The Monster:
And behold! it was a winged creature: if bird, then greater than all other birds, and it was naked, and neither quill nor feather did it bear, and its vast pinions were as webs of hide between horned fingers; and it stank. A creature of an older world maybe it was, whose kind, lingering in forgotten mountains cold beneath the Moon, outstayed their day, and in hideous eyrie bred this last untimely brood, apt to evil.
The Critic:
There's something hesitant and tentative in such passages, suggesting a writer whose imagination is not all that sharply focused on what he wants us to see.
My comment:
It has not occurred to the eminent (or otherwise) critic, that Tolkien is describing, what in a letter to a reader he called "something perydactylish": and that the hobbit who is supposed to have written this in Westron could hardly have heard about this Greek and scientific name of it. Supposing this to describe a live pterodactyl (ridden by a demonic ghost) to someone who has never heard that name, the description is economical:
"And behold!" - you'd say that too, if you had to face a live pterodactyl with a demon rider
"it was a winged creature:" - bird, bat or, as is the case here, something pterodactylish
"if bird, then greater than all other birds," - in fact bigger than a bird
"and it was naked, and neither quill nor feather did it bear," - not a bird then
"and its vast pinions were as webs of hide between horned fingers;" - but a "reptile" except that such crawl and do not fly: i e a pterodactyl
"and it stank." - as a creature ridden by a demon [or demonic ghost] ought to do
"A creature of an older world maybe it was, whose kind, lingering in forgotten mountains cold beneath the Moon, outstayed their day," - a guess about what the darwinist reader is supposed to "know": if pterodactyls survived to meet men (and hobbits) they were by then "living fossiles"
"and in hideous eyrie bred this last untimely brood, apt to evil." - an understatement, considering the rider.
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