Quote:
Originally Posted by Boromir88
Personally, I always rather liked the Narrator, and the tone the voice establishes in The Hobbit. As the story continues, the Narrator gets used less and less as the book changes from light-hearted to a more serious tone. However, I don't think it's good or bad writing, just a matter of personal taste. Something the reader will probably either love or dislike (not much middle-ground  ). I would have been most disappointed if a book of LOTR's magnitude and darkness used the Narrator's voice. But for The Hobbit I quite like it.  |
Yes, it's not at all an essentially 'bad' thing. It's something you find in children's books even now, though more often in stories aimed at younger kids. If you read a lot of children's lit from a hundred years ago or more, you find it used quite often. It's not that Tolkien wrote 'badly', he wrote in a perfectly acceptable tone for a children's book, especially one of his era. Even JK Rowling starts the Harry Potter series with a more authorial tone which she lost rapidly as the books kept coming.
Tolkien did indeed dislike it - Verlyn Flieger brought it up in a lecture at Birmingham 2005 where she highlighted that it was a prime example of the 'pigwiggenry' Tolkien deplored so much in On Fairy Stories.