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The Forging of Good Fantasy. (+1 story of resonance)

  
 
Digital Hermes
20:23 / 23.02.06
(Before anyone points it out to me, I know about the general fantasy thread, the anti-fantasy rant, and the cack fantasy threads.)

The goal here isn't to list your favorite book, or at least, not only that. I'm looking to determine what Barbeloids consider the constituent parts, the guts, of good fantasy. A bit of craftsman's look at the creation of them, the widgets and gears that make them move through the stories, that sort of thing. If you're going to rave about a favorite book, or grip about recent tripe you've read, let us know what factor of the story or writing elevated or destroyed your enjoyment.

For me, the word is resonance. Part of what made Lord of the Rings work so well was it's historical and mythological resonance. The Rohirrim are kind of Celtic, the Gondorians are Germanic, the hobbits, quite a pastoral English. So we understand it and accept it due to it's proximity. The larger-than-life aspects are reminiscent of our own legends, from Arthurian to Norse, and beyond. A general European mix. (Though someone contest me, if they disagree with my attributions.)

Guy Kay does the same kind of thing, a little more historical and less fantastical, often focusing on one specific area. (Medieval France, Spain, Italy, for starters.) Yet so much of the reality comes from a rememberance that in the back of your mind, you know this world without being introduced to it.

Martin's 'Songs of Ice and Fire' series is similarly resonant, though in the other direction, more fantastical than historic. His grasp of medieval European society, particularly England, though, is apparent, with something that seems to be shaping up in a War of the Roses fashion.

So that's the good. Now for the less so...

I've been slogging my way through the Belgariad on the urging of a friend, and though I initially enjoyed it's lighter tone, and the general wit of the characters, I've found the inabilty for the characters to actually change to become tiresome. Though the events proceed, the character's demeanors don't. Unless the plot demands it, at which point the normally complacent Garion becomes fervently conservative, or extremely eloquent, etc. Likewise for the archtypal wizard figure, who through most of the series is placid and calm, very rarely reacting strongly to anything.

Coupled with this are out-of-place statements that seem to imply a normally-functioning medieval society, which didn't seem to be represented till these sporadic kinds of statements.

Lastly, I would cry with happiness if he decided to speed through at least one of the travels to and fro across the world, instead of hanging with every step. Even Tokein sometimes flashed to the end of a journey.

Someone who's even more guilty of that last crime is...

Robert Jordan.

His first book is a good opener to the series, full of evil monsters and compelling heroes. But the longer the tale drags on, the less I am capable of caring about these characters. What seemed like a fun little way to reference other fantasies and mythologies has turned into long tedious description about the neckline and colour of the clothes in every village and town the characters enter.

I have a love/hate relationship with this series. I love the detail, but I hate the fact that it's chokeing the story. Also, the prolonged nature of the book makes it feel as though the characters never change. Despite going through world-shaking events, they often default to generally intransigent stubborn individuals, different only in their vocal characteristics.

Please. Agree, disagree, bring up your own, but keep it crafty...
 
 
All Acting Regiment
09:37 / 24.02.06
The Forging of Good Fantasy

Are we talking about fantasy in general or Tolkein-a-likes? Because methinks there be a difference. Let's look at a dictionary.com definition:


Fantasy:

1 The creative imagination; unrestrained fancy. See Synonyms at imagination.

2 Something, such as an invention, that is a creation of the fancy.

3 A capricious or fantastic idea; a conceit.

4 a. Fiction characterized by highly fanciful or supernatural elements.
b. An example of such fiction.


Given that that's what the word Fantasy means, why does the average fantasy writer feel the need to restrict themselves to trolls, dragons and other medieval tropes? Given the ammount of creative freedom implied by "unrestrained fancy", why must there always be a magic sword and a little map in the front of the book? In other words, why follow Tolkein's model? Of which more later.

In fact, isn't there something a bit dubious about this notion of "the fantasy genre", or "the fantasy writer"? To my knowledge, the best examples of fictional texts with a fantastic element were written before such conventions locked into place (Pere Ubu, The Time Machine, The Tempest, The Island of Doctor Moreau, Tristram Shandy etc) or written outside the genre's boundaries.

I think what makes these books good is the whole "High Concept" idea, the idea of chipping the thing down to one strong, simple notion or factor that can hold up an entire text. So, Jaws = Big Shark. Alien = Big Sex Monster In Space. Jurrassic Park = Dinosaurs. The Birds = Nasty Birds. Day of the Triffids = Nasty Begonias.

Thus, things like Deep Blue Sea (= Er, big GM sharks attacking underwater base) or Predator (= Er, Big Fighty Monster in, er, Vietnam) don't hold up so well because they come as more content-muddled descendants of a piece that was always more about simple, direct content than anything else.

Tolkein's LotR has a high concept, beleive it or not: namely "Huge Saga Set Within (Almost Anally) Detailed Fantastic World". Which kind of makes any other "straight" attempts at such a bit pointless, because unless you do as Tolkein did it won't be as good: to get your Detailed Fantastic World as pure, clean and non-anachronistic as Tolkein's (perhaps the only saving grace of the book) means putting in all the work that he did, and he put in one hell of a lot of work. You'll have to read all the sagas and rig vedas and Greek myth cycles, and you'll have to study Anglo-Saxon and Norwegian and then synthesise your own languages. This is not something I see most "fantasy writers" doing: rather it seems to be par for the course to pluck languages, themes and ideas from the genre and popular history and then rearrange them in a slightly different- often anachronistic- but ultimately conventional way. Even if they did manage to get their world up to Tolkein standards, why waste a career slavishly copying another writer?

Language is another issue. I've spoken before about the high concept being the focus of a fantastical work; the flipside of this is that other elements are often neglected. For example, you don't get the same language in Jurrassic Park as you get in Ullyses. In fact, you don't get very nice language at all, nor any really worthwhile characters, nor anything much of more-than-acceptable worth beyond a high concept of "Dinosaurs!". If there was no hot concept in JP the book'd most likely be worthless.

Same could be said for Tolkein. His Elvish is beautiful but his English is ugly, and his characters...aren't characters, really. It's the high concept that carries the work. So, if someone's working in his mould (High concept, poor everything else) but failing to hit the concept, as most all of his imitators do, there's really nothing of worth in their books.

So, swing that round into positive terms. Use beautiful language. How? Read around. Read Woolf. Read poetry. Read everything. It really is glaringly obvious from the ammount of cliches used in most fantasy work (and I have been reading a lot, incl. Jordan, in the process of helping a friend's project) that the writer either isn't bothering to experiment, or hasn't read enough to be aware that they can.

To sum up: break genre conventions, use your fucking imagination, use beautiful language, and work the story down to a simple, strong concept.
 
 
Loomis
11:09 / 24.02.06
You think Tolkien's English is ugly and his characters aren't characters but you recommend reading Woolf? Is that a wind up? Those are two accusations that I would level at Woolf far soooner than Tolkien.

I have something of a problem trusting anyone's views on fantasy if they rank Tolkien so low. Just because it's a bit grand and noble and saga-tastic doesn't mean that the motivations of his characters aren't complex and interesting, nor that his language is ugly.
 
 
the permuted man
12:48 / 24.02.06
As Legbra points out, imagination is a key constituent in good fantasy. I think what classifies as well written and what doesn't is far from black and white however.

Personally, heavily immersive fantasy novels -- the bulk of them I guess -- turn me off. I think the pacing suffers and anything over 500 pages is hard for me to finish in a day. Not that every long fantasy novel is immersive, though this is often the case. I don't want to escape into a fantasy world where every minute detail is thought out for me. I want to take ideas away from it, fill in the gaps with my own imagination, think about the story from outside it--not from some sequential soap opera with delusions of being epic inside it.

My favorite fantasy stories involve interdimensional exile and urban fantasy--maybe because these most mirror my own daydreams. I like the heroes and anti-heroes who end up in a strange world and have to find their way home, and I like the dissolvement of the world arround us to unveil imaginative underpinings.

I like conceptual stories, especially when the story is on a different scope from the concept. Some concept stories take place on the same level and in my opinion exhaust the concept. A good concept story, I think, takes place a step down, leaving countless for the reader to imagine on their own. Sort of, here's one thing that might happen if things were this way.

Hmm, random other things I like with little justafication: dream logic, steampunk, victorian horror, humour, whim, wonder. Wow, I can't believe I made it to the end of my reply without mentioning an author or novel!
 
 
Digital Hermes
16:08 / 24.02.06
Short answer, Legba: I agree with you. But...

Yes, the vast amounts of Tolkein re-hash are insipid and without inspiration, or High Concept, as it were. That said, the ones that have some bare concept of what made Tolkein work, tend to work themselves. Such as Guy Gavriel Kay. Also, those who were of the pulpy market, Fritz Leiber and Robert E. Howard, were able to give the thrilling action (sometimes even with social critique) without taking it as seriously as Tolkein (and his imitators) do.

Swords-and-sorcery tales have been with us a very long time, in legends and history, so it seems to fit that we would still have a fascination with those stories. I myself am a fan of Pynchon, Joyce, and Tolkein, the latter because of the resonant archtypes he's touching on.

Tolkein wears his influences on his sleeve, and his characters are about as rounded, if not moreso, then many of the epics I've worked through. In contrast, Guy Kay removes the world-saving element (at least in his later works) and gives us the character depth and intimacy that is admittedly missing from Tokein. But I think they are fundamentally different stoies.

I also agree that fantasy can be more than a pseduo-epic with Tolkeinisms plugged in. Gene Wolfe is at least one sterling example. I'm often on the lookout for a fantasy story that steps outside of what has become some very restrictive genre catagories. Some of which can be blamed on D&D novels, with sprawling trilogies, and characters that are in so many books, it begins to take on a fiction-life.

So to look at beginnings, does the vast amount of shlock genre work invalidate an attempt at epic storytelling? I hope not, because I still enjoy that kind of story, and look for it to be told well again.

I'm not too sure if writers trying their hand at any sort of fantasy would want to delve too deeply into the modernists, and post-modernists, you allude to. Since so much of fantasy involves some twist on reality, it could be a problem writing the whole book stream-of-conciousness. Can you imagine a modern urban fantasy written in the style of Finnegans Wake? How could you tell if it was fantasy or not? (Again, all of this is with the caveat of agreeance with you: I do think fantasy writers could benefit from better crafted sentences, better plotting, etc.)

As for alternate types of fantasy, I'm a little fuzzy on alternate types. There's modern or urban fantasy, space opera (which would fit the mold), what else? It seems like just about anything with a major shift from our own reality could be considered fantasy, including comic books, etc.

And in keeping with the craft-based nature of the thread, what makes for good alternate fantasy?
 
 
This Sunday
17:23 / 24.02.06
Is anything even mildly outside our own 'understood/accepted' reality, in fiction, then fantasy? Yes. Entirely.
Crowley's 'Book of Lies' isn't a 'made-up, fantasy' book to some people, and to some it is. The Catholic miracles in things like 'The End of the Affair' may simply not be miraculously impossible to some readers, but simply the sort of thing God goes around doing. From my end of things, not being particularly Catholic and not trusting Crowley's enthusiasm... they're both fantasy works. And so is 'The Dreamquest of the Unknown Kaddath' and 'Mort D'Arthur' and any random issue of 'Amazing Spider-Man'.
Fantasy as a buzzword meaning Tolkien... fuck that. Those sort of sword and sorcery things go back farther and have been better before and better done after Mr. Tolkien. And, besides, that's like people being so in love with, say, a harlquin romance as to claim that all novels must involve at least on shirt-ripping Fabio-alike. Which might make for an interesting rule of revision, but it cannot be plausibly defended as a stopgap on a genre or field.
You can't even say all romance novels require it or if they don't have their de-shirting hunka manliness, that they're consciously rebelling or alternative. Because giant spiritual feet of Durell and Nabokov will come crashing down atop this insistence, smushing it to flat little pieces. Which, Byron and one or two of the Brontes will piss on.
In fact, I'd say it was the myth of Tolien holding back the realization that fantasy is like ninety-seven percent of our entertainment. Unless you're reading all those FXed-up blockbusters at the local cinema as something legitimately plausible and likely.
But, no, we're supposed to think of Tolien as 'fantasy' and if it's something different, serious or well-written - espectially - then it's oh, 'magical realism'. Which, is the shittiest, most annoying marketing term I can think of at the moment. Borges, Nabokov, and Joyce all wrote some fantasy, in their time. 'Like Water for Chocolate' and 'Fabulous Harbors' and 'VALIS' are all fantasy works, and so is 'Wuthering Heights' and some of the better plays of Shakespeare.
To sort of back some of this up, a short list of very good fantasy works in print: 'Finnegans Wake' by Joyce, 'Ada, or Ardor' by Nabokov, 'Invisible Man' by Ellison, and one short work that springs right to mind: 'Pennies Off a Dead Man's Eyes' by (that other) Ellison (Harlan).
 
 
Saltation
19:18 / 24.02.06
>The goal here isn't to list your favorite book, or at least, not only that. I'm looking to determine what Barbeloids consider the constituent parts, the guts, of good fantasy. ...
For me, the word is resonance. Part of what made Lord of the Rings work so well was it's historical and mythological resonance.

You appear to be using Resonance in the sense of how close a fit readers see/feel between what's in the book and what they know[&feel an urge towards].

I agree. Primarily with your Resonance thoughts, but also with your specific example being a direct extrapolation of that.

By the bye, in amusing synchronicity, I started a thread recently discussing precisely the same thing but at a much more Primitive level (so it's far less amenable to such neat examples): what's a better word than Myth?.


Re "what makes Fantasy" - in a commercial sense, i will drily note that in distinguishing SciFi, Fantasy, or "Literature, whichever publisher/channel it's sold through appears to have more bearing on the book's category than does its content.


Re "what makes good Fantasy" - i think there's a distinction to be drawn between good and popular, but that they are not an either/or distinction: they are different scales. and the scale of "good" varies almost by person . but the key thing i've noted for Popular is your term Resonance. the closer something resonates to a group-agreed concept, the more people will like it. and most of those group-agreed concepts come to us from our pre-adult culture. (or perhaps pre-leavehome culture might be more ultranational.)
so just as mediaeval japanese would have regarded a book referring to the man in the moon as weird and freaky, they would have found a book referring to the rabbit pounding rice meal as comforting. comforting because it re-affirms a situation they already know and feel comfortable in: their current lives and memories.
it's the same reason soap operas are the most popular tv shows on the planet and, for many, the most addictive.
there's also the aspirational aspect of comfort: it's nice to see something you want, and it feels good to have power over other people (note two different flavours of Desire underlying Aspirational there). this aspect of comfort/desire underlies the Fantasy TV shows like "Location, Location, Location", "What not to wear", and "Big brother".

so lord of the rings, drawing as it does so heavily upon all the existing myths and stories, and only tweaking the standard stereotypes slightly before extrapolating situations, Resonates very powerfully with people.

but more people Resonate with Star Wars. i realise this is straying out of your topic slightly but i'll stop it after this example, i promise.
star wars has all the same basic features as every single fairy tale ever told. plus gadgets and spaceships. and ALL the superior guys get an excalibur.
what it has over and above Lord ot Rings is cartoon-level HEROES. unambiguous: all of StarWars' heroes are sketches with no messy extra stuff. and they're represent a few different flavours for different people to attach themselves to. LotR lacks cartoon heroes: this is deliberate apparently, and JRR was hoping to have Samwise come out of it as the most praiseworthy.
so it has same comfort-similarity factor as LotR, but then adds Simplicity, plus adds greater ease of identifying with a Hero. Heroes have Power over other people, and they achieve Reproductive Success.

The Hero always gets hir Mate.

Bridget Jones, anyone?

"there are no new stories"

so yeah, anything that Resonates with a fundamental human drive will appeal VERY powerfully. and anything that Resonates with a known cultural milieu will appeal powerfully.
 
 
Saltation
19:21 / 24.02.06
i apologised before, but i DID bring up scifi's "Star Wars".

so i'll do the right thing and, in keeping with this thread, here's how to link Star Wars straight back to Harry Potter:

Harry Potter, the script
 
 
Digital Hermes
21:04 / 24.02.06
Ok, well, we're vacillating here between either defending or attacking Tolkein (which is fine) and his general footprint on the speculative fiction industry. (Because whichever way you want to cut it, it's a massive footprint. You and I may not entirely like that, but market-wise, it's true.)

And though we can agree that all works of imagination are fantasy, I think it might be helpful, if anything just to focus the discussion, on works where there is a significant deviance or change from the world of the book. Finnegans Wake's major deviance, along with Ulysses, is how that world is represented. It's not like he's populating Dublin with unicorns, though Leo Bloom may hallucinate them.

So, let's get some names and titles out there. Explicate on some particularly good fantasy you've read, be it epic-style, urban, or what-have-you. I'd go first, but I think I've yapped too much on this thread.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
01:18 / 25.02.06
Swords-and-sorcery tales have been with us a very long time, in legends and history

I question the link between modern "swords and sorcery" and ancient "legends". We go into something like Tolkein knowing that it's not real, whereas when "legends" were current, it's reasonable to say that the audience might actually have beleived quite a lot of them, experienced them as truth rather than as pure entertainment- though obviously there was entertainment involved. Viking-era literary axe-slaying is not an escapist intellectual conceit, it could be equivalent to WW1-era literary machine-gunning in it's adress to the context- serious business, in other words.

so it seems to fit that we would still have a fascination with those stories.

While we're on the subject of the "fascination" that people have for "Swords and Sorcery", I often call balls on the old reactionary argument that people are attracted to something with "mythic" qualities because we now live in a complicated, ambiguous modernity that has become removed from the "good old days" of simple technology, simple living and, ultimately, simple justice, when might went hand in hand with right and a man could cut off someone's head and be safe in the knowledge that the decapee was an evil sorceror.

Rather, I think it's more Oedipal. The huge American market for "Celtic Fantasy Trilogies" perhaps has something to do with wanting to connect to a safe version of European history, a sanitised, valourised image of the past, free from the moral ambiguities of that real place and time, as opposed to looking into actual American history with all the genocide and horror that that represents.

Quite possibly this could be applied across the 1st world: because history texts now have a nasty habit of biting us in the arse with the unpleasant colonial reality of recent history, we look to Tolkein with his simple morals not as an escape from the present but an escape from the past.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
01:51 / 25.02.06
Kind of on the same tack, I'm rather frond of Glen Cook's "Black Company" novels. Big High Fantasy tropes, yer proper epic backdrop and everything, but all told from the point of view of the grunts. They're actually a lot closer in feel to Vietnam memoirs/novels than more "traditional" fantasy stuff. Probably not ever gonna be considered classics, but they're a good little read. And as far as I know they are actually fairly original in tone, despite using all the same cliches as everyone else. All the big spectacular magical war stuff is going on, and they're grumbling about when they get paid and whether they'll survive the epic LOTR-style battles.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
02:03 / 25.02.06
So to look at beginnings, does the vast amount of shlock genre work invalidate an attempt at epic storytelling? I hope not, because I still enjoy that kind of story, and look for it to be told well again.

I think there are definitely certain elements that are invalid at the moment for being so clichèd. Doesn't mean they always will be, of course. Off the top of my head, I can think of Norse/Celtic nouns- way overused, and used without skill or foreknowledge.

Is the entire epic as a concept invalidated? Maybe it's right under y'nose in a different form. Doctor Who? Lost? The Tomb Raider games?
 
 
This Sunday
08:26 / 25.02.06
Mostly the concerns of fantasy, and of the romance and epic, are less their existence in our mainstream or general contemporary fictions, but a problem of perception. For the most, we kind of generally default fantasy to sword & sorcery and we default epics and romances to fantasy. This is unnecessary. The mode of storytelling is what makes something an epic or a romance. I'd posit that a large percentage of our prose fictions being turned out, today, are epics or romances, rather than novels in the proper sense. Those Rice vampire books, Wooster and Jeeves, and the Jack Ryan sequence... somewhere along the line - some quicker than others - the idea of them as novels is kinda bumrushed off the scene. A novel, by definition, requires that sort of singular moral element that all other pieces revolve around. If it's more episodic than that, it's not a novel, generally, but an epic - and depending on how out-your-window it is, it may be a romance. So, the Anita Blake books or the Alexandria Quartet, are made up, perhaps, of novels, but a sequence as a whole is bigger than the sum of its novelistic parts, so that it isn't really any more a sequence of novels, per se, as they revolve not around a singular moral concern - moral being here any nonphysical concern/crisis - but utilise a setting or character(s) repeatedly, to discuss and analyse several different concerns in a continuing narrative that feeds off its earlier iterations.
'Passage to India' is a novel. 'Right Ho, Jeeves' is a romance. 'Star Trek: Deep Space 9' is an epic. And none of it because they involve mighty barbarian princesses or Strider on the cross.
I'm very tempted to start calling all proper novels 'housewife fictions' now, in the same vein as 'airport fictions,' but I won't.
The only thing's I can think of that actively and consciously set out to rebel against or correct the Tolkien mode, are the David Eddings sequences and those early Moorcock things with the petty albino and his continual bewilderment that the world isn't half as shitty as he'd like to think of it. Other than that, from Tennyson to Leiber to whomever was responsible for 'The Scorpion King', are most definitely entirely distinct and not terribly concerned with Tolkien's hobbits and evil races of dark things on elephants what must be destroyed by the true king of manly men at the boiling heart of an old witchy mountain.
What I'm wondering, now, is if the epic mode isn't what's killing too much fantasy. Just cutting it off at the knees, because you can't take one good story, one good book or movie or whatever, and leave the rest. I really don't care for the original 'Star Wars' or the latter three films, but 'Empire...' and '...Jedi' are worth a rewatch now and then... except that I can't really, readily, divorce 'Return of the Jedi' from 'The Phantom Menace' any more. I can't take 'The Dark Knight Strikes Again' and separate it from the entire Batman narrative of page, screen, et al, or sluice 'The Madness of Tristram' from the whole Mort D'Arthur, and this upcoming Hollywoodian lovestory action blockbuster version is going to seep into the cracks and never go away, either.
Other genres, other areas, seem to have no real addiction to this serializing, though. Fantasy marketed as fantasy seems to require being a series, now. It can't ever just do its bit and die. Robin Hood needs that arrow to finish it off as much as Quentin Compson's got to buy the farm in "The Sound and the Fury". Faulkner can't go and write the "The New Adventures of Quentin - Surprise He's Not Dead! - Compson" and get away with it. You let them do their bit and then put them away. Unless they immediately lend themselves to being a reiterated character, a character who can be used specifically to tackle different subjects, like Stephen Daedelus or Jack Ryan. But, no, thanks to the market being what it is, we'll have a thousand 'Wheel of Time' books wheeling along for all time, filling up the shelves and generally weighing down the whole thing like some horrible punishment for our literary sins.
What's the bit from 'Kill Your Boyfriend'? "It started as a trilogy but it's on book eight now, and there's a really strong female lead with her own sword and everything," or something like that?
 
 
Digital Hermes
17:24 / 25.02.06
While we're on the subject of the "fascination" that people have for "Swords and Sorcery", I often call balls on the old reactionary argument that people are attracted to something with "mythic" qualities because we now live in a complicated, ambiguous modernity that has become removed from the "good old days" of simple technology, simple living and, ultimately, simple justice, when might went hand in hand with right and a man could cut off someone's head and be safe in the knowledge that the decapee was an evil sorceror.

To be fair, I never said that the fascination came from those aspects. My statement was essentially saying that epics, myths, legends, the whole ball of wax, have similar tropes that are in play in Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. I'm taking a very Joseph Campbell view here, so if you're not of that camp, we'll part ways on this point.

I don't think we're yearning for the 'good old days', so much as we want to be thrilled, and maybe, inspired. Perhaps the Arthurian tales, before Malory ever set them to paper, were as much of a moral code system as the bible later became (amoung the many things that book became).

I think a major difference is due to information saturation in the world. When you're telling a story, in print or orally, and your audience has a fair shot at either going to the library or the internet to find out if it actually happened, it's a little harder to give them the impression it was a true story. Interestingly, those who have come after Tolkein acknowledge their fiction element, and in the levels of cheese and stereotypes abundant in their work; you see that it's crafted. Though I don't argue that Tolkein is a good enough writer to make his words dissapear, I would argue that his sprawling narrative, and abundance of detail, come from an impulse to suggest that this is a forgotten epoch of our world. In that sense, Tolkein is acknowledging his sources; the epics and myths that he was so familiar with. His writing of it was primarily for himself and his family, passed down as a tale of things that interested him. It's publishing and our familiarity with it are incidental. He was not writing it for global consumption.

Ok, I'm ranting a little here, but it seems like Tolkein could do with a bit of defending. In some respects, it seems like the people hitting him the hardest are essentially blaming him for an industry, a marketing juggernaut, he never intended to create. It's easy to attack him in retrospect, but consider when he was writing it, and when it was eventually published.

I think it can be agreed that Fantasy, as well as Romance, Epic, and so on, can be attributed to a wide range of storytelling styles and mediums. So, I mentioned Joseph Campbell previously. Where does his mythopoetics fit? Or does it at all? Keeping in mind the 'sword & sorcery' model isn't necessarily the only model usable. (Let's not badger the old proffessor too badly, eh?)
 
 
All Acting Regiment
14:46 / 26.02.06
To be fair, I never said that the fascination came from those aspects.

No worries, I wasn't aiming any balls at you. Must dash but shall be back shortly. In the meantime, who's Joseph Campbell?
 
 
Digital Hermes
17:14 / 26.02.06
Joseph Campbell was a mythographer who basically followed the lines of Jung's 'collective unconcious,' saying that myths are prevalent in human society because they satisfy a subconcious need. Also, that you can find such similar iconography, or similar plots along myth-lines, seems to indicate that many of these stories are following a sort of ur-myth, or meta-myth.

I'm kind of compartmentalizing his views, but a lot of what I'm talking about here comes from his book, "Hero With A Thousand Faces," which is looking at the hero myth, in particular.

(I should probably defer to the internet oracle, Wikipedia, on the subject.)

Anywhoo, in continuing my beleaguered Tolkein defense, I would put out that Tolkein was very much in imitation of these myths and epics, where as the orcish-typist legions that followed him with re-hashes of the same story, are only imitating him. They are not recognizing his source, and would then be less resonant based on the lessened source.

(All of this is with the caveat that there have been some diamonds inside that rough.)
 
  
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