/lit/ - Literature

>>19695976
How about the sense of melancholy, the sense of despair?

The Lord of the Rings is a magical world whose magic is a fraction of what it used to be, and even that magic is going away from the world for good. The elves are leaving. The dwarves are a shadow of their old glory. Even the evil things, like the balrog or the Nazgul, are mere echoes of their power and terror in times of yore. Men have degraded so much that there are scarcely any Numenoreans in Gondor. The Ents are slowly dying away to nothing, and the forests are vanishing. What magic there is, in places like Rivendell or Lothlorien, is isolated and small, and even there, it's going to go away forever. Destroying the Ring will ENSURE that it goes away forever, because with the destruction of the One Ring the power of the Three Rings will be broken, and their ability to preserve and maintain the elves in Middle Earth will be gone.

Yet you never get this sense of melancholy, of loss, in modern fantasy. Modern fantasy is so frequently set in a vibrant, thriving fantasy world, where the elves and the dwarves and the halflings and everybody else are getting on just fine. But that melancholy, that despair, is what gives LOTR a lot of its power. The sense of loss, of passing away, hangs over the books. But it also gives them an innate goodness, because so many of the good characters are willing to accept that loss, to endure that passing away, if it means the chance to rid the world of Sauron. There's a heroism and a nobility to it. Modern fantasy doesn't really have that at all. It's just kind of a meaningless power trip and lore dump.