I'd like to show how one great writer wowed an audience using resonance. Let's use J.R.R. Tolkien as an example. Books and movies based on his works are widely popular, so you're probably familiar with them.

But there is another reason that I would like to use him as an example. A few years ago I was at a conference where a renowned writer dismissed Tolkien's work as a "literary trick." I've heard other critics occasionally take swipes at him, claiming that his work is juvenile and has little merit. Now, I'm not going to claim that he was the world's greatest stylist, and I can certainly see weaknesses in his writing, but I believe that such comments are . . . uninformed.

Often when we talk about a writer who is a great stylist, we say that he has "fine literary sensibilities." In other words, he recognizes what sounds beautiful and what does not, and so he brings his story to life with grace and power.

Of course by saying that, it suggests that few writers have fine sensibilities.

But the truth is that most of us have fine sensibilities in one area or another. Orson Scott Card has a phenomenal ear for dialogue. Shannon Hale writes metaphors that leave me breathless. Brandon Sanderson has an unfailing sense of pacing. Steven King has been praised for being a modern Shakespeare when it comes to imitating the voice of the common man.

So most well-known authors have a major strength. With Tolkien, when it comes to an understanding of and the use of resonance, he may have had few equals in all of literature. He not only used resonance in all of the ways that I spoke about above—he discovered new methods that no one else had ever considered. His personal sensibilities were acutely focused on how a work resonated.

I read Lord of the Rings as a teenager and felt overwhelmed by its power and originality. Now I have to warn you that this article will be a spoiler, and by the time that you're done reading it, you may lose some respect for Tolkien's "originality."

I hope that you don't lose respect. Tolkien drew inspiration from not just hundreds, but thousands of sources, and it is beyond the scope of what I'm doing here to detail all of them. In fact, I'm sure that I would fail in any such attempt. I'm only trying to give you a sense for what he is doing, to scratch the surface of his work

Before I begin, it's important for you to know that Tolkien was a master philologist (lover of words), and his first civilian job after WWI was to work on the Oxford English Dictionary, researching the roots of Germanic words. (For those who are not familiar with the Oxford English Dictionary, it is the most exhaustive of English dictionaries in that it discusses in detail, not only the meanings of words, but their history, usage, and etymology. When I talk about the Oxford English Dictionary, I am not referring to the condensed volume you sometimes see in stores. The last published Oxford English Dictionary was 20 volumes long.)