Tolkien's shifting style

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

One of the most remarkable things (for me) about The Lord of the Rings has always been the wide variety of styles employed throughout to tell the story. From twentieth century realism to Romance, Old English epic and Celtic fairy-tale, all the way to Homeric bravura and Dickensian verisimilitude. Probably because it's been such a favourite aspect of the book for me, it's been swirling around at the back of my head for a number of years, but recently I've had a series of thoughts about it that are perhaps going somewhere...

1) Audience: The first thing that occured to me is that the shifts in style seem to match up with the audience at that moment: obviously, not the actual audience, since you are (more or less) the same the whole time you read, but the notional audience, or those 'in the book' who are 'between' us and the action in some way. For example:

The earlier sections detailing the Hobbits' adventures are clearly told in a very 'hobbitish' way (which is to say, according to the dictates of modern relism). The assumed audience of these sections is someone very much like the real reader will probably be.

The first really interesting shift in the narrative comes with the entrance of Tom Bombadil, when it becomes much more like a children's book (makes sense when you realise that Tom began as a series of bedtime stories for Tolkien's children). But then this tone is immediatly complicated and enriched with the emergence of Goldberry who brings about the novel's first real foray into the "higher" style that really dominates many of the later chapters. The notional audience for these sections are more "Elvish" (if I dare say that). The effect of this merging of realism and high style, is to subtly shift the reader from Realism to Romance, perhaps preparing us for much more of the same later on.

Of course, as the story progresses, these forays into non-Realistic modes of narrative become more and more frequent, until you have whole chapters written in nothing but that style. In these moments you can see that the notional reader is now no longer a Realist in any way, but something else. Which leads me to point number

2) The Audience in the Work: as the story goes on we get more and more moments where the narrative doesn't just tell us what's happening, but it tells us what's happening through the eyes of observers in the text. The coming of Gandalf to Helm's Deep; the destruction of Isengard; even the passage of the paths of the dead are not narrated directly, but through the eys of an observer (the army of Rohan watches Gandalf come; Merry and Pippin narrate the destruction of Isengard; Gimli watches Aragorn in his greatest moment).

By the time we reach the final chapters of the book, this narrative shift from 'in' to 'out' is almost entirely complete with the Coronation of Aragorn, and then the return of the hobbits to the Shire -- both of these moments are told from the point of view of citizens of Minas Tirith or of the Shire, respectively. We're not so much 'with' the omniscient narrator as he looks 'through' the protagonists' eyes as we are 'with' the omniscient narrator as he looks 'through' the eyes of people watching and observing the protagonists. Which now leads to my final point...

3) The return to the oral tradition. I was listening to an interview with an inuit film-maker and he argued that in the oral tradition of story telling you don't find that singular focus on the individual hero that dominates the novelistic tradition. He argued that oral stories are about the communities that they take place in and not in the 'hero' -- there still are heroes, of course, but the story does not focus on them, it only 'uses' them to reflect on the wider experience of the community.

And I thought: whoa!

Seems to me that this can go a long way to explaining much about Tolkien that fascinates and intrigues me. The emphasis in the narrative does seem to move from the individual to the communal as we shift point of view from Frodo, to other members of the Fellowship, to the whole societies who regard the heroes and who try to figure them out. We move from looking out of Frodo's eyes, to looking at Frodo, Sam, Aragorn, Merry, Pippin and Gandalf through a lot of other people's eyes. It's almost as though the story goes in reverse, beginning with the written tradition and then moving 'back' toward an oral tradition.

So are there other ways in which this move to orality exists in the story? Does it even move the way I think it does? There is such an emphasis throughout on story-telling, it only makes sense to me that it would be partly, well, told rather than written, but is that possible in a printed book?

And what of the impact on the heroes of approaching the story as an oral tale rather than a written novel? Does it indeed move us away from Individual Heroes toward heroic individuals in a community?