Quote:
ps.
boring: The bloomin' detailed descriptions of EVERY landscape feature and EVERY campsite. "Where's the dialog!!"
Thirty years later: "Oh, that description of dreary barren wasteland is so evocative and so heartbreaking..."
|
Exactly what I was going to say! I used to scan the pages, looking for "something to happen!" I remember finding the descriptive writing during the first travels of the Fellowship ("The Ring Goes South") especially dull. Who cared what the country looked like? When were they going to meet some more interesting people?
But now as I read the book I find the descriptions to be some of the most precious passages. They're so evocative and so vital to the story--the landscape always furthers the story and is never irrelevant. For example, would the adventure in the Barrow-Downs seem so liminal without the long passages describing the crests of each hill in turn and the hotter and hotter weather? The very landscape builds the tension like the humid weather before a thunderstorm, and by the time the hobbits fall asleep under the standing stone it's clear that something very, very sinister is about to happen.