The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings
Language and languages
I am not a linguist—translators aren't linguists except by a title of courtesy—and so I can't say anything useful about Elvish and the other invented languages in LOTR. These are simply a few trivial remarks about how Tolkien uses the fictional tongues.
Not the least fictional is the English in which the story is narrated. Readers of P.G. Wodehouse will recognize the strategy: a language never spoken outside of books but used there to great effect as a space-filling medium (like the coloured lights). What you get from Tolkien's narrative language is the impact of the language itself, not the impact of the objects or events he describes with it. So I ask how the English works.
For one thing, it is crushingly antique. Thomas Malory has to be among the models: Le Morte Darthur is full of sentences like "Then came Sir So-and-So full wroth to the castle, and there slew he two-and-twenty recreant knights." You can find that kind of thing on almost every page of LOTR.
But Malory is less oblique than Tolkien. People in LOTR are awed by Arwen, but aside from one crack about the color of her hair we never learn what she looks like; we can picture Barliman Butterbur more clearly. The twentieth century taught us that you don't just say "horror" or "beauty" and expect the reader to follow; you tell what the character is seeing. Tolkien consistently shies from any such description. I suggest it's a defect in his style, indirectness where directness offers a big payoff.
But Malory isn't prolix, as Tolkien often is. Every sentence moves the plot forward. A lot of people think the entire second book of LOTR fails to advance the plot. Nor do Malory's stories stall, as LOTR often does when the author really gets the cap off his fountain pen.
Tolkien must have read all the classics of English literature, and so he must have read Anthony Trollope, the great one for announcing that a story line was now being laid aside for a few chapters, jumping back and forth in time, and bringing stories abruptly together for flashy effects. Read The Two Towers and The Last Chronicle of Barset for an instructive comparison. But Tolkien can't put charm on the page as Trollope can; he does try, but too often (as in the case of beauty and horror) he signals that a character or a situation is charming but fails to show you why.
What impels the reader to stay with LOTR, then? Tolkien shares with Malory and (more so) with Trollope a meticulous care in writing. You can rely on the author not to drop the tone or lose track. Stella Gibbons, in Cold Comfort Farm, gives a hilarious example of a writer who can go along with a story but from time to time breaks the line with a tastelessly overwritten paragraph. None of that in Tolkien. It's all overwritten, but it's all tasteful too.
And Tolkien, as a scholar of antique poetry and an inventor of languages, shows a keen awareness of what mode will be most effective in telling each part of his story. With no fanfare he shifts from Frenchified Malorian to carefully chosen "Anglo-Saxon" as the action moves into Rohan, for example. The reader gets value from the author's depth of study, even if much of the prose is more scholarly than novel-like.
Finally, Tolkien really does love those hobbits. As one who came back from the war when a million others didn't, he knows how good it is to be alive and British. He's sappy about Sam, but sappy is how the English felt about one another for most of the author's life, so the reader understands how sincere is his admiration for this countryman.
I can't be the only one who thinks good riddance to the Elves. You could get along with the Dwarves; the Rohirrim play rough but nearly always fair; their vileness aside, the Orcs are probably not such bad types; the Haradrim are wicked through and through but they ride Oliphaunts. Tolkien can't put an Elf in, though, without a little snatch of Elvish, and the Elvish seems to lead to poetry, and the poetry always stops the story dead. Remember the kid in high school who knew at seventeen that he would be a preacher? And how much you wanted to put him on a ship bound for some other country?
Oh, but that isn't just about the language, of course. Hh-hmm.
The two things I most enjoyed about Tolkien's invented languages:
1. The poetry of Rohan. Of course he translates it into Westron, but this is what Tolkien did for a living—translating Old English poetry into Modern English—and he did it well.
2. The Dwarvish war cry. Instead of "Dwarves Rule!" or "At 'em, Dwarves!" they shout this: "The Dwarves are upon you!" Maybe as a war cry it would be more effective if they said it in a language their enemy could understand, but in itself it is a little jewel of a slogan.
I do remember saying these comments would be trivial. Now they're over, too.
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Lord of Rings