Rosebury studies several examples of Tolkien's diction in The Lord of the Rings at length, citing passages and analysing them in detail to show what they achieve. One is the moment when the Hobbit Merry has helped to kill the Witch-King, the leader of the Ringwraiths, and finds himself standing alone on the battlefield. Part of the quoted passage runs:
"And still Meriadoc stood there blinking through his tears, and no one spoke to him, indeed none seemed to heed him... And behold! there lay his weapon, but the blade was smoking like a dry branch that has been thrust in a fire; and as he watched, it writhed and withered and was consumed. So passed the sword of the Barrow-Downs, work of Westernesse. But glad would he have been to know its fate who wrought it slowly long ago in the North-Kingdom when the Dunedain were young, and chief among their foes was the dread realm of Angmar and its sorcerer king. No other blade, not though mightier hands had wielded it, would have dealt that foe a wound so bitter, cleaving the undead flesh, breaking the spell that knit his unseen sinews to his will."
Rosebury writes that this begins with "essentially plain syntax", as if Merry were speaking; but "woven into the clauses" are subtle clues in the syntax, like "heed" rather than "notice", and the Hobbit's full name Meriadoc to stay in touch with the un-Hobbitlike "heroic tonality" of the passage. The first sentence of the second paragraph, he notes, heralds a shift of mood, as does the following "But glad would he have been", with effective use of inversion. Rosebury shows how awkward the uninverted form would have been: "But he who wrought it long ago ... would have been glad to know its fate." The passage ends with a powerfully musical sentence with assonances between "blade", "wield", "dealt" and so on; alliteration with "wield", "wound", "will"; memorable phrases like "unseen sinews"; and the immediacy of the present participles "cleaving...breaking", the implied "and" importantly suppressed. Rosebury states that the wide range of styles could have become an untidy mess, but the narrative is big enough to allow Tolkien to modulate gracefully between low and high styles.