Squaring Circles: Anachronism in Fantasy Hot

I dunno, I always thought Stan Lee was the author of the century. Maybe that's the Jason Lee part of me talking...;D

pocket-watches in Bilbo the Hobbit? are you sure? clock on the mantelpiece, yes (2 occurrences in the text); but pocket-watches?

Shit!! I have tried about 20 times to read those Thomas Covenant books. Best I have got is half way through the first volume.

Are they really worth the effort...I find the writing pretty turgid.

Not 100%, no, but I thought at one point he checked his pocket-watch. I didn't check the book beforehand as the point I'm making is still valid, whether I'm right about the pocket watches or not.

Well I think they're excellent but if you're not enjoying it after reading half the book, I don't think reading the rest of it is suddenly going to make you change your mind. A lot of people find Covenant himself pretty irritating, even horrible: but that's part of the point, he's an anti-hero rather than a traditional protagonist.

Well, there's no post office in Bilbo either. (only a reference to the reader knowing his way to one). There is a post office in LotR though.
Your point about a literary device to help the reader enter the story is true, but some of your paragraphs are totally based on pocket watches in Bilbo, and as such, invalid.

Also, who's Tolkein?

I'm sorry, but that's just rubbish. Substitute "clock" (which you've already admitted exists in the hobbit) for "pocket watch" and the argument remains the same.

but some of your paragraphs are totally based on pocket watches in Bilbo, and as such, invalid.

Wouldn't the clock you mention serve the exact same purpose as far as his arguement is concerned?

Nice article Matt, I know what your saying and while I do know that many stories like to give you a character going through the discovery the same time as you I kind of prefer when the writer doesn't do that. As an example the Coen movie Miller's Crossing, the first time you watch it a number of scenes don't make complete sense at the time because you don't know who they're talking about or what situation they are referencing. They assume you already know, as the movie unfolds those same events and characters become known to you so that if you watch it again it makes more sense. It encourages you to return to it, which to me is a good sign. I also really hate expository dialogue which serves a similar but more obvious purpose.

What ruins these things for me is being aware of it. The story feels more contrived, hence less believable, if your aware that it is doing things specifically to increase your comprehension. I prefer the info to reach me seemingly by accident.

I don't want to know who that man is behind the curtain.

It's never even used as a "clock" (as in, reading the time) in the hobbit; only as a device under which to put Thorin's letter, that Bilbo forgets to read.

Matt's post was not there when I wrote this. Now this accident has forced me to leave a second, less contributive post, immediately afterwards. Thanks God!

I hate lame explanations of magic in fantasy stuff. If you know how it works, it's not really MAGIC, is it?

Like the force in Star Wars; it was much cooler back when it was mysterious, before the lame midichlorions explanation in episode I.

I think that there are two different issues here: one is the need for scientific explanation for everything, which will obviously tied the hands of any fantasy author. That is the sort of stuff science-fiction could care about (according to my understanding). But you cannot avoid the need for coherence. That's why for example Harry Potter's world doesn't make any sense: "magic" there is only a catchall of entirely disconnected objects, powers, events. Of course things have to make sense, but not necessarily in scientific terms.

Bilbo checked his pocket watch in the movie from '77. His mantel clock could have been a water clock, which have been around longer than the medieval times.

All that aside I enjoyed the insight into easing the reader in the story using a guide we could relate to from a contemporary standpoint. The modern attempts to flush out every last detail of the fantasy universe seems natural for the fantasy geeks who derive pleasure from the esoteric. If it weren't for Tolkien we wouldn't have created the elvish language (written and spoken).

Is the Steampunk universe an extension of the "Edwardian fantasy anachronisms" Tolkien supposedly set forth?

I don't think so. I was under the impression that water clocks either a) looked nothing like normal clocks or b) were absolutely fucking huge. Often both.

Now that is an interesting idea. I have no idea what the answer is, but it certainly seems likely that *part* of the inspiration behind Steampunk is the geek drive to over-emulate Tolkien.

Tolkien's strength in my opinion is in his prose and the storytelling. But from a details perspective, Tolkien is excellent at getting the details correct for details that he chooses to goes after, and that builds his credibility for all the details he leaves in the mystery.

And mystery is where it belongs. I had no clue about whether there was a pocket watch in the book or not, because it just doesn't matter. It didn't matter when I read the book and it doesn't now. His writing is about the tapestry he weaves -- I don't care about the loose threads on the side facing away. If you want to read about minutia get a textbook. If you want to be entertained sit down with a storyteller.

S.

Sagrilarus: thanks for finding my words

Well said Sag. Also, Thomas Covenant is a dick.

So why then is Tolkien commonly perceived as the author who developed a fantasy world more completely than any other?

What I'm getting at in the piece is the idea that Tolkein built a lot of detail into the world that most readers are never aware of, except at a subliminal level, because he believed (correctly) that people would be able make connections based on linguistics and culture without really thinking about it. Shippey goes into this in great detail in his book but I'll offer the one example that stuck in my head. In The Shire, all the place-names are English, derived from Anglo-Saxon. When the hobbits travelled to Bree, Tolkien wanted to give the sense that it was somewhere *similar* but *different* to The Shire. So Bree itself, and the names of the villages thereabouts, are all derived from Welsh. The assumption was that English speakers would pick up on this and "sense" a linguistic difference between the two places.

That's the sort of detail I mean. And when you study it - as shippey has done - the amount of this sort of detail squeezed into the book, detail that anyone who wasn't heavily educated in north European language and mythic literature would miss, is quite incredible. It gives a huge sense of depth whilst still allowing Tolkien the sort of wiggle room for mystery that you talked about. But that sense of depth has driven many of his emulators and they've (understandably) not been able to replicate the original achievement.

Don't you think onf of the main reasons tolkien built up the hoemy familiar atmosphere of the shire was to heighten the contrast of adventure?

Also some of the best fantasy I've read comes off more as realism in a fantasy setting. I love how the Black Company embroilied the reader in the trials and tribulations of being in a mercenary company. Cooke didn't bother to explain magic in that setting either, it was just another part of the neccesary arsenal of the company. Too bad those books got more and more obtuse as you went into the series.

Steve"Croaker"Avery

Did he add that level of detail to impress the lay-reader? I'd wager not, using it instead as much as a fun diversion for himself as anyone else. Some people he knew likely got it and he never talks down to his audience. That's laudable. I suppose to some extent everyone gets some feel of it on an unconscious level and that's good -- he paints a unique all-around profile for each culture in Middle Earth.

Where Tolkien's detail impressed me that last time I read him (I was about 36 at the time) was his unerring description of the moon. I worked in a planetarium for three years in high school and I can tell you that pretty much every author and film ever produced screws up the moon and the stars with wild abandon. Tolkien is the shining exception. He not only gets the location time and phase correct on every particular reference, but they work correctly in relationship to each other throughout the time-line of the story. That never happens in other fiction.

And this really got me thinking the last time I reread LotR. Middle Earth is indeed Earth. It's foundation is Europe and Africa and the time setting appears to be in the pre-historic period prior to Bronze age. Now, I fully understand that he isn't truly setting it in that period and geography, trying to pretend there was a vast kingdom that historians have overlooked. But the ancient nature of the narrative and the details provided on things like the moon and the ethnic details of human kingdoms place the story firmly on Earth. He roots the story in ground he knows well.

A limitation of imagination? It could well be. I don't see the man quite as god-like as some do. But to some extent I think he recognized it and chose to stay in the safe end of the playground, focusing on what the body of actual ancient legend provided as a backdrop. This gave the work more solid footing, and also filled in a lot of detail so that his readers could hit the ground running. Orcs are new, Hobbits are new, but elves and dwarves and dragons and wizards and the hardware they're all carrying around are foundational concepts pulled out of Chaucer and Beowulf and Grimm and even Homer. His story stands on the shoulders of Giants.

My most recent reading really changed my opinions of the books because I noticed the sentence structure and the flow of the story. His writing is truly head and shoulders better than other authors in the genre. Donaldson edged towards it in Thomas Covenant but his self-destructive leading men (and two women) are just so tedious to read about. (For my tastes I need a bit more Hile Troy and much less Covenant.) I'm amazed when kids speak of Tolkien as overcome by modern author's works, though I don't think I was in a position to appreciate the prose at their age either.

S.

Sag - Wasn't Tolkien's purpose from the get go to create an English mythology? Sure he draws from Roman, Greek, Norse, etc - but they all kinda shared anyway. I thought he was working backwards somewhat in an effort to provide the English with something like that.

Hoping I remember *something* from my Tolkien seminar class from college...

You got me! I just read the books. Sounds plausible though.

S.

You do. And furthermore he took the opportunity to try and fill in some gaps and solve some puzzles that had been bothering scholars of the mythology for decades. And yes, of course, most of that material goes way over the heads of most readers, including me. But the point about the linguistic and mythological stuff is that most readers were capable of making the connections without thinking about it because they'd been bought up steeped in it.

Chiming in late here, I think the thing he does better than most and which is so key for fantasy is the way in which he builds the facade of a much bigger world. I like to use World of Warcraft as an example for this, bear with me please it's not what you might think; If you go into some zone in the game and look around, the edges of where you can no longer travel are blocked off by mountains or seas or great chasms and so forth. You can look off across this epic landscape and see what seems like forever into the distance. But as is always the case, people have figured out how to get BEHIND these areas and these mountains are basically one sided props, similarly, the sea that goes between the continents doesn't actually exist beyond a bit past where you would drown from fatigue. But as outsiders looking in to these things in the way they were constructed to be viewed, we see epic hugeness and fill out the rest of the world in our own imagination.

Tolkien and other great world builders use this sort of thing to great effect. Casually referencing all sorts of old times and lands that fall outside of the scope of the story makes the world feel enormous and full of life and history. And while Tolkien, moreso than pretty much anyone ever, did fill out a lot of this stuff with things like the Book of Lost Tales, he never actually has to fully pull back the curtain. If you just read LotR and not any of other books, you're still easily drawn into the idea that those other books MUST exist, even if only in his head.

I hadn't really considered how he did this so well, but in light of this discussion I see that it is how well he rooted it in reality so that it became subliminal to fill in the gaps as a reader. I think one of the other important elements that most modern authors miss is the casual and vague references to these other elements of the world. For example, the multitude of ruins that seem to be everywhere, sometimes a little bit is given on where they came from (sometimes a lot), but sometimes no real mention. They just ARE, and that the characters don't need to make a big deal of it makes it feel much more real. Walking around a land where there are lots of ruins and sights to see, you'll behave exactly like that; some worth talking about, others not so much.

Both these observations are totally accurate. The subliminal bit is what I've been discussing above. The bit about filling in the gaps is also crucial - it's easy to forget now, looking back that Tolkien *never finished* his legendarium and that large parts of it were still in flux in his imagination when he wrote LotR. So many of the references he put in to the larger history of middle-earth were, at the time, just stubs that he picked up later and filled in.

However I think the fact that he combined the two is vital in understanding why he succeeded where so many (possibly all) of his emulators fail. It's because of the subliminal stuff that the reader feels confident enough about the "realness" of the imaginary world to pass over the stubs without further comment.

PS: I just ordered the book. Thanks haha

It's difficult for me to express this, but here goes:

I have a problem with Tolkien's writing and I've never really been able to pin it down, but this conversation has helped I think. If you were to look at Tolkien's details as either macro or micro then I think I'm in love with his macro details as have been discussed here. His ability to weave a world with showing and not telling that really ignites the imagination without Jordan-like details about every. single. sunrise.

That said though, I think it's in his micro details that for me, he fails a bit. I want more dialogue and characterizations. Everything feels so impersonal and third person. My problems with his micro details are mostly about characters and it always made it hard for me to connect with them I guess. To this end, Peter Jackson's versions and even the old Hobbit cartoon (which I loved and was creeped out by as a kid) helped immensely in my comprehension of what all was going on. But then again, maybe I'm just a bit denser than the rest of Tolkien's audience.

Sidenote: What I've read of the Silmarilion I loved. But then I was introduced to it with "Imagine if you were reading the Bible for middle earth. Yeah, it reads like that." So maybe it's about expectations too.

Re Thomas Covenant I think it's a really great series (the first three anyway - the second three are just plain depressing but are still worth reading). Agreed Covenant himself is a dick (but as someone else commented, that's deliberate) but the world Donaldson creates is IMHO every bit as well formed as Tolkien's and at least we don't get any of the crummy poetry. I reread them about 12 months ago for the first time in a decade and they still stand up really well.

Honestly, I'd say it's because he's the most well-known and widely read. He helped shape the entire modern fantasy genre. Of course people are going to point to him. But there are more developed fantasy worlds out there, they just aren't as popular.

I think it's interesting to compare Tolkein to someone like M.A.R. Barker and his fictional world Tekumel. Like Tolkein, Barker is a linguist, and he also bases his many fictional languages upon real ones - only he uses Urdu and Mayan as his basis for them instead of familiar Romantic / Germanic languages, so they automatically have an alien feel to most Western readers. He's extensively developed the mythology and cultures of Tekumel, but used Indian and Egyptian and Middle Eastern mythologies as his touch point instead of the English and Nordic myths that Tolkein built on. And Barker has gone WAY beyond anything Tolkein ever did in creating these cultures - he's put together a world that is entirely fleshed-out. There aren't many "stubbs" left to fill in regarding Tekumel, and he's done it in the same informed way that Tolkein did, by basing it on real history, real civilizations.

But Tekumel doesn't resonate in the same way that Middle Earth does. And I'd argue that's just because the cultures it draws upon are foreign to most of us, whereas Middle Earth is familiar.

We're just drawn to what we recognize.

Funny that some think that Jackson helped them feel the story, I'm one of those Tolkien nuts who think that Jackson destroyed every single character of the book by perverting-warping-diminishing-corrupting them. There are so many cringe-inducing useless character-killing scenes in those movies that I can only but think he's a desperate pessimistic.

In a way, the movies aren't at all related to Tolkien's universe. The Hobbit will probably be as perverted as LotR.

carthaginian - as to the movies (what Tolkien discussion *doesnt* go there eventually?), I think of them wholeheartedly as an adaptation of the books. In my eyes, Peterson is allowed to give us his version of the trilogy. He uses similar characters and much of the same plot, but he does take liberties. NERD ANGERING LIBERTIES. Some are laudable, and some are laughable.

PO-TAY-TOES.

Ska_baron : (Last post on the topic from me) You're right on all counts, starting from the fact that a Tolkien nerd like myself cannot help mention his dislike of the characters' depictions in Peter Jackson's trilogy.
Jackson is of course allowed to take liberties, and I'm allowed to say that I find them distasteful. I don't know if you bothered comparing the characters' motives and reactions between the movies and the books, but really, every single one of them is somehow made pusillanimous by Jackson. Every. single. one. of them.
The funny thing is that I keep watching the movies in spite of him, only for the props. He didn't get Tolkien, but for the most part his team got the feel of the universe very well.

Regarding the topic: MattDP : I read LotR in French first and I was caught in the books too, though I never recognized Welsh/English differences, simply because the french translators changed some names in my edition (the Shire="la Comté", Frodo Baggins="Frodon Sacquet", Rivendell="Fondcombe", etc.) In the japanese edition that I read too, all the names are transliterated, which makes it even worse for native readers to distinguish the languages from one another. In spite of this, the book was and still is a success in both countries, and many others.... interesting, isn't it?

I've been to Bilbao and I'm pretty certain that a pocket watch or two exist there so I'm not quite sure what carthaginian's quibble is all about.

Also, as far as the movies are concerned, while they may not be entirely (or at all) accurate, they are certainly an acceptable alternative to slogging through Tolkien's dense writing. He may have been a genius at making his world believable (no argument there) but he is miles away from being a master of literary skills.

I'll agree that Peter Jackson did a much better job at creating the "world" than he did at developing the characters. I found few of them to be truly engaging in any way. Perhaps oddly, I thought Boromir's depiction was by far the most believable in this series, even though I don't really remember if his character in the books was the same. Frankly, since I have absolutely no deisre to subject myself to a rereading of the trilogy, I will have to rely on someone commenting on this observation to get my answer.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but I'm not sure this is entirely fair. Take the Council of Elrond chapter - it's the longest chapter in the book, contains virtually no plot and consists of virtually nothing *but* dialogue and characterizations. And yet most readers don't find it dull, but captivating. I'd argue it takes considerable skill at just those properties you say are missing in order to pull that off as an author, and I think that if you look at the details of the way the chapter is written you can get a sense of exactly where and how those skills are deployed.

I thought Tekumel was an RPG setting rather than a literary one? But that's splitting hairs, I guess. You could make a similar point about Glorantha as well. I think your broad point about being "drawn to what we recognise" is correct but I think you missed the main point of recognition: it's the mythology we're drawn to in Tolkien rather than the language, I think. That explains partly why Glorantha has never taken off in the same way, because it's just too outlandish for most people to connect with.

Yeah, it's a personal thing. I'm on the fence about this: I understand the need to "take liberties" in order to make the story digestible to a mainstream audience but I still can't understand why he did what he did to the plot and characters in the second film. The big changes there were unnecessary, I think, and a mistake. I'll rant at detail about it if you're interested. One thing I do think is praiseworthy about the films is that Jackson did manage - somehow - to shoehorn some of the sense of "depth" that we've been talking about in this thread into his movies, and that's quite an achievement.

Yes it is, I was wondering if someone was going to bring this up. I think it helps demonstrate Tolkien's skill as a writer that the book survives translation so well. But do you really get the same sense of depth reading it in another language? I have no idea - I'd be curious to know your opinion.

I could rant on and on also; I'm not sure the sense of depth is quite here in the story, actually.
The small amount that is here comes from the quality of the pictural depiction of the universe, I think.

Yes it is, I was wondering if someone was going to bring this up. I think it helps demonstrate Tolkien's skill as a writer that the book survives translation so well. But do you really get the same sense of depth reading it in another language? I have no idea - I'd be curious to know your opinion.

Well, I did get interested enough to read the silmarillion in french too, multiple times and going back to the SdA books to see where it connected.
Of course, traduttore, traditore; so there's nothing better than reading it in english, but that can be said of any book.

It started off as a fantasy world he created, which he then used for an RPG setting and later as the backdrop for a series of novels that never really attained much popularity.

Nah, I get that. I just think it's even simpler than that. Tekumel is likewise based on real-world mythology, only it's mythology most Westerners aren't familiar with. I don't think we're drawn to mythology, per se. We're just drawn to what we know, and in the case of Middle Earth, that happens to be the European-based mythology which Tolkein parallels.

I'd argue exactly the opposite. In my opinion the one thing the films simply could not replicate was Tolkien's rich writing style. My Anglican Bishop used to say, "The order is this ladies and gentlemen, King James Version, Shakespeare, Book of Common Prayer." I'd always add, "then Tolkien" and never get an argument.

S.