QUOTE : Actually it is easy to exaggerate this, to make him into a caricature of the comic professor muttering inaudibly to himself. In reality it was not much like that. He did speak fast and not very clearly, but once the listener was used to the mannerism there was little difficulty in understanding most of what he said. Or rather, the difficulty was not physical but intellectual. He moved on so fast from idea to idea and spoke so allusively, assuming an equal knowledge in his listener, that all but those with a comparable range of learning wee left behind. Not that to speak too cleverly is necessarily more defensible than to speak too fast, and Tolkien can be justly accused of over estimating the intellectual powers of his listeners. Alternatively one can say that he did not bother to make himself clear because he was really speaking to himself, airing his own ideas without any attempt at real conversation.