“Butter scraped over too much bread” is underrated as an emotional descriptor line.

Like people want to make Tolkien out to be all about the academic linguistics & worldbuilding & epic battles but that’s a stellar fucking line by any measure & I come back to it a lot in extremis

— Christmas Valente (@catvalente) December 12, 2021

Tolkien was a very good writer who achieved exactly what he intended in his works. That much of it wasn’t in a modern mode is what people object to — it was designed to feel like Old English and Old Norse works feel if you were reading them in those languages, which most people cannot. So Tolkien attempted to make LOTR have that sense of foreignness, except in English.