[Eurytus]

OK since someone has asked to provide examples of bad writing, here are a couple that I think to be pretty poor;

"Hey dol! merry dol! ring a dong dillo!
Ring a dong! hope along! fal lal the willow!
Tom Bom, jolly Tom, Tom Bombadillo!"

A lost mythology for England?? Suddenly I'm in Alice in Wonderland.
Never have I been so glad for a change from book to film. Not to mention the over-abundance of exclamation marks.

"Then Merry stooped and lifted his hand to kiss it, and lo! Theoden opened his eyes, and they were clear, and he spoke in a quiet voice though laboured."

Quite apart from sounding like a list (and, and, and, and) was the lo! really justified by Theoden opening his eyes? Although of course by now lo! is as ubiquitous as the word Excellent is in a Bill & Ted movie.

"And he sang to them, now in the Elven-tongue, now in the speech of the West, until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness."

Sounding like another list (another 4 ands in one sentence!) this pearler contains the cracking phrase "their joy was like swords".

But the fact that we are supposed to believe that this was written by the same author as the one who wrote about a fox thinking to himself "There's something mighty queer behind this" He was quite right, but he never found out any more about it.

Now that is what I am talking about when I mention a disconnect between books 1 and 3. Reading the HOME series you can clearly see that the FOTR starts as a straight sequel to the Hobbit. The ROTK attempts to be a sequel to the Silmarillion. When Tolkien did that he should have gone back and fixed things. Elements like the language change and the Fox shows pretty clearly that he did not.