Describing the Weather

When I tried to read The Lord of the Rings as a teenager, I could not get past the first few pages of Tolkien’s extensive descriptions of Bilbo’s home. “Who spends this much time pointing out what stuff looks like?” I thought. Now, I know better: The backstory is the story, and there’s no such thing as too much detail.

Having recently finished The Fellowship of the Ring for the first time, I’m now off into The Two Towers. One pattern which struck me is how much time Tolkien dedicates towards describing the characters’ surroundings and the weather. If I had to guess, I’d say the former makes up 10-15% of the book. Throw in the latter, and you probably get to 20, maybe 25%. That’s one in every five sentences dedicated to rocks, clouds, rivers, hills, meadows, sunshine, or the moon!

Some readers lament this extensive scene-setting, thinking it breaks the flow of the action. If you ask me, it makes the book rather than breaking it. This is a story that happens in the great outdoors. The environment is beautiful yet often just as dangerous. Snow isn’t something our cast watches through a living room window. It’s an obstacle and, potentially, the difference between life and death. If our fellowship hadn’t turned around near the peak of Caradhras during a snowstorm, they might not have lived to see the morning.

Consistently describing where our heroes are and under which conditions they operate reveals our choices to them without constantly stating the obvious. It explains why Aragorn is moody, why Legolas is prancing around, and why the short-legged hobbits need rest where everyone else could still keep going.

It also sets up how various characters feel and foreshadows upcoming events. If the gang is staring into a dull landscape of barren fields and ash-gray ridges full of sharp rocks, no one expects them to encounter a friendly traveling salesman five minutes later. But, sometimes, they might—yet only the description opens up the opportunity to meet or subvert readers’ expectations.

Finally, and this may be their most important function, the descriptions pull us in. They ground not just the characters in this world unfolding in our heads, but us, too. With his maps and names and great attention to detail, Tolkien went above and beyond in this, but many other books also get us involved primarily by giving us something to look at—if only in front of our mind’s inner eye.

A little stream is trickling down an almost-dry riverbed, and you can hear it. Dark clouds roll in from the East, and you can see them. Nature and the weather are always present in Tolkien’s works—and that’s why we are, too, when we read them.

Who spends this much time pointing out what stuff looks like? Anyone who cares to create a world the rest of us will genuinely love to visit.