I recently published the following inflammatory video on YouTube--warning! May cause annoyance or techbro syndrome!

My dear friend Alyssa House-Thomas wrote a thoughtful response, which I thought was worth sharing. I hope it sparks ongoing intelligent conversation. Here 'tis.

By Alyssa House-Thomas:

I'm familiar with your claim about the shortcomings of Tolkien's prose, so I'm not actually going to assess that claim, other than to agree with Mr. Hillman [in the comments] that it's refreshing for you to recognize archaism is a matter of aesthetics and not quality. Speaking only on argumentation, I think you have a weakness in the script you presented. Do you realize it's potentially confusing to (a) claim Tolkien's writing is more enjoyable for more people than top-tier technical excellence specifically because it is easier to read with less mental effort, but also (b) model how you would "streamline" a Tolkien passage by removing conjunctions and righting inverted syntax? I understand that your comparative claim (c)--Tolkien's writing is technically less complex than Joyce, Hopkins, Rossetti, etc.--includes dimensions beyond grammar: you listed layers such as connotation, musicality, visual appeal, etymology, etc. But I think there's a point to be made that for readers to whom archaisms are not natural or congenial, there is an amount of mental effort expended on translating them to more straightforward language--just as you did. Having to work out the meaning of a sentence despite the opacity of its language to you is not cozy sweatpants. The Lord of the Rings may not be comparatively as difficult to read as Finnegans Wake, true, but it is also not as easy (for some readers) as works written in straightforward contemporary English would be. 

I would argue that the cozy sweatpants/mental break argument (as applied to language only, not other considerations such as emotional tone, richness of imagery, moral values, etc.) might more properly apply to works where there is no appreciable stylistic gap between the everyday language people speak and the language employed in their reading materials. I'm thinking of popular genres and works that are well-known as leisure material: a bestselling potboiler crime novel like those by James Patterson, a comic book or cozy mystery series or romantasy using primarily contemporary English written at the level of high-school attainment or lower. Another example is the current fashion for first-person voice and present tense in popular suspense or mystery books, almost to the exclusion of other ways of writing, which I believe is an accommodation to digitally-shrunken attention spans. The ideal technique there seems to be to minimize any friction between the narrator's consciousness and the reader's. Portions of Tolkien's large canon may qualify as easy to read in this restricted sense that their language is completely transparent (this is the less likely as we get removed from his own mid-20th-century English context), but that definitely does not apply to the parts with archaisms!

I agree with commenter Finarphin that your implying Tolkien's word choices were little considered by him (compared to the multi-level consideration given by the other authors you cite) is inaccurate, in light of the existence of a letter from Tolkien himself saying that hardly a word in LotR was left unconsidered. That's a fair correction. Not to mention the evidence of a huge number of Tolkien drafts which show him revising extensively to all kinds of enhanced effects, whether improvement in rhythm, sound, clarity, or something else. There have been at least a couple of book-length studies done on Tolkien's prose, one by Steve Walker and this more recent one by Kullmann and Siepmann. I suggest it might be advisable to take favorable sources like this into account when advancing critical claims about the technicalities of Tolkien's prose.

On Ghân-buri-Ghân's speech, it is cringey to us now largely because of our awareness of cultural insensitivity and primary-world colonialism. I agree with another of the commenters that Tolkien was probably not trying for disrespectful caricature, but a fictional representation of a pidgin or contact-language. My basis for that has always been the dignity Tolkien grants Ghân in the wose's withering scorn for the Rohirrim assuming he's a savage who like a child can't count to high numbers. The effect of that passage is to show that Ghân-buri-Ghân's use of the common tongue may be simple, but his intellect and emotions are not; it shows Tolkien reflecting critically on the belittling attitudes of colonizers toward the colonized.

Finally, I think the end of your video contains another stumble, when you (a) explicitly recognize that scholars have built careers analyzing Tolkien because there is a richness which rewards study, but (b) say you'd go to Tolkien's languages for mental exercise and analysis, but not his narratives which you compare to comfort food. It's not an actual logical contradiction if that's simply your own experience, but I think your language right at the end could be clearer in distinguishing your own individual preferences about what gives you mental stimulation from the fact that others have found mental stimulation where you do not. Personally, the breadth of your language there did sting a little: even when it's clear (to me, though apparently not to some other viewers) you meant to praise, your tone was dismissive, "Oo Those Awful Orcs" stuff. The only difference is you're not claiming it's juvenile trash, you're claiming it's juvenile GOLD when people need a break from challenging intellectual pursuits. I would have hoped for more nuance, especially since I know you know from working with me on Mastery that parsing and stretching Tolkien's meaning is an intellectual-analytical game for me, which is why ideas take priority in my writing over technical mechanics. I assume you'd agree that it's perfectly fine for people to use and enjoy Tolkien, or any author, in widely divergent ways for their own purposes; for me however it felt like this commentary missed the mark by overgeneralizing.