Is Tolkien still relevant?

[HareBrain]

But I was contending that the great fantasy writers are often emotionally and imaginatively connected with particular places, in a way that isn't, it seems, typical of many authors.

But does that appeal to readers generally, or mostly to readers who have similar connections with their local bits of ground? Does the place-connection element of writers like Tolkien and Cooper hold any appeal for kids who've rarely experienced the countryside, for example? Or are they into it for other reasons? (I'm posing the question without hope of getting any definite answer, as I doubt any research has been done, but maybe other posters can refute it from their own experience.)

 

[Ray McCarthy]

@HareBrain
I think, like any writing based on experience, makes it better.
Obviously a purely Urban based fiction, even if SF on an other planet is usually benefiting from the Author having the eye and ear and experience of big city life and appropriate strata of society.

 

[Kerrybuchanan]

Interesting points. I was brought up in the English countryside and now live in the Irish countryside. I'm uncomfortable in towns and cities and don't really enjoy urban fiction much either. I do love stories based in the countryside with strong place settings.

My children grew up in cities but now live in the country and enjoy both urban and rural settings in Fantasy fiction.

 

[mgilmour]

I think that Tolkien is very relevant to the huge numbers of fans that enjoy the movies and books over and over again. The story of pure evil versus pristine good that is embodied in the weakest member (ie. Frodo) resonates strongly with readers. So many people feel powerless in their circumstances today and Frodo says to them....no you're not! You just have to make a decision to stand up for what is right and push through adversity. In fact, without you, all the rich and mighty rulers of our "real world" will come tumbling down. Kings, wizards and knights couldn't carry the ring....it had to be the lowest, simplest and most basic character.....who didn't actually want the task. Sort of like....nearly everyone.

I enjoy reading Martin but what is he really saying to us? The world is brutal and just when you thought that it couldn't get any worse it will. If you've lost a loved one....don't worry, another one will die shortly. How uplifting is that? Our only hope is that Arya will have her revenge.....(nothing like a child training to be an assassin) and that Tyrion will somehow survive (I really do like his character). I know that I'm grossly oversimplifying things here but I wouldn't be surprised if GOT dwindles off the radar in 20 years time while LOTRs will still be there. Why? At its core, GOT is really quite depressing....brilliant.....but depressing.

Tolkien's stories are stories of hope. They speak to readers in a unique way by telling them they can be like Frodo and rest in the undying lands across the sea. I think that this is incredibly relevant to a society that is so frenetic that many of us have forgotten what it would be like to just rest. Jackson captured this in film by the elves speaking incredibly slowly, the haunting music and everything is green and right in Lorien. I don't know about you but I want to live there!

When we're writing fantasy or science fiction we are creating worlds that people want to escape to....that's why they read the 100,000 plus words that we've carefully constructed on the page. For a brief period of time they can flee their current life and enter another world where they can let their imagination run wild. Yes, they are reading our stories but more than that they are wondering what it would be like to be one of the characters.....and this is what makes a good book.

Anyway.....yes, Tolkien is very relevant.

 

[Extollager]

But does that appeal to readers generally, or mostly to readers who have similar connections with their local bits of ground? Does the place-connection element of writers like Tolkien and Cooper hold any appeal for kids who've rarely experienced the countryside, for example? Or are they into it for other reasons? (I'm posing the question without hope of getting any definite answer, as I doubt any research has been done, but maybe other posters can refute it from their own experience.)

Really interesting questions, and, as you say, probably hard to answer.

I suspect that, at least, a small but significant number of people who have been in some degree concerned about ecology, wellbeing of the land, locavore-ism, animal welfare, or even just tending a garden, etc. fairly often were young first-time readers of LOTR in the 1950s-1970s. (This was also the time of paperback editions of E. F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful, etc.) Right now all we have, so far as I know, is anecdotal evidence.

The question was, "Is Tolkien Still Relevant?" I have my doubts about whether people, especially the young, who known Tolkien primarily through the movies, are stirred to concerns for the land from having watched them.So, if one refines the question to read, "Is Tolkien still relevant as an inspiration to concern for nature and the land?", I doubt that he is, much.

Tolkien will always be relevant for some readers, in the sense not only of providing superlative entertainment but in that of influencing their appropriation of perennial values. However, the perennial nature of the values that one encounters in Tolkien will probably make Tolkien's work increasingly off-putting to many, as culture becomes increasingly antagonistic towards those values. The more comfortable you are with the directions culture is going, the less taste you probably will have for Tolkien. However, that suggests that, conversely, his books could come to have an "underground" importance for some.

http://touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=15-01-048-f

 

[MWagner]

Really interesting questions, and, as you say, probably hard to answer.

I suspect that, at least, a small but significant number of people who have been in some degree concerned about ecology, wellbeing of the land, locavore-ism, animal welfare, or even just tending a garden, etc. fairly often were young first-time readers of LOTR in the 1950s-1970s. (This was also the time of paperback editions of E. F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful, etc.) Right now all we have, so far as I know, is anecdotal evidence.

The question was, "Is Tolkien Still Relevant?" I have my doubts about whether people, especially the young, who known Tolkien primarily through the movies, are stirred to concerns for the land from having watched them.So, if one refines the question to read, "Is Tolkien still relevant as an inspiration to concern for nature and the land?", I doubt that he is, much.

Tolkien will always be relevant for some readers, in the sense not only of providing superlative entertainment but in that of influencing their appropriation of perennial values. However, the perennial nature of the values that one encounters in Tolkien will probably make Tolkien's work increasingly off-putting to many, as culture becomes increasingly antagonistic towards those values. The more comfortable you are with the directions culture is going, the less taste you probably will have for Tolkien. However, that suggests that, conversely, his books could come to have an "underground" importance for some.

http://touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=15-01-048-f

I disagree. The first generation to embrace Tolkien were suburbanites already a generation or two removed the countryside. The romanticized depiction of the countryside appealed to them because it was something they were already removed from. In my experience, back-to-nature hippies are almost invariably young people alienated by cities, rather than people who grew up in the countryside.

I've heard it theorized that the English romanticize the countryside so much more than their counterparts in Europe or North America because England was the first country to experience the trauma of the industrial revolution, and it happened more swiftly and more brutally there than in other countries. Beatrix Potter and the rest were a reaction to abrupt and traumatic change. And I've heard a Benetton executive, commenting on the need to tailor a message to different nationalities, say "the way to get to the heart of an Italian is with food, for the French it's sex, and for the British it's small, furry animals."

Where is the environmental movement strongest? In Germany, a densely populated and highly industrialized country with no wilderness. Germans come over to Canada to rent canoes and pretend to be natives for a week. People long for what they've lost.

That's especially true of fantasy fans, who seek out fantasy to experience that which they don't have. Sometimes that's solace and an idealized past. Sometimes it's the thrill of danger in a harsher world than our own. I think one of the reasons dystopian fiction is so popular with young adults today is they're aware, on some level, of how soft and enervating their lives are. Life is so much more intense and raw in a harsh world where you live or die by your wits. Hence the Hunger Games, the Maze Runner, etc. And fantasy's roots have always found fertile soil in dreadful places. The world Conan strode in his sandal-clad feet was not a green and happy land, but a place of savage wildernesses and foul, decadent cities. Jack Vance, my personal favourite, invented hundreds of civilizations and worlds, each one more cynical, bizarre, and predatory than the last. And I don't think people read his work because they lived in awful places full of awful people. They just wanted to escape their world for one that was more exciting and exotic.

 

[Extollager]

I disagree.

I'm not sure just what I said it is that you disagree with, so I won't respond yet.

I am thinking primarily of Americans in my remarks on how Tolkien was -- as I suspect -- an ingredient in a turn towards caring for land. Some of this will have been a deeper and more long-lasting thing than in others. Tom Shippey, my favorite writer on Tolkien, said memorably in a video portrait of JRRT that reading Tolkien makes people bird watchers, tree spotters, hedgerow grubbers, etc. Perhaps in the opinions of some this relates to their charge of a "twee" quality in Tolkien. I suppose the activities Shippey mentions are not important in their priorities.

Dickerson and Evans, in the book I mentioned before, cite Kentucky essayist Wendell Berry’s “Conservation and Local Economy,” which includes theses with which Hobbits would agree:


“II.Land cannot be properly cared for by people who do not know it intimately, who do not know how to care for it, who are not strongly motivated to care for it, and who cannot afford to to care for it.

“IV.People are motivated to care for land to the extent that their interest in it is direct, dependable, and permanent.

“VII.A nation will destroy its land and therefore itself if it does not foster in every possible way the sort of thrifty, prosperous, permanent rural households and communities that have the desires, the skills, and the means to care properly for the land they are using.”

Berry might not be well known in the UK and Europe. Over here he is revered, an actual living sage (not "guru"). I'm not sure he has cited Tolkien. he certainly has cited C. S. Lewis's prescient That Hideous Strength, a kindred book in its way to LOTR.

 

[MWagner]

I'm not sure just what I said it is that you disagree with, so I won't respond yet.

Sorry, I rambled a bit.

I disagree that as we become more urbanized, young people will care less about the land. The generation who made Tolkien popular in the first place were already urbanized, and if they were drawn to his depiction of rural England, it's because it was something they had already lost.

What fantasy fans don't want to read about is the world they already live in, and for the overwhelming portion of young readers in the last 60 years, that world has been the suburbs.

 

[Extollager]

I'm saying that I think it likely that some of the effort that has been expended, particularly on local levels, to care for nature, to be imaginatively and emotionally involved with conservation and stewardship of the land, etc., has been inspired in part by Tolkien. He is a "green" author and, for some people, perhaps the only or the most important one whom they have read. He sometimes changes the way people feel about the world. This seems to be the case around the world, too, including in the USSR samizdat period.

But, on the other hand, I don't think we will get new fantasy writers of a truly Tolkienian spirit, in part just because of the social changes you mention. So a Tolkien-influenced person may live in an urban apartment but be doing things that in some way relate to Tolkien's agrarian values and to his perennial morality. I myself live in a small rural Midwestern town in whose limits one sees beavers, bald eagles, deer, turtles, Canada geese, etc. (and I understand we have coyotes in the county limits -- but not Wargs). But if I lived in Minneapolis, I could still garden, support green spaces and parks, perhaps locavore food consumption, join the International Dark-Sky Association, etc. -- and well might do all these things in part because Tolkien inspires me.

I'll quote some more from my review of the Dickerson and Evans book:

Their epigraph is taken from Gandalf’s charge to the Captains of the West in The Return of the King: “…it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succor of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”
Stewardship is thus the single word that best characterizes Tolkien’s understanding of man’s intended relationship to the earth. Stewardship, Dickerson and Evans believe, is a Christian principle: the universe is the Creator’s work, in which He delights; in Tolkien’s legendarium, the earth is entrusted to the care of “gods” (the Valar), Elves, and men, who should praise its Maker, enjoy its bounty, and pass it on to later generations in a wholesome condition, and who must not tyrannize over it or hoard its fruits. Humans (and the Valar and Elves) are ontologically superior to plants and animals. Elves and men, the Children of Ilúvatar, are “physical creatures who are a part of nature,” but also are “transcendent beings” who “can be assigned the moral calling of caring for nature.” Stewardship belongs to mankind and to Elves from their beginnings.
Possessiveness is the opposite of stewardship. It disregards “the creator’s prior, and higher, claim.”

 

[Ray McCarthy]

The Wargs today have suits.

 

[HareBrain]

Much as I loved Tolkien when I was younger, I never saw him as truly reflecting my experience of my own piece of rural ground, the Sussex Downs. In some ways, such as on a warm summer evening, it's like the Shire, but Tolkien's Shire is never less than benevolent. What's missing from it is the cold threat of night coming on when you're out in the woods as dusk is falling, or the stink of dead Vikings you wipe off your boots when you get back from a walk. The Barrow Downs and Old Forest get at some of this, but without the multi-layered complexity of the real thing.

Tolkien ducked the fear and unease about Nature (even Old Man Willow is easily mastered by Bombadil), which I think was always there in romanticism. So his writings might inspire love of nature, but I'm not sure they would inspire awe. Susan Cooper, to me, captured that much better.

Someone said of neo-romantic artist Paul Nash that he wasn't interested in archaeology as it related to the past, but in the accumulated weight of past as present. (I can't remember the exact quote, which was better, but that gets across the gist of it.) This is what the Shire lacks, which is why it can't stand as a real image of England.

(I hope that at least approaches coherence.)

 

[Extollager]

By the way -- in LOTR, Farmers Maggot and Cotton appear to practice good husbandry and are also notable in the defense of the Shire when Saruman seeks to subjugate it to industrialism. Given that Bombadil is a near-embodiment of land and water, his praise of Maggot may be considered to be praise from nature itself. Incidentally, I learned from Evans and Dickerson that “maggot” can mean “grub worm” or “earthworm” rather than housefly larva, and so is a well-chosen name for an exemplary member of an agrarian people.

 

[Extollager]

Someone said of neo-romantic artist Paul Nash that he wasn't interested in archaeology as it related to the past, but in the accumulated weight of past as present. (I can't remember the exact quote, which was better, but that gets across the gist of it.) This is what the Shire lacks, which is why it can't stand as a real image of England.

I think that, while only a very little of it rhymes, LOTR is a vast "poem." Tolkien isn't attempting to be comprehensive, any more than you'd expect a poet or artist to say everything there is to say on a topic. The Shire could be an image of an aspect of England, but not of all aspects thereof, not even of all the good ones.

......."The past is never dead. It's not even past." -- William Faulkner

 

[BAYLOR]

I think he'll always be read and will never go out fashion. Why? Because the Hobbit , LOTR , The Silmarillion , The Children of Hurin all his stories and poems are tales well told. They're timeless and will be read and rediscovered and loved by every new generation that comes after us. Tolkien will be here till the end of civilization. Maybe even beyond for all we know.

 

[Brian G Turner]

Tolkien's influence on the likes of Jordan, Martin and Williams is evidant. But I would argue their work, including the likes of Erikson, Bakker, Lawerance, Abercrombie has something more going for it than Tolkien's.

Quite true, and it's easy to perceive - though whether true or not - that the fantasy genre has lived too long under Tolkien's shadow. Modern media means that a raft of wider influences are now available - and being expressed - meaning that we're seeing something of a renaissance in fantasy in general. How long that lasts remains to be seen, but even though many writers might now look beyond Tolkien as an influence, or even not be inspired by him, Tolkien still remains a giant of the genre, whose tropes remain huge in video gaming and film.

 

[BAYLOR]

Quite true, and it's easy to perceive - though whether true or not - that the fantasy genre has lived too long under Tolkien's shadow. Modern media means that a raft of wider influences are now available - and being expressed - meaning that we're seeing something of a renaissance in fantasy in general. How long that lasts remains to be seen, but even though many writers might now look beyond Tolkien as an influence, or even not be inspired by him, Tolkien still remains a giant of the genre, whose tropes remain huge in video gaming and film.

The genre existed well before Tolkien.

 

[Brian G Turner]

The genre existed well before Tolkien.

I didn't suggest otherwise.

 

[BAYLOR]

I didn't suggest otherwise.

I know that.

But ive run into people over the years who were of the impression that he invented Fantasy.

 

[portman]

Could the simple fact that we're having this discussion in the first place mean he's still relevant?

Really interesting reading!

 

[MWagner]

Tolkien's influence didn't really come to dominate fantasy until the early 80s. Before that, the genre was a mix of a sword and sorcery, pulp, and vaguely Tolkienesque fantasy. Once the Sword of Shannara hit the bestseller list, the whole genre went into Tolkien-emulation mode (and also grew commercially). It also became homogenized. So in a sense, the diversity in fantasy over the last 10 years or so is a return to the pre-80s era.