Meadow writing
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From "Everyday Politics in Russia", The Eurasian Knot 4/6/2026:
The podcast starts with a message from listener Amanda, who has been reading all of Dostoevsky for a workshop in Russia. In addressing the podcast's host Sean Guillory, she says (starting at 4:21.5):
I sympathize with you, Sean, that you just couldn't get into him,
but I've personally never felt that way about Dostoevsky.
I remember trying to read the Lord of the Rings series,
and I couldn't stand it.
I couldn't stand ten pages describing a meadow.
And ever since them I've thought of fiction writing in terms of
meadow-writing and non-meadow-writing.
No wonder I love Dostoevsky —
he has nothing whatsoever to say about meadows.
"Meadow-writing" is a strikingly evocative name for a stylistic category, but I'm puzzled about its concrete reference. The Fellowship of the Ring has six occurrences of the word "meadow", scattered in the background of six (mostly non-consecutive) pages. The Two Towers has two occurrences of that word. The Return of the King has just one.
Update — PGilm in the comments combines a good general point — "that Amanda wasn't complaining about meadows specifically but about landscape description generally" as kschwatz puts it — with quotations that are entirely hallucinated, as kschwartz also notes. I found that PGilm had commented once before in 2019 as "Philip", with the same email address, in both cases from a Verizon IP address in Scarsdale, suggesting that he's a real person even if his comment on this post was partly or entirely bot-generated.
PGilm said,
April 8, 2026 @ 4:50 pm
Here are a few prime examples where the meadowy detail is particularly dense:
1. The approach to Emyn Muil (The Two Towers)
Tolkien spends several pages describing the "labyrinth of slice and gully." He focuses intensely on the physical texture of the stone—sharp, jagged, and "diseased."
"The air was growing sulfurous and pungent… They were in a dark country wide and waste, now cold, now hot, and everywhere filled with a reek of smoke and a stench of burning things. The very stones seemed to be foul and rotting."
2. The marshes of Sarn Gebir (The Fellowship of the Ring)
Before the Fellowship reaches the Argonath, Tolkien provides a granular breakdown of the river's geography, the shifting currents, and the exact way the light hits the grey stone. It reads almost like a surveyor’s report, slowing the narrative pace to a crawl to establish the sheer scale of the wilderness.
3. The description of Ithilien (The Two Towers)
When Sam and Frodo enter Ithilien, Tolkien’s inner botanist takes over. He lists specific plants—anemones, lilies, iris-swords, and many-colored celandines—to contrast the beauty of the "garden of Gondor" with the growing shadow of Mordor.
"Groves of hazel and of ash… there were anemones and lilies of the valley, and many-colored celandines; and from the deep boles of the trees the climbing ivy and the clematis hung in long festoons."
4. The Midgewater Marshes (The Fellowship of the Ring)
During the trek from Bree to Weathertop, Tolkien describes the soggy, monotonous terrain with such repetition that the reader feels as bogged down as the Hobbits. He focuses on the "shifting quagmires," the types of reeds, and the oppressive atmosphere of the flies, turning a transitional journey into an exhaustive study of a swamp.
AntC said,
April 8, 2026 @ 5:39 pm
I agree there's little about meadows I remember from LoTR. (I listened closely to the clip in case this was a soundalike for some other word, but no.) Lengthy discourse on meadows would be more like Proust — Spring meadow biscuits recipe could be taken for a madeleine?
I sympathise if Amanda gave up on LoTR out of sheer boredom. Too many battles, too many long marches, too many good chums tittle-tattle, with no sexual tension. Give me a flawed hero like Odysseus any day.
Michael Vnuk said,
April 8, 2026 @ 5:43 pm
It’s decades since I read ‘Lord of the Rings’ and my memory of it has faded, especially anything to do with meadows. Overall, I felt that some parts were good and other parts slow. I haven’t read anything by Dostoevsky (Should I admit that here?), so I’ll leave others to compare his work with Tolkien’s. However, I recall starting Edith Pargeter’s ‘By Firelight’ (1948). I didn’t finish the book because it became tedious. Notably, she managed to spend about a page describing the face of one of the main characters. She detailed his forehead, eyes, nose, lips, ears, and so on.
Viseguy said,
April 8, 2026 @ 6:28 pm
It may not be meadow writing, but the ending of Crime and Punishment is pretty Elysian Fields-y.
AntC said,
April 8, 2026 @ 8:40 pm
Thank you @PGilm. Those must be bits I skipped over — they'd be under 'long marches' in my earlier post.
I think I might be the only New Zealander who hasn't seen all of the movies. I suffered the first out of some sense of patriotism. It was even tediouser than the books, I guess because I couldn't skip ahead.
ktschwarz said,
April 8, 2026 @ 9:33 pm
The comment supposedly from PGilm is AI-generated. The style and structure smell of chatbot, but the clincher is the fake quotations: most of what's between quotation marks is not Tolkien, as anyone can check with a Kindle or the web. "Labyrinth of slice and gully": nope. "The air was growing sulfurous and pungent": nope. It's a fair imitation of Tolkien's style, but these are hallucinations, not quotes. Yes, Tolkien does list many specific plants in the description of Ithilien — including anemones, iris-swords, lily-flowers (not "lilies of the valley"), and celandines (not "many-colored celandines") — but the quoted sentence is phony. (It did manage to get a couple of short quotes right: "garden of Gondor" and "shifting quagmires".)
On the other hand, the chatbot got the point that Amanda wasn't complaining about meadows specifically but about landscape description generally, and the places it names really do have lengthy descriptions in the book.
Michael Vnuk said,
April 8, 2026 @ 9:50 pm
Google tells me 'No results found for "labyrinth of slice and gully".' Perhaps there will be at least one result tomorrow.
Roy Sablosky said,
April 8, 2026 @ 10:27 pm
Thank you so much for that corrective, ktschwarz!
Mark Liberman said,
April 9, 2026 @ 5:05 am
FWIW, someone with the same email address as the commenter self-identified as "PGilm" commented once before, self-identified as "Philip", on 5/8/2019:
Both comments came from an IP address in Scarsdale NY, in both cases via a Verizon connection.
So PGilm/Philip seems to be a real person, not a bot, and presumably just asked some AI helper for information about the "Meadow writing" idea.
Perhaps PGilm/Philip will fill us in on the which helper bot(s) he relied on, and how much of the comment they wrote.
And as kschwartz noted, the topic of the response is helpful, and the contexts in The Lord of the Rings are valid, even if the specific quotations are all hallucinated.
KeithB said,
April 9, 2026 @ 8:56 am
Obviously there has to be a balance. I just read _Three Miles Down_ by Harry Turtledove, and he really describes the South Bay area of Southern California, naming streets, landmarks and providing a detailed sense of place – maybe too much.
On the other hand, I also read Seanann Mcquire's _Chaos Choreography_, and while set in Los Angeles/Hollywood, I got no sense of place in the book, it could have taken place in any generic town.
IMHO, Tolkein's descriptions, along with the hinted back story are what give LOTR the vivid sense that it is a real place, with a real history.
David Marjanović said,
April 10, 2026 @ 9:03 am
For a detailed description of a meadow, try Adalbert Stifter and see how far you get!
HS said,
April 10, 2026 @ 6:38 pm
I think I might be the only New Zealander who hasn't seen all of the movies. I suffered the first out of some sense of patriotism. It was even tediouser than the books, I guess because I couldn't skip ahead.
I'm another New Zealander who hasn't seen all the Lord of the Rings movies. (I'm willing to grudgingly consider AntC a New Zealander, even though I would certainly advise people not to take on trust anything he says about New Zealand English without checking it out with a native-born speaker first.) I sat through the first one and thought it was awful. I remember talking about it on an online discussion board at the time and describing it as "dull, flat, boring, uninvolving, unengaging, over-earnest, badly structured, woodenly acted, interminal", which didn't go down well with the Tolkies. And believe me, there is nothing as vicious, as vituperous, as a pack of ravenous, enraged, slavering Tolkies when you dare to suggest that the Lord of the Rings books are not the greatest books ever written and the Lord of the Rings movies are not the greatest movies ever made. Not liking the Lord of the Rings movies is almost considered treason in New Zealand (though fortunately it is New Zealand, and despite being clearly treasonous I came to no actual harm. In Trump's America I might have found myself bound and gagged and on an involuntary one-way flight to some hell-hole prison in Honduras or El Salvador, where I strongly suspect my half-remembered Useful Conversational Phrases from my beginners' Spanish textbook like "donde este las llamas muertas" wouldn't do me much good.)
Even the scenery didn't do much for me – though to be fair, as a New Zealander it didn't really seem as spectacular to me as it presumably would to a foreigner. I've spent a lot of time in the New Zealand back-country and could easily name dozens of places more spectacular than the ones that appeared in the movie. But spectacular scenery can't make up for poor story-telling, poor acting, poor script-writing, interminable tedious computer-generated battles, etc.
After seeing all* the critics rave about the series I did wonder whether I'd just had a bad day and whether my opinion of the first movie was perhaps a little unfair, so when the whole series appeared on TV a few years later I sat down and started watching the second and third ones, just to be sure, but in both cases I found them so awful that I got up and turned the TV off after about 10 or 15 minutes. I had better and more enjoyable things to do, like mowing the lawns.
I've never read the books, and almost certainly never will, so I can't comment on whether they are as tedious as the movies, but I strongly suspect they are.
To be fair, my tastes in movies are probably not those of the general movie-going public. I'm a fairly dedicated film buff and belong to a film society (which attracts about a thousand people to its weekly screenings – I live in a very arts-oriented city.) Last week we saw Kwaidan, a stunning Japanese film from 1966, and next week it's The Cranes are Flying, a Russian classic from 1957 that I've wanted to see for a long time. And all on the biggest screen in town, in the most glorious cinema in town.
(None of the above is intended to be in any way critical of intelligent Languagelog readers who like either the books or the movies, obviously.)
*well, most of them anyway. There were a few thoughtful critics who had a contrary opinion and dared to suggest that the movies were basically rubbish, and they apparently received just as vituperous a reaction from the Tolkies as I did, including apparently death threats. Clearly there is something about these books that brings out the worst in some of its fans. I seriously began to wonder at the time whether the books should be banned, like Mein Kampf, for the good of the public at large.
SlideSF said,
April 11, 2026 @ 12:56 pm
It has been many decades since I read the LOTR books, but I immediately knew what Amanda was talking about with her "meadow writing" comment. I am neither a fan nor a reviler, but I found it difficult to get into The Fellowship of the Ring, especially at the beginning with what I recall as endless description of The Shire, the Barrow Downs, and the insufferable Tom Bombadillo digression (I never did get through that part). I kept wondering when the story would finally start.
Later in the books however, I came to appreciate the way the writing seemed to progress through the landscape. The transition felt very palpable, like the way you might take in the view from a train window as it transitions from urban center to farmland, and then to prairie, foothills, mountain, foothills again, more farmland, and finally coastal plain. I found it at least as engaging as the interaction between the characters. I think this effect could only be achieved through somewhat copious descriptive "meadow writing".
I sometimes wonder if I would find it as engaging today, a half century later; but it's unlikely I will ever find out…
JPL said,
April 11, 2026 @ 6:19 pm
I've never read anything by Tolkien, and I'm not interested in the "fantasy'" genre as a whole, so I'm not about to waste my time seeing what all the fuss might be about, but one might wonder, what is the point of subjecting the typical reader to interminable passages of landscape description, or description of any essentially static scene, which from the author's point of view, no doubt, are not interminable enough? Is it possible that Tolkien was more interested in the words he was using to describe the flora and fauna than the whole meadow itself? Perhaps marveling at and luxuriating in the richness of the terminology and special terms for the minute details regular city-dwellers are unable to appreciate, because they don't have the vocabulary to even notice them, let alone describe them effectively? If that were the case, we would expect that general terms like 'meadow' would not be as important or interesting for the author as the very specific terms for rare flowers and parts of flowers, rare plants and other little-noticed natural phenomena that the noble English rural peasantry has over the centuries created names for in their infinite wisdom. The wonder for the author is in the words, this rich vocabulary that is totally unavailable to city-dwellers, and all that. That's the real English language. Kind of a "word-mysticism". Such a mind would have no special reverence for a "bleached-out" word like 'meadow'. I suppose he expected the reader to take up this attitude. (Biologist and ant-lover E O Wilson had a similar attitude of reverence for the terminology of biological description.)
PGilm said,
April 11, 2026 @ 11:10 pm
Yeah my bad. At least I wasn't wearing cat ears and whiskers, and I _was_ wearing pants when i posted hastily.
I was discussing with a young colleague my memories of reading the books multiple times in the mid through late 70's and sympasizing with Amanda about the ferns and rocks and I thought I remembered meadows. Any hoo, this colleague surprised me with this and I posted it without fact-checking. The original came with references and everything!
Rodger C said,
April 12, 2026 @ 9:48 am
The Lord of the Rings
Is one of those things;
If you like it, you do;
If you don't, then you boo!
–Rhyme from the Sixties
HS said,
April 12, 2026 @ 7:21 pm
The term "meadow writing" vaguely reminds me of the term "pillow shot" used to describe a characteristic stylistic device in the films of the Japanese film director Yasujiro Ozu. Perhaps "meadow writing" serves the same purpose in Tolkien as "pillow shots" do in Ozu. I love Ozu, so maybe I should read Tolkien after all.
Nah, I don't think so. Ozu's films didn't feature endless battle scenes of vast armies of computer-generated Orcs slaughtering each other….
JPL said,
April 13, 2026 @ 1:10 am
@DS:
Thanks for pointing out pillow shots: not so much the term, but the narrative technique in filmmaking. I didn't know that was a thing. A little while ago I watched John Ford's "My Darling Clementine", and the Ozu clips reminded me of certain scenes from Ford's film that held the scene more than is conventionally necessary and broke up the pacing. I got the impression that, in a scene where there is action, the action proceeded beyond the point where the activity is relevant to the narrative, but informative of the inner turmoil and churn of the characters. I'd have to look at it again to say anything more specific, but my impression was that "Hollywood films never do that". There are mysterious neglected places all over, in the surroundings, in the mind; maybe Ozu just wants us to look at these "unswept corners" that we pass, but never take in. (I liked the term "still lifes" that one critic used; I don't think Tolkien was doing "landscapes", so I don't think the term "meadow-writing" describes the style he was using.) Ngugi wa Thiongo used to throw in at certain points a dialogue scene that turns into a monologue of unusual extension that turns interesting in itself, pages, where the unfolding of the action pauses for a while while a character expatiates. I don't think Tolkien, by the accounts here, was probably doing that. If he was, he probably shouldn't have started off with that. People are going to put down the book with a little extra push.
Philip Taylor said,
April 13, 2026 @ 4:33 am
"Ozu's films didn't feature endless battle scenes of vast armies of computer-generated Orcs slaughtering each other…." — well, neither did Tolkien's. Tolkien wrote books, he didn't produce/direct/whatever films …
HS said,
April 13, 2026 @ 9:39 pm
well, neither did Tolkien's. Tolkien wrote books, he didn't produce/direct/whatever films …
That's true, of course; I was talking about Peter Jackson's movies, not Tolkien's books, and strictly speaking it would be unfair of me to judge the books based on the movies (there have been an awful lot of bad movie adaptations of good books). However, it's also true, I think, that most people who love the books also love the movies, so I think I'm justified in forming some provisional opinion of the books based on the movies. Though having said that, I should in fairness also say that I know a couple of thoughtful, intelligent people who really like the books but didn't like the movies, so there you go.
But the reality is that Tolkien's books are long, time is short (and even shorter if the deranged madmen of the world get their way and inflict upon the rest of us the Apocalypse that they are clearly devoutly hoping for), and there are an awful lot of books in the world that I haven't read, so I still don't think I will be reading Tolkien any time soon. Taking into account all the evidence (or at least the evidence that I've seen), my Bayesian Posterior probability that I will like the books is, I think, pretty low – and that's starting from a neutral Prior, which it wouldn't be.
ajay said,
April 14, 2026 @ 4:23 am
one might wonder, what is the point of subjecting the typical reader to interminable passages of landscape description, or description of any essentially static scene, which from the author's point of view, no doubt, are not interminable enough? Is it possible that Tolkien was more interested in the words he was using to describe the flora and fauna than the whole meadow itself? Perhaps marveling at and luxuriating in the richness of the terminology and special terms for the minute details regular city-dwellers are unable to appreciate
Tolkien was a city-dweller for almost all his life! Birmingham, then Leeds, then Oxford.
ajay said,
April 14, 2026 @ 4:32 am
But the reality is that Tolkien's books are long, time is short (and even shorter if the deranged madmen of the world get their way and inflict upon the rest of us the Apocalypse that they are clearly devoutly hoping for), and there are an awful lot of books in the world that I haven't read, so I still don't think I will be reading Tolkien any time soon.
Tolkien published two novels in his lifetime. One is The Hobbit which is not long by any measure. The other is The Lord of the Rings which is, in my edition, 981 pages excluding appendices, index, and prologue. Since we're talking about Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov is 960 pages in the Penguin Classics edition – you should probably avoid that as well if you struggle with reading.
ajay said,
April 14, 2026 @ 4:34 am
Best avoid Tolstoy as well, which is not only tediously long but also has endless battle scenes of vast armies of computer-generated Frenchmen slaughtering each other.
HS said,
April 14, 2026 @ 8:06 pm
Whoa! Three comments in the space of 11 minutes! I feel I may have hit a raw nerve…!
There I was making what I thought were some good-humoured comments in which I explicitly acknowledged that other people could have different opinions and even noted that I have a couple of friends who like the books. I'm not sure that I entirely interpret your statement on my reading ability in the same good-humoured way, though tone of voice is of course hard to judge in writing and I'm perfectly willing to give you the benefit of the doubt.
I acknowledged above that my comment above about "endless battle scenes of vast armies of computer-generated Orcs slaughtering each other" was really referring to the movies and not the books, but that constitutes my major source of information on which to form a judgement on whether I will like the books, and as I said, I think I'm justified in forming some provisional judgement about the books based on the movies. I'm perfectly willing to incorporate your opinion of the books into my Bayesian judgement as to whether or not I will like the books, but you are just one data point and to be honest I don't think it will affect my posterior probability very much. (Just done the analysis and it didn't!!)
Regarding the long battle scenes of vast armies of Frenchmen slaughtering each other in War and Peace, your point is well taken. However, I feel those scenes probably have more literary merit and convey more human depth than the battle scenes in Lord of the Rings, but again, I'm basing that judgement largely on the scenes in the movies. As noted above, I'm perfectly willing to incorporate your opinion into my Bayesian analysis, but again, I don't think it will change my posterior probability very much. (Nope, it didn't!!).
As to length, the movies were over three hours each and the one I saw felt like at least twice that. I have actually watched a number of movies with running times of between 6 and 12 hours that flew by and I enjoyed very much, but I can't say the same about the first Lord of the Rings movie. Though this may well reflect Peter Jackson's directorial style more than Tolkien's writing style. (I don't believe Peter Jackson has released the full 500-hour Director's Cut yet, but I expect it any day soon.)
Regarding the length of the books, I did actually check before making my comment and the source I saw gave a figure of more like 1200 pages, i.e. 20% larger than your figure, though this will of course vary by edition depending upon the page size, the font size, and how many tedious appendices are included. Personally I think 1200 pages constitutes a long book in anybody's, er, book. I'm perfectly willing to launch into a long book if I think the payoff will be worth it, but it's a lot of time to invest if I'm not sure about the payoff. As I said, time is short (and gets shorter every day) and there are an awful lot of books in the world that I haven't read, and I think this is a perfectly reasonable attitude to take. Instead of reading one 1200-page book I could actually read six 200-page books. And if I read six 200-page books I think it is almost certain that there will be at least one that I will like. (I'm happy to do the probability calculation if you want me to). And if I think my Bayesian probability that I will like the Lord of the Rings books is, say, 40% (and to be honest it's a lot lower than that), my payoff will clearly be greater if I read the six 200-page books instead of Lord of the Rings.
What's really needed here, of course, is some kind of utility function in addition to my Bayesian probability analysis, but I can't be bothered actually setting one up. I've got better things to do with my time – like finishing Conrad's The Secret Agent, which I'm currently part way through.
p.s. to return this to something a bit more related to linguistics rather than literature, when I wrote "interminal" in my first comment above I of course meant "interminable". I've been staring at that "interminal" and it annoys me! I'd blame the spelling checker if I could, but I can't. I hate spelling checkers and always turn them off if I can. Why is it that you always notice a mistake like this immediately after you post a comment and it is too late to correct it? I'm sure it must constitute some Law with somebody's name attached.
HS said,
April 14, 2026 @ 8:32 pm
@ajay
having read your comments again I now think your comment "if you struggle with reading" may be referring to my struggling to find time to read, rather than my ability to read, but I'm still not sure!
HS said,
April 14, 2026 @ 8:57 pm
In the comment above, where I say "my payoff will clearly be greater if I read the six 200-page books instead of Lord of the Rings" I should really say "my expected payoff". Who knows, maybe if I actually read Lord of the Rings I would decide that it's a masterpiece!