By Steve Walker (auth.)
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Extra info for The Power of Tolkien’s Prose: Middle-Earth’s Magical Style
Sample text
En route to encounter that climactically villainish dragon Smaug in The Hobbit, we pass a preparatory procession of intermediate monsters—trolls, goblins, wargs, and giant spiders—plus a long list of confirmatory allusions to Smaug’s existence beginning with the dwarves’ legendary dragon lay as early as the initial chapter. 77 Middle-earth creations not only come anticipated, they reveal themselves realistically. 78 24 THE POWER OF TOLKIEN’S PROSE But they appear initially as “Black Riders,” spies more human than diabolical.
The narrator goes to great trouble to naturalize the uncanny disappearance of hobbits: “Even a keen-eyed beast of the wild could scarcely have seen the hobbits, hooded, in their grey cloaks, nor heard them, walking as warily as the little people can. Without the crack of a twig or the rustle of a leaf they passed and vanished” (686; cf. H32, 963). Often Tolkien’s presentation is so manifestly biased toward natural explanation that it provokes the reader in compensation toward the magical, as with the mysterious roads of Mirkwood which “vanished or fell into disuse,” or the “earthquake or two (which some were inclined to attribute to the dragon)” (H175).
On and up the stairway bent and crawled, until at last with a final flight, short and straight, it climbed out again on to another level. The path had veered away from the main pass in the great ravine, and it now followed its own perilous course” (694). Such dynamic metaphor amid the environmental vividness of Middle-earth generates intense kinetic energy. Scanning the vista of Tolkien’s epic, the reader views a landscape that hosts seething activity and is itself incessantly active, a region where not only are paths running with unusual metaphoric vigor, but mountains are “marching” (H42), downs “stalking” (119), boulders “galloping” (H51), forests “striding” (475), clouds “hurrying” (272), and mists “crawling” (94), where everything from “writhing” roots (109) to winds with “searching fingers” (274) displays vivid activity.