Tolkienian fantasy

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Tolkienian fantasy

Post by Particles the Greek »

And why not? This thread is for discussion of fantasy that follows the "Tolkienian" model, whatever that is, and does it right and/or well.

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Re: Tolkienian fantasy

Post by Pole, the »

I think “Lord of the Rings” qualifies. Maybe “Hobbit”, too.
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Re: Tolkienian fantasy

Post by Daistallia »

Dennis L. McKiernan's The Iron Tower - it's a close enough knock off to be accused of plagiarism. I'm actually surprised he wasn't sued by JRRT's estate.

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Re: Tolkienian fantasy

Post by Salmoneus »

I'm not sure there's actually been any Tolkienian fantasy since Tolkien. Even something like, say, "The Sword of Shannara", which is a complete and blatent rip-off of the plot of LotR, is totally different in themes and tone.

I think maybe Donaldson's Covenant books may come closest. Yes, they're very different in some ways, but I think they're closer in the more important ways.

Things I would see as essential to Tolkienian fantasy:
- a secondary world containing fundamentally incommensurable and ultimate threats (eg you can't negotiate Sauron round to your side, you destroy him or get destroyed). I don't mean that ALL the threats have to be like that, but some of them should be.
- a world where large and important parts are beyond human control, and ideally beyond human knowledge or understanding.
- primary characters who take the position of the everyman, and hence have relatively little power, at least day-to-day.
- a plot where the primary characters are faced with a series of profound moral conundra
- relatedly, plenty of moral or philosophical deliberation
- an archaic or unusual use of language, ideally with long descriptive passages
- an external world that to some extent seems to mirror the inner journey of the characters
- strong impression of serious threat to the characters
- heroism and resulting tragedy


So I'd contrast Tolkien with somebody like Jordan:
- both Sauron and Shai'tan are incommensurable threats; but in Jordan the practical struggle is against a small group of petty-minded villains (the Forsaken) who are both occasionally ammenable to compromise and pragmatism and also highly prone to incompetance and human weaknesses. Although Shai'tan poses an existential threat, somehow, it's not really focused on very much (the larger threat always seems to be the proximal one of orcs killing your loved ones).
- magic in Tolkien is unexplained and mystical, the world itself often seems to have a personality not always pleasant (eg 'fighting' against Caradhras, which is never explained), there are lots of nameless things in dark corners of the world older than mankind itself (eg the 'watcher' outside Moria), etc. In Jordan, things are 'unknown' only because information has been forgotten after an age of magical science collapsed. Magic remains fully controllable and explained in mechanistic detail, taught in a school. Everybody has precise power levels, so fight outcomes can be predicted. Non-human intelligent species are extremely restricted in habitat and power, and basically act like humans anyway.
- Jordan's primary characters include queens and emperors and wizardess-nun-popes and greatest-swordsman-alives and genius-generals
- In Jordan, decisions to be made are primarily practical or personal, with few genuine moral quandries to face
- basically no moral or philosophical content in Jordan
- long, repetitive descriptive passages (of dresses and bathing), but a simple, sometimes even simplistic, prose style
- Jordan's world just sits there, a stage. Contrast the way Tolkien uses Moria, or Lorien, or Dagorlad, etc, to show us the psychological state of the characters
- in Jordan, I don't know whether maybe one or two characters might die right at the end, but up until then everyone's safe from anything worse than a good spanking. In Tolkien, characters die, and others seem in grave peril.
- nobody in Jordan is heroic, at least not on screen (maybe Lan in his backstory?). They are brave, courageous, but there's no heroism, just pragmatism. And accordingly there's hardly any actual tragedy either.
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Re: Tolkienian fantasy

Post by WeepingElf »

I think that most "Tolkienian" fantasy is actually D&Dian fantasy. Dungeons & Dragons campaigns turned into novels. I once heard the criticism, "Nowadays, it is hard to find a fantasy novel where you don't hear the dice rolling all the time."

Of course, D&D owes a few things to Tolkien: Elves, Dwarves, Halflings, Orcs. But that's pretty much about it. Sure, there are some other things in D&D that also occur in LotR, but that is merely because both drew from the same sources; D&D just pillaged everything that got in the way and wasn't bolted down. And the Tolkienesque player character races were added as an afterthought, I have been told, in order to sell the game to the millions of LotR fans. Otherwise, a typical D&D campaign just doesn't work the same way LotR works. Go through Salmoneus's list and check how much of it applies to a typical D&D campaign, and you'll see what I am talking about.
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Re: Tolkienian fantasy

Post by Torco »

Sal: I may be misremembering here, but I don't think LotR is as rife with moral conundra and room for complex moral deliberation: way I see it, evil and good were *actual* forces in it, as real as gravity or magnetism, and similarly clear-cut: sauron is bad, as are his minions, the company is good <except when lead astray by evil magics>, everyone does their best and it all works out in the end, except for those who sacrificed their life and limb <or, int he case of frodo, got severe PTSD>, who suffer the consequences of their unambiguously heroic acts: the grayest thing I can recall out of the top of my head is probably gollum, who is more of an example of fate <he ends up saving the world out of 'accident' and somehow gandalf, whom is a mage, knew he would play an important role if not killed> than any sort of redemption. Everyone's who's good is good in their own way, they embody their own virtues: low-brow peasant loyalty for Sam, high-brow noble loyalty and duty for aragorn, strenght and good-natured ambition for boromir*, etcetera.

*I think boromir gets the short end of the stick here: he ended up being corrupt, sure, but he was corrupted by the evil magic of the most powerful magic evil objects in the world, the power of which Men were always known to be especially susceptible to: I mean, come on, can you really blame him? he wasn't even of the superior race, like Aragorn.

as for Weeping's point, I agree: I actually hate the way D&D appropriated the Tolkenian aesthetic while eschewing utterly both what those aesthetic tropes were supposed to mean and the whole tone and thematics and stuff.

for example: tolkenian elves are numinous fae-like creatures, not quite mortal, dreadfully beautiful and blablabla... D&D elves are just thinner, pointy eared, longevous people. who sometimes live in trees. tolkenian dwarves are resentful of elves because they were incredibly close to them, and they feel betrayed. elves and dwarves in D&D are inimical because... they're racially predisposed to dislike each other? tolkenian hobbits are all fat, good-natured folk who live peaceful lives removed from the woes of the world: but one of them was once hired to be a burglar, you know, in the eponimous book, so D&D's hobbits are all dexterous rogues. Orcs are savage mutant begotten out of the corruption of elves, in tolkien: in D&D they're just... a random inferior race that is inferior because... yeah. Not to mention the awful take on magic! clerical spells are fine, i mean, you ask in advance for your deity to grant you a few powers, and he does <granted, its kind of mechanical and un-numinous, like, you don't need to prove to your god that you deserve your spells or anything, but whatever>. Sorcerers are nice as well, you just know a few spells, cause that's who you are [its kind of ugly the way its implemented, like, if I have the blood of a dragon and can cast fireballs out of some affinity with fire out of that magical lineage, how come i can't warm up my coffee? do anything with fire outside casting fireballs? oh, whatever]. But the wizard, and in general the concept of spell, is ugly as fuck. Magic in tolkien is strange and dangerous, even powerful wizards don't use it unless they have to: it is full of meaning and for the most part subtle: more about the ring tempting you, or a sword glowing in the presence of danger, or song and beauty healing the weariness and despair of a broken heart. In D&D spells are so gratuitous and mechanistic it feels more like batman's belt of many tricks than any sort of numinous force of metaphysical significance. D&D has, in my opinion, Flintstones Syndrome: you remember the flintstones? allegedly prehistoric but de fact 1960ies american petit-bourgeoises? with washing machines, typewriters, and industrial furnaces, all operated by dinosaurs? yeah, well D&D really feels kind of like that, sometimes.

So... yeah, no I'm not sure I agree that D&D is tolkienian in any sense except cosmetically.
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Re: Tolkienian fantasy

Post by zompist »

Tolkien knits together a few strands; his particular combination may be rare, but the strands themselves are not.

Sal himself listed a bunch of fauxdieval works in the other thread. The Middle Ages weren't even over before Malory had produced a nostalgic glorification of them; within a century Ariosto and Cervantes had taken them to baroque and satiric extremes.

For the numinous element in Tolkien, you could look to his own friends C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams, or the older generation-- G.K. Chesterton, George MacDonald. The underlying but hidden Christianity can be found in Madeleine L'Engle and Diane Duane.

For a similar horror of the modern world, and a longing glance back at the magnificent well-ordered past, there's E.R. Eddison.

The dwarves go back to Nordic legend, the elves to medieval stories of longaevi or faeries. Disturbing alien civilizations like the orcs are reminiscent of Lovecraft, Howard, and Burroughs. The whole pulp and sword & sorcery tradition is probably also the origin of conworlds worked out enough that the author would provide a map. (These also tended to share the idea of magic as rare and uncanny. D&D makes it common as dirt in order to make a game out of it, not because such commonness was part of its models.)

The hobbitry is more typical of children's stories, such as Oz.

One of the amazing achievements of Tolkien is the sense of a layered world-- we are in the Third Age and the book is alive with clues that the author knows much more about the First and Second. Though I can't think of a predecessor which has the same literary effect, it's a perfection of the Lost Civilization and Orientalism, both old tropes in Western fantasy, themselves arising both from the contemplation of ancient ruins, and the discovery of actual lost civilizations.

Tolkien is #373-4 on Arika Okrent's chronological list of conlangs... but LOTR is so far as I know the first fantasy novel to make heavy use of one-- but Orwell's 1984, with its significant excursus into Newspeak, precedes it in sf. A quick Googling suggests Burroughs as a semi-predecessor.

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Re: Tolkienian fantasy

Post by ol bofosh »

Warhammer. Not a novel, but most of the background material reflects a lot of LOTR/D&D imagery.

There are novels derived from it.
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Re: Tolkienian fantasy

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ol bofosh wrote:Warhammer. Not a novel, but most of the background material reflects a lot of LOTR/D&D imagery.

There are novels derived from it.
The Warcraft franchise got started after a deal to do a Warhammer game fell through. It has several novels as well (and mostly non-evil orcs, eventually, which more settings could stand to try tbh). Tho they're of pretty variable quality.
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Re: Tolkienian fantasy

Post by Mornche Geddick »

zompist wrote:The hobbitry is more typical of children's stories, such as Oz.
Tolkien actually started out by writing children's stories if I remember right.
zompist wrote:One of the amazing achievements of Tolkien is the sense of a layered world-- we are in the Third Age and the book is alive with clues that the author knows much more about the First and Second. Though I can't think of a predecessor which has the same literary effect, it's a perfection of the Lost Civilization and Orientalism, both old tropes in Western fantasy, themselves arising both from the contemplation of ancient ruins, and the discovery of actual lost civilizations.
That's true. Middle Earth would be a great place for an archeologist. In fact you could say an archeologist would really dig Middle Earth.

I think I know the reason for the famous industrialism phobia. Tolkien was born well before the Clean Air Acts, in a time when every house and every factory burnt coal. The London smogs were notorious - at worst you could hardly see for more than a few feet (which could be very dangerous). In the cities soot got everywhere, the pollution was literally in your face. Housewives and housemaids spent most of their lives cleaning. (One of my aunts has told me that in her grandmother's time "you were either a slut* or a slave") All that coal left waste - huge heaps of ash at factories, landfill sites, rubbish yards and mines like the one that buried the school at Aberfan. Land used for waste was ruined for any other purpose. Other types of waste were poured into the rivers, on a scale to kill most of the plant and animal life in them. Finally, it was becoming obvious that the system was making a few people rich, a lot of people poor, and a great many people ill.

Under those circumstances it's not surprising that anyone would see industrialism as evil.

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Re: Tolkienian fantasy

Post by WeepingElf »

Mornche Geddick wrote:
zompist wrote:The hobbitry is more typical of children's stories, such as Oz.
Tolkien actually started out by writing children's stories if I remember right.
Actually, not. The Hobbit was a children's book, sure, but it wasn't the starting point of his legendarium. The stories in The Silmarillion are much older; they date back to the posthumously published Book of Lost Tales which Tolkien began to write during the First World War. Tales in which he elaborated on his war experience and which were far too grim for children. The Hobbit was only peripheral to the legendarium, though it is full of allusions to it; only with The Lord of the Rings these two strands were really threaded into one.
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Re: Tolkienian fantasy

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Mornche Geddick wrote:
zompist wrote:The hobbitry is more typical of children's stories, such as Oz.
Tolkien actually started out by writing children's stories if I remember right.
zompist wrote:One of the amazing achievements of Tolkien is the sense of a layered world-- we are in the Third Age and the book is alive with clues that the author knows much more about the First and Second. Though I can't think of a predecessor which has the same literary effect, it's a perfection of the Lost Civilization and Orientalism, both old tropes in Western fantasy, themselves arising both from the contemplation of ancient ruins, and the discovery of actual lost civilizations.
That's true. Middle Earth would be a great place for an archeologist. In fact you could say an archeologist would really dig Middle Earth.

I think I know the reason for the famous industrialism phobia. Tolkien was born well before the Clean Air Acts, in a time when every house and every factory burnt coal.
Also, after his father died Tolkien lived in semi-rural Warwickshire as a child. When his mother died, he moved to central Birmingham, a highly industrial city back then. So certainly, one could argue that industrialisation symbolised a loss of innocence for Tolkien.
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Re: Tolkienian fantasy

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Dunsany, Lovecraft, maybe Kipling
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Re: Tolkienian fantasy

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Rusanov, didn't Lovecraft *avoid* good vs. evil? For him, it's humans vs. unknowably advanced forces from the Outside, not Frodo saving the Shire from being overrun by evil orcs or whatever.
zompist wrote:For the numinous element in Tolkien, you could look to his own friends C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams, or the older generation-- G.K. Chesterton, George MacDonald. The underlying but hidden Christianity can be found in Madeleine L'Engle and Diane Duane.
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Re: Tolkienian fantasy

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What's your question?

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Re: Tolkienian fantasy

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Diane Duane has clarified this - she is not a Christian. Her works have a few things which seem to be clear references to Christianity - I'm thinking particularly of the ceremony in Deep Wizardry - a much larger number of references to various real-world religions, and then a whole lot of reality-transcending things. But her themes and events are not particularly Christiany.

In terms of religious content, and the presence of doctrinal ideology, D. Duane really can't be compared to M. L'Engle.

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Re: Tolkienian fantasy

Post by Mornche Geddick »

Some of the theology in the Book of Night with Moon, especially that dealing with the Lone Power, struck me as very strongly influenced by Christianity. But I think the influence must be unconscious.

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Re: Tolkienian fantasy

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Her family was Catholic. But after a nun told her that the prayers of her Jewish friends were not heard by God - and that they didn't make it more than knee-high from the ground - she began to look critically at the faith.

She's not a Christian now. Her fictional theology (for lack of a better term) seems to owe a great deal to Tolkien rather than Christianity itself, so many of the religious influences are secondhand.

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Re: Tolkienian fantasy

Post by Sakir »

And, of course, one can reference and creatively reapply ideas in one's works without cleaving to them personally.

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Re: Tolkienian fantasy

Post by Mornche Geddick »

Melend wrote:a nun told her that the prayers of her Jewish friends were not heard by God - and that they didn't make it more than knee-high from the ground -
That's mean!

And probably blasphemous too. Who was this nun to tell God which prayers He could hear?

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Re: Tolkienian fantasy

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Re: Tolkienian fantasy

Post by Salmoneus »

Mornche Geddick wrote:
Melend wrote:a nun told her that the prayers of her Jewish friends were not heard by God - and that they didn't make it more than knee-high from the ground -
That's mean!

And probably blasphemous too. Who was this nun to tell God which prayers He could hear?
It's certainly against Catholic teaching. Indeed, it's positively evil by Catholic standards.

Catholic teaching is that the efficacious thing is the will, not the intellect. You can, they say, adore God even if you are confused about his nature. Catholicism recognises that Islam and Judaism in particular are religions that really are devoted to the true God, and that while the errors of the religions may lead individuals into sin, they are nonetheless 'rays of light' and pathways to God. A devout Jew's prayers are directed to God, and God can hear them. Moreover, Catholics are meant to actively promote and preserve what is good in other religions, particularly in Islam and Judaism, and since prayer is one of the things that the Church thinks those religions 'get right', as it were, Catholics should be encouraging toward Jewish prayer, not discouraging. After all, telling a Christian child that her friend's prayers are unheard may lead to her telling her friends that, which may help dissuade those friends from prayer, which from a Catholic point of view would be driving the partly-right-and-partly-wrong further away into error!

That said, I think there are protestant groups with more hardline attitudes toward infidels and heretics.
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