The "Clomping Foot" Of Nerdism

Dan Jones

Dan Jones

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I wonder if anyone has seen this article from the Daily Telegraph (UK) by Laurence Dodds?

It's a nicely written article, as you'd expect, and I think he makes some decent points about world-building sometimes detracting from the story, but I do strongly disagree with his comments about the narrative of Lord Of The Rings.

I thought it might make for a lively Chrons discussion!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/...yed-Tolkiens-dream-and-the-fantasy-genre.html
 
But Lord of the Rings is Tolkien in the spirit of the archivist – a serious man who does serious work and does not abide half measures. It is the spirit of his seminal scholarly work on Beowulf, Gawain, and the Pearl poems – and of the Oxford English Dictionary, where he spent years meticulously tracing the etymology of Germanic words which began with the letter W. It is a noble spirit and an admirable spirit and a spirit of great interest to many people. But it is not a spirit for storytelling.
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I wonder what he thinks the Silmarillion is?

Hobbit is a story for Children and LOTR for Adults. One wonders how much real Fantasy he has read? Most isn't anything like LOTR.

Edit: He does know about the Silmarillion
The Silmarillion, edited and published after his death by his son Christopher, takes nerdism to its logical conclusion: a gigantic collection of myths and legends, with no central ‘plot’ as such, which comprehensively explains the history of Middle Earth. Tolkien had never managed to finish these works, feeling they required revisions which he never made, and Christopher admitted in his preface that they could not be made completely consistent with themselves or with what had come before it.
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World building ...
I have a fake Wikipedia with mix of real and fantasy (using the same software). If I ever publish the content it would be only after I was sure I wasn't writing more books in that "World". So possibly only posthumously.

It seems like a rambling rant.
An entire generation of fantasy novels was predicated on the idea that a coherent world was more important than an interesting literary text,
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Maybe some, but not very many compared with bulk of successful fantasy since 1960s. Good stories sell books, world building is secondary interest for most readers? The evidence is in the sales?
 
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I have quite a lot of sympathy for this view. I can think of no genre that has been crushed and stunted by one writer's influence the way fantasy has been by Tolkien, and that isn't Tolkien's fault but that of the people who wanted more of certain aspects of his writing. More pages, more elves/dwarves/Medieval times, more scope (never mind depth), and so on. (Especially about 10-20 years ago. Things are changing, but slowly). Without one intepretation of Tolkien, there would be no Eddings or Brooks. Yes, there has been plenty of non-epic fantasy, but I wonder how well it does in terms of sales.

And I see the point about worldbuilding. It does seem that for some readers, there must ultimately be a D&D manual for any setting at all. Everything has to be known to the author and preferably explained to the reader, where in many cases there's no real point in doing that at all. The irony is that, in a lot of fantasy, it doesn't really matter who was King of Xland 200 years ago, or which forest is haunted, because it's just shuffling a very small pack of cards to rearrange familiar ideas.

In SF, the setting is often used largely as the vehicle for the novel's ideas, especially with writers like Philip K Dick. Fantasy seems to be much more reluctant to use these one-off settings. Also, it's often necessary to use shorthand in a novel. Characters arrive in a country full of spies, with banners everwhere depicting the party symbol and pictures of the Glorious Leader on every wall. They're obviously in a totalitarian state. Does it matter where the Glorious Leader came from? Not if the story is about something different but set in the same place. You might as well ask who built the castle in Where Eagles Dare. It might be interesting, but it's just not the point of the story.

Then again, epic sells, and backstory and worldbuilding of this sort feel epic.
 
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Toby, I'm actually inclined to agree with you. I'm writing epic ATM, and one obviously has to do a certain amount of world-building, but I do think that when the world-building overtakes the point of the story then something very tangible is lost.

My own thoughts about fantasy echo that of Tolkien himself; fantasy's strength is its ability to lend itself to the timeless. Ironically, its strength is proportional to one of the inherent weaknesses of SF, namely that its settings can age particularly badly as real world science catches up, branches off, or overtakes it. A fantasy setting should act as aspic, preserving a story for time immemorial, but of course the story has to be good. While the fantasy world is necessarily at least one step removed from our own, it should allow for stores that echo our own existence. As Goethe said: "the poet must endeavour to capture the specific; if there is anything about him, he will reflect the universal." I believe Tolkien achieved this with LOTR, even though he might not have wanted to (he famously said LOTR was not allegorical - yet of course it is; what is probably accurate is that he didn't intend it as allegory).

What goes on 'behind closed doors' in a fictional world is neither here nor there. I must admit, sometimes I have fleshed out backstory in order to make my own thoughts make sense, but that doesn't mean it all makes its way into the finished product.
 
You’re right about the closed doors. That’s a good way of putting it. What puzzles me is that fantasy often deals in archetypes (the dark lord, say) which don’t need explanation and often suffer for it. I really don’t want an explanation of where Sauron came from – in the case of the Emperor from Star Wars or Pinhead from Hellraiser, the explanation takes away a lot of the mystique of the character (and besides, it usually involves being corrupted by another mysterious dark lord, like a Russian doll of darklordation). Perhaps the archetypes are needed to create the sense of the world being in aspic.

I suppose two distinct issues are being mixed together in the original article: the obsession with worldbuilding and the general influence of Tolkien on the genre. Both create a tendency toward epicness, to the point where any deviation from the “dark lord tries to conquer world” story is seen as wildly original (take The First Law, which – whilst good – is really just that story told through a very thick veil of cynicism). When you look at some fantasy from the 60s and 70s (which was of very variable quality), you see short books without much worldbuilding. They’re often very strange, but they are quite refreshing when they work. I’ve always liked John Brunner’s The Traveller in Black especially.

I’m also trying to write an epic fantasy and it is difficult. In terms of worldbuilding, my approach has been to say “Stuff it, this world is extremely similar to a caricature of the real one”, although quite when varies – somewhere between the Renaissance and the English Civil War. I’m hoping that a vague “muskets” period will work in the way that a vague “Middle Ages” approach works, and that this will carry me through.
 
You're right about the explanation of the Dark Lord figure. I can't think of a single instance where the explanation of a backstory to the Big Bad has added anything to their character - and in many instances actually detracts from it. Off the top of my head the worst offender was Thomas Harris; I'm thinking of Hannibal Lecter, where Harris tried to make him a sympathetic, more human character by giving the backstory about him and his sister in Hannibal - and straight away some of that inhuman, almost Godlike mystique that was built up so successfully in Silence of the Lambs is lost.

Best baddie ever? Big Brother. You never see him, never hear from him, don't know anything about him, he might not even exist. And he's terrifying.

As for your own book, I don't think there would be anything wrong with using the Musketeer period as a setting. The reason the medieval setting is so popular is because huge amounts of European mythicism are set therein, and as europeans it's kind of indelibly inked into our culture, collectively and individual, so I don't think it'll ever go away.

I'll be sure to take a look at the Brunner book.
 
On the one hand, this is kind of annoying: There are people producing a thing, and lots of other people enjoy that thing! Does it really matter that the thing is not some other thing, that maybe more people would enjoy... why are the first group of enjoying people not entitled to enjoy their thing?

Yes, a lot of epic fantasy is over-concerned with world-building and under-concerned with prose and plot and character. So what? Is it a requirement that the publishing industry only produce things that tick off a list constructed by a self-selected literary panel?

On the other hand, I think there is an argument that there is a strait-jacketing effect caused by the success of Lord Of The Rings and close descendants (which include imitators, but not everything that's a close descendant is an imitator). Having said that, there's a lot of other stuff in fantasy, and simply ignoring that by playing the "genre definition" followed by "blindness" games is cheating. There's a wide variety of other-paradigm fantasy out there, influencing authors and entertaining readers. Not much of it gets made into films, but for a long time that was generally true of fantasy full-stop.
 
At the risk of broadening this enormously, I do find it a bit depressing how easily the spin-offs from the books fit into the standard template for fantasy gaming etc. I know Tolkien to a large extent started fantasy off, but I’ve always seen his world as a bit different to the standard tough-guy computer game setting – a bit richer and more sophisticated, even with the languages aside. So it’s slightly annoying when the new additions do exactly what you’d expect – here is an elite Uruk-Hai, with twice as many hit points as an Uruk-Hai warrior, who can only be killed with power attack X... I saw an advert for a computer game set in Mordor recently which looked like “LOTR goes Grimdark”. For all his (arguable) flaws, Tolkien’s work had real charm, and I think a lot of the spin-offs don’t.
 
The reason for the hackneyed Tolkien spin-offs is presumably laziness on the part of games designers, etc. It must be easier to cobble together Tolkien movie graphics and Gigax's D&D simplicity than it would be too bring the richness and tone of Tolkien's world back to life. I agree with Toby - it's a bit depressing. Personally I'm happy with world-building nerdism. This was great in Dune too, and things like the Faded Sun books, and they weren't derivative, or fantasy, but they were richly detailed and better for it, to my mind. A rich world doesn't obviate a decent tight plot.
 
Much as I enjoyed "The Hobbit" it is a very light read as it's really meant for children.
But don't let that put you off, so is Harry Potter and I enjoyed that as well.
"Lord Of The Rings" is for adults and can be a bit of a slog at times, but I think it's well worth the effort.
There are some very moving scenes such as the ending, and some very well described battles.
One strange thing I found was the Tom Bombadill chapter in Fellowship.
This seems so strange and out of place to the rest of the books?
What is also odd is you get the same thing in "Wind In The Willows".
The chapter called "The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn", about an encounter with the Great God Pan is just so out of place?
But as I said LORT is well worth the effort, I would like to thank the late Terry Rundel who put me on to them.
 
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I wonder if anyone has ever told LotR from Sauron's view. I do know there was book about Orcs some years back but I mean a retelling of the whole story from that of the Dark Lord. Interesting. Might even fill an idle weekend if there isn't any :)

I read LotR in 3 weeks. This was in college, where I reread entire textbooks the night before exams so that's not terribly fast. I was, however, a small elf named Gypenglass for some weeks thereafter. That was my first fantasy and, except for what was necessary to earn a living, I have never left since.

LotR is not as much slow as engrossing. There are spots when nothing really happens for a while, like in any journey in real life. And, like real life, LotR picks you up and carries you along through these uneventful times. A journey full of nothing but breakneck excitement would be great fun, but in real life you'd be dead long before the end. And the scenery itself is so interesting
 
REF:Joan Drake
I have the Orc books, can't remember who wrote them but they look interesting.
Must get around and read them one day, there is also an Orc Graphic Novel by the same Author.
This I have read and it's very good, highly recommended!
 
There is a mention in the History of Middle Earth series (I can't remember where) that Morgoth kept his own version of the history of the world in a "Black Book". A few years ago I remember seeing an online reference to "The Black Book" by Morgoth. Apparently someone actually wrote it, but it was in Russian and not translated into English.

I find the idea of LOTR written from the opposite perspective fascinating as well. I'm interested in those Orc books if you can find a reference.
 
REF:Joan Drake
Dear Joan, I have braved the outer wastelands (the back bedroom) for you and behold I have found it!!!
The Orcs author is Stan Nicholls, there are six novels plus the graphic, the graphic novel is titled "Orcs: Forged For War".
The first 3 novels are in a omnibus simply titled "Orcs", they are "Bodyguard Of Lightning", "Legion Of Thunder" & "Warriors Of The Tempest"
The other 3 are in an omnibus which I think is titled "Orcs 2:Bad Blood"
These are titled: "Weapons Of Magical Destruction", "Army Of Shadows" & "Inferno".
They are all available from Amazon, hope you enjoy them, best of luck!
 
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