/lit/ - Literature

Honestly, LotR is actually kind of bleak for me. Were it not for the One Ring's destruction, Sauron would definitely have won, and, from Tolkien's perspective, destructive industrialism and technicism would have prevailed over the free, organic and nature-respecting society he loved so much. LotR says: on its own, traditional society simply cannot resist the imposition of progress.

But in the real world there is no such thing as an One Ring that can stop the encroachment of technology and industry upon nature and the societies that nature fosters. And if in LotR the only thing that stops this force is the existence of the One Ring that binds them onto its doom, what does it mean for a world where "Sauron" has basically no such weakness?

>[Tolkien] could laugh at anybody, but most of all himself, and his complete lack of any sense of dignity could and often did make him behave like a riotous schoolboy.

>At a New Year's Eve party in the nineteen-thirties he would don an Icelandic sheepskin hearthrug and paint his face white to impersonate a polar bear, or he would dress up as an Anglo-Saxon warrior complete with axe and chase an astonished neighbour down the road.

>Later in life he delighted to offer inattentive shopkeepers his false teeth among a handful of change. 'I have,' he once wrote, 'a very simple sense of humour, which even my appreciative critics find tiresome.

>>19477871
Probably. I think fantasy writers often lose themselves in the smell of their own farts, their books get so fucking long because of all the time they spend in worldbuilding. They think, well, Tolkien wrote a load of shit just to have a fully fleshed world, I'm just doing the same, but really, they aren't.

Take LOTR. LOTR (the trilogy alone) has relatively little exposition into it, besides the appendices. They're massive bricks, but what Tolkien dwells into is the real world stuff that he's passionate about - forests, nature, mountains, small life, the awe caused by the ancient. Those are pretty universal things, it's easy to relate to them even if they happen to be called Fangorn or whatever, because what draws Tolkien's attention to it is not the fantastical but that which also exists in our world.

The average fantasy writer, though, will spend pages upon pages describing the whole lineage of King Fantasyname the Fourteenth and the specifics of the War of the Great Autism against the Dark Specters - things that no one gives a shit about. It's pure wank. Tolkien put some things of this into LOTR, but mostly relegated it to the appendices. A book where those things take center stage is, frankly, completely uninteresting; it's like listening to some kid drone on for hours about his invented world, nothing's relatable.