Tolkien’s Mythic Plan for England
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I'd really like to see counter-examples though; I feel like I haven't dived into the genre enough, in part because I'm turned off by the sheer volume of some book (series) on the one hand, and the juvenile tropes (generic hero's journey formula) on the other.
A lot of it is very Tolkien-esque, given Tolkien's influence on D&D and its influence on RPGs that followed, but it has a different feel than the fantasy of the 70's-90's that lived deep in his shadow.
UKLG's Earthsea is the series that I hear most often loved by other authors, although I'm not familiar with it myself.
Then there is Pratchett, who set out to do simple parody of high fantasy and ended up creating a deeply humanist character-driven universe.
As a side note in my opinion this series is an example of how the current phase of thinking someone has to be of a group to understand the group is wrong. The female author brilliantly captures a young male's journey towards a strong, compassionate, brave and very masculine manhood with all the mistakes along the way. As I grew up (and indeed still grow up) I often reflect on what Ged would do at different phases of his growth. So essentially the female UKLG is guiding me in my life. (Or maybe men and women are even more similar than I'm accounting for and a young woman's journey is just that similar to a man's).
> Or maybe men and women are even more similar than I'm accounting for and a young woman's journey is just that similar to a man's
You're almost there; the point is not that you have to be in a group to understand a group, but that because of the power structure some are much more visible and celebrated than others. A female writer is more likely to be able to see what the male journey is like (due to thousands of examples) than a male writer, who is in turn more likely to project his own prejudices than actually find out what it might be like.
(In turn, there have been a number of literary fights lately about white female authors doing terribly bad racial stereotypes of their nonwhite characters...)
I take issue with this statement. It's essentially a variant of the No True Scotsman. I constantly see the OP's statement asserted, in various contexts, by various parties, in the same way he worded it.
I don't doubt that you've seen a more refined version of it. "People" are a fairly heterogeneous bunch, and when it comes to race/gender stuff I constantly see nuanced (whether or not agreeable) arguments filter out from academic circles into the general public and to activists, where they're distorted or simplified.
You're absolutely welcome to raise a more refined version of the argument and point out where it's more valid - I think that's a healthy contribution to any discussion. But you don't get to unilaterally assert that the version of the argument that is constantly being put forward ... isn't being put forward, or isn't "the real" argument.
But there's a ton of fantasy where the other important tropes of Tolkien (great lost past, the dark empire, all good on one side and all bad on the other, the pure heroes) is missing. The first that come to mind are "the wheel of time" and "the chronicles of Thomas covenant".
Also if you move from high fantasy there's a ton more interesting stuff, imvho :)
We must see different things. As I see the wheel of time:
- Great lost past. This one's obvious; the Age of Legend is a huge focus of the books.
- The dark empire. Doesn't exist in the present, but it is a feature of the great lost past.
- All good on one side and all bad on the other: this seems to describe the wheel of time well? The whole story arc is Rand fulfilling the separate prophecies of every ethnic group in the world, bringing them all under the same government (his), and taking them to battle the even more unified forces of evil.
- The pure heroes. Not sure what this means.
There is one Big Evil but the lesser ones are all scheming against each other. In Tolkien there's just a bit with Saruman and the spiders, but you don't really have factions amongst the ringwraiths, for example. It's all just a battle between Sauron/everyone or Melkor/everyone.
The good ones in WoT don't simply start separated but actively hating and fighting each other, Rand has to go to war with many nations and specific groups within nations, and some of them just split and start killing each other. This is not the same as Gondor and Rohan being on bad terms, or some elven clans just standing on the sides.
In Tolkien's universe you 99% of the time know who is evil and who is not (elf, dwarf, hobbit, ent, eagle, northern man = good; orc, goblin, troll, dragon, great spiders, eastern man= bad).
Yes, a couple human characters are ambiguous, but it's a pretty small minority.
In WoT you have a couple evil races and you, the reader, have a clear view of who is good and who is bad.
But in-world people want to kill other people because each thinks the other is evil: that looks a substantial difference to me.
Re: pure heroes, I meant that the main characters basically are all 100% good. This is the same in both universes too, just not a constant in all high fantasy. At least I think, I didn't finish the wheel of time ;)
In the wheel of time, good and evil are objective. (Well, evil is objective.) Everyone, good or evil, agrees on what it means to be evil. By definition, everyone evil ultimately reports to the same leader. Good is a little less unified than that, but they likewise all agree that they're on the same side. If one good person in the wheel of time wants to kill another good person for being evil, that doesn't reflect different views of what evil is; it's just a simple mistake of fact.
And that's pretty much what I understand by "all good on one side and all evil on the other", I guess.
> The good ones in WoT don't simply start separated but actively hating and fighting each other, Rand has to go to war with many nations and specific groups within nations, and some of them just split and start killing each other. This is not the same as Gondor and Rohan being on bad terms
On the other hand, it is the same as e.g. the relationship between the Mirkwood elves and the dwarves, as depicted in The Hobbit.
The closer you get to reality -- the more magic becomes a tool, rather than a rule ala gravity, the "lower" your fantasy gets; the lowest essentially being the one guy who stumbles into magical powers, but no one else has anything close, or a portal dimension opens and thrusts magical creatures upon our universe for a bit.
tolkienesque would be more specifically the tropes of LOTR, as you've described.
But essentially any modern high fantasy film/tv/game (I don't read much fantasy, so I can't comment on books) either mimics tolkien's systems and races (elves are slender long-lived creatures of the forests, dwarves are short hole-digging mountain-men, glowing weapons and runes scattered throughout the lands, wizards as wise-men etc), or it is best described as a reaction to tolkien -- deliberately trying to be NOT-tolkien.
In my mind, the failure to detach wholesale from tolkien, but still exist as "high-fantasy", is because few attempt a more holistic attempt at it -- to craft the rules of the universe, run the (mental) simulation, to set the stage for whatever plotline. Instead the world is crafted in the void, but because the rules are never clearly defined, it naturally defaults to similar rules as tolkien (randomly broken to fit the story, because they were never defined well-enough to review).
However, there are stories more derived from gods & myths that would fit my given definition of high fantasy, though I'm not sure I'd put them under the same umbrella as tolkien
There's perhaps no direct borrowing of names and character types, but by George R.R. Martin's own attestation, he sought to write a story with a scope approaching Tolkeins but disposing of Tolkiens idealism and dualism. He was deeply influenced by Tolkiens writing, and sought to correct it's flaws.
https://www.tolkiensociety.org/2019/09/george-r-r-martin-i-k...
Elevator pitch for you: you know the epic good vs. evil showdown where the good guys charge epically against the likes of Sauron and his evil army? Well, the good guys lost. It’s 1,000 years later and the evil dark lord is running the show. Now a team of magic wielding (illegal) misfits is planning an ocean’s 11 style heist to get filth rich and topple the evil empire at the same time!
Again, fantastic series. I was hooked just a few dozen pages in. The Magic also has a crazy interesting mechanic/rule set that makes it more of a strategy issue in some ways.
They've got more than a few roots in fantasy gaming, which in turn does owe something to Tolkien, but they're unquestionably high fantasy, and they certainly struck me a very diffent from Tolkien.
The novel owes absolutely nothing to Tolkien; it's entirely its own thing, subverting generic fantasy tropes left and right, while providing a clever variation on the classic hero's journey. And the same time it has this magnificent aura of otherwordliness, like a mythological narrative written thousands of years into the future (which it purports to be). It's an absolute masterpiece.
Wolfe really made a career out of subverting fantasy tropes. His Latro series [2] (Soldier of the Mist, etc.) is set in Ancient Greece, and features an amnesiac mercenary whose memory resets every day. The Wizard Knight is another good one; essentially a riff on Tolkienesque Norse mythology and Medieval romances, it features a prepubescent boy who is accidentally transported to a fantasy dimension, and then into the body of an adult knight. It's absurd, but also deliciously weird, just like some of Wolfe's other books (the Long Sun and Short Sun books, etc.).
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B075JL493G
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Soldier-Mist-Latro-Book-1-ebook/dp/B0...
[3] https://www.amazon.com/Wizard-Knight-Gene-Wolfe-ebook/dp/B08...
You know, I did try to read The Princess and the Goblin. I think I got through it. There is a sequel, The Princess and Curdie. I tried, but failed, to read that. They aren't books I would recommend.
I do like the animated film.
Even as I now move into programming, computer science, and industrial programming language research, I'm still grateful for that small amount of art theory I did at university. You don't need to try to be original - rather it's important to seek wide and varied influences, develop your sense of taste, and from that will flow seemingly unique and varied insights.
Adding on to this, the evolution of modern music, particularly sampling and DJing, is a very visceral example of how originality doesn't just appear in what sources you approach, it can also come from the /way/ you approach them.
The bigger risk is that by not knowing your sources, you end up repeating the same work from the same start, and end contributing little
This is pretty much forced on people by the nature of the intellectual property system. If it's ""derivative"" of something written in living memory, you have to pay.
I mean, yes, _something_ in the story is going to be repetitive.
But the unrealistic expectations people have these days is that it that it should be 100% original. don't write stories about humans, write about aliens, but no, alien vs predator covered that.. it is never ending.
One such person had said to me a long time back that "you'll never write something like this". I was like, "you don't know me and never say never. Just because you lack the ability to write something down doesn't mean the rest of the world does, too."
> Speaking of the history of stories and especially of fairy-stories we may say that the Pot of Soup, the Cauldron of Story, has always been boiling, and to it have continually been added new bits, dainty and undainty.
> For this reason, to take a casual example, the fact that a story resembling the one known as The Goosegirl (Die Gänsemagd in Grimm) is told in the thirteenth century of Bertha Broadfoot, mother of Charlemagne, really proves nothing either way: neither that the story was (in the thirteenth century) descending from Olympus or Asgard by way of an already legendary king of old, on its way to become a Hausmärchen; nor that it was on its way up. The story is found to be widespread, unattached to the mother of Charlemagne or to any historical character.
[...]
> The historian would be likely to say that [...] “the Goosegirl Märchen became attached to Bertha.” [But] I think it would be nearer the truth to say that the Archbishop became attached to the banana skin, or that Bertha was turned into the Goosegirl. Better still: I would say that Charlemagne's mother and the Archbishop were put into the Pot, in fact got into the Soup. They were just new bits added to the stock. A considerable honour, for in that soup were many things older, more potent, more beautiful, comic, or terrible than they were in themselves (considered simply as figures of history).
- from Tolien's essay/credo "On Fairy Stories" ( https://coolcalvary.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/on-fairy-sto... )
On a more serious note, I would suggest that Tolkien with his unabashed traditionalism was actually a major figure in the 20th c. postmodernist tradition. The "Cauldron of Story" is not very far removed from "Death of the Author" or "Primacy of Language". Tolkien was just peculiar in his choice of source material. He also managed to make his texts not look like romanticised folkloristic pseudomedieval fare of the early fantasy writers by adopting the technique of realist writers of the 19th century.
on edit: obviously I ask because I find him miles better than some of the better known ones.
― Paolo Coelho
Hmm, I doubt it. The Hobbit is fun, but many adults returning to LOTR think "gosh, this is long, dull and badly written". Here's an example, which is also a more interesting review than the unherd one:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n22/jenny-turner/reasons...
But Tolkien is uncannily like Shakespeare in that it appeals both to people who come looking for Dungeons and Dragons, and also to academic literary scholars. There are academic conferences, and one literature professor has been doing a close reading of Lord of the Rings as a podcast for five years... and has only made it to the Council of Elrond. (https://mythgard.org/lotro/exlotr/)
For that matter, many people find Shakespeare long, dull, and badly written. I think Tolkien has a chance of being remembered as long as Shakespeare, and revisited in every generation the same way. We've already come a long way from the hippies seeing psychedelia in The Hobbit (which annoyed Tolkien no end). I don't believe Tolkien is quite so flexible as Shakespeare, but his work was consciously written to harken to very long traditions of English literature (going back to Anglo Saxon), and that could give it durability.
That is, by the way, an excellent and insightful review. Thanks.
For example, Leonard Nimoy sung a ballad about it in 1967, with a music video full of dancing hippies. It's a lot of fun! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BC35cQKHwzg
And this was true even before it had the movies to drive marketing. My mom picked them up at a yard sale when I was nine or so, and without even knowing they were famous, I devoured them and then bought every other Tolkien book I could find. Now I can’t imagine how I made it through them at that age, but something was captivating.
I couldn’t, by the way, make it though any of the other books, so my appetite for long and poorly written books only went so far.
I did the same rewatching all the Star Treks, Stargates, and other '90s sci-fi TV several times. Now it's kind of...dull. It's all too familiar. Now I'm more impressed with newer scifi that tries to evolve the genre without being too different. Like: The Expanse, Farscape, Dark Matter, Another Life.
Isn't all "good" literature meant to be "long dull and badly written[to the untrained eye]"? The more I think about what you said, the more I realize that the image of "nobel winning" literature that I have in my mind is by definition long, boring, impossibly allegorical and it must feel like you have to be superhuman to read it and understand it. Equally, in my mind anything that's easy and pleasant to read must be trash(because anything I have ever read that was enjoyable was dismissed later as easy-reading garbage). My only experience with "great works of literature" is of that by Polish writers since that's where I grew up, anything by Sienkiewicz or Mickiewicz is considered almost sacred, literature with the "big L" as they say, those are big names with international renown, yet their books are the most soul destroying thing I have ever read, it's just so dull. Hell, Władysław Reymont won a nobel prize(!) for his novel "Chłopi"("Peasants") yet I'd rather stab myself with a fork that try reading that again. Same with more modern authors, Umberto Eco is impossible to read unless I'm actively trying to sleep, and he's considered a "good" author.
So my immediate thought after reading Lord of The Rings was....wow, it must be good(because it's so dull to read). It's almost like pavlov's instinct at this point, years of education has trained me to think dull book = great work of art.
Example: photography contests.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcxcGBbLIwk
The cool, pretty, easy to access photos aren't surprising to someone who's seen it all. Anyone with enough money and time can take those photos, just as anyone with enough time and little concern for popularity can sit there and write something that surprises the people who give out writing awards.
Also, to say Tolkien re-arranged things is true as far as it goes, but look at how much he re-arranged: he used his knowledge of several languages to create several other languages; he used his knowledge of several myth systems; he used his own personal experience in war.
I don't intend to tear down the grandparent, but I thought their perspective was surprising and it brought up the philosophical meaning of newness and what constitutes creation for me.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-29787528 [2] https://www.malvernbeacon.com/home/gas-lamps-cs-lewis-and-jr... [3] https://www.malvernbeacon.com/home/elgar-and-the-malvern-hil... [4] https://www.newstatesman.com/books/2008/06/real-brideshead-m...
Maybe this is down to a difference in time as well. Forster, writing before the Great War, could believe in the power of recognizing the connectedness of people to one another, and Tolkein perhaps could not.
As for any inner meaning or 'message', it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical.... Other arrangements could be devised according to the tastes or views of those who like allegory or topical reference. But I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.
> a land of enchantment and possibility and freedom, with a powerful and complex mythology that would bear comparison with those of any other country.
No, they wouldn't bare comparison with just any other country. Tolkien was writing about his own country, which was England. The English countryside and culture is unique. The Shire, its jokes, its traditions, its lore, is just so obviously an adaption of the early 20th century English-countryside. Sure, there are some vague similarities between other Western countries, but it is so unmistakably English, that trying to make a feel-good statement like this at the end seems horribly forced.
Both because he was in it and because it was the first industrialised war. Mordor makes one think of trenches and devilish factories.
Tolkien hates you now!
But seriously, he was open about how WWI influenced his writing. I think his rant against allegories is more about direct allegorical reading like "Mordor is supposed to symbolize WWI trenches etc."
A few examples can be seen when characters walking for days start walking by the grass at the borders of the path, or to describe fields without cattle in wartime.
He wrote that he did: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/135952/did-tolkien...
Tolkien is rejecting allegorical reading like "the ring symbolize the coronavirus, Saruman represent Trump" etc.
The article is not about allegory though but about the intentions and influences of Tolkien. Tolkien was open about his influences and at times they are pretty blatant, like directly taking the names of dwarwes from the Edda. Also the whole mythology is directly based on christian mythology, but he didn't consider that allegory but more like a retelling.
Brb, gonna make a YouTube-video with a million views.
That sounds like a pretty big stretch to me, could you elaborate? I agree there are most certainly elements from Christianity in it, but claiming the entire thing is based directly on it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, nor does that seem to be how Tolkien viewed it, at least as far as I can tell. For example, in one particular quote in the preface of the Silmarillion (as part of a letter Tolkien wrote to Milton Waldman), Tolkien says
"In the cosmogony there is a fall: a fall of Angels we should say. Though quite different in form, of course, to that of Christian myth. These tales are 'new', they are not directly derived from other myths and legends, but they must inevitably contain a large measure of ancient wide-spread motives or elements...There cannot be any 'story' without a fall - all stories are ultimately about the fall - at least not for human minds as we know them and have them."
I suspect the tendency to lump Tolkien's works together with Christianity may be more due to both his own association with Christianity as well as the general cultural knowledge of Christianity, whereas other myths he may be deriving from are not as widely known.
I actually think this is key to his success: He takes a lot of cool stuff from pagan mythologies and legends, but he frames it in a simplified "good versus evil" dualism which is easier to understand for modern readers with this background.
But what he didn't like were crude 'Saruman represents Judas' type comparisons, not least because he'd criticised his friend CS Lewis for being as explicit as to incorporate Jesus as a talking Lion who is resurrected into his novels and said he found their symbolism heavy handed [it's interesting Lewis himself rejected the idea of his books as allegory, but not the idea that Aslan was supposed to be that world's Jesus or that respective books in the series were supposed to have Creation/Crucifixion/Antichrist themes. Perhaps they both viewed the term allegory as an accusation the scope of their work was too narrow]
LOTR is Christian inasmuch as it has very explicit concepts of good and evil and temptation, but it's also a book involving more explicit anti-industrialization messaging and Tom Bombadil.
Authors don't always know what their work is about, especially as they're writing it.
If I understand the quote correctly, he is rejecting the form of allegory where the reader is supposed to "get it" and use the allegory to "decode the message". But Tolkien wasn't trying to say anything about the Jewish people through the vehicle of Dwarwes, he was just drawing on some inspiration.
I agree you can't just read Middle Earth as "alternate Europe" (and especially not the War of the Ring as a WW2 allegory) and a lot of people unfortunately do. But if Tolkien had nothing to say, he would not have written anything; and having written something, he cannot help but say something.
I curious what you think he was trying to say with this?
> Or even by the simple mixing of the unquestioned Norse "supreme contribution to Europe" with Jewish mythology, he wasn't hinting that, maybe, also, the Jewish people had contributed in the same way?
Jewish mythology was by far more well known than Norse, through the Old Testament and its influence on Christianity. So I don't see why Tolkien would want to make that a point of that.