What writing

So, I can only speak for myself, but when its been a while since I've read Tolkien, I seem to forget just how good a writer he is. Its easy to remember that his stories are awesome, but just how good the prose is, wow. I'll give you a couple examples I came across while reading The Two Towers on the train.

Dreadful as the Dead Marshes had been, and the arid moors of the Noman-lands, more loathsome far was the country that the crawling day now slowly unveiled to his shrinking eyes. Even to the Mere of Dead Faces some haggard phantom of green spring could come; but here neither spring nor summer would ever come again. Here nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rottenness. The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails upon the lands about. High mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of earth fire-blasted and poison-stained, stood like an obscene graveyard in endless rows, slowly revealed in the reluctant light.

I particularly liked this one.

...like men on the edge of a sleep where nightmare lurks, holding it off, though they know that they can only come to morning through the shadows.

Anyway. There's a little Tolkien for you, what a great author. That is all.