tolkien's weaknesses?

I've gotten into a couple of conversations lately about the strengths and weaknesses of Lord of the Rings. So many people have, over the years, responded so defensively to my accusations of bad writing that I feel the need to explain a bit. Tolkien isn't a bad writer: when his brain is on, he's fluid and brilliant. It's just that he got sloppy and became guilty of tone drift. To see how badly written the epic is in places, just read The Hobbit, a model of elegant, sleek prose.

At the beginning of the series, you feel a gentle consonance that makes a paragraph pop and bounce pleasurably without calling attention to itself; toward the end, it's self-conscious Beowulf pastiche, turgid and pretentious, the verbal equivalent of those vases you see at Hobby Lobby that are painted to look antique.

I played a little round of Put The Finger On The Page in both books:

Soon the passage that had been sloping down began to go up again, and after a while it climbed steeply. That slowed Bilbo down. But at last the slope stopped, the passage turned a corner and dipped down again, and there, at the bottom of a short incline, he saw, filtering round another corner — a glimpse of light. Not red light, as of fire or lantern, but a pale out-of-doors sort of light. Then Bilbo began to run.

* * * * *

Fey he seemed, or the battle-fury of his fathers ran like new fire in his veins, and he was borne up on Snowmane like a god of old, even as Oromë the Great in the battle of the Valar when the world was young. His golden shield was uncovered, and lo! it shone like an image of the Sun, and the grass flamed into green about the white feet of his steed.