Tolkien's writing is technically incredible, it's just that he's employing the style and structure of 10th century Norse and German rather than 20th century English literature. Anyone who's ever read Heimskringla or Beowulf will see where Tolkien is taking his narrative ideas from. Also, it's worth noting that Tolkien essentially wrote Lord of the Rings as something to do on Sunday evenings after a couple of pints with C.S. Lewis., to relax after a hard week deconstructing the philological roots of kennings in proto-germanic bears son folk-tales. The incredible levels of detail are excusable because it was basically his own private fantasy world; that it was such a phenomenal success says a lot about how incredibly clever Tolkien's use of language and mythic narrative actually was. I find the supposed flaws in Tolkien's work particularly intriguing, actually, because it is a work of such obvious eccentricity, crafted with only the authors amusement in mind. When I compare this with, say, a tedious shite-spewing fuckhead like Stephen King, a man who has seemingly been trying for years to see if he can reach some unholy nadir of absolute awfulness in literature by striking a perfect balance between pretension, populism, condecension, lack of technical skill and sheer fucking ball-crushing stupidity, well.
Back on to the darlings of the literati, Virginia Woolfe. Orlando is ok, everything else is pretty much awful. She would almost certainly never have got a word published if she hadn't been busy exploring the genitals of half of Londons literary elite. Most of her work was glorified vanity projects but, in the complete opposite of Tolkien, of such obvious and tedious pretension that reading her work is basically tiring. When she does produce a good passage (I do remember a few diamonds in the awful rough that is To The Lighthouse) she always manages to fuck them up by doing something utterly stupid, like making a sentence that runs for two pages strung together with forty semi-colons.
