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For me the most striking part of this chapter is the long description of Isengard - the section beginning "Beneath the mountain's arm within the Wizard's Vale . . ." As unremarkable as these paragraphs may seem when compared with such scenes as the battle of Helm's Deep, I think that this description exemplifies certain aspects of Tolkien's writing style and ability.
First, there is the mere fact that this account is placed here. Up to this point the narrative in this chapter has followed our heros as they deal with loose ends from the battle and start on the journey toward Orthanc. If I had been writing this chapter, I probably would stayed with these viewpoint characters exclusively, describing Isengard as they come to it, from their perspective. Now of course that's because I don't have anything remotely like Tolkien's grasp of the technique of story-telling - but after all, it does seem like the more natural thing to do, and I'd guess that few writers, even good ones, would think to break away from that viewpoint and move to, as it were, a higher perspective, to give a more distant and objective description of Isengard before proceeding.
Yet this is something Tolkien does quite often. It happens constantly in the Silmarillion - many transitions are effected by "Now it must be told . . ." or "Now the tale turns to . . ." and very often we are pulled out of our perspective in time and space with references to events that occur later on and far away. This happens less in LotR, but it still happens. Most often we are only briefly taken out of viewpoint, but the passage in this chapter is not unique. Another notable one that occurs to me at the moment is an account of Shelob toward the end of book IV.
These passages make the narrative voice of LotR the so-called "omniscient narrator". I think that this is an important point to note when one considers Tolkien in relation to other modern authors. I would say that most current fantasy writers (and indeed most current commercial authors) tend to use the "third person limited" voice, in which, though the prose is still in third person, each scene is told the perspective of one of the characters in that scene.
I would go so far as to say that this is one of the ways in which modern fantasy fails when compared with Tolkien. For - and I admit that this is speculative - I think that there is something about the fairy-story as a genre that lends itself to the omniscient narrator. I'm not entirely sure why this is. In part, it may be that the omniscient narrator, in a manner of speaking, is capable of lifting the story up out of the mundane and making it bigger than the individual perspectives within it. That is certainly something that happens in this instance; in a way the shift in perspective is very cinematic. It's as though we follow the characters with close shots and shots from their perspective as they move toward Isengard; then when they finally approach it, the camera jumps to a high wide shot of the whole area. In a movie this would have the effect of opening up the story, making it feel big or expansive - and I think it is the same effect that Tolkien achieves here.
Perhaps a more mundane reason that this omniscient viewpoint is effective is simply that it allows the narrator to more effectively communicate information to the audience. In a limited perspective (and most of all in first person) the author must contrive it that all the information the reader needs to know must be accessible to the narrator. If this chapter were told strictly from the perspective of the main characters, it would take quite a while for the reader to grasp the layout of Isengard, as the characters slowly approached it and entered it. The omniscient voice allows Tolkien to simply tell us what we need to know.
That's a somewhat long analysis of a fairly short passage, but I think that Tolkien's narrative voice is an interesting and under-discussed subject.
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