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What's dated about it?


Weeeelll...

From the writing style point of view:

- we wouldn't pace it like that these days. When the story splits, Tolkien tells an entire story from the point of view of some of the characters, and then rewinds time by quite a long way to tell an entire story from some of the other characters. We'd tend to use more changes of PoV, so that all the events progress at the same time. This has the advantages that the climaxes all happen simultaneously, and also allows compare-and-contrast between different plot threads.

- the writing style itself is pretty uneven; there are sections at the beginning which have the same forced-joviality-talking-down-to-children feel that the Hobbit had, but which is quite out of place in the much darker book. It gets better later on, though. (IIRC he only redrafted it once, due to not having a word processor.)

From the worldbuilding point of view:

- despite all the care behind Gollum's characterisation, the bulk of the antagonists get no characterisation whatsoever. Orcs are simple ciphers, portrayed as irredeemably evil; which doesn't fit in Tolkien's cosmology (only Illúvatar, God, can give or take free will). Tolkien was aware this was a problem later on and tried to address it in the Silmarillion, but apparently he was never happy with the solution there. Sauron, of course, famously never appears on stage at all.

- there's a lot of 1950s attitudes, both subtle racism --- he's got a regrettable tendency to use dark skin or deformity as a marker of being evil --- and subtle classism --- and I'm not talking about Sam vs. Frodo here; what I mean is that outside the Shire, the only people we ever meet who matter are aristocracy. Ordinary people exist, because at one point our characters stand on Edoras and look out at the burning farmsteads, but only as comic relief or bit parts. And, of course, there's the famous lack of female characters.

- Sam and Frodo's relationship is very alien to modern eyes: we just don't seem to do that master/servant relationship any more, or if we do, we interpret it as a sexual relationship (hence all the 'Sam will kill him if he tries anything' jokes). Tolkien uses this elsewhere; Saruman/Wormtongue is a perverted example. (There is, BTW, another excellent example of this done right in Kipling's Kim, which you should totally read.)

None of this, BTW, is any reason why it's bad, because not, it's a great book; and the fact that a 60-year old book holds up so well today is a tribute to just how good it is; but it is still very much an artifact of its time, and needs to be remembered as such.


A lot of the points you raise aren't much to do with it being dated IMO, merely the style in which its written. You say "we'd do this, we wouldn't do that" (where "we" is presumably modern day fantasy writers), but he made those artistic choices. It sounds like you consider writing fiction to be a technological domain, where advances are made that make old forms obsolete. Maybe fantasy writing is -- I don't read it, although I have read LOTR -- but that makes fantasy sound like an even more limited genre than I thought it was. I'm an avid reader BTW, but of literary fiction, for want of a better term.

I absolutely agree that no one can write sincerely in the style of a bygone age. But having been written in the past doesn't in itself make, say, Anthony Powell's books (to pick someone writing in a different style at a similar time) dated. It's not like we learned more about how to write novels since then, or novelists of today would be easily able to do better than Powell, which I don't think they are.

Your points about racism etc do make sense though, things like that can be jarring, and it's always a bit disappointing to me to remember that our favourite writers were subject to the reality tunnels of their time.


> and it's always a bit disappointing to me to remember that our favourite writers were subject to the reality tunnels of their time

As are we. Don't forget that.


> but it is still very much an artifact of its time, and needs to be remembered as such.

I think that is a good attitude.

Although I do want to add about the aristocracy/common people issue: the fact that we almost only meet nobles outside of the Shire is consistent with his medieval-style world. At the level of planning and command that the Fellowship moves in, only kings and the like would have any say. (Imagine the battle of Minas Tirith and the march on Mordor being written from the POV of a normal soldier - almost nothing of what's going on would make sense.) Also, one of the big themes of the book is how the Hobbits themselves change from being young, simple, rural people to being warriors and true leaders. This change is made possible in large parts by their dealings with the nobility of other countries.




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