I have read amazing books with boring stories. I have read amazing stories with poor writing. Both are good for very different reasons.
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.
They're Tolkien ripoffs only in the same sense that Tolkien is a rip off of early fantasy writers such as Dunsany and George MacDonald. He was undoubtedly a huge influence on modern epic fantasy, but he himself was working from a tradition that already existed while he was writing.
I think the article somewhat belies some of the assumptions underpinning your comment. It's pretty clear that Tolkien was not being terribly _original_ in creating his universe; his style was quite directly a pastiche of historical styles nearly the whole way through, and all the things he included there are pretty direct adaptations of the Northern cultures and folktales he liked so much. Beowulf and the Anglo Saxons, Germanic folklore and the Germanic tribes, et cetera.
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.
It is important to distinguish between inspiration and ripoff.
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.'
This is bad writing because of its use of cliches ('green-fingered' larches, for goodness sake); because of the way it lists facts ('birds were singing') with out really building up a picture, and because of its ham-fisted archaisms. It's one thing to use Latinate reversals when you describing a firey demon on a bridge ('a red sword leaped flaming'); but merely irritating to do so when you are describing the pretty countryside. And what the heck is 'dryad loveliness', anyway?
"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.
That quote is a misquote; the prose felt 'off' to me, and yep, grepping for 'dryad' brings up:
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.]
So, after complaining, what do I like about this passage? The hobbits have come through a long journey of increasing trauma and lately are skirting Hell, looking for a way in. They find unexpected beauty in Ithilien, part of a pattern through the whole story of havens after dangers. Here's the full paragraph:
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.
It does get worked up about 'pretty countryside': that last sentence practically wants to go in a poem. (The GARden of GONdor now DESolate... still a dishevelleddryadloveliness.) The 'poetry' caps the paragraph where it fits in the rhythm of the telling. I didn't notice this artifice while reading the book, except insofar as it marked it into memory to bring the scene back from "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.
Line after line of near-perfect iambic pentameter. I don't know if Tolkien consciously hid a Miltonic line in his prose there -- I sort of doubt it -- but I am confident it was more than coincidence that put this longest iambic passage my program found at this moment of the story. Or that it's got more than its share of alliteration.
(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.
And lets compare things like this with some of the other "greats" of literature. Namely, Jules Verne and 20k Leagues Under the Sea. Pages upon pages are used in almost literal fact-listing of the surrounding area, without anywhere near the prose of Tolkien. A large amount of the book reads like a biologists travel journal. I quite enjoy Verne's works, but holy cow can they be dry at times.
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.
Furthermore, in many of the literary traditions Tolkien was building on, formulaic phrases are just the way it’s done. For a well-known example in epic literature, take Homer: the Iliad and the Odyssey are full of repeated wordings which, if you’re being uncharitable, you could call clichés or dead metaphors. It’s simply not the level you look at to appreciate that particular genre, any more than you would look for grand allegories in P. G. Wodehouse.
Anybody complaining that the Iliad and the Odyssey are full of clichés is forgetting that they were written several thousand years ago. The clichés where stolen from Homer, not the other way around!
Sure, but even internally. Like a lot of long oral literature in verse, it has a smallish set of colorful epithets for often-mentioned things. For example, where the rhythm requires it, Ulysses might be called πολύτροπος, resourceful; where there’s less room in the hexameter, he might be δῖος, glorious – over and over and over again.
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.)
In studies of Balkan epic poetry and Irish oral tradition, these are sometimes called stereotypes. (Not to be confused with the modern PC term.) One function is as a sort of compression/mnemonic. Keep in mind that these orations could go on for four entire evenings. Stereotypes let longer passages fit into fewer mental entities.
One function is as a sort of compression/mnemonic.
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.
A few Irish tunes have a somewhat self-similar structure. There are two parts, which are a call/response to each other, and each of the two parts themselves have a call/response structure. Sometimes it goes another level, but then we start getting down to the granular limit of a distinct melodic idea.
I also wonder why the original author says "green-fingered larches" is a cliche? "birds were singing" is a cliche, but the rest of it is reasonably fresh prose.
I found the critique misleading. It doesn't make sense to disparage Tolkien's Middle Earth writing without taking his background into account. He was a scholar of Anglo-Saxon legends and literature written in Old Saxon, Old Norse, and Old English. He was also a linguist who worked on the Oxford English Dictionary for two years. He was an expert on Beowulf; one of his most celebrated scholarly works is "Beowulf and the Monster Critics".
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 found the critique misleading. It doesn't make sense to disparage Tolkien's Middle Earth writing without taking his background into account. He was a scholar of Anglo-Saxon legends and literature written in Old Saxon, Old Norse, and Old English.
The author of this critique, more than once, refers to specific Tolkien passages and mentions which specific historical styles or texts these are pastiche of. Why do you think he doesn't understand Tolkien's field of study?
Because he repeatedly used the words "bad writing" without providing any support for the assertion. He just provided sample texts — sample texts which read to me like translations of Old Saxon and Old Norse. This implied to me that he was saying that Anglo-Saxon texts are inherently "bad writing."
You have to read it in context. It was written around the time of World War 1, when movies were still in their infancy and radio was limited to maritime and military use. Evocative descriptive language was the norm, because people were not used to thinking visually and needed all that verbal detail to fill the imagination.
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.
Oh, good catch. It was Tolkien who served in WW1, not his son. Sorry about that. And I'm not sure its right to emphasise the contemporary literature from his youth as I did, considering how much he was influenced by epic medieval poetry. I should know better, I did school projects on him.
The author of the article is a huge douchebag when he says things like "we can see why people who read real books hate Tolkien like a phobia". Are you kidding me? Get off your ivory tower. Criticism of Tolkien or anyone else is justified, but phrases like that make my blood boil. Who decides what makes a real book?
It's pretty simple, actually. Literary fiction makes for "real books," genre fiction does not. The terminology is unnecessarily loaded, IMO. Both styles have their followings, both can be highly enjoyable, and both have established and respected awards.
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.
Tolkien was not a 'perfectionist', inventing history because Middle-earth demanded it. Inventing history was a little game, a 'secret vice'; Middle-earth grew out of the game. And it is clear that he did not take the game half as seriously as some of his fans.
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 the author is right that the main pleasure of Tolkien is to revel in the vast world he created, both strange and yet archetypally familar. Where I disagree is that this is necessarily a bad thing.
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.
The article calls Le Guin a good writer and Tolkien a bad one. Le Guin herself writes:
"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."
The author quoted a Tolkien sentence about 'sombre trees like dark clouds on the hillside' as evidence of bad writing... but personally I thought that was a brilliant phrase.
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.
The article talks about how slow the book is. He fails to realize that Tolkien is writing about a very deep game of strategy. It's like watching grandmasters play chess. Sometimes there is a flurry of captured pieces, but a lot of it is maneuvering, which may seem boring to those who don't understand it.
> In order to get there, we have had to follow, in remorseless day by day detail the Hobbits' walking holiday from the Shire to Rivendell, the highlight of which is the monumentally irritating Tom Bombadil, who communicates entirely in jingles
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.
Perhaps lost in this discussion is the fact that for all practical purposes, Tolkien invented the modern fantasy fiction genre as we know it. Elves, trolls, dwarfs, orcs, wizards, halflings, and all that. He is also the predecessor to modern fantasy gaming, ala EQ and WoW.
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.
"But it also turns the book into a sort of puzzle, a complicated thread of back and forward reference which the dedicated enthusiast can attempt to solve. ... If you do follow all the references then, of course, it all hangs together beautifully."
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!
Meanderings of fantasy's writers make me nauseous. Tolkien's no exception. What is good writing is an extremely subjective topic. Suppose his work is some sort of accomplishment... though I never understood people's facination with it.
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.
The celebration of Tolkien has much to do with the way he summarized the rich traditional mythology of the English language and then wove a beautiful story into that fabric.
Agreed, but again this has to be taken into context, The Hobbit was a children's story, and LotR was originally its follow-up that developed into its own.
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.
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.