Is Tolkien Actually Any Good? (2003)
rilstone.talktalk.net
rilstone.talktalk.net
Tolkien still stands out in my mind as one of the best story tellers I have ever read. He was such a good story teller that people are retelling them in every way they can imagine in books, films, role play games, computer games, all sorts of media. D and D, warcraft, Diablo, all Tolkien rip-offs. Even Harry Potter.
The awe inspiring bit is the ambiguity, the hints of all the other stories untold, the heroes with bit parts, mentioned in passing. He didn't just write a story, he wrote a whole universe. What he did is rare, I can think of only a handful of other works that pull off the immersion convincingly, Isaac Asimov's Foundation, Ian M. Bank's Culture, Lucas' Star Wars (if they'd have just left it at 4-6) and Herbert's Dune (just). And none of them quite touch the awesomeness of middle earth.
He wasn't just good, he was amazing. Pure fluke perhaps, as the article hints at, but what a great one.
Not that this is really a knock against Tolkien. But I think it's important to deal with the notion that instead of creating something new, the man mostly was very, very adept and very _dilligent_ at synthesizing the epic poetry and folklore of the various northern traditions into a huge and accessible tapestry.
Which is good, and is very appealing to the sort of kid who spent much of his childhood eagerly reading RPG sourcebooks and monster manuals (like me). But I think it's very short-sighted to claim that all fantasy is a Tolkien rip-off. <i>Tolkien</i> is a Tolkien rip-off.
D & D mythology is a direct ripoff of Tolkien. It was not the inspiration for it, it was a direct ripoff. Tolkien = humans, dwarves, elves, orcs, trolls, dragons, etc. based in a medieval timeframe with magic. D & D = humans, dwarves, elves, orcs, trolls, dragons, etc. based in a medieval timeframe with magic.
And a lot of modern fantasy games are direct rip-offs of d & d or tolkien (practically the same thing).
Northern European folklore was the inspiration for Tolkien. A lot of different sources of inspiration. There was no one story where humans, dwarves, elves, orcs, trolls, dragons, etc. were all protagonists based in a medieval timeframe with magic.
It's very, very different. You seem to have a penchant for words, I'm surprised you don't see it.
| 'Here, spring was already busy about them; fronds pierced moss and mould,
| larches were green-fingered, small flowers were opening in the turf,
| birds were singing. Ithilean, garden of Gondor now desolate kept still
| dishevelled dryad loveliness.'
"Disheveled dryad loveliness" is quite evocative for me. This reminds me of many paintings of the Romantic period, many of which are also celebrations of nothing more than "pretty countryside." Many modern people think of such stuff as pablum, but there are places in the world that can be so beautiful, one's breath is taken away. (One particular brook by Glendalough on a good day, with no one else about, for one example.) If someone has never had this experience, I would feel sorry for them. If one's cultural background in mythology is based on action-oriented computer games, I can see how one might be annoyed by "pretty countryside." In a game, this is the annoying, tedious bit one has to get through for the good parts. In real life, it is a billion times more compelling, complex, and stirring than any game ever written until now could ever hope to be.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think Tolkien is a literary god, but I also doubt this author has the background to fully appreciate where he's coming from.
I've got a fair number of authors I like considerably better than Tolkien, but he's quite good right now, and surprisingly more enjoyable and approachable than many authors from the same time period.
It’s not just that we don’t think of “rosy-fingered dawn” as being fresh because we know Homer used it: it’s that even if you’ve never heard it before, it will have lost its freshness halfway through the Odyssey.
So word-by-word freshness is usually not a useful or fun thing to look for in epic literature. While people can criticize Tolkien for a lack of eye-kicks (as I think I remember William Gibson calling phrase-scale fireworks in cyberpunk), a tree can be green-fingered twenty times without it being a violation of the rules of the game he’s trying to play.
(Also, for all we know, Homer might have stolen all his clichés.)
Bingo. I think this is very important insight from CS to this kind of literature. You might enjoy Robert Bringhurst’s discussion of Haida myths, where he calls them fractal in a way that doesn’t set my teeth on edge (the way most non-rigorous uses of that word do).
This is the kind of thing that makes me sad about the two cultures problem. The few scholarly discussions of oral literature that I’ve read seem to be groping for this kind of concept, while a lot of hackers I know are dismissive of the idea that there’s anything of real interest in fields like anthropology. Everyone loses if we can’t find ways to say things like “self-similar structures compress well” across fields.
Edit to self-link: I tried to make this kind of idea engaging to some of my friends at http://basecase.org/env/time-and-myth . The book where Bringhurst talks about this: http://books.google.com/books?id=QhMkb1HOjz4C .
Here Spring was already busy about them: fronds pierced moss and mould, larches were green-fingered, small flowers were opening in the turf, birds were singing. Ithilien, the garden of Gondor now desolate kept still a dishevelled dryad loveliness.
Comma, Spring, colon, Ithilien, 'a'. I think the essay's author has a bit of a tin ear, from this. Tolkien had great prose style, particularly fine at description, as here -- here's a UChicago writing instructor in agreement, listing him among other "superlative writers of description": http://writing-program.uchicago.edu/courses/index.htm
[I've only glanced through the OP; this misquote just caught my attention.]
Day was opening in the sky, and they saw that the mountains were now
much further off, receding eastward in a long curve that was lost in
the distance. Before them, as they turned west, gentle slopes ran down
into dim hazes far below. All about them were small woods of resinous
trees, fir and cedar and cypress, and other kinds unknown in the
Shire, with wide glades among them; and everywhere there was a wealth
of sweet-smelling herbs and shrubs. The long journey from Rivendell
had brought them far south of their own land, but not until now in
this more sheltered region had the hobbits felt the change of
clime. Here Spring was already busy about them: fronds pierced moss
and mould, larches were green-fingered, small flowers were opening in
the turf, birds were singing. Ithilien, the garden of Gondor now
desolate kept still a dishevelled dryad loveliness.
I can't resist sharing another bit of found poetry, found by a program of mine at http://github.com/darius/versecop -- at the climax of all the action, Sam stands on Mount Doom and sees Sauron's works fall to ruin:
... A brief vision he had Of swirling cloud, and in the midst of it Towers and battlements, tall as hills, Founded upon a mighty mountain-throne Above immeasurable pits; great courts And dungeons, eyeless prisons sheer as cliffs, And gaping gates of steel and adamant: And then all passed.
(Running the same program over the works of Jane Austen brought up only a few passages of two or three lines. Austen is great, just very different.)
Back to the first paragraph, "day was opening in the sky" -- "mountains receding eastward in a long curve" -- "Spring was already busy about them" -- "fronds pierced moss and mould" -- "Ithilien... kept still a dishelleved dryad loveliness". It's an awfully animate sort of landscape in these words, though not obtrusively so. I think that's another way the scene's brought to life.
There are nine and ninety ways to write, but I gotta say this is one of them.
The writing in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion echoes the style of the work he studied and taught. I understand that many modern readers find the style and language alien; after all, the English language and English literature evolved considerably since Beowulf. Tellingly, the author of the critique compares Tolkien to much later authors, all of whom use ordinary 20th-century (American) English. Tolkien is a modern writer who consciously adopted an older cadence, and the author of the critique does not seem to understand this.
(It's worth noting that The Hobbit and the first chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring use a whimsical, less-grandiose style. I don't have a good explanation for this, except to guess that they originated in bedtime stories for Tolkien's children.)
I just found the critique to be ignorant.
I went through much the same experience as the author, but I still think Tolkien was OK, even though I no longer enjoy reading him so much. Sure, he's turgid in places (the second chapter of the first volume of LOTR is easily the worst part of the whole book), but then so's a lot of Charles Dickens' work. I love Great expectations but still wince at the hackery of Hard Times...there's a reason nobody even tried to make a movie out of that one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_rings
Although some Tolkien's underlying interest and work dates back to WW I.
I think the distinction between the two has to do with the primary driver of the book. Genre fiction tends to be about telling a story about people and events. Plot and character both get strong billing, but plot dominates. In literary fiction, though, plot tends to be unimportant and character analysis dominates. A whole book can take place inside the mind of one person over the course of, say, one uneventful day.
This isn't an iron-clad rule, of course. By my definition, A Wizard of Earthsea is basically literary fiction; not coincidentally, English teachers sometimes assign it. Occasionally, a writer sprinkles fantastic or pulpy elements in a work of literary fiction and earns high praise; Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie do this routinely. It was kind of amazing that Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go — very much a dystopian science fiction novel — made the Booker shortlist in 2005.
This is supplied as a criticism, but for me this is what makes Tolkien great. I dislike immensely that feeling that authors are just throwing in fantasy-ish sounding names and toss-away references to "deepen" the story. I can tell when they're doing it, its cheap feeling, and it sucks.
The one thing you know for damn sure about Tolkien, is that when he mentions some ancillary character or place reference, not only did he not make it up on the spot, there's very likely a whole file cabinet drawer on it somewhere because he'd been thinking about it for 20 years.
It made his world huge, internally consistent at nearly every turn, and immensely satisfying to read about even if his prose was "dense" or "cliche".
The fact that it wasn't intended explicitly to be a book, and was something he did for his own amusement is probably a key ingredient in the magic.
I think we lack the vocabulary to describe this art form of building convincing universes. We can only conceive of it as a subordinate to narrative, with words like 'mise-en-scene'. But that doesn't quite cover what Star Wars or Tolkien or Dungeons and Dragons or Grand Theft Auto really are. World-building is arguably the dominant art form of the late 20th century and early 21st.
"I picked for comparison three master stylists: E. R. Eddison, Kenneth Morris, and J. R. R. Tolkien; which may seem unfair to any other authors mentioned. But I do not think it is unfair. In art, the best is the standard. When you hear a new violinist, you do not compare him to the kid next door; you compare him to Stern and Heifetz."
and:
"Tolkien writes a plain, clear English. Its outstanding virtue is its flexibility, its variety. It ranges easily from the commonplace to the stately, and can slide into metrical poetry, as in the Tom Bombadil episode, without the careless reader's even noticing. Tolkien's vocabulary is not striking; he has no ichor; everything is direct, concrete, and simple."
http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/arts/al0127.html
(there's no way to escape its essential Catholic vision).
I wonder how many books had Appendices before LOTR (fiction works obviously). I remember I couldn't wait to finish the main novel so I could investigate the Appendix!
Is amazingly evocative. I can see that clearly in my mind. It's perhaps no coincidence why so many people, after seeing the movies remarked at how similar the movies were to what they had imagined when reading the books -- the imagery was just that good.
He always saved it for me by having such a wide and soaring vision of middle earth and then delivering it.
The silmarillion is horrible though :-)
Strangely, I loved the detailed walk through the forests. It made me feel like I was actually undergoing the walk. The entire book made me feel I made the journey!
I read LOTR first time at around 39 and loved it. It's time now for a re-read at 45. However, I've tried reading Silmarilion several times but never been able to complete it.
Yes, one may find other examples of "fanciful" works, for instance, George Eliot's "The Lifted Veil", early horror works of Stoker and Shelley, or perhaps Jules Verne (which is not fantasy, so much as sci-fi), but modern fantasy, as we know it, began with Tolkien.
Interesting that LOST looked like this sort of story, and drew in a bunch of dedicated fans on that basis, but turned out to be a more traditional character-based story after all -- where the references do not, in fact, hang together. Then out came the torches!
English is not my first language, maybe thats one of the reasons I prefer terse and to the point, yet beautiful writing. In my personal opinion, fantasy is good for those with excellent reading speed.
Today, I would classify LotR as as Young Adult novel and not an adult piece of fiction. Honestly, it's themes were vastly mature compared to the Hobbit, however they weren't exceptionally mature for the time it was written. Consider that Return of the King came out in the same year as Lolita, and Fellowship/Two Towers came out in the same year as Lord of the Flies, which is another 'adult' novel that is arguably a Young Adult novel, although IMO deals with a much more mature subject.
Hobbits are a long lived race. Frodo had only recently 'came of age' when the story begins, IIRC at 33 years old. Considering the traditional ages of 'coming of age' I'd bet he was the maturity equivalent of ~15 years old, and he certainly behaves like it in the beginning.
IMO LotR was a great YA novel, just like The Hobbit was a great children's novel. They're amazing stories that you can sit down and read with you kids, but you're not necessarily going to be enjoying them as much as they are, and in 20-30 years time, your kids might be reading them to your grand kids and feeling the exact same way.