The Lord of the Rings and it surrounding material has a very particular feel to it. It has spawned innumerable imitators but the funny thing is, very few of them really capture the same feeling of Tolkien's works.

Historically, people have attributed this to the imitators not being able to replicate the depths of Tolkien's worldbuilding in terms of his languages etc. But this does not ring true to me as an explanation. Firstly because when you read LotR, you find that there is actually very little Elvish in there. Secondly because when you do come across Elvish material in the book, to the reader it is indistinguishable from complete gobbledygook. The fact that there is actually a semi-functional language behind it is completely invisible to the reader unless they go looking for it.

So, what story elements do you think actually define the feel of Tolkien's works?

Some suggestions:

- The ancient and the contemporary in contrast. In many ways, the Hobbits serve as the "contemporary" in the LotR narrative. The Shire is a comfortable place possessing most of the comforts of modern civilisation, where magic and the supernatural are essentially unknown. When you step out of the Shire into the wider world, it is almost like an urban fantasy transition where the characters come to learn that there is a hidden world of magic. And that wider world is marked by the presence of people and places connected to ancient and great historical events and civilisations, most particularly in the Elves, who lived those events.

- The presence of the holy/divine. The treatment of the Elves in LotR is very much of a holy/divine nature. They are not just beings with different abilities, rather they are treated as holy representatives of goodness. Merely sighting them, speaking with them etc. is considered a spiritual experience. Their ways are disconnected from the everyday concerns of the "contemporary" characters. Their food and drink sustains not just the body but the spirit. They sing through the night while our characters go to sleep. Loyalty to the Elves and their ways is considered a proxy of goodness; to reject the Elves, or to envy them, or to come into conflict with them, is considered a fall from grace into evil, and when the Elves share some product of their higher civilisation with mortals, it is an act of benevolence/beneficence.

- Evil looms but rarely appears. Evil in Lord of the Rings is generally a looming threat, poorly understood, originating from far away with obscure motives and mechanisms. The Black Riders appear and hound our characters, but we rarely hear them speak, and do not know what they are or where they come from. Sauron himself is never seen, or even described, and we don't know his activities. He is simply a looming presence. Similarly, Mordor is known to be a real place with a grim reputation, but its distance is so great that it has an almost fantastical feel to it for those in the Shire.

- Low key magic. Magic exists but is rarely used, and when it is used, it is often out of sight or cannot be perceived by the characters. Much of the magic we do see appears to be an aspect of craft, imbued into objects, rather than spells being thrown around. And on the rare occasion we do see magic being cast in a more overt manner, it is generally perceived as a spiritual act of goodness vs. evil.

- Prose. The prose is formal and descriptive. The characters speak formally, and often at length, and Tolkien does not bother much with interspersing dialogue with action beats etc. He just lets characters speak, sometimes for multiple long paragraphs without interruption, telling stories and histories and expounding upon their thoughts and plans. I don't think this stylistic convention can be underestimated in terms of how much it contributes to the feel of the story.

 

A bit late responding, but I think something that shouldn't be underrated is how cheerful the narration can be, playful even. I'd consider it a key element of the story because of how good it is at crafting Tolkien's tone.

An example - I think the essence of the Hobbit and Tolkien's work would be incredibly different if he was the kind of writer to start The Hobbit with grand, vivid scenes about Smaug killing all the dwarves he could find as he stole their home, instead of the iconic opening lines of the actual story.

It's that emphasis on what other writers would overlook, having grand epics focus and turn on literally and metaphorically the smallest people involved, that helps make Tolkien's work distinct even in other high fantasy stories.

 

On re-reading the series what stood out to me most was the goodness of the characters. They're moral people doing their best to help. For whatever reason that's exceptional behavior in fantasy.

 

The essence of Tolkien sounds like it might have a bit of an aftertaste.

 

- Textual richness
How he develops characters and ideas simply through word choice.
None of this is necessary for the general reader to understand his work because he incorporates it so deftly in recognition of the utility of language and the erosion of meaning.
It is, as you say, almost invisible, but nonetheless adds so much depth.

• Bilbo in his very nice but humbly named Bag End i.e. cul-de-sac / contrast with the uppity Sackville-Bagginses who've gone so far as to Frenchify their names in their pursuit of social mobility
• Bilbo going from burg-dweller bourgeois to burg-breaker burglar
• Feanor passive(?) aggressively naming Maedhros "Nelyafinwe" and the subsequent naming war between Feanor and Fingolfin? (Or perhaps Fingolfin trying to pay homage to Feanor by naming his own sons after the the sons of his older brother? Either way, it adds color to the rather sparse treatment we get in the Silmarillion)
• Gandalf brings not bad news lathspell, but rather good news godspell
• that lovely bit of self-deprecating humor in RoTK where Aragorn lambasts the master healer for knowing all the various names of athelas but failing to recognize its value

- Linguistic development

• linguistic imperialism--e.g. Children of Hurin where Mim the dwarf is forced to give up his home in Amon Rudh, which was known as Sharbhund "before the Elves changed all the names"
• Rohan's oral culture--only song and woven tapestry to pass down history / contrast with Gondor's great libraries.
• Thingol outlawing Quenya once he learns of the Kinslaying
• The Elves' obsession with (mis)naming things -- e.g. naming Men "the Sickly", "Mortals". Hmm.

- Structure/style

• Home is both beginning and end of the journey, not simply the starting point. That the Noldor are doomed to be "dispossessed" in the aftermath of the kinslaying speaks volumes about the spiritual/psychological value of a physical home.
• Rest & Quest--most evident in the neatly segmented children's book format of the Hobbit, but the LOTR and Silmarillion follow the same cyclical structure.
• Economical descriptions--often describe the viewer as much as the object.
  • e.g. Bilbo's description of Elrond, "as noble and fair as an elf-lord, as venerable as a king of dwarves, and as kind as summer" speaks both to Elrond's credit and also to Bilbo's unhobbitlike knowledge other cultures as well as his hobbitlike fondness of summer's harvest.
• Medieval style/archetypes/values but made relatable and understandable to the modern audience through hobbit POV.

- Christian Themes

• Decay / The Long Defeat: no victory is complete in Arda Marred, and progress is generally futile. Salvation is only ever achieved by divine intervention.
• Evil is powerful but ultimately self-defeating. e.g. Ungoliant devouring herself in her insatiable hunger; Saruman attempting to sabotage Sauron; Saruman trusting in his devices but failing to make the necessary preparations and a proper strategy; Morgoth weakening himself in expending his will onto his subjects to the point that he can be crippled in single combat with an Elf.
• The last shall first, first shall be last--hobbits being the most insignificant, parochial creatures to exist in Middle-Earth but having the most important role in being the keepers of History.
• Hope/Despair -- despair being symptomatic of pride, i.e. the misbegotten belief in the work of one's hands
• Spiritual/psychological value of food/hospitality

 

Easy enough. Take whatever Rings of Power did, then do the exact opposite of that.

 

I made a point in Steelbadger's HP/LotR story, about how Tolkein was influenced by the thinking of his time when it came to things like gender roles. He was born in 1892, about thirty years before women got the right to vote in the UK. The thinking of the time was very much "women stay in the kitchen." You see that in characters like Arwen and Galadriel, in that they aren't really characters so much as objects of desire--not sexual desire but more like a beautiful piece of artwork you admire from afar and wish could be yours. At the same time it's not quite...sexism as you typically think of it. It's not really a patriarchy keeping women down so much as "this is how things naturally are." They just aren't usually actors in their own stories. The two exceptions I know are Luthien (who did her thing out of love for a man) and Eowyn (in order to exploit a loophole in the "no man can kill me" prophecy thing).

I'd suggest reading his article on Wikipedia, or other similar articles. There are dozens of books and websites out there analyzing every bit of Tolkein's writing, which can be used to identify what influenced his writing.

As a side note, Tolkein was friends with C.S. Lewis, author of the Chronicles of Narnia. He even was a major contributor to Lewis's conversion from atheism to Christianity. They even made characters based on each other in their books--Lewis wrote Tolkein as Reepicheep, a super-fast-talking, quick to anger and bluster mouse. Tolkein wrote Lewis as Treebeard. Not sure how that fits into writing styles, but I thought it was interesting.

 

Calling it "the thinking of his time" is a bit odd, since he was actually essentially rewriting Northern Europe's mythic cycles, just with more Christian undertones to curb the Pagan themes. The general idea of those roles for women is vastly older than "his time." In fact, Eowyn's importance to the story is a sign that he was deriving those attitudes from times much earlier than his own, since the idea of a Shield-Maiden is utterly barbaric and anathema to the Victorian/Edwardian culture he grew up in, but was quasi-accepted in early Medieval Germanic and Norse culture, where he was drawing the majority of his influences from.

Also, the idea of divine, semi-divine, or culture-heroic women - like Eowyn, Luthien, and even Galadriel - doing legendary deeds is drawn straight from Europe's pre-Christian traditions, and is, again, a concept that Tolkien's own time and culture rejected entirely outside the confines of ancient myths. I sincerely doubt he was trying to be some kind of feminist pioneer, but he very clearly went against the grain of his own generation/time's view of women in favor of a much older one.

 

Yeah, this is something that vexed me too.

It’s hard to imagine someone as badass as Galadriel being relegated to the kitchen. Arwen, too, is a fairly boring character consigned to remain in the Last Homely House weaving Aragorn’s banner while all the men go off to war. But when you consider those vexingly traditional gender roles with an understanding of Tolkien’s primary objective of Recovery, it makes much better sense. I don’t think Tolkien aims to subvert tropes and he’s fully cognizant of and sympathetic to the effect of gender roles on a person’s psyche (see “Mariner’s Wife” in Unfinished Tales, a truly excellent piece of writing that can be read as a stand-alone work). Rather, he seeks to reinstate what ought to be joyful and life-affirming activities from the rigid, stifling duties they’ve become in our time.

From "On Fairy Stories"

So we come back to Galadriel’s role in the kitchen baking bread for the Fellowship. We learn in Nature of Middle Earth that the art of lembas making was taught to the Elves by Orome himself. That art is revered and the giving of lembas is reserved as the right of the Queen. But even if you don’t know that obscure bit of lore, Tolkien makes it clear enough what a profound encouragement it is to Fellowship to receive this queenly gift.

In respect to Arwen’s weaving, I think it’s interesting that a voiceless character is given the task of announcing the return of the King. (Also, the description of the banner in RoTK suggests that Arwen herself crafted the gems sewn into the banner, which is such a nice callback to her Noldorin roots.) We learn in the Silmarillion that the Halls of Mandos are decorated with the work of Vaire the Weaver whose role it is to rehabilitate the souls of the lost with raiment for their new bodies as well as the history of the world. So Arwen’s banner isn’t just the work of a bored noblewoman locked away in her tower, but a powerful reclamation of a lost kingship, the undertaking of a new history, a palpable record of good overcoming evil.

Yeah, it would've been fun to see Arwen whooping a bunch of orc ass, but respect to Tolkien (and Jackson for his restraint in cutting Liv Tyler's scenes from Helm's Deep) for being able to write a strong, gentle character.

Tolkien even takes the time to give voice to the nameless, ordinary woman. One of my favorite bits in the entire legendarium is when the wood-elf Nellas is brought as a witness before Thingol’s court in the matter of Saeros v Turin. She’s understandably shaken and nervous, but it’s her testimony that saves Turin from misjudgment (not that it matters much in the long run, but still).

I must add that though Tolkien’s female characters are far outnumbered by his male characters, they’re generally written as superior. It’s an act of supreme grace and love for them to descend to the level of their partners. Take Melian who not only outranks her boy Thingol by virtue of her race, but also in matters of the heart. Where Thingol’s love for Luthien is greedy and possessive and objectifying, Melian counsels him to let her go, to respect Luthien's choice despite having the foreknowledge that she will be forever lost. Just. Amazing.

Take Luthien who overpowered not only Sauron but Morgoth himself. Take Arien, the embodiment of the Sun and evil’s greatest fear, subversively written as a female character. Take Uinen who remains faithful to the cause of the Valar when her boy Osse is seduced by Morgoth and goes rogue. Take Nienna, the goddess of suffering and wisdom whose pupil Gandalf is the only one of the Istari to stay on course.

But these characters aren’t perfect. Galadriel is deeply flawed in her pride and unwillingness to repent. She matures into wisdom having fought "the long defeat" and suffering much loss. Nienna advocates on behalf of Morgoth only to be betrayed. Eowyn isn’t caged so much by her gender as much as she is by her twisted perception of it (which is understandable given her close proximity to Wormtongue).

Anyway, all this to say that Tolkien really respects his female characters.

 

Yes, one thing that I had to think about while writing Tales of the Late-Comer recently was the fact that it was within Elrond's power to deny Arwen's hand to Aragorn, and to set conditions upon which they could marry. Which indicates a relatively patriarchal power structure. It is something I think which clashes with the popular conception of Tolkien's elves as wise, ethereal vegetarians who live in a post-scarcity egalitarian utopia, but which fits pretty well within what Tolkien actually wrote of Elvish society as one which was largely feudal in nature.

Another thought as to the essence of Tolkien: the fact that his characters are all relatively old. It's curious that even in all the Tolkien knock-offs, the call to adventure tends to come to a young man, generally around 18. But of course in Tolkien's work, the "everyman" going on an adventure is actually a 50-something, well-educated aristocrat and gentleman of leisure.