BF2S Forums The Dead Pool

Last edited by uziq (2020-01-18 01:19:02)

uziq wrote:

Dilbert_X wrote:

Why was Tolkien a 'bad writer'?

" james joyce's and dickens' estate are, or have been, in similarly miserable hands." Good, I haven't read any Joyce but apparently its also shit.

those are not controversial opinions. tolkien's writing is very dry, flat, and endlessly descriptive. he was not a novelist by trade, he was an etymologist/linguist of old english/norse, what in the 19th century would have been termed grandly a 'philologist'. his world building is done with a metric tonnage of words, words, words. his sentences do not vary. his characters all talk in the same voice. his plots/arcs and dramatic conceits are all just taken from old norse sagas or epics. the only difference being, of course, the technical differences of the many imagined languages he came up with. but putting 4 new languages and alphabets, alien to the reader, into a book isn't literature, it's an autistic brain dump, a tweedy oxford don depositing the contents of his study or writing desk's top-right drawer onto the page.

tolkien was criticised for his style then, he was criticised during the 'boom' of popular fantasy writing in the 1970s and 1980s, he was criticised by sci-fi writers and cyberpunks, etc. read a page of william gibson's 'neuromancer' and a page from 'the Silmarillion' and tell me who is the more engaging and exciting stylist (somehow i doubt you've read either). here's how a writer interested in language opens a novel: 'The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.'. here's how tolkien opens: 'There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called lluvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought ...' even with the intentionally old testament genesis vibe, this shit continues for about THIRTY pages. all of these entirely made-up names are no doubt interesting for their etymological roots, and i'm sure 'Eru' means something in sanskrit that would warm an erudite oxford prof's cheeks with recognition, but good writing it is emphatically not.

not to mention the fact that he gave to fantasy a cast-iron conservatism, everything determined, like his close associate c.s. lewis, by some predetermined view of the world that was hardly imaginative and more a re-dressing of some very old ideas (pastoral-sentimental pre-ww1 guff about england in tolkien, high-anglican god toss with lewis).

but can you really say you've read 1,100 pages of lord of the rings and enjoyed it? that it jumped off the page? that you sat in an armchair in a state of rapt attention, wondering just what was over that 135th escarpment awaiting your plucky fellowship?

btw joyce's estate was controlled in a different way, in that his grandson controlled strictly what was permissible research and what topics constituted libel. it's certainly never hindered the publication of his books. they are all (justly) celebrated as some of the best works of the 20th century.

DesertFox- wrote:

Man, there's a lot of old farts still kicking around from page 1 of this 10 year-old thread. Some hits, though, too.

uziq wrote:

"so you haven't read the book". ok, great. nice to know you're a member of an anti-fandom, dilderp.

SuperJail Warden wrote:

Trivia Challenge: Can anyone remember why ATG created this thread?