/lit/ - Literature

Fuck the anglos

Is the Tolkien's world the the sublimation of the traditional Anglo culture as a collective unconscious that he beard to his literature?

>>16016709
Yeah Tolkien is unironically a massive Chad. Tolkien served in World War I. Tolkien was at the Battle of the Somme, he saw death on a massive, horrifying scale. And then he came home and wrote The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings.

>>15912244
>What the fuck, no. Go to the lit departement of any top university, no one likes him. He is only considered "literary" by shallow consumerists who couldn't perceive literary depth if it was staring them right in the face.

I have met a few professors in my time that took Tolkien very seriously. He's more respected than you think.

Does anyone else think that the fact that so many modern fantasy authors are hardcore atheists is part of the problem with modern fantasy?

I feel like if you want to properly write fantastical literature, with magic and strangeness and powerful spiritual forces, you need to be somewhat spiritual yourself. Tolkien, of course, was a devout Catholic and had a really powerful love of the Divine. But I feel like just SOME spiritual sense, ANY spiritual sense, is what you need to write really good fantasy, because you need to be able to properly conceptualize something above and beyond the material. That's what makes for really good magic. Ursula K. LeGuin was deeply interested in Taoism and Buddhism, and Gene Wolfe was a Catholic convert, and both of them wrote really good fantasy, too.

Whereas it seems like so many modern fantasy writers are just dull materialists with no transcendent idea of reality, and their fantasy suffers as result. They don't have a grasp of the mysticism that would necessarily suffuse any world where magic was real, where gods and fairies and spirits and other such things are real.

>>15008267
Tolkien's friendship with Lewis was precisely why he criticized him. Tolkien knew Lewis could do better and was disappointed when he failed to live up to his own lofty potential.

Lewis did the same thing to Tolkien. There's a particular chapter in The Lord of the Rings that Lewis kept reviewing and sending back to Tolkien, telling him that he could do better. And Tolkien kept improving and improving it. That chapter is "The Voice of Saruman," one of the high points of all of LOTR.

Does Tolkien count as a decelerationist?