Tolkien A or B?

[Boromir88]

As C.S. Lewis remarks in Tolkien's obituary...he says that Tolkien 'had been inside language.' I think that's an excellent way of putting it and part of the reason why Tolkien wrote a fantasy story people love to read.

I'm going to use another author (J.K. Rowling) as an example. Rowling by no means is an awful author who can't write her way out of a paper bag. But the difference between Rowling and Tolkien is simply Tolkien was in a whole different league.

Rowling has managed to write several stories that are a great joy to just sit down and read. She (like Tolkien) managed to create a believable fantasy world of her own (in my opinion ).

But what seperates Tolkien apart from Rowling is, I think, Tolkien's knowledge of language. I guess this is what happens when a philologist writes a story as Tolkien points out in an interview with The New York Times:

The invention of languages is the foundation. The 'stories' were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows.

Now we see what Lewis meant by his remarks that Tolkien 'had been inside language.'

[CSteefel]

Originally Posted by Boromir88

But what seperates Tolkien apart from Rowling is, I think, Tolkien's knowledge of language. I guess this is what happens when a philologist writes a story as Tolkien points out in an interview with The New York Times:

Not quite sure what you mean by this. I don't find the linguistic references in Tolkien as interesting as his language, or more accurately, his writing style, but then I am not a philologist...

What really strikes me about Tolkien is how well the books hold up as they are reread. Every single sentence has a role in the book and they can be appreciated at multiple levels, but sometimes more so on the 3rd (or 6th or 9th) reading. He captures the physical texture of the landscape, for example, and this contributes to the overall mood on the earlier readings, but evokes additional "texture" on subsequent readings. His prose style is beautifully delineated at every level, whether he is describing a great event, or a simple landscape through which his characters are moving.

Rowling has some of this ability, especially in her later books where the prose description becomes much better, but she is not going to match the Master. This ability of Tolkien to capture the great themes while maintain absolute crystalline, laser-like clarity (sort of like a great white Burgundy) is what makes him a great writer IMO...

The comparison here would be more likely Joyce's Ulysses, which is "championship game" prose, as Nabokov said, and not the murkier alphabet soup of Finnegan's Wake...