/lit/ - Literature

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>>22836143
it sounds so typical cause it started it all

>Gay unpractical societies and cultures and magical powers that don’t make any sense and don’t have any explanation.
It's so depressing being reminded this is the level of retard you share a board with.

Tolkien was genuinely a genius. The Hobbit and LOTR are masterpieces that will most likely never be surpassed. So many fantasy authors have tried and failed to create something better. It's got everything; adventure, magic, songs, poetry, a beautiful romance, invented languages, deep lore, really awesome and inspiring characters that are virtuous. Tolkien was in the right place at the right time. He lived through WW2, he learned, and then taught at Oxford. He was surrounded by men like himself, highly intelligent and brave. It all adds up to the perfect recipe to write the most incredible fantasy of all time. I'm currently on my 3rd read of LOTR, and I've been pondering the last few days about Tom Bombadil. What a legendary character. Just a dude chilling in a remote old forest spending his days, singing, wandering around the woods and pounding his sexy fairy wife; what a absolute alpha. Disliking Tolkien and his works is one of the easiest indicators that someone is incapable of deep, critical thought.

>>22836270
>Disliking Tolkien and his works is one of the easiest indicators that someone is incapable of deep, critical thought.

>>22836143
Agreed, I never understood the hype.

It's honestly pretty mediocre compared to the classics of the 19th century or the masterpieces that came out throughout the centuries before.
It's only rated so highly because of those movies. The book was already beginning to become obscure in the literary world by the 90s (except the fantasy ilk, those retards), until those movies came out. Now it's in the public's consciousness forever, and I have to hear about a mediocre story forever now.

Cinema killed literature.

>>22836143
>gay creatures like elves and hairy meek hobbits. Gay unpractical societies and cultures and magical powers that don’t make any sense and don’t have any explanation. I mean it’s just a fairy tale for 6 years old.
Sir, it's a christian book.

>>22836284
That's not true and you know it.

>>22836251
Consider yourself basedjakked plebbitor

>>22836534
Why not? Nobody managed to give an explanation any different from your typical Reddit talking point yet.

Authors who inspire a movement are usually misunderstood, especially by those they have inspired, and Tolkien is no exception, but one of the biggest misconceptions about Tolkien is the idea that he is somehow an 'innovator of fantasy'. He did add a number of techniques to the repertoire of epic fantasy writers, and these have been dutifully followed by his many imitators, but for the most part, these techniques are little more than bad habits.

Many have called Tolkien by such epithets as 'The Father of Fantasy', but anyone who makes this claim simply does not know of the depth and history of the fantasy genre. For those who are familiar with the great and influential fantastical authors, from Ovid and Ariosto to Eddison and Dunsany to R.E. Howard and Fritz Leiber, it is clear that, long before Tolkien, fantasy was already a complex, well-established, and even a respected literary genre.

Eddison's work contains an invented world, a carefully-constructed (and well-researched) archaic language, a powerful and unearthly queen, and a central character who is conflicted and lost between the forces of nobility and darkness. Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword , which came out the same year as The Fellowship of the Ring, has distant, haughty elves, deep-delving dwarves, a broken sword which must be reforged, an epic war between the armies of light and darkness, another central character trapped between those extremes, and an interweaving of Christian and Pagan worldviews.

So, if these aspects are not unique to Tolkien, then what does set him apart? Though Dunsany, Eddison, and Anderson all present worlds where light and dark come into conflict, they present these conflicts with a subtle and often ironic touch, recognizing that morality is a dangerous thing to present in absolutes. Tolkien (or C.S. Lewis), on the other hand, has no problem in depicting evil as evil, good as good, and the only place they meet is in the temptation of an honest heart, as in Gollum's case--and even then, he is not like Eddison's Lord Gro or Anderson's Scafloc, characters who live under an alternative view of the world, but instead fluctuates between the highs and lows of Tolkien's dualistic morality.

(1/4)

>>22836634
is a dangerous message to make evil an external, irrational thing, to define it as 'the unknown that opposes us', because it invites the reader to overlay their own morality upon the world, which is precisely what most modern fantasy authors tend to do, following Tolkien's example. Whether it's Goodkind's Libertarianism or John Norman's sex slave fetish, its very easy to simply create a magical allegory to make one side 'right' and the other side 'wrong', and you never have to develop a dramatic narrative that actually explores the soundness of those ideas. Make the good guys dress in bright robes or silvery maile and the bad guys in black, spiky armor, and a lot of people will never notice that all the 'good guys' are White, upper class men, while all the 'bad guys' are 'brutish foreigners', and that both sides are killing each other and trying to rule their little corner of the world.

In Tolkien's case, his moral view was a very specific evocation of the ideal of 'Merrie England', which is an attempt by certain stodgy old Tories (like Tolkien) to rewrite history so that the nobility were all good and righteous leaders, the farmers were all happy in their 'proper place' (working a simple patch of dirt), while both industrialized cultures and the 'primitives' who resided to the South and East were 'the enemy' bent on despoiling the 'natural beauty of England' (despite the fact that the isles had been flattened, deforested, and partitioned a thousand years before).

Though Tom Bombadil remains as a strangely incoherent reminder of the moral and social complexity of the fantasy tradition upon which Tolkien draws, he did his best to scrub the rest clean, spending years of his life trying to fit Catholic philosophy more wholly into his Pagan adventure realm. But then, that's often how we think of Tolkien: bent over his desk, spending long hours researching, note-taking, compiling, and playing with language. Even those who admit that Tolkien demonstrates certain racist, sexist, and classicist leanings (as, indeed, do many great authors) still praise the complexity of his 'world building'.

And any student of the great Epics, like the Norse Eddas, the Bible, or the Shahnameh can see what Tolkien is trying to achieve with his worldbuilding: those books presented grand stories, but were also about depicting a vast world of philosophy, history, myth, geography, morality and culture. They were encyclopedic texts, intended to instruct their people on everything important in life, and they are extraordinarily valuable to students of anthropology and history, because even the smallest detail can reveal something about the world which the book describes.

(2/4)

>>22836638
So, Tolkien fills his books with troop movements, dull songs, lines of lineage, and references to his own made-up history, mythology, and language. He has numerous briefly-mentioned side characters and events because organic texts like the epics, which were formed slowly, over time and compiled from many sources often contained such digressions. He creates characters who have similar names--which is normally a stupid thing to do, as an author, because it is so confusing--but he’s trying to represent a hereditary tradition of prefixes and suffixes and shared names, which many great families of history had. So Tolkien certainly had a purpose in what he did, but was it a purpose that served the story he was trying to tell?

Simply copying the form of reality is not what makes good art. Art is meaningful--it is directed. It is not just a list of details--everything within is carefully chosen by the author to make up a good story. The addition of detail is not the same as adding depth, especially since Tolkien’s world is not based on some outside system--it is whatever he says it is. It’s all arbitrary, which is why the only thing that grants a character, scene, or detail purpose is the meaning behind it. Without that meaning, then what Tolkien is doing is just a very elaborate thought exercise. Now, it’s certainly true that many people have been fascinated with studying it, but that’s equally true of many thought exercises, such as the rules and background of the Pokemon card game, or crossword puzzles.

Ostensibly, Scrabble supposedly is a game for people who love words--and yet, top Scrabble players sit an memorize lists of words whose meaning they will never learn. Likewise, many literary fandom games become little more than word searches: find this reference, connect that name to this character--but which have no meaning or purpose outside of that. The point of literary criticism is always to lead us back to human thought and ideas, to looking at how we think and express ourselves. If a detail in a work cannot lead us back to ourselves, then it is no more than an arbitrary piece of chaff.

The popularity of Tolkien’s work made it acceptable for other authors to do the same thing, to the point that whenever I hear a book lauded for the ‘depth of its world building’, I expect to find a mess of obsessive detailing, of piling on so many inconsequential facts and figures that the characters and stories get buried under the scree, as if the author secretly hopes that by spending most of the chapter describing the hero’s cuirass, we'll forget that he’s a bland archetype who only succeeds through happy coincidence and deus ex machina against an enemy with no internal structure or motivation.

(3/4)

>>22836641
When Quiller-Couch said authors should ‘murder their darlings’, this is what he meant: just because you have hobbies and opinions does not mean you should fill your novel with them. Anything which does not materially contribute to the story, characters, and artistry of a work can safely be left out. Tolkien's embarrassment of detail also produced a huge inflation in the acceptable length of fantasy books, leading to the meandering, unending series that fill bookstore shelves today.

Now, there are several notable critics who have lamented the unfortunate effect that Tolkien’s work has had on the genre, such as in Moorcock’s Epic Pooh and Mieville’s diatribe about every modern fantasy author being forced to come to terms with the old don's influence. I agree with their deconstructions, but for me, Tolkien isn’t some special author, some ‘fantasy granddad’ looming over all. He’s just a bump in the road, one author amongst many in a genre that stretches back thousands of years into our very ideas of myth and identity, and not one of the more interesting ones

His ideas weren’t unique, and while his approach may have been unusual, it was only because he spent a lifetime obsessively trying to make something artificial seem more natural, despite the fact that the point of fantasy (and fiction in general) is to explore the artificial, the human side of the equation, to look at the world through the biased lens of our eye and to represent some odd facet of the human condition. Unfortunately, Tolkien’s characters, structure, and morality are all too flat to suggest much, no matter how many faux-organic details he surrounds them with.

(4/4)

>>22836625
LOTR had multiple adaptations by then and several references in classic rock (and the later metal scene), all before the 2000s movies. Tolkien was far from obscure or irrelevant. The movies were an inevitability, not a revival of an obscure fantasy series.

The guy inspired everything. From world of Warcraft to Dungeons and dragons, magic the gathering, the endless amounts of fantasy series that came after hell Link from Zelda wearing green and brown like Legolas. All fantasy all vidya when the the fellowship sets out the first thing I thought is they sound like a party in an rpg game you have a wizard a dwarf an archer etc and Tolkien goes so far as to go down the “party” and describe them as such and my brain worked that way because his works influenced game designs and tropes. If you don’t get why it’s so influential and a big deal that’s a you having a small mind problem. To be honest I don’t even like it all that much I thought most of the songs and poems were pretty annoying cringe cheesy dumb. But I can respect and appreciate his work for what it is.

>>22836643
Amazingly high quality and in-depth post, thanks anon

>>22836643
There’s zero reason to delve that deep analyze or even think that hard about it it’s nothing more than entertaining fiction

>>22836143
you're brown

>>22836143
>typical fantasy
Maybe it's because modern fantasy is highly based on LOTR?

>>22836284
The book is one of the most successful sellers in the last century, why do you faggots give the most retarded criticisms? Are you angry that your favourite book is not as popular? I thought this board was filled with devoted christcucks who would at least appreciate the books for their christian symbolism. But no, you get ignorant retards who can't tell apart the purpose of a fictional novel to that of mythological fiction. Le books have to be le traditional fiction to be good in my eyes. And this is coming from a board that thinks the bible is the best book today, but when tolkien attempts to make mythological fiction based on europe, it automatically becomes unreadable.

>>22836284
>compared to the classics of the 19th century
You mean the ballroom circlejerk garbage

>>22836143
you need to understand context. and also who Tolkien was is a big deal, a great philologist of English. Basically you're favourite english prof's father

>>22836638
Stopped reading when he started attacking Tolkien for being supposedly racist. WHO FUCKING CARES, tall about the book not the author scat fetish or loli fetish or whatever the fuck

>>22836143
>made up language
>made up lineages
>made up hereditary names
I hope this is not why lotr world building is praised Jesus Christ who fucking cares about this meaningless nerd shit

>>22836143
Don't read it as a run of the mill fantasy story. Read it as an elaborate cope over trauma from WWI, which is what it is.

>>22836757
All these influence seem flackery and surface level and even if they were taken away they would not change the quality of any of these products or games, on the contrary it would push them to be more diversified and distinct from each other lel.

>>22837371
So what nigger the same could be said about 50 shades darker

>>22837666
What have you influenced anon?

>>22836284
>I have to hear about a mediocre story forever now.
Thank you for acknowledging that you don't know what the LOTR is.

>>22836143
This was the first book I ever read which didn't have pictures, I was 9 or 10 I think, and it was the most intense literary or artistic experience of my life. I would dream about the story every night, read it constantly, and I was actually sad when it was over. So a lot of my reaction is contextual, and I can't be 100% objective. But I reread it several times, including to my own kids, and it's just a really good story really well told, with interesting and suggestive digressions that make everything seem much bigger and more alive. I can understand finding hobbits and magic rings silly, which it is, and not wanting songs in fake languages on every other page (I skip them), but it's a truly great work taken on its terms.

Inspiring the fantasy genre is nearly unforgivable, however.

>>22836143
>predictable good ending
Is it though?
Did you only watch the movies so you think the story ends with Aragorn crowned and you skip to Frodo leaving?

>>22838262

>>22836244
This, fantasy is basically all based on lotr

>>22837646
When did he call Tolkien racist?

>>22836244
/thread
OP is a retard

>>22838268
>This, fantasy is basically all based on lotr
Narnia isn't, and there are a few other examples. You could also read myths and legends as a similar "fantasy" genre - Tolkien would have considered them on the same level, sub-creations - and these are what LotR is based on, not the other way around.

But yes, the entire landfill fantasy genre, the HBO dragon show, video games, ren faire nerd culture, is all a 50th generation copy of Tolkien, all awful and lacking SOVL.

>>22836143
>the protagonist forms a party
but that's precisely the opposite of what happens, and that is the entire point of the series.

>>22838170
You mom anus

>>22838772
>Narnia
the only book i genuinely liked as a kid

>>22836143
>I hear people claiming it’s a masterpiece. I don’t get it.
Your whole take reeks of present-day arrogance and rebellion. I'm willing to bet anything if everyone told you the book was trash before you read it you'd be in here claiming it was the best thing you've ever read. You are literally too dumb to generate your own genuine assessment based on the content alone so you weigh it against third parties. Sad.

>>22836270
>Will likely never be surpassed
I absolutely give credit for Tolkien establishing the fantasy genre as we know it today, but it is very much a bland example of the genre by modern standards. Deserves all the praise it gets for what it did and for being a wonderful example of world building, but it is a god damn slog of a read.

>>22836641

>Simply copying the form of reality is not what makes good art.

I think this is what separates most genre fiction from literature. There are so many fantasy and sci-fi authors that think adding elaborate lore will inherently bring depth to their stories. But nobody gives a shit about how large the family tree is or how technical and complex the “magic system” is. It doesn’t mean anything if that’s the only extent to its depth.

>>22836143
fuck off George

Reading it for the first time at 30 right now and you’re wrong

>>22836270
/thread.

>>22836634
>>22836638
>>22836641
>>22836643
This set off my bullshit chatGPT instincts, not reading lol

>>22836143
I'm still not reading shit of thrones. Try again George

>>22841534
It clearly isn’t AI generated

>>22840700
>Your whole take reeks of present-day arrogance and rebellion. I'm willing to bet anything if everyone told you the book was trash before you read it you'd be in here claiming it was the best thing you've ever read. You are literally too dumb to generate your own genuine assessment based on the content alone so you weigh it against third parties. Sad.

>>22836270
There's almost no character development and bombadil is fucking gay. Tolkien was a genius but that doesn't make his creation perfect. He's been surpassed by other fantasy authors.

>>22836143
HUR DUR WHY DIS THING LIKE OTHER THING THAT WAS INSPIRED BY IT?

>>22836270
Ever read The Worm Ouroboros and The Gormenghast Trilogy. They aren't as good IMO, but both are brilliant.

>>22843919
>He's been surpassed by other fantasy authors.
Who?

>>22844526
Wolfe, Peake, Martin

>>22840769
I don't think it's bland at all, the amount of linguistic variety in LotR makes it very flavorful to read.

>>22844646
you shut that bitch down

been a while since I've seen an OP get BTFO this decisively

>>22838772
The Broken Sword was released the same year as Fellowship of the Ring and almost feels equally foundational despite hardly being known these days

>>22845884
Is it? I read Broken Sword a while ago and didn't think it was anything special, the only thing I felt influenced by it is probably conan. On the contrary with all the big works which recycled LOTR tropes I still think the latter had never really been surpassed.

>>22845893
It's depiction of Trolls is the real origin of the Orks of much popular fiction like Warhammer and Warcraft. Many depictions of elves are much more like it than anything in Tolkein as well.

>>22843919
>There's no character development
Imagine parroting this retarded opinion.

>>22840769
What is considered áthe best in the genre by modern standard?

>>22836143
I've only read the first book in the trilogy. I enjoyed it and found it quite comfy but I agree its fantasy slop. This is one of those bokes where you just read it to your kid and that's it.

>>22836244
spbp

>>22844646
Go back to plebbit nerd

>>22844646
They all have
>Worse prose
>Worse story
>Worse characters

>>22843919
>There's almost no character development

>>22843919
>There's almost no character development
every character in the Fellowship changes in certain ways during their journey

>>22849377
>every character in the Fellowship changes in certain ways during their journey
wow!! you mean like... in any other book in history?! Crazy!

>>22847300
>Go back to plebbit nerd
>t. actual plebbitor

>>22845879
I guess your forgot your meds. half the posts agree with OP

>>22836143
You think it is cliched because it is the piece of media that started the cliches, there's not a single piece of fantasy literature from the past fifty years that isn't derivative of Tolkien, he deserves some respect purely because of the cultural impact.

Tldr, Tolkien is to fantasy what the Roman Empire/catholic church is to western society

>>22849469
>there's no character development dixit atheist/pagan tranny
>gets proven wrong
>over the top passive aggressive atheist/pagan tranny response
Predictable.

>>22836643
Delightfully postmodernist and Marxist, you should share it on r/atheism.

>>22836143
>with a predictable good ending
>meek hobbits
Have you actually read the book or just watched the movies?

>>22847078
Well ackshually it is one book divided in three parts because of publishing issues in the 1950s

>>22849785
Not an effective response to a multi-reply essay

>>22836270
>Tom Bombadil. What a legendary character. Just a dude chilling in a remote old forest spending his days, singing, wandering around the woods and pounding his sexy fairy wife; what a absolute alpha.
Just read it for the first time and this for me is one of the main takeaways from the book although his part is almost entirely independent of the main story and always gets left out from adaptations. Probably at least in part because they can't find an actor to play him
> None has ever caught him yet, for Tom, he is the master:
> His songs are stronger songs, and his feet are faster.

>>22841534
>>22842193
it's copied from a goodreads review

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>>22849377
Only the hobbits and Gandalf change. And Boromir if you consider dying changing.
Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, as well as other characters like Faramir, Eowyn, and Gollum don't change. This is why the films are better.

>>22836143
you are ignorant saaar
tolkien is master superpower saar