Matt Colville, and Most Tolkien Critics, Are Wrong

doctorbadwolf said:

The simpler explanation is that he both got paid more, and delighted in it such that even when he was quite successful and was getting paid quite well for appearances, he continued to write in his signature verbose and indulgent style.

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doctorbadwolf said:

IMO, the world could use a new Dickens.

Le Guin is an amazing author, but like many authors she gives advice from the perspective of what has worked best for her. That is probably impossible to completely avoid, in fact.

Sometimes “more words” can elevate a work, without being strictly necessary to tell the story. We don’t have to know about the lay of the land in the shire to know that it’s idyllic and rustic, JRRT could just say that it is, but it’s a better work for his loving descriptions of the place.

Many great authors use eloquent prose to accomplish *more* than telling the story, and readers are richer for it.

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Ralif Redhammer said:

Heh, "Oy, did youse check out the new bistro up north, Udun Eats? They got a right good kale mac'n'cheese!"

It's a fun line, but it makes no real sense, and is in there just because someone thought it was a cool line.

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Mercurius said:

I think you're missing the point I was trying to make, and what Le Guin meant. The quantity of words used has no bearing, in and of itself, on the quality of the prose. It neither inherently adds or subtracts from quality, which has to do with how you use the words.

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Umbran said:

An *even simpler* explanation is that "verbose" is subjective. What seems overly verbose and tiring when you are reading for two hours straight may seem just if you are reading one serialized section a day.

Shakespeare's plays were written to be performed, not read. Dickens was written to be read in small installments, not in long segments.

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Mercurius said:

I think you're missing the point I was trying to make, and what Le Guin meant. The quantity of words used has no bearing, in and of itself, on the quality of the prose. It neither inherently adds or subtracts from quality, which has to do with how you use the words.

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Janx said:

The basic lesson is "Remove Unnecessary Words." Quite a few writers have said this in variations.

In my experience (aka as mistakes made), the lesson is really a tool used on somebody who's over-written. Too verbose, repetitive variation of phrasing. Stuff that an editor can cross out and it will be shorter, simpler, better.

The other use of cutting out excess isn't individual words, its sentences, paragraphs and even chapters of content that really doesn't add to the story and removing it doesn't damage the rest. It's why cutting Tom Bombadil didn't kill the LotR movie, despite lamentations of Tolkien purists.

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doctorbadwolf said:

Eh, not just “purists”. I don’t care that Saruman didn’t give his “I’m of all colors now!” Speech, or that it was the Elves of Lothlorian who show up at Helm’s Deep instead of the Dunadain. Bombadil and the Old Forest was more important than dumb gimli jokes, or Pippin knocking things over all the time, or several other little scenes.

The movies lost something by its absense, as does every adaptation without it. Not just bc of Tom, but the whole sequence of leaving the shire is just less interesting and could be cut down by half as it is, rather than being an adventure itself with symbolic resonance by the end of the trilogy.

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Ryujin said:

I missed Tom Bombadil. I missed "The Scouring of the Shire" more.

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