Originally posted by: JediSage
Tolkien is well written, he's just all over the place. "The world's about to end, I'll be back in 17 years", "We need to leave now" *feast* *poem* *poem* *song* Death and destruction *poem* *lyric*
I've no problem with backstory and history, so long as it's pertinent to character in the context of the story. For example, if Joe is the best forensic expert in the state, it doesn't help to say something like "...and it was because his mother made him eat Tuna on white when he was a kid". It just doesn't matter. So there ARE rules to be adhered to in literature, whether we want to obey them or not. If a writer wanders too much he/she leaves themselves open to some criticism regardless of who they are.
Tolkien drew a lot of inspiration from The Kalevala and many epics: true. Do they necessarily make for good reading just because they're "epic"? No.
The problem with literary criticism is that it is very subjective. There's no hard and fast set of rules that say this must happen, but there is I think concensus on certain fundamentals, ie: Introduction - Rising Action - Complication - Resolution - Denoument. It's fair to say that Tolkien followed this, it's just that the stuff in-between is what bothers me personally (on occasion).
The thing about Tolkien's writing method is that he was trying to convey the same storytelling devices used in old Northern European poems and stories which a lot of were lost though years of invasions.
If you've ever read Beowulf, you definitely see the similarities between how the two stories are written. In these old poems and tales, we were given tons of detail about their lives and songs that they sang and how wonderful - or awful - these characters were.
Of course, MODERN story telling is much more condensed and straight to the point. Writing teachers will always tell you to strip out all the superfluous material. Tolkien didn't want to write a modern story. He wanted to create an epic story based on the writings of old. While this obviously alienates a great deal of people, Jedisage, there are a lot of others who understand what Tolkien was doing.
The movies condense this into a more modern storytelling device, although even this starts to crack through the seams when ROTK ends. If you thought the movie had too many endings...just feel lucky they didn't include the whole scene where Sarumon and other men had taken over the Shire, and Merry and Pippen lead the Hobbits to fight them away, which then leads to Sarumon's death (He didn't die at the tower!).
