Funny, I got an entirely different impression of it.
I heard it as, "Tolkien did everything 'all wrong'" - with 'all wrong' in quotation marks. In other words, he didn't do things the way that a "professional writer" who has been trained to follow a specific literary formula, should do them. After all, traditional literary convention for a fantasy work like Lord of the Rings, which is written in the third person, would be to either use an "omniscient" third person - one which "knows" everything that is going on... in other words, the author is writing as though you are there with the "eyes of God" which have all the information available, and these eyes only filter things when the author does not WANT you to know what's going on (but will explain it later). The narrative is usually a "first-hand" account; i.e., given as though you were "there."
What Tolkien (re) introduced into the LotR narrative was a "historian's perspective" third-person narrative. In other words, his third-person narrative looks as though it is a narrative that is only limited in perspective and is a second-hand or third-hand account (albeit a well-read one), likely sewn together from the limited first-person first-hand accounts of those who were actually there and saw it. In other words, your narrative voice wasn't actually *at* Weathertop; rather, he had interviewed Pippin and Gandalf and Aragorn to find out what was going on at Weathertop. This explains why the account is sometimes disjointed and sometimes has holes, as he jumps from Pippin's description of events to Aragorn's to Gandalf's (in this particular example, using Gandalf's account of leaving a mark at Weathertop and fleeing the Nazgul to confirm Aragorn's speculation that Gandalf had been there ahead of them when he found a mark that he was not certain was deliberately created).
I said "(re) introduced" because the Bible - specifically portions of the Old Testament such as "Kings" or "Chronicles" - is more or less a similar work... a work written by someone who had access to both the historical records (to place things in their historical perspective and offer a little bit of extra insight) and to the first-person accounts of the events involved (be it interview or, more likely, journal-keeping). Using this technique is the "natural" way to write a history book... the historian has not experienced history, but he has access to both first-hand accounts and a knowledge of the "wider spread" of how these accounts fit together. As most of us know, Tolkien was not trying to write a "novel" per se, he was, in essence, writing a section of a history book (the section about the transition from the Third Age to the Fourth Age, much like today we might write about the transition from the 19th to the 20th century while it's still fresh in our heads and there are letters and journals thick on the ground if we know where to look) about the world of Middle Earth AND a novel (as a follow-up to the "children's book" that was The Hobbit) intermixed together. I use the Bible as an example because it's the only thing I can think of off the top of my head that is both (a) well-known and (b) an example of trying to weave together a broad historical sweep with personal anecdotes about individuals.
Tolkien's style "succeeds" because of the unique thing that the Lord of the Rings is - a hybrid history book entry/novel. For "traditional fantasy," it breaks almost every literary convention of the time (though his style has been copied with varying degrees of success since)... simply put, he wouldn't have written this way had he been a "trained writer" the prevailing literary thought at the time simply didn't even conceive of this as a method!
I am reminded of Orson Scott Card's comments in the foreword to one of his novels - or perhaps it was a talk at a seminar - to the effect that, "I majored in Literature, so I know all the little literary games and constructions that writers are taught to make their work 'deep' and 'insightful' - by obfuscating meanings so that only other 'elite' who have been trained as they have will be able to understand things. I consciously rejected that - I want my books to be accessible by everyone, not some elite club." Even today, writers are taught that there is a "right" and a "wrong" way to do things. Of course, what may be "right" for one book is totally "wrong" for another! Tolkien hadn't been told he was doing things "wrong" and so he wound up doing them right!
In other words, saying he did things "all wrong" was a COMPLIMENT and not a slam. In the same fashion, we might say that "Ghandi did things all wrong... everyone knows that to get change you have to be vociferous and boisterous and grab attention and be violent to get on the news... passive resistance will never work." It's a slightly sarcastic comment meant to be interpreted as a compliment.
I'm rambling now, so I'll stop.
--The Sigil
