What's "real," anyway?

[Novnarwen]

However, I don't think LOTR is that well written .....

*gasp* (!!)

That sentence came as a real shock! I won't shoot you; just give a few comments before I take my leave.

I do think it's a surprising approach of the book and the author. Tolkien was after all a Professor in English language and literature. Surely, he had his way with words. How could it not be well written?

Comparing Shakespeare and Tolkien is like comparing the Queen and me. Imagine that! :P (Eeek, bad example, but I have no other.) Shakespeare and Tolkien are completely different, as they not only write differently (in style and language), they also lived in two different periods of time. Shakespeare has this old elegant English (I have no other name for it). Yes of course, it seems so romantic, so wonderful, and so incredibly brilliant! But Shakespeare doesn't have these descriptions Tolkien has in, amongst others, Lord of The Rings. The wonderful paragraphs where Tolkien describes to us Middle-earth so clearly, make us think that it's all real! Shakespeare's stories are real. His stories are set in France, in Denmark, Greece etc. . . Tolkien’s world is not real, it's not set in a country we know of. That's why it's so real, because Tolkien actually manages to successfully create a world we are willing to believe in. (So how can Lord of the Rings possbly not have been written that well?) Shakespeare didn't do any of that that; he didn't create France or Denmark. We know where France is, we know that Frenchmen speak French and we know that they have moustaches. (Hehe. Not women.. Men only ) We did not know of Middle-earth before Tolkien described it to us. He described all of it to us; the history of Middle-earth, the people, the languages etc. He gave us a whole world, his descriptions were annoyingly () real. How can that be? Because he writes well! Because Lord of The Rings is amazingly well written!

Yeah, I'm done.

Nova