debate about fantasy

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Zane Curtis

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VMcNeill said:
I personally think that China had some good points, but his view on fantasy is rather extreme.

I didn't think that was particularly extreme. If you want the extreme version of that argument, try Michael Moorcock's classic essay, Epic Pooh. I don't know about the comments -- my internet connection is not loving panmacmillan.com right at the moment.

I'm pretty much on China's side in this. LOTR isn't a bad book. It has its points. But it is also deeply flawed, and these days it looks rather dated. I'll go through some of what I think are its good and bad points, starting with the good:



  • Tolkien made good use of his rather academic interests and created convincing languages and myths.
  • LOTR is the kind of book that draws you in and keeps you reading. You can lose yourself in it, in spite of its slow pacing and large page count.
  • Tolkien drew on his WW1 experiences in the trenches to create quite a chilling and oppressive mood for the scenes set in The Dead Marshes and Morder.
  • Tolkien created a handful of interesting and memorable characters: Golem, Shelob, the ents, the black riders (as they appear early on in the story).
  • Middle Earth is one of the more successful "world building" exercises -- a world that can stand alone, and still be fairly interesting.
Now onto the bad points...

  • Tolkien was very much the old-fashioned Oxford don -- a Victorian relic displaced into 1950s and 60s. As Michael Moorcock points out, LOTR possesses a cloying, Victorian sentimentality. The hobbits are like children. Many of the scenes featuring them come across as a sort of sentimental yearning for childhood, which is rather at odds with the darker tone and direction of the book as a whole.
  • The opening sequence of LOTR is all hobbits, and all horrible. It's a kind of pastiche of the whimsical, sentimental tone of The Hobbit -- almost an unintentional parody. Presumably, he wrote it like that because, to begin with, he still thought he was writing down to children.
  • Tolkien was also quite staid and priggish. He completely glossed over what could have been one of the strongest sub-plots of LOTR -- Eowyn and Aragorn. Would the story of King Arthur been half as interesting without Lancelot and Guinevere? Tolkien also kept the lid firmly on the fantastic, which really only becomes apparent when you compare LOTR to unrestrained fantasies, like Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time, Mieville's The Scar, or even a book like Gulliver's Travels. From the pages of LOTR, you can almost hear Tolkien saying, "Well, I couldn't possibly delve very deeply into that. There are just some places an Oxford man doesn't go."
  • Tolkien had a serious problem with pacing. And he bought it largely upon himself by doggedly following the hobbits on every step of the journey between Bag End and Mount Doom, and back again. So we get pointless excursions through the old forest and the barrow downs, and sections of narrative that read like a hikers journal ("Struck camp at eight, walked past a few trees, set camp again, boring.") In the meantime, all the exciting stuff happening to Gandalf at Orthanc gets relegated to the huge info dump that is Elrond's council.
  • The ending of LOTR is one huge anti-climax. The menace of Sauron, which has cast a pall across the preceding 900 pages, disappears in a puff of smoke, just like that. Kaput. Gone, without even so much as a saving throw. Then we follow Tolkien on a long sequence where the Hobbits have to kick Saruman out of Bag End -- a sort of anti-climactic caricature of the final confrontation we really wanted to see. Even Saruman's motivation for the whole episode is quite cartoonish.
None of this would matter, only there are all these people who worship the ground Tolkien walks on. When these people sit down to write, they tend to reproduce all of Tolkien's faults without possessing any of his virtues. In a sense, it's not really Tolkien himself that causes the Mieville's and the Moorcock's of this world to go against him. It's more the people who write thinly disguised Tolkien fanfic, and who argue that thinly disguised fanfic is the be-all and end-all of fantasy.

Can you understand why those of us who come to the genre via Spenser, Swift, Lord Dunsany, Peake, Wolfe and other such ambitious and imaginative writers might be a little miffed at that?
 
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I think Mieville's a twit. He's pretentious, and egotistical, and, more often than not, wrong. Take this bit:

Tolkien's cliches - elves 'n' dwarfs 'n' magic rings - have spread like viruses. He wrote that the function of fantasy was 'consolation', thereby making it an article of policy that a fantasy writer should mollycoddle the reader.

He's alluding to a bit from Tolkien's essay "On Fairy Stories" in which Tolkien refers to the consolatio. That's not the same as a "consolation." And it has nothing to do, at all, with mollycoddling anyone. The consolatio is a genre; the most famous example, and one known exceedingly well by Tolkien, is Botheius' Consolatio Philosophiae. The Consolatio, rather than "mollycoddle" one, in essence suggests that misery is a good thing because it reminds us of the harsh nature of life in this world. It's intended as comfort, but it's harsh comfort--the Consolatio, both Boetheius; and the consolatio as a genre comes very very close to saying "suck it up kid; that's life on earth. This is a temporary existence though, so prepare for the next world as you live in this one."

I don't expect Mieville to like Tolkien; that's a matter of personal choice, but he should at least be accurate about Tolkien's own words.
 

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Zane Curtis said:
Can you understand why those of us who come to the genre via Spenser, Swift, Lord Dunsany, Peake, Wolfe and other such ambitious and imaginative writers might be a little miffed at that?


I'm mifffed more at Tolkien's editors; he really could have used a good modern editor to gently suggest some things might be better trimmed, or cut altogether. His editors seemed to have stuck to copy editing, and frequently, rather poor attempts at that.


There's also a certain irony in the fact that Tolkien came to fantasy not only through medieval literature, but through Andrew Lang, and yes, Spenser, Swift, and Dunsany.
 
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zizban

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Tolkien had a plan to write a huge sweeping epic that not only covered the basic plot of defeating Sauron but also the general sweep of the history of Middle Earth, it's cultures, it's peoples. In this regard, LOTR does the job extremely well. It may not appeal to everyone but he did what he set out to do. The defeat of Sauron couldn't have been the climax, that wasn't the end of the history of middle earth of its first three ages, other things had to happen as well.

But I do agree the Scouring of the Shire was a complete waste and should have been cut from the book.
 

Zane Curtis

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Medievalist said:
I don't expect Mieville to like Tolkien; that's a matter of personal choice, but he should at least be accurate about Tolkien's own words.

To be fair, this is not so much Mieville's opinion as Moorcock's, and Mieville is simply paraphrasing it here. The bit that got Mike going was this one: "But the 'consolation' of fairy-tales has another aspect than the imaginative satisfaction of ancient desires. Far more important is the Consolation of the Happy ending."

In short, it's not the word "Consolatio" that Mieville refers to here, but the phrase "the Consolation of a happy ending." He's following Moorcock's original line, which is this:

The little hills and woods of that Surrey of the mind, The Shire, are "safe", but the wild landscapes everywhere beyond the Shire are "dangerous". Experience of life itself is dangerous...

The Lord of the Rings is much more deep-rooted in its infantalism than many of the more obviously juvenile books it influenced. It is Winnie-the-Pooh posing as an epic. If the Shire is a suburban garden, Sauron and his henchmen are that old bourgeois bugaboo, the Mob -- mindless football supporters throwing their beer bottles over the fence -- the worst aspects of modern urban society represented as the whole by a fearful, backward-yearning class for whom "good taste" is synonymous with "restraint"...

There is no happy ending to the romance of Robin Hood, however, whereas Tolkien, going against the grain of his subject matter, forces on on us -- as a matter of policy...

This is where Mieville is getting that word "mollycoddle" from. Tolkien mollycoddles his middle-class audience by appealing to a rather vapid sentimentality.
 
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Zane Curtis said:
To be fair, this is not so much Mieville's opinion as Moorcock's, and Mieville is simply paraphrasing it here. The bit that got Mike going was this one: "But the 'consolation' of fairy-tales has another aspect than the imaginative satisfaction of ancient desires. Far more important is the Consolation of the Happy ending."

Yeah, but Moorcock is paraphrasing "On Fairy Stories." He now knows what a consolatio means, and why Tolkien used it. ;)
 

Zane Curtis

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Medievalist said:

There's also a certain irony in the fact that Tolkien came to fantasy not only through medieval literature, but through Andrew Lang, and yes, Spenser, Swift, and Dunsany.

I wouldn't say irony, I would say pathos. Tolkien was influenced by writers his most myopic fans overlook completely. How many times have you heard people insist that Tolkien invented modern fantasy? Dunsany was there before him. Peake beat him into print by eight years.
 

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I am not a big Tolkien fan--ploughed my way through LOTR in high school and wondered if all the other people reading and rhapsodizing about it were secretly as bored as I was--but I do think Mieville's essay is unfair and overgeneralized. Elves and dwarves and so on have become cliches via the agency of other writers. Blame Terry Brooks, if you have to blame someone--he's really the one who made fantasy a genre, and trigged the wave of Tolkien ripoffs.

The critic Gabe Chouinard has said that we're entering a new period, a renaissance in the creative radicalism of fantasy that hasn't been seen since the New Wave of the sixties and seventies, and in echo of which he has christened the Next Wave.
Apart from the fact that I think it's a stretch to call Gabe Chouinard a critic (most people who claim that title are really just book reviewers and/or essayists), I think this is just another example of speculative fiction's tendency to bifurcate into exclusive little subgenres--in this instance, the New Weird. New Weird gets all the literary cred these days, and people who are writing serious, grown-up fantasy that doesn't fit into that box are not allowed to play.

The idea is that where SF is radical, exploratory and intellectually adventurous, fantasy is badly written, clichéd and obsessed with backwards-looking dreams of the past - feudal daydreams of Good Kings and Fair Maidens.
I do agree with him about this, though, and share his frustration. But again, you can't blame Tolkien.

- Victoria
 

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an interesting opinion.

i would bet a hundred golds that if china had grew up in the 60s-70s his opinion would not be so. the truth is we are all desensitized to tolkien.
we've seen enough and we want more. thats why george rr martin is so popular right now. his writing is up to date with what we are comfortable with..and the man is spitting one raunchy tale. twins in love with each other?..wow!

anyways, writing is evolving and im sure 50 years from now our grandchildren will look back at all our fantasy and sf and say.."i can do better".
 

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I can't get to the responses for some reason, but I think Mieville's essay is spot on except where he talks about Tolkien. I'm certainly no Tolkien worshipper--I finally got through the trilogy just before the movies came out, but it was a hard slog and I didn't enjoy them much--but I'm also willing to concede that Tolkien isn't all that bad. The Hobbit is a great children's book, for one thing.

The reason many people think Tolkien invented the fantasy genre is that his books became so hugely popular that they were the first fantasies many people read (and for some people, the only fantasies--my mother, for instance, has read them many times but despises fantasy as a whole and reads mostly hard SF). As for Tolkien defending the status quo of his time in his writing and being old-fashioned, I think it's a bit harsh to judge a writer for not living and writing 50 years later than he did.
 

preyer

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sounds like the critic wanted tolkein to write in then-modern sensibilities into his book based untold centuries before. rather like the authors 50 years from now saying 'i can do better,' then proceeding to rewrite what's already been done with merely their modern sensibilities added in, know what i mean?

i found the books rather boring, too, back when i read them around my high school daze. i did try, though, to frame my opinion given the time they were written. it's like snickering at a 40's film when a guy gets riddled by a machine gun yet there aren't a dozen squibs splashing blood all over the place. :)
 

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I tend to love Tolkien's body of works. But you really have to love them for what they are, if you like him.

He's not conventional, and although he doesn't put you inside the character's heads, he puts them in situations where you really have to think in order to realize there is some brilliance there.

For instance, in the Silmarillian, you have an orphaned Elf named Feanor. And he ends up bitter and leads his people on a quest that borders madness. He uses a mythological approach instead of a common everyday approach because at this time he was writing a mythology for England and not a story for popular culture. So, it's very discriptive, but there's very little conversation.

But if you break down the psychology of how people might act if they felt they were a burden to their mother and father, he's a classic case. Feanor's mother lost her will to live after her son was born. Then his father went into a depression, and although he loved his son, he never felt he was good enough to make his father happy. So he becomes resentful (as an adult) when his father takes another wife and sires a new family. He has contempt for them.

Likewise in LOTR, if you look at how Eowyn responds when she finds out Aragorn is going to the paths of the dead, and refuses to take her. Essentially, she acts like someone who has lost her parents, her adopted brother, and her uncle to madness. She basically goes into a funk and doesn't want to live anymore. Now, she is a heroine, and much can debated about her motives. But she doesn't say she wants to go out and "live" and have victory in the war. She wants to go out and die.

Now, this suggests more than her being brave, but something very subtle, almost saying, "Aragorn if you don't take me, what do I have to live for?" People who have abandonment issues become very possesive of people. They can fall in love very quickly, and then go into a depression if it's not reciprocated.

So, Tolkien is unconventional, and if some think he's trite, I think they're mistaken. If people look, he's very deep. And in fact, if you look at the hobbits, you might see what some of the people in the trenches were like. Common everyday people trying to make light of difficult situations. Frodos, who were bakers and accountants fighting in horrible situations. It's all in how you look at the stories and what you are looking for.
 

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I think Mieville and Moorcock are both twits, and if either lives to be a thousand they won't begin to write anyting one tenth as good as LOTR.Soem will see parts of Tolkien as flaws, some won't. I don't. I don't see any of the flaws mentioned here, or by Mieville and Moorcock. Now, if you want me to point out some flaws in Mieville's work, or in Moorcock's work, I would, but I can't stand to read Mieville at all, and I can get through only a few things Moorcock has written. But I can read Tolkien over and over, and so can millions of others.

I believe, as they say, that literary criticism reveals more about the nature of the critic than about the nature of the literature.
 

Richard White

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I like Moorcock's Elric series and a few of the rest of his eternal champion series, but I certainly don't hold him up on some pedestal. The other guy, I've never heard of before, so I can't comment one way or the other.

I guess I really enjoyed Tolkein's books when I was introduced to them in 1979, considering I read the trilogy in one 36 hour marathon over Christmas break at college. Took me three tries to get through the Simarilion, but I eventually got through the first 1/3 and really enjoyed the rest of the book and am enjoying the "Lost Tales" and the rest of the Middle Earth cycle.

I also take all the books with a grain of salt. Tolkein wrote the books as an excuse to use the languages he created and to tell a tale he wanted to in the way he wanted to. His tale is no more dated than reading Edgar Rice Burroughs or Arthur Conan Doyle, once you take into account when they were written. I certainly don't pick up a Jules Verne story and expect to see modern attitudes and approaches. Hell, a lot of the sixties writers seem dated and stale also, if that's what you're looking for.

A good fantasy story is no more or no less valid a story than a Science Fiction story, and considering the dystopia some SF writers wallow in, I'd rather read a good fantasy anyway. If I want to be depressed, I'll read the NYT or the Journal, thank you very the hell much.

Come to think of it, most of my SF collection is the Stainless Steel Rat series, the Hoka series by Anderson/Dickson, Hammer's Slammers series by Drake, Berserker series by Saberhagen, and Niven's Known Universe series. Almost all the rest of my fiction books are fantasy.
 

Sharon Mock

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I personally agree with David Brin's take on Tolkien (http://www.davidbrin.com/tolkienarticle1.html), though it's a bit harsh. Though I like and respect Tolkien, I've grown less and less fond of Tolkienesque fiction as I've gone along. Discovering Peake was a revelation.

Of course, I also appear to be the only outright Mieville fan on the boards, so.
 

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Zane Curtis said:
Tolkien was also quite staid and priggish. He completely glossed over what could have been one of the strongest sub-plots of LOTR -- Eowyn and Aragorn... Tolkien also kept the lid firmly on the fantastic,... From the pages of LOTR, you can almost hear Tolkien saying, "Well, I couldn't possibly delve very deeply into that. There are just some places an Oxford man doesn't go."

That's one reason I like him so much. Let's hear it for Oxford gentlemen! :Clap:

------------

I believe that Mieville and Moorcock dislike Tolkien because they are extreme leftists and Tolkien was conservative. It is political, not literary.
 
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