The Characteristics Of William Tolkien s The Great...

Throughout his work, Tolkien exemplifies the characteristics found in accepted works of literature and asserts himself as a literary author. One method of assessing literary merit is to measure prestige. While it may seem to be a trivial test at first, it is an oddly potent one. People whose voices are respected (scholars, critics, other writers, the kind of people who set the agenda for cultural norms of literary greatness) take Tolkien’s work seriously. Uniformly, no, but broadly yes. W.H. Auden is the foremost example of someone unimpeachably in the â€Å"establishment†, as it were, to push for recognition of Tolkien s artistry, and by and large he succeeded. And he s not the only one, though honestly, one should care a lot less about who thinks Tolkien was sublime or rubbish and pay more attention to why. So there has to be some artistry to recognize. Does it have craftsmanship? Is it well written? Does the author attend carefully to the mechanics of storytelling and the nuances of prosody? Undoubtedly yes, one could argue this is the area that puts Tolkien several leagues above his later imitators in commercial fantasy. One can think of a few good studies that dive right into Tolkien s sentence structure and dialogue and examine just how careful and varied it is. Tom Shippey s book Author of the Century has a whole chapter that is about the different voices in the Council of Elrond—how, for instance, the diction of the Dwarves reflects the culture of the Dwarves, and