I never enjoyed reading Tolkien. That doesn't prevent me from respecting his writing though.

For me, his use of language seemed excessively verbose, the books could have been written with 1/10 of the words.

However, I do love books from the 1600s, 1700s and 1800s.

You can see how the language evolved over time, how beautiful and descriptive it was.

By the 1950s our language began to go into decline, just like our culture.

Tolkien was like a last gasp of beauty, a memory of a time when our language matched our ambitions...

Now, if our discourse is to be any kind of measure of our ambitions, we are sadly lacking.