[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

You are, of course, quite right, Saucepan: most of this argument is a matter of opinion. There are, however, certain objective realities in play that have nothing to do with what any of us thinks. I always shy away from using popularity as a measure of quality: one only has to look at the bestseller lists or the music charts to see how seldom high sales figures indicate artistic merit. Most very popular work is intended to be so, and is thrust upon the general public by whatever means are available to its producers. Often that which has real merit is pushed into the shadows for fear that it will not sell, or that it might damage the commercial image of the company that produces it. However, sometimes a work of quality does achieve great commercial success. Somehow it makes its way into the public domain and succeeds on its own merit, and I believe The Lord of the Rings to be such a work.

We know that The Lord of the Rings wasn't originally expected to sell well from the unusual profit-sharing arrangement that Tolkien agreed with Allen and Unwin. He stood to make nothing on his book if it did not make money for the publishers. It's also blatantly obvious from the author's correspondance that he had early abandoned any attempt to give his publishers what they had originally requested. This indicates to me that for Tolkien himself, money was a secondary motive, and that Allen and Unwin were publishing more in hope than in certainty of a profit. As matters transpired this was a pretty clever risk to take: Tolkien made more money than he would have done with a standard contract and the publishers made more than they could possibly have hoped. However, this success took a long time to achieve, and was based almost entirely on public reaction to the work itself rather than to a campaign of placement and promotion.

Of course, this says nothing about the book's quality other than that a lot of people wanted to read it. Nobody here seems to be denying that the book is worth reading, and this is about all that one can say on the subject from the figures. What popular success can never do, though, is provide an objective assessment of the quality of the prose. It might indicate that people like it, but people like a lot of things that aren't necessarily very well made.

That said, I would inevitably opt for the quoted passages being, if not great writing, then at least fairly good. The problem with presenting just the passage without explaining the reasons why one considers it poor is that the rest of us, who might like that sort of thing, then have no grounds on which to respond other than flat agreement or disagreement. Tom Bombadil is obviously a matter of taste. Personally I think that a world that can encompass both Sauron and Bombadil has more depth and breadth than one in which all of the main characters are either impressive and good or impressive and bad, with only the lesser being comical or eccentric. The very idea of a powerful being who delights in simple pleasures and silly madrigals, and who is, most significantly, both happy in himself and a source of happiness to others seems to me a perfect counterpoint to the amorphous, threatening and overstatedly potent Sauron.

Tom's rhymes and songs are intentionally rather silly, employing a style that seems strange and imperfect with its reliance on nonsense words and half-rhyme. It did not seem so, however, to the medieval mind, nor to the minds of those who composed folk songs that employ just these techniques a mere century ago. It is entirely probable that Tolkien heard some traditional music as a boy that sounded much as Tom's singing does. The overall effect of his rhyming on us at the beginning of the twenty-first century is indeed odd, but since its purpose is to show that Tom is a strange, ancient and comic figure, whom some might regard as ridiculous, I think that it works very well. Tolkien sets up his character as a seemingly harmless eccentric and then shows that the great One Ring has no power over him. He pits a seeming clown against the great Dark Lord and the clown wins easily. For the first time the power of the One has been questioned, and by a character whose demeanour seems calculated to devalue both the ring itself and the will to power that is its main allure. Powerful characters who delight in nonsense words and silly rhymes are a common theme in fairy-tale and myth, so it seems to me perfectly reasonable that such a character was included in a book that was heavily influenced by those forms. Tolkien may have included the character to please his children, but he interpolates him in such a way that he makes an important point: Sauron and his works are not invincible.

Anyway, the Bombadil chapters are a good bit of fun, which is reason enough for me. It doesn't do to make everything deadly serious, even for an adult audience.

Personally I regard "their joy was like knives" as a fairly run-of-the-mill simile for piercing joy (a popular theme with Tolkien). Joy can stab and rend just as any strong emotion can, indeed as a sword can. Also it should be possible to spot dramatic repetition when it is used. It was a common technique in ancient saga, just as is the sort of warlike simile that compares happiness with a sharp blade. Similarly, the use of 'Lo!' in a descriptive sentence seems perfectly in-keeping with the Old-English poetic use of hwæt, which is often translated as 'Lo!', 'Hark!' or 'Behold!'.

The main objection to the above techniques would seem to be that they are completely out of character for a Hobbit. However, what if the particular Hobbit that wrote that section had before him a song made in Rohan as a eulogy for King Théoden? We know that Snorri Sturluson had before him mouldering scrolls of court poetry when he wrote his historical saga cycle Heimskringla. Imagine that the scribe in question unconsciously adopted the high tone of the formal state piece. I can't say whether or not this was intended, and the chances are that it was not; but since Tolkien was able to spot quite obscure grammatical errors when re-reading his work, it seems odd to me that he should leave writing in place that just looked wrong. Of course the difference between what Tolkien thought was wrong and what we think is wrong has already been covered. The point is that he typed out The Lord of the Rings several times, and on each of those occasions he refrained from re-writing the earlier passages. For such a compulsive reviser not to revise something implies for me either a lack of time or a disbelief in the need for revision. The number of years that passed between the completion of The Lord of the Rings and its publication discounts the time factor, which leaves us with Tolkien reading the whole work through and being content with the tone that he had set. We can believe one of two things: either an Oxford professor of English couldn't spot bad prose when he read it or we are missing his point. Of course, there is a third option: perhaps the author's taste was unusual and will thereore meet with strong criticism or defence depending on the personal opinions of those discussing him.