Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven
|
|
| Sunny Days in Heaven Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven |
|
|
Tuesday, November 04, 2003 Fantastic simplisme This fellow sees some negatives in Tolkien and LOTR. "Tolkien is the wen on the arse of fantasy literature. His oeuvre is massive and contagious - you can't ignore it, so don't even try. The best you can do is consciously try to lance the boil. And there's a lot to dislike - his cod-Wagnerian pomposity, his boys-own-adventure glorying in war, his small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos, his belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity. Tolkien's clichés - elves 'n' dwarfs 'n' magic rings - have spread like viruses. He wrote that the function of fantasy was 'consolation', thereby making it an article of policy that a fantasy writer should mollycoddle the reader. " "Glorying in war"? I suppose if anyone had a right to glory in war, it would be Tolkien who knew the horror first hand in the trenches in WW1. This is really an attack on J.R.R.'s Christian/Catholic moralism. The problem for fantasy writers is that Tolkien's Middle Earth is not only epic, but it is so fully realized in both its myth and characters - its races, histories, languages, and primitive pitch like Norse sagas and Homeric legends. Everybody else's fantasy world thus suffers by comparison as small, pinched, shallow, trite, and thin. Tolkien is the Tolstoy of the genre (and transcends it), whereas others try to be John Grisham - plot driven pot boilers with cliche observations, and one dimensional characters. posted by Mark Butterworth | 12:48 AM | |
|
|
|
|
|||||||||
|
 |
||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||
