I’ve often found Tolkien’s habit of overly describing his landscapes to be rather tedious (I get it, you’re into elves and forests, can we move on please?) but that same tendency is used to good effect in the scenes in and around Mordor. As has been pointed out elsewhere, Mordor’s smoky, ashen, pock-marked landscape bears more than a passing resemblance to the WWI battlefields Tolkien experienced. When, for weeks on end, your world is a muddy trench you start to get real familiar with it and I imagine the fear and monotony was oppressive.

I had a strong reaction years ago while reading Alain Robbe-Grillet’s The Voyeur. The author describes everything precisely, methodically, even geometrically. He will then frequently repeat the scene giving additional details each time. It is at times monotonous but that only makes it feel more eerie. The cumulative effect was a paradoxical one, the more tangible the reality of the world described, the more dream-like (nightmarish, really) and unknowable it became. One had a very unsettling feeling of being inside the mind of a very deranged person. Whether my reaction was psychological or chemical I’ll leave to others to determine.