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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Clint_L" data-source="post: 9758006" data-attributes="member: 7035894">He's a complete outlier, whose style was wildly out of synch with 20th century literary trends. In many ways, he could be considered a bad writer. He's often expository, his dialogue is often stilted and not how real people talk, he relied heavily on stereotypes, his class and gender assumptions are regressive, and, well, actually, almost everything about his work is regressive (fantasy as a genre tends to be regressive by its nature). He has almost zero range - you can't imagine him writing a mystery, or a romance (lol), or, well, anything but epic fantasy.I write all that as a fan. He's a genre of one, excepting maybe Milton, and his work carries an epic weight that not only outweighs all of his faults, but turns them into strengths. I find him almost impossible to critique, for this reason, because what he is doing obviously works, but only for him. His many imitators are miles behind - he's not like a Joyce, who changed the game for everyone and reinvented the modern novel, inspiring many more great innovators. Tolkien is Tolkien.</blockquote>