Prelude to Revision: Complex Composition from Tolkien, 2 - Direct Narrative Exposition

In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien has so many intricately detailed secondary stories which require exposition, that he uses just about every single expository technique on Earth, and several in some pretty exotic orbits. I think this variety is one of his strengths, because of all narrative techniques, exposition is one of those which get oldest fastest. And the richness of this particular story demands a lot of it.

What is exposition? Back to basics:

...most complex compositions fall into the intermediate zones, where only part of the imaginary tale is actually made explicit - just as much, in fact, as serves a proper reading of the real one. The methods of achieving this partial telling are what I mean by exposition.

By imaginary stories, to recap, I mean stories which are not exactly told as stories at all, except in the limit as they approach reality and are glommed onto the 'real' story whole. But they are intended, essential to the overall composition, and actually presented in some clear sense, or else we don't care about them. In the next few posts I'm dealing with the expository techniques of making them somehow explicit and localized, as opposed to the incluing techniques of implicitly spreading them throughout the text.

The crudest and simplest method of exposition is just this: the narrator dumps on the reader exactly what they need to know of the exposited story, when they need to know it, by Word of God, or at least Word of Phil the Fibber whom it is pleasing the reader to stand the drinks.

( Example of direct narrative exposition. )

( Narrative exposition in Tolkien. )

So. What does this mean for my own project?

( What it means. )

Next up, a Tolkien favourite and now a big-time genre trope in its own right: Exposition by Loremaster.