All through The Fellowship of the Ring the narrative is fixed and linear, but it divides into several parts as the Fellowship breaks up and the story jumps back and forth between separate characters in different places. This is to be expected, we now have separate actors operating independently. But the Ents, like Bombadil, seem to drop in out of nowhere, from outside the main story. I get the impression that this is a whole other narrative that has been hastily inserted into the text from an earlier tale. Who are the Ents, and why the mystery of the Entwives? Are they mentioned in Tolkien’s other writings? Is this what you mean about the character of the writing changing? Up to now, the tale had been compact and direct, a river changing in form, but growing and flowing faster and deeper. Now it only seems to be splitting up into tributaries and some of the streams seem to issue unexpectedly from unknown places. Both the rhythm and tone of the tale change abruptly, just like they did with Bombadil.

I’ve seen this pattern before, in the Old Testament and Homer, old tales and myths are woven into the main narrative, reflections of other bards and legends hastily incorporated and transmitted through the text. We aren’t reading a book, we’re browsing a library. But this epic comes from one man, in one lifetime, it is not the collected wisdom and history of the roots of a civilization, assembled and edited by a thousand scribes over the centuries. Or did Tolkien do this
deliberately, to try and capture the rhythm of an ancient history, a legend, a compilation of myths and folk tales?

In the Odyssey, we have a dim glimpse into the Bronze Age, the Greek Dark Ages, the time between the fall of the Mycenaean Empire and the rise of the Iron Age City-States. The story was edited and retold, written down by countless scribes but it is handed down from pre-literate times. The Classical Greeks knew there was a time before iron tools, when the language itself was very different and long poems were sung by bards from memory. Nowhere in Homer is “writing” mentioned, and it is written in unrhymed verse, easily remembered by an oral reteller.

And there are hints of earlier times; Greek society was fiercely patriarchical, even misogynistic, but the women of Homer are strong, independent and capable. Penelope is Odyseus’ queen, but her aristocratic suitors, hoping he is dead, know whoever she marries will be King, not their son Telemachus. Is this a glimpse into some ancient matrilocal society, where Royal authority is held by males, but passed down along the female lineage? Its totally out of synch with Classical Greece, but as far as I know none of that is ever even mentioned by the time the old song is finally written down in its final form.

Could something like this have been attempted deliberately by Tolkien?
We read the Old Testament, and Homer, (not to mention all the old Northern European myths Tolkien studied) because they are the surviving racial memories of our distant ancestors. Every culture has them, the Vedas and Gilgamesh, the ancient Buddhist texts, the Tao. They are the past seen through a glass darkly, reflected in dark and troubled waters. But they are all that survives across the centuries of our earliest history.

But Tolkien wrote this all himself. It all comes from his mind, his imagination. It is not myth, or legend, or history. Just what is it?