... gritted teeth ...
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... an appreciation of this particular aspect of Tolkien's skill as a writer (who should be hailed as that, and should be considered to stand shoulder to shoulder - perhaps head and shoulders above - Steinbeck, Golding, and any other major 20th century author you can think of).
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Now, I've already had this argument with just about everyone on these boards, and there you go throwing salt on a
livid festering wound [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]
The dense and painterly (or photographic) style of description used by Tolkien, with it's narrative undertone (foreboding obviously, or hope - the landscape where Frodo and Sam meet Faramir, for example), seems to me more redolent of 19th century writing than the 20th. Parts of Poe's
Masque Of The Red Death, or anything by Joseph Conrad, are in a similar vein. Of modern authors, perhaps JG Ballard has the same visual attentiveness, wrapped around dialogue that is by contrast starkly laconic. The modern trends have been away from grand metaphor and simile, and the opening of literature to a wider cross-cultural audience and authorship has led to a range of equally valid forms, from the colloquial to patois and so on. And a simple economy of narrative certainly has its place (not in my posts here, obviously [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img] )
A great book? LotR, certainly. Tolkien the best writer of the 20th century? Based on LotR alone, I would say not. Based on his canon, certainly not.
But we've already had that discussion, which was eventually adjudged a somewhat of a "no result" as the protagonists (including yours truly) ground themselves into inextricable entrenchment, like the last great barques of an ancient armada, angular sculptures of black-brown driftwood that seemed to groan silently under the weight of their own failed expectations, and
in that melancholy rootless, yet somehow fixed forever in golden sand that bore their wheeling and spiked shadows without complaint, and still glistened at sunrise, like a half-forgotten dream, with the memory of spray and wash, the salmon leap and the dark, burrowing mollusc, preserving a timeless hope in its yielding texture, like the .... erm ... etc. etc. [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]
Apologies for the mischief [img]smilies/tongue.gif[/img] I think the living dead marshes were more of an atmospheric device than a specific kind of natural phenomenon that can be rationalised within Tolkien's cosmogony. Whilst some precursive elements of Gaia theory may arguably be superimposed on Tolkien's intuitive and poetic sense of the land, the recent philosophical notion of "living earth", with its comprehensive ecological paradigm, is not really inferred. The Tolkienesque kind of allusion can also be found in the work of the poets of the First World War in their reflections of battlefields and the pretty fields of France that became the great graveyards of that war.
Peace [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]