Well, I've dug out
Letters and tracked down the relevant passage, only to find that The Squatter of Amon Rudh has beaten me to it.
I've never been much impressed with (or perhaps have never understood) criticisms of this sort - criticisms about "pretention" or lack of modern style. Such arguments come with a host of meta-artistic assumptions. They seem to be criticisms not of the work of art itself, but rather of the author. For surely a text alone cannot be "pretentious"; it can only be so in a certain context, and given certain preconceptions about what pretention is. Hence a charge of "pretention" only has force if one accepts the view that the quality of art depends on the artist rather than the art itself.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I have always been interested in the art, and interested in the artist only as a related matter not concerned with my primary enjoyment of the work. I like the
Iliad not because it is old, but because it is good. I would like it just the same whether it was written three thousand years ago or last year. But I suppose there has been a great trend in academia toward the opposite view: that ancient literature is only interesting for its antiquity, not as literature in itself. (This, by the way, is a view that Tolkien certainly disagreed with).
An accompanying view is that modern literature must be modern in style. But again, unless it is not the works of art themselves in which we take an interest, there can be no reason for this. Unless, I suppose, it is the belief that the modern style is simply innately superior to all others - and if this isn't an example of temporal parochialism, I don't know what is.
It is quite a different matter when one encounters a poor attempt to write in an archaic style, as Tolkien points out in letter 171:
Quote:
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The proper use of 'tushery' is to apply it to the kind of bogus 'medieval' stuff which attempts (without knowledge) to give a supposed temporal colour with expletives, such as tush, pish, zounds, marry, and the like.
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But such writing is bad simply because it is bad, not because it is outdated.
Tolkien points out quite rightly that there are simply some things that are better expressed with archaic language. Archaic English really does have a terser, nobler quality to it than modern English, quite in keeping with the heroic spirit of heroes from northern mythology. Tolkien was, more than most authors, keenly aware of the close relation between language and content. If you are going to write a mythic story about heroism in an ancient world surely it makes some sense to write in a mythic, heroic, and ancient style. Writing about these things in a modern style would result in a subtle disjunction between form and content. The Shire is, in quite a few ways, more modern than other regions of Middle-earth, and it makes sense that those portions of the book which it concerns employ a more modern style.
It is hardly parochialism to suggest that the style of a book should match its content. It certainly is parochialism to insist that one's own native style is the only style that ought to be used.
Certainly there are examples of modern epics, like
War and Peace that do not use an antiquated style. Why should they? They are about the modern world. Even were they not, no one is insisting that an archaic style is the
only way to write about archaic things. It is simply the way that best preserves unity of prose and content.
I do think that there may be a problem with supposing that the hobbits wrote all of this in its high style. But this is quite a different criticism. And I am not altogether convinced that Frodo was incapable of grasping the higher style - he was rather a learned hobbit. But there are other problems with the framing device as well: there are two passages (one in book I about a fox that observes the hobbits and one in book IV about Gollum's near-repentance) describing things that none of the hobbits could possibly have known about.
I should perhaps defend myself against the charge (made against the forum in general) that I refuse to criticize
The Lord of the Rings in any way. It's my favorite book, and so I find very few things to criticize. But there are flaws. The book would benefit from an improved characterization of Aragorn, for example, whose personality is somewhat ill-defined, considering his central importance. The entrance of Sam and Frodo into Mordor relies a bit too heavily on coincidence and luck. There is a certain insensitivity with regard to the portrayal of race. These and others, though, are very minor flaws in my estimation.