#i have a friend who does not vibe with tolkien at /all/ but listens patiently to my screeds about the movies

[anghraine]

I understand why people often say things along the lines of "academic folk who admire Tolkien do so for his ideas/themes and work with setting and ambition, not for the style or quality of his prose." But also ... lmao, speak for yourself. LOTR would be 1000x poorer without Tolkien's personal prose style as well as the (frequently complex) interplay between the language and style of epic poetry and emphatically novelistic prose.

I think Tolkien is (at least in English) a better prose writer than a poet, but his prose is also very poetic when it's not deliberately anti-poetic. A lot of the language just seems very beautiful and effective to me in a way that doesn't diminish verisimilitude or immersion or the ultimate purpose of the novel, and IMO that's something very few people are good at.

He's not alone in it by any means. But there's a committed, unembarrassed richness to his default style that I just don't encounter that often in English of that kind, and which I think is very impressive. It doesn't always work, but I think it usually does, and both can illuminate character in really intriguing ways (take a look at which characters can shift between these registers and which mostly don't or can't—it's interesting!) and can just linger with you as powerful, effective language.