Is Tolkien Actually Any Good? (2003)

I have read amazing books with boring stories. I have read amazing stories with poor writing. Both are good for very different reasons.<p>Tolkien still stands out in my mind as one of the best story tellers I have ever read. He was such a good story teller that people are retelling them in every way they can imagine in books, films, role play games, computer games, all sorts of media. D and D, warcraft, Diablo, all Tolkien rip-offs. Even Harry Potter.<p>The awe inspiring bit <i>is</i> the ambiguity, the hints of all the other stories untold, the heroes with bit parts, mentioned in passing. He didn't just write a story, he wrote a whole universe. What he did is rare, I can think of only a handful of other works that pull off the immersion convincingly, Isaac Asimov's Foundation, Ian M. Bank's Culture, Lucas' Star Wars (if they'd have just left it at 4-6) and Herbert's Dune (just). And none of them quite touch the awesomeness of middle earth.<p>He wasn't just good, he was amazing. Pure fluke perhaps, as the article hints at, but what a great one.

<p><pre><code> | 'Here, spring was already busy about them; fronds pierced moss and mould, | larches were green-fingered, small flowers were opening in the turf, | birds were singing. Ithilean, garden of Gondor now desolate kept still | dishevelled dryad loveliness.' </code></pre> <i>This is bad writing because of its use of cliches ('green-fingered' larches, for goodness sake); because of the way it lists facts ('birds were singing') with out really building up a picture, and because of its ham-fisted archaisms. It's one thing to use Latinate reversals when you describing a firey demon on a bridge ('a red sword leaped flaming'); but merely irritating to do so when you are describing the pretty countryside. And what the heck is 'dryad loveliness', anyway?</i><p>"Disheveled dryad loveliness" is quite evocative for me. This reminds me of many paintings of the Romantic period, many of which are also celebrations of nothing more than "pretty countryside." Many modern people think of such stuff as pablum, but there are places in the world that can be so beautiful, one's breath is taken away. (One particular brook by Glendalough on a good day, with no one else about, for one example.) If someone has never had this experience, I would feel sorry for them. If one's cultural background in mythology is based on action-oriented computer games, I can see how one might be annoyed by "pretty countryside." In a game, this is the annoying, tedious bit one has to get through for the good parts. In real life, it is a billion times more compelling, complex, and stirring than any game ever written until now could ever hope to be.<p>Don't get me wrong, I don't think Tolkien is a literary god, but I also doubt this author has the background to fully appreciate where he's coming from.

I found the critique misleading. It doesn't make sense to disparage Tolkien's Middle Earth writing without taking his background into account. He was a scholar of Anglo-Saxon legends and literature written in Old Saxon, Old Norse, and Old English. He was also a linguist who worked on the Oxford English Dictionary for two years. He was an expert on Beowulf; one of his most celebrated scholarly works is "Beowulf and the Monster Critics".<p>The writing in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion echoes the style of the work he studied and taught. I understand that many modern readers find the style and language alien; after all, the English language and English literature evolved considerably since Beowulf. Tellingly, the author of the critique compares Tolkien to much later authors, all of whom use ordinary 20th-century (American) English. Tolkien is a modern writer who consciously adopted an older cadence, and the author of the critique does not seem to understand this.<p>(It's worth noting that The Hobbit and the first chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring use a whimsical, less-grandiose style. I don't have a good explanation for this, except to guess that they originated in bedtime stories for Tolkien's children.)

You have to read it in context. It was written around the time of World War 1, when movies were still in their infancy and radio was limited to maritime and military use. Evocative descriptive language was the norm, because people were not used to thinking visually and needed all that verbal detail to fill the imagination.<p>I went through much the same experience as the author, but I still think Tolkien was OK, even though I no longer enjoy reading him so much. Sure, he's turgid in places (the second chapter of the first volume of LOTR is easily the worst part of the whole book), but then so's a lot of Charles Dickens' work. I love <i>Great expectations</i> but still wince at the hackery of <i>Hard Times</i>...there's a reason nobody even tried to make a movie out of that one.

The author of the article is a huge douchebag when he says things like "we can see why people who read real books hate Tolkien like a phobia". Are you kidding me? Get off your ivory tower. Criticism of Tolkien or anyone else is justified, but phrases like that make my blood boil. Who decides what makes a real book?

<i>Tolkien was not a 'perfectionist', inventing history because Middle-earth demanded it. Inventing history was a little game, a 'secret vice'; Middle-earth grew out of the game. And it is clear that he did not take the game half as seriously as some of his fans.</i><p>This is supplied as a criticism, but for me this is what makes Tolkien great. I dislike immensely that feeling that authors are just throwing in fantasy-ish sounding names and toss-away references to "deepen" the story. I can tell when they're doing it, its cheap feeling, and it sucks.<p>The one thing you know for damn sure about Tolkien, is that when he mentions some ancillary character or place reference, not only did he <i>not</i> make it up on the spot, there's very likely a whole file cabinet drawer on it somewhere because he'd been thinking about it for 20 years.<p>It made his world <i>huge</i>, internally consistent at nearly every turn, and immensely satisfying to read about even if his prose was "dense" or "cliche".<p>The fact that it wasn't intended explicitly to be a book, and was something he did for his own amusement is probably a key ingredient in the magic.

I think the author is right that the main pleasure of Tolkien is to revel in the vast world he created, both strange and yet archetypally familar. Where I disagree is that this is necessarily a bad thing.<p>I think we lack the vocabulary to describe this art form of building convincing universes. We can only conceive of it as a subordinate to narrative, with words like 'mise-en-scene'. But that doesn't quite cover what Star Wars or Tolkien or Dungeons and Dragons or Grand Theft Auto really are. World-building is arguably the dominant art form of the late 20th century and early 21st.

The article calls Le Guin a good writer and Tolkien a bad one. Le Guin herself writes:<p>"I picked for comparison three master stylists: E. R. Eddison, Kenneth Morris, and J. R. R. Tolkien; which may seem unfair to any other authors mentioned. But I do not think it is unfair. In art, the best is the standard. When you hear a new violinist, you do not compare him to the kid next door; you compare him to Stern and Heifetz."<p>and:<p>"Tolkien writes a plain, clear English. Its outstanding virtue is its flexibility, its variety. It ranges easily from the commonplace to the stately, and can slide into metrical poetry, as in the Tom Bombadil episode, without the careless reader's even noticing. Tolkien's vocabulary is not striking; he has no ichor; everything is direct, concrete, and simple."<p><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=ksOjjuy3issC&#38;pg=PA83&#38;lpg=PA83&#38;dq=elfland+poughkeepsie" rel="nofollow">http://books.google.com/books?id=ksOjjuy3issC&#38;pg=PA83&#3...</a>

A older friend of mine wrote this great assessment of Tolkien's work:<p><a href="http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/arts/al0127.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/arts/al0127.html</a><p>(there's no way to escape its essential Catholic vision).

The author quoted a Tolkien sentence about 'sombre trees like dark clouds on the hillside' as evidence of bad writing... but personally I thought that was a brilliant phrase.<p>I wonder how many books had Appendices before LOTR (fiction works obviously). I remember I couldn't wait to finish the main novel so I could investigate the Appendix!

Tolkein is certainly not the best writer; but on the scale of fantasy writing he is still near the top.<p>He always saved it for me by having such a wide and soaring vision of middle earth and then delivering it.<p>The silmarillion is horrible though :-)

must not feed the trolls, must not feed the trolls...cause when the sun comes out they will all turn to stone ;-)

The article talks about how slow the book is. He fails to realize that Tolkien is writing about a very deep game of strategy. It's like watching grandmasters play chess. Sometimes there is a flurry of captured pieces, but a lot of it is maneuvering, which may seem boring to those who don't understand it.

&#62; In order to get there, we have had to follow, in remorseless day by day detail the Hobbits' walking holiday from the Shire to Rivendell, the highlight of which is the monumentally irritating Tom Bombadil, who communicates entirely in jingles<p>Strangely, I loved the detailed walk through the forests. It made me feel like I was actually undergoing the walk. The entire book made me feel I made the journey!<p>I read LOTR first time at around 39 and loved it. It's time now for a re-read at 45. However, I've tried reading Silmarilion several times but never been able to complete it.

Perhaps lost in this discussion is the fact that for all practical purposes, Tolkien invented the modern fantasy fiction genre as we know it. Elves, trolls, dwarfs, orcs, wizards, halflings, and all that. He is also the predecessor to modern fantasy gaming, ala EQ and WoW.<p>Yes, one may find other examples of "fanciful" works, for instance, George Eliot's "The Lifted Veil", early horror works of Stoker and Shelley, or perhaps Jules Verne (which is not fantasy, so much as sci-fi), but modern fantasy, as we know it, began with Tolkien.

"But it also turns the book into a sort of puzzle, a complicated thread of back and forward reference which the dedicated enthusiast can attempt to solve. ... If you do follow all the references then, of course, it all hangs together beautifully."<p>Interesting that LOST <i>looked</i> like this sort of story, and drew in a bunch of dedicated fans on that basis, but turned out to be a more traditional character-based story after all -- where the references do not, in fact, hang together. Then out came the torches!

Meanderings of fantasy's writers make me nauseous. Tolkien's no exception. What is good writing is an extremely subjective topic. Suppose his work is some sort of accomplishment... though I never understood people's facination with it.<p>English is not my first language, maybe thats one of the reasons I prefer terse and to the point, yet beautiful writing. In my personal opinion, fantasy is good for those with excellent reading speed.

My grandmother read The Hobbit to me when I was 8. I read it to my stepdaughter when she was 8. Awesome book that we all enjoyed. Why the question?

Personally, I find Tolkien unreadable. I much prefer Michael Moorcock or Robert E Howard.