Is not a comma more than warranted in this kind of situation? [closed]

From The Two Towers:

To his simple mind ordinary hunger, the desire to eat hobbits, had seemed the chief danger in Gollum. He realized now that it was not so: Gollum was feeling the terrible call of the Ring.

This is not the first time I see this in English. It's equally jarring to me each and every time. If I had written that sentence, it would have doubtlessly been like this:

To his simple mind, ordinary hunger, the desire to eat hobbits, had seemed...

To have "mind and ordinary" right next to each other like Tolkien (apparently) did (unless the digital copy I have has a mistake in it) seems extremely strange to me. Downright wrong! But since I've seen it so many times in English, I suspect that it is indeed valid. I just strongly dislike the practice.

In old texts, they frequently over-used commas, yet not in this case where it truly is warranted for clarity and ease of reading.

Solution 1:

There's often a trade-off between precisionist application of rules (admittedly probably calling for the comma here) and laying things on with a trowel, crudely overengineering (here, comma clutter). And the extra comma doesn't make things all that wonderful for the inexpert reader. How does one differentiate right away between the introductory-phrase parenthetical comma (omitted by Tolkien) and the two other parenthetical-offsetting (for the [whimsically narrowing/specifying] appositive) commas? We only have the one punctuation mark to serve different roles (or, as here, in an ambiguous [AB] + C or [A] + [BC] role). If we had a half-comma, that would work after the introductory phrase; the slight pause would show how I'd read the sentence.

A totally clarifying solution would be:

To his simple mind, ordinary hunger – the desire to eat hobbits – had seemed the chief danger in Gollum. He realized now that it was not so: Gollum was feeling the terrible call of the Ring.

, – – and not the less clear , , ,

But this replaces the trowel with a larger one. The detailing apositive is best set off by the humble comma (one at each end).

I never had the privilege of meeting the good professor, though we may well have passed within yards of each other as we were brief contemporaries when I was at university. I do remember the story of his 'uncorrecting' an edit made to one of his submissions to his publishers. And I'm aware of his reputation as a linguist. In spite of which, I think his popular writing is unsurpassed. If he decided that a slight possibility of a garden path sentence was preferable to comma clutter, a different complication in parsing, and jerkier prose (or far more clunky dashes), I would be happy to agree (and do).

Let him who has better qualifications, a wider and more devoted readership, and more respect than Tolkien insert the first comma. (Is this a rant?)