The Power of Tolkien's Prose

[Pitchwife]

Thanks for the recommendation, tumhalad! I've just ordered Walker's book via inter-library loan and intend to revisit this thread once I've read it (which may take some time), but here are some stray remarks in the meantime.

First of all, it's great that Tolkien's works are becoming more and more accepted as an object of serious scholarly criticism, and I think we should be grateful for every new author who approaches them from a new angle. I can't claim to be an expert on the current state of Tolkien scholarship, but what I've read up to now (mainly Shippey's Author of the Century and a few essay collections) seems to have concentrated on his mythological and medieval sources and some general philosophical questions (such as e.g. the nature of evil in his world), while somewhat neglecting his craft as a writer of prose - so it looks like Walker's book is going to fill a market gap, so to speak.
(Btw, do you have any idea what sort of theoretical background he's coming from? I'm asking because your post and the review on your blog made me wonder what e.g. a descendant of the Russian Formalists would make of Tolkien...)

About Tolkien's "inherent ambiguity" - this touches on an interesting but rather short-lived discussion we recently had on a thread about Tolkien and Negative Capability, but the discussion over there was preoccupied with ambiguities in Tolkien's 'worldbuilding' (i.e. ambiguous/contradictory representations of events/characters in various writings of his on the same subject), so I'm curious to see how Walker is going to apply this to the fabric of Tolkien's prose, and what examples he proffers.
One example that came to my mind is Tolkien's tendency to represent natural objects which we usually think of as inanimate (like mountains or trees) as dynamic agents rather than static elements of a landscape - i.e. he ever so often describes them as 'marching' rather than just 'extending' into the distance (in fact, this kind of thing is so omnipresent in LotR that I can't think of any specific examples right now, but I think you know what I mean). Now usually we would read that kind of usage as metaphorical - but when we come to Entmoot and the Ents' and Huorns' attack on Isengard, we suddenly find the forest marching as a matter of fact! "Metaphor actualised", it can't be described any better than that.

On a more general note, to quote from your blog:

Walker contends that above all else, Tolkien was an effective writer, and that it is his effectiveness as a writer that accounts for much of his popularity.

Amen to that! And I think one of the secrets of his effectiveness is that his prose, no matter how many layers of implied meaning can be unearthed from it at close study (and I'm sure there are quite a lot), never draws attention to itself, never stands in the way of the story it's telling, but makes itself the perfect vehicle for conveying the story. A rare virtue among authors of our age, I think.

Finally, talking about the power of Tolkien's prose, I can't describe its effect on me any better but by this quotation from LotR itself (Book II, Lothlórien):

All that he saw was shapely, but the shapes seemed at once clear cut, as if they had been first conceived and drawn at the uncovering of his eyes, and ancient as if they had endured for ever. He saw no colour but those he knew, gold and white and blue and green, but they were fresh and poignant, as if he had at that moment first perceived them and made for them names new and wonderful.

Exactly: we read no words but those we know... but.