Ugg, Tolkien. Uses 89 words when 23 would do. Then adds a dozen more just for good measure.

I’m an avid reader - read over 200 novels before trying The Hobbit. The man spent a page describing the Hobbits front door.

So you can create entire languages (which is very impressive) but adds nothing to the story (it’s just something the reader has to contend with).

Immersive is one thing, that’s beyond the pale.

Edit with further exposition on why Tolkien isn’t what people think:

Tolkien is best understood not as someone continuing an ancient tradition, but as someone reacting anxiously to modernity. He compensates. He is responding to a world that is complex, fractured, industrialized, and morally unstable by constructing a system that aggressively eliminates those features.

That’s not archaic - it’s defensively modernist.

He fears the loss of shared meaning, so he constructs with excessive detail to ensure the only meaning is the one he wants to deliver.

By the early 20th century, the conditions that made myth function organically were gone: no shared cosmology, no stable moral hierarchy, no common symbolic language, no authority that tradition could simply assert.

Other writers (Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Beckett) responded by embracing fragmentation, ambiguity, and internalization: meaning is provisional and reader-dependent.

Tolkien cannot tolerate this. His response is not to engage complexity, but to seal it off.

He reacts to the anxiety of this through world-building so he can control every detail.

Middle-earth is not expansive because Tolkien loves freedom. It is expansive because he is terrified of indeterminacy.

Every anxiety modernity introduces gets neutralized: language drift is frozen by invented etymology, moral ambiguity is replaced by simplistic good and evil, history is stabilized through exhaustive chronologies, cultural difference is aesthetic, not epistemic (this should be offensive to anyone today), change is always decline, never transformation (also offensive).

Nothing important is allowed to be unresolved. That’s not mythos, it’s closing off.

Calling this juvenile doesn’t mean childish prose or simple vocabulary - it means he rcan’t stand the discomfort of ambiguity. It requires an external authority vs negotiation over meaning, moral certainty instead of self-analysis.

He relies on massive scale and accumulation as substitutes for insight.

This is no different than any other escapist writing - romance, power fantasy, etc. Different content, same structure - the reader isn’t asked, “What do you think this means?”, instead they are told what it means and merely asked to agree “Is this not magnificent?!”

Tolkien doesn’t trust the reader. He doesn’t even trust his own fiction to stand unaided, so he creates glossaries, appendices of everything, some as long as many novels; repetitive songs, narration to explain everything just in case you missed the significance.

That’s not generosity. It’s preemption of reader cognition.

He’s terrified of misreading, disagreement, loss of authority.

Tolkien lived through World War I with it’s previously unimaginable mechanized slaughter, breakneck industrialization, worlds order upending, with the collapse of traditional imperialism/monarchic certainty, major erosion of religious authority.

Instead of directly confronting these issues, he retreats into a moralized agrarian fantasy and assumes technology is corrupting by definition, power is evil unless inherited (what could be more archaic? Anyone today should be put off by this), social hierarchy is natural (again, in today’s world, people want to embrace this in their fantasy reading??).

He also sees history as a single tragic arc.

This isn’t subtle engagement with the reader, it’s refusal of the reader as an independent mind.

Tolkien merely offers relief from the reader being troubled do any work. Everything has a place. Everything has a name. Everything has already been decided.

He offers nothing more than comfort (in 100,000 words or more). But he’s also infantilizing his reader, by spoon-feeding every last detail. Snooze-fest.

People who just love Tolkien get defensive because if they acknowledge he’s just a reactionary system-builder rather than a mythic genius, then his authority collapses. He becomes one aesthetic option among many, not the yardstick. And many readers don’t want an option. They want a refuge.

In the end, Tolkien didn’t recreate myth - he simulated myth under laboratory conditions: he removed the danger, the contradiction, and the resistance: the very things that make myth compelling, and lasting.

What remains is not ancient wisdom but curated certainty.

And curated certainty is one of the most recognizably modern responses to a world that refuses to behave.