silver

I've never thought of Tolkien as switching at all, though admittedly it's been awhile;

Never too late for a re-read (said the man who's gone back to that particular textual well probably more than 30(!) times. Some books just speak to us ...

I think it's probably a sign of skill if you can switch language 'levels' without bludgeoning your reader with it.

He mostly did it through dialogue: vocabulary, cadence, sentence-structure, all differed among different characters, but also among different cultures (the Rohirrhim, for instance, spoke an almost archaic English).

Anyway. I'll stop, lest I spend the rest of the night thinking about Tolkien ...