Comment by magic_hamster

English is not my first language, and Tolkien's prose is one of the easiest English language texts I've ever read. Even the occasional stylizations to old scaldic verse is very easy to comprehend.

There are worlds of difference between analysing the syntax and semantics of languages in a structured and scientific way, and writing "good" prose (as subjective as that is).

I guess you're just a huge fan of Tolkien?

In which case, have you read https://archive.is/20241231024916/https://www.newyorker.com/... in which Michael Moorcock calls Tokein's work:

"...a pernicious confirmation of the values of a morally bankrupt middle class".

Which I'm not saying should change your opinion on anything, I just find it's always a good exercise to find the juiciest criticism of one's darlings.

> Tolkien was a seasoned linguist and he worked on LoTR for about a decade

This actually understates the effort Tolkien put in. He'd started the world-building that led to LoTR approx 35 years before the publication of the first volume (in 1954), specifically by writing the first tales in the Legendarium we now recognise as The Silmarillion. And he never actually completed the latter even having spent almost 60 years working on it.

Huge Tolkien fan here. But the list of great authors and great books is long. It is certainly not unfair to compare Nabokov, Rushdie, Kingsolver, Ferrante, etc etc etc to Tolkien. Some were linguists, translators, literature professors. Some were journalists. Some had no obvious qualifications at all. Some wrote their novels very quickly, some took decades. Shakespeare and Dickens were not linguists and (mostly) wrote very quickly.

You're suggesting their arent any other authors who have taken over a decade to write a book? Prousts' In Search of Lost Time took 13 for example.