whispered counsels [Curufin] spake, / and showed [Celegorm] what answer he should make [to Lúthien]” (lines 2452-3). Then, Curufin bids Celegorm to lie to her in order to persuade her to come with them to Nargothrond (lines 2454-63). Through such deception, Curufin further separates his intentions to lock Lúthien away and his spoken promises to offer her shelter and aid. Morgoth’s indirect manner stems mainly from concealment behind metaphor. Morgoth describes Lúthien as a flower used by “‘amorous gods [...] / honey-sweet to kiss, and cast then bruised, / their fragrance loosing, under feet’” (lines 4030-2), which abstracts away the (potentially sexual) violence Morgoth wishes to do her and thus helps Morgoth seem removed from such violent acts. This metaphor also brings Morgoth’s speech closer to that of Curufin’s, for it mirrors Curufin’s own vague allusion to killing Felagund if he were to return to Nargothrond with a Silmaril (“‘[...] and if [Felagund] bear / a Silmaril--I need declare / no more in words’” (lines 2332-4)). Beren, on the other hand, does not attempt to hide his intentions from Lúthien. For example, in his bid to not bring Lúthien into harm, he tells her as such (lines 2979-81). Thus, the matching of his words to his intentions highlights the goodness of Beren’s intentions, while Curufin and Morgoth’s ill intentions are reflected in their deliberate obfuscation. 

Finally, Curufin and Morgoth use the same snarled syntactical structures in their manner of speech, which further aids in masking their true intentions. As an illustrative example, Curufin expresses the following to Celegorm regarding Felagund:

            ‘At least thy profit it would be             to know whether dead he is or free;             to gather thy men and thy array.             “I go to hunt” then thou wilt say,             and men will think that Narog’s good             ever thou heedest. But in the wood

            things may be learned [...] (lines 2324-9)

Curufin breaks from the typical subject-verb-object structure in English sentences; instead, he places the subject after the object (or the verb phrase in general), as in lines 2324 and 2327. He also employs passive voice, such as in line 2329. These techniques allow Curufin to hide the subject of his sentences and thus conceal the actors that would gain from (and would be culpable in) performing the acts that Curufin suggests.

In his metaphorical description of violence against Lúthien, Morgoth performs a similar tactic: 

    ‘[...] In slothful gardens many a flower

like thee the amorous gods are used

honey-sweet to kiss, and cast then bruised,

their fragrance loosing, under feet.’ (lines 4029-32)

In this sentence, “‘flower’” is the object. The subject is the “‘amorous gods,’” who perform actions against the flower, such as kissing it or bruising it. But this sentence is also constructed in passive voice, as evident in “‘are used,’” such that “‘amorous gods’” seems like the object on which actions are performed when the sentence actually means the opposite. Through this construction, Morgoth conceals his role as the instigator of violence. Thus by employing these syntactic twistings, both Curufin and Morgoth are able to superficially distance themselves (and their culpability) from their wrongful actions.

Beren, however, does not twist his sentences as such. For example, Beren’s first speech of substance to Lúthien mainly employs simple sentences in standard syntactic constructions: 

    ‘Where art thou gone? The day is bare,

the sunlight dark, and cold the air!

Tinúviel, where went thy feet?

O  wayward star! O maiden sweet!

O flower of Elfland all too fair

for mortal heart! The woods are bare!

The woods are bare!’ he rose and cried. (lines 774-80) 

The subjects of each sentence are easily identified and lack concealment. Such construction more firmly supports how Beren’s intentions and his spoken words are clearly and directly linked. Beren also employs direct questions (e.g., “‘Where art thou gone?’”), appositive phrases  (e.g., “‘O wayward star!’”), and epithets (e.g., “‘Tinúviel’”) that highlight how Beren is trying to talk to Lúthien rather than around Lúthien like Morgoth and Curufin do. Through the clarity of his syntax and his almost reverent exclamations, Beren’s love for Lúthien becomes most evident. 

In all, though the initial descriptions of the desire that Beren, Curufin, and Morgoth have for Lúthien are similar, the sharp contrast between Beren’s love and Curufin and Morgoth’s desires is mirrored in their respective dialogue with Lúthien. Beren’s speech is clear and precise, which both conveys and highlights the purity of his love, but the speech of Curufin and Morgoth is twisted and obfuscated, which only emphasizes their ill intentions.  — GMH

Everyone Knows a Sam

 I didn’t know what fairie was.

But, Tolkien did. Somewhere between the Shire and Rivendell, he showed me. The question worth asking is not: What is fairie? It’s: How does Tolkien take you there?

What kind of place is Middle Earth?

-RFB.

Well, it is fantasy. Certainly. It gets us to fairie. But how?

Many readers, many critics, and most editors speak of style as if it were an ingredient of a book, like the sugar in a cake, or something added onto the book, like the frosting on the cake. The style, of course, is the book. If you remove the cake, all you have left is the recipe. If you remove the style, all you have left is a synopsis of the plot.

– Le Guin.

Ah yes, that’s how you get to fairie: the style. That of Elrond and Sam, of prose and poetry? What is that style?

The Fellowship of the Ring’s world-building happens with words. No sh*t. But not just any words. Words that describe the Shire like an English countryside and speeches that make you too feel drunk and bored at Bilbo’s ramblings and songs that make you feel like you understand a tree’s mind.

In these chapters, familiarity buds. I haven’t lived in the English countryside, but I feel like I have. I don’t know a Tom Bombadil, but his skips and quips on flowers and his lady make me feel like I do. In The Fellowship’s early pages, Tolkien invites you into a world that has already existed for you. 

Just as Le Guin said that “the style, of course, is the book,” Tolkien builds this style, adjective by adjective, register by register. Sam speaks sermo humilis (a description he’d not even know how to define). It’s humble speech, the style of the Gospels: the books in the Bible that talk about fisherman and tax collectors, those on par with Sam the gardener.

“I don’t know how to say it, but after last night I feel different. I seem to see ahead, in a kind of way,” says Sam. This style, this humble speech, this low register, is what gets us to fairie. “Everyone knows a Sam,” said RFB, “but what about a Banazir Galabasi?”

Banazir Galabasi is Samwise Gamgee. Yes- that is his actual Westron name, the name he’d’ve had before Tolkien’s translation. In the appendices, Tolkien explains his rewriting of names: “Samwise” means “half-wise” or “simple.” This is an example of how Middle Earth is a world you know, because stylistic choices like these make it accessible. Sam is one of us. Banazir Galbasi would have been just as brave. But, Sam gets you to fairie.

Frodo speaks book language, just like you do.

-RFB.

Frodo, by Bilbo, learned from books– those of Elvish poetry and deep histories that most hobbits waved away. Frodo learned and lived Middle Earth and could therefore speak in both high and low styles. Tolkien needs Frodo because someone has to walk between Rivendell and the Shire without a translator. Tolkien knew this character from somewhere.

Have you been to mass? Have you had the hymnal book at the ready waiting for them to announce the number? Have you ever tried to hit the high notes in Angels We Have Heard on High? Tolkien did– his whole childhood.

Mass, for its majority, happens in front of you. Words being said, rehearsed responses clockwork-ed-ly given back, but when the congregation sings, they are no longer the audience but participants. This too, is style. In mass, the sermo sublimis, the grand speech, the priest declares and the humble style (the congregation) participates. And just as Psalms 100 says to “Shout for joy to the Lord.. come before him with joyful songs,” the way to fairie is to be sung.

Dwarves write beautiful ballads.

Elves write eloquent narratives.

Hobbits write nursery rhymes. 

-RFB.

A ballad is heavier than a nursery rhyme, though not as sculpted as a narrative. A ballad describes what is gone, what is mortal. Far Over the Misty Mountains Cold, is a long, repetitive structured telling of a long walk toward a home that might not exist. If the hobbits are the congregation and the Elves are the priests, the dwarves are the dirge, for they sing slow, mournful songs, hymns, and poems to lament the mortal.

Consider Galadriel’s lament in Lothlórien. Elvish (ancient, sculpted) lets you hear the grief but not feel it. This is a stylistic choice: the Elves are not for you. They have their own chillingly beautiful fairie, but their adjectives, their style, their poetry, remind you that you have yet to step foot into it. The Elvish register mirrors that of the priests Tolkien grew up with. Galadriel does not need you to follow verbatim, but rather to recognize the vastness and timelessness of her words. Then, in contrast…

The hobbits sing when they’re cold and when they’re hungry, when they’re tired and when they’re happy, about a bath and about a beer. The Shire runs on rhymes that don’t need special intellectual capacity to sing intently. This is everyone in the congregation singing Angels We Have Heard on High, maybe not getting to the high note but singing anyway as it is the participating that involves them, not the priest’s sermo sublimis.

Mass is neither the priest nor the congregation, it’s the full liturgy. Middle Earth is not just Rivendell nor the Shire, it’s all the styles Tolkien uses at once. You need Bilbo’s ramblings and Sam’s honesty just as much as Elvish poetry or ballads about Moria.

The Fellowship of the Ring is an invitation. Over the course of it, Tolkien has made you fluent, not just in the lore and history, but the style. You know that Elvish poetry ascends eloquence in a manner incomprehensible to your mere double digits of age. You know that Merry and Pippin’s giggle about the Lembas bread consumption could very much be your younger brothers. You’ve become fluent in Tolkienian style, and as was said in class, “no spell or incantation is more potent than the adjective.” Tolkien gave chartreuse to the Elves and green to the hobbits.

This fluency gives one final thing. You have learned, in one book, that transcendent experiences, a step into fairie, happens through the humble speech. Elrond can convene a council on the fate of Middle Earth, but only Sam can make you cry about it. And by the end of The Fellowship, you have been trained to listen when the prose drops from grand to humble. You too are Frodo, with fluent understanding of all registers.

The Fellowship ends with the Fellowship broken. Sam thrashes in a river after Frodo– no ballad, no narrative. Just a hobbit, recalling his promise to another hobbit in humble speech:

It would be the death of you to come with me, Sam.

I am going to Mordor.

It’s the only way.

-Frodo.

Of course it is, but not alone.

I’m coming too, or neither of us isn’t going.

-Sam.

Tolkien spent 400 pages teaching you to hear the cost of this sentence. 

EGA

When Style Becomes Meaning

"People who think like that just do not talk a modern idiom...But there would be an insincerity of thought, a disunion of word and meaning. For a King who spoke in a modern style would not really think in such terms" (Page 206)

 

There is something about Tolkien that defies simple explanation. After finishing The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, I had the impression that Middle-earth originates from a deeper place and that the story has a weight that most entertainment does not, drawing readers into a strange yet familiar universe. The richness of the world-building, the constructed mythology, and the Norse, Anglo-Saxon and religious foundations are the typical targets of criticism. The impact is not fully explained by any of it. Although the bits are visible, they do not contain the spell. But the answer lies somewhere simpler and harder to pin down. It lies in the way the prose itself is written. Shippey identifies three reasons for the continuing appeal of Lord of the Rings that most readers feel but cannot name: flexibility of style, resonance of the highest levels, and the ability to reach mythic meaning while remaining embedded in story. Ultimately, these form one argument about what style actually does in Tolkien, and together they explain why LeGuin in her frosting and cake analogy, the style is the book itself.

 

The impression of an inhabited world starts when Shippey recognises Tolkien's artistic versatility. There isn't a single narrative tone in Tolkien. He allows various registers to coexist in the same narrative, and the contrast really works. Merry and Pippin communicate in a straightforward, comfortable manner that grounds them. Gandalf, Aragorn, and Théoden have a more powerful voice that is moulded by authority and history. This is particularly evident in the Council of Elrond, where Boromir's formal, high register conveys his political identity, pride, and the strain of Gondor's circumstances before he has taken any action in the plot. Here, style is not decorative. 

 

The second feature is harder to pinpoint since the reader's emotions in Tolkien's elevated portions seem more like inheritance than creation. When Aragorn tells the story of Beren and Lúthien or the Company journeys through Lórien, the prose often conveys a feeling of depth and weight that becomes apparent before the reader get to fully comprehending the meaning of the tale itself. Ursula K. Le Guin claims that although Tolkien's vocabulary is simple and mostly unadorned, his writing may go from the everyday to the grandiose and even into a rhythmic or poetic style. Rather than unusual or archaic language, the effect is determined by speed, structure, and tone. Tolkien spent his professional life immersed in older literary traditions such as Old English poetry, mediaeval romance, Norse myth, and the King James Bible, which influenced the underlying movement of his prose. According to Tom Shippey, Tolkien possessed an exceptionally accurate understanding of the meaning that language and style convey. The combined presence of these traditions operating beneath the surface is what readers notice in these passages, giving the text its unique weight but making it challenging to pinpoint the source of that effect. 

 

Thirdly, Tolkien’s rejection of allegory and metaphors in his writing allows his stories such as Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit that give meaning to each individual character beyond what their stated purpose seems to be. For instance, Frodo finishes the quest at Mount Doom but is unable to destroy the Ring, which is eventually destroyed by Gollum. As Ursula Le Guin suggests, the fantasy genre has to go beyond simple storytelling and layer in meanings that are somehow relevant and relatable to the reader so that they are not only fully immersed but also feel this everlasting connection with the works of Tolkien that transcends generations. Moreover, Tolkien does this layering by grounding the stories in the root emotions of familiar human experiences and human quests of endurance, preservice, humility and failure, which ultimately allow us to build resiliency and character. Ultimately, the works of Tolkien through both his style, his use of layering and his deep historical references and inspirations allow him to write with such meaning and in yet such an abstract genre that is somehow relevant and hard hitting to readers through time. 

 

-RS

 

"Deliberate 'Archaism'": Tolkien's Worldbuilding through Prose and Verse

 In a November 1956 letter to Terence Tiller, producer of the BBC’s adaptation of Lord of the Rings (letter 193), J.R.R. Tolkien attempted to explain how and why the particular accents of the characters of Middle-Earth crucial essential to the story. “I have no doubt that, if this 'history' were real, all users of the C[ommon] Speech would reveal themselves by their accent, differing in place, people, and rank, but that cannot be represented when C. S. is turned into English - and is not (I think) necessary. I paid great attention to such linguistic differentiation as was possible: in diction, idiom, and so on.” He recognized that the adaptation had to reflect the linguistic choices he had made that distinguished the various races of Middle-Earth from one another, so the Rohirrim did not sound like the Gondorians even when both spoke in an archaic style. Both in his construction of prose and poetry, Tolkien uses this style to make his characters and peoples distinct from one another and bring the readers into the world, where they feel it is internally consistent and real. They reflect the care and attention Tolkien put into all of his characters and their world to make them seem believable, as if they are part of a longer history that stretches beyond the moment that Tolkien presents in Lord of the Rings.

In a letter to Hugh Brogan in September 1955 (letter 171), Tolkien remarked on the way that authors seek to use a fake medieval style to give their work additional authenticity, “in an age where almost all auctorial manhandling of English is permitted (especially if disruptive) in the name of art or ‘personal expression’ [authors] immediately [dismiss] out of court deliberate ‘archaism.’... But a real archaic English is far more terse than modern; also many of things said could not be said in our slack and often frivolous idiom.” He calls on Bogan to “shake yourself out of this parochialism of time! Also (not to be too donnish) learn to discriminate between the bogus and genuine antique - as you would if you hoped not to be cheated by a dealer!” This echoes what Ursula Le Guin writes in “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie” regarding the importance of prose style in constructing “a world where no voice has ever spoken before; where the act of speech is the act of creation. The only voice that speaks there is the creator's voice.” As a result, authors who indulge in hacky archaism or do not even bother (the Poughkeepsie style, as she calls it) are undermining the world they are attempting to create in their story. 

It may seem that Tolkien eschewing a deliberately anachronistic manner in his word choices would make his work seem like the Poughkeepsie style that Le Guin is criticizing here. But there is a difference between that and the prose stylings of Tolkien. The former is a style similar to journalism, where a “language intended to express the immediate and the trivial is applied to the remote and the elemental,” to which Le Guin objects because its indistinct and flat prose does nothing to bring the world to life. By contrast, Tolkien “writes a plain, clear English. Its outstanding virtue is its flexibility, its variety. It ranges easily from the commonplace to the stately.” He does not need to use words like ichor, eldrich, and tenebrous that worse authors use to give their sentences that archaic quality. Instead, it is through his command of grammar that he is able to subtly avoid modern speech while at the same time ensuring the reader can fully understand.

In his analysis of the Council of Elrond, Tom Shippey identifies the particular elements of Tolkien’s prose that allows him to write in this archaic style without words like ichor, that Shippey describes as “the first resort of the amateur medievalist.” Instead, as in Elrond’s dialogue, Tolkien uses flexible word order like inverting subjects and verbs (‘Fruitless did I call the victory of the Last Alliance?’) while remaining within the bounds of colloquial English. Boromir’s speech is quite similar, as befitting his Númenorian heritage. The speech of Gloin, by contrast, is marked by leaving out causal connections between sentences and oblique statements, both of which are within colloquial English but still suggest his archaic manner. All of this shows the attention with which Tolkien sought to make his characters feel grounded in a premodern world.

At the same time, Tolkien takes effort to make the races of Middle-Earth feel distinct from one another in their speaking style. Elrond’s archaic manner “serves to distinguish his speech from that of the others; to act as a continual reminder of his age; and to make a link with the similarly archaic speech of Isildur, when Gandalf also comes to quote this later on.” Gandalf speaks similarly, which makes sense given that he is a Maiar and similarly wise. Gloin’s old speech “creates strong characterization for the whole dwarvish race: stubborn, secretive, concealing their intentions,” which then plays into Gimli’s portrayal later in the book. Aragorn and Boromir are contrasted through their language, where both are similarly capable of the archaic tone but Boromir, wanting to show his status as a high-born Gondorian, uses it all the time while Aragorn is more confident in his position and willing to speak plainly when he must. This in turn informs the reader of Boromir’s hubris which leads to his demise, while Aragorn leads a successful war effort and becomes king as he knew he would. All of these choices serve as crucial characterizations that help the reader understand all of the new characters that he introduces.

Tolkien similarly constructs the poetry appearing intermittently through the book in a similar way to give the sense that each race has their own literary tradition that has lasted for hundreds or thousands of years with its own character as a genre. Hobbit poetry is so distinct from Elven lays in form and style as to clearly indicate their separation. When Frodo sings his nursery rhyme in the Prancing Pony, it indicates their relatively childish nature compared to the other peoples of Middle-Earth, yet with an innocent joy. The lays of Beren and Luthien sung by Aragorn are in an epic tradition that reflects their clear memory of days past. The Dwarf ballad of Gimli about Moria has a tragic yet mythic quality of half-remembered times past, which are no longer with them, that mourns what was once great and mighty. The Rohirrim poem is reflective of their society centering around the horse, with a wistful mood that harkens back to the glory of their ancestors, intended to sound like the Old English verse that Tolkien studied. All of these help to reveal something about the peoples who wrote them, inserted at such a point to help the reader understand their particular place in Middle-Earth. They are crucial to providing that sense of realism to the world, in showing these are real peoples with their own unique artistic tradition that had developed through the ages and influenced their self-understanding. More than the archaic manner of the prose, poetry emphasizes the depth to Tolkien’s work that makes it impossible to think of it as anything like Poughkeepsie.

- IAG