And I don’t know what bloggers doing at the moment. It’s been behaving really strangely recently.

One brief point though (which has nothing to do with the main argument)
be thankful your library stocks a copy of Slaughterhouse 5 - no matter what section they put it into. Mine seems to have the entire output of every chick lit writer ever published under one roof. (and there are only so many times you can read about a harum scaarum not conventionally attractive, has a passion for shoes, needs to find the right man after a failed relationship, seems to hold down a brilliant high flying career despite being singlarly inept at it heroine. And the number of times is….twice)

ta hb, i always get it muddled as to whether TH’s actual writing-time predated or was interlaced with LOTR. be assured, i will have forgotten again in another couple of years.

same as Slaughterhouse 5

(notice the amusing insight you get into the day-to-day processes of libraries when you see that british libraries automatically put a sticker on copies of “Slaughterhouse 5″ tagging it as “Comedy/Humour”, and move it to a separate section for the simple-minded.)

The Hobbit was rewritten as a back story once T realised that his sequel to it (TLOR) offered him a chance to develop his own personal mythology. Specifically, he rewrote Chapter seven to turn the ring from a standard issue magic ring found in all good old english tales and romance fairytales into something slightly more weighty and sinister. This was in about 1945 - 46 - around the same time that Tolks realised that he’d spent more time writing the sequel to TH than he had writing the original and that it was already twice as long. What he didn’t know was that it would be another decade before it was published. It was published unfinished in T’s eyes. He was revising it for the umpteenth time when his publisher, Unwin, after a seventeen year wait, got sick of waiting, drove to Oxford, stole the manuscript and had it typeset and printed. TH was a story he made up for his kids in the 30’s - one of the winter reads he jotted down. TLOTR’s was, in his words, ‘my lifes blood. Whether it runs thick or thin, I cannot tell. I only know this.’

“Smaug” is the Romanian (and its surrounds) word for “Dragon”

>But it does represent the first consolidation of the epic fantasy form.
ah ha, right, that makes better sense to me. yes, i agree completely with this.
the second landmark consolidation of epic fantasy form i’d suggest is Star Wars and the third Harry Potter, although HP was not deliberately constructed so.

remind me to post that hilarious .gif which converts the star wars script to harry potter…

back to LOTR musings:
i like the way it is 2 books: the first chapter, and all the rest. the first chapter is a pisstake satire of small village life. and if you want a surreal jolt, spend some time in west jutland: it IS the shire. same sleepy but indefinitely robust people, same landscape, same activities, same culture, even the same houses for gods sake. it was the houses that finally let me put my finger on what it was reminding me of. hobbit holes. for real.

i agree with your description of “not a writer…one project”. you could also say the same thing about moorcock, i’d suggest, although moorcock was actively seeking to be a writer. but all his books are just flavours/facets of the one book. go jc!
jrr’s other books/short stories are nice enough but not arresting. (farmer giles of ham etc)

i do find it amusing how LOTR has been canonised, such that certain core added memes of his are accepted as tropes and can be re-used without comment and without requiring explanation. orcs and [tolkien’s preferred flavour of] elves, mostly.

i would venture to suggest also that any genre-encompassing analysis of fantasy fiction is deficient if it doesn’t include the phenomenal impact on the world of fantasy-fiction-readers of Dungeons & Dragons. the interactivity (a core human ur-meme) built its own community (corollary: Web 2.0 swamping preWeb with only a tiny fraction of the preceding memes surviving but exponentially wider broadcast), and introduced far greater homogeneity as a result, as interactive communities tend to (need to) collapse to norms. (reduces interperson communication drag) since D&D most heavily drew on LOTR and Zelazny’s Lhankmar, those ideas developed their own self-reinforcing community and became memes/tropes.

i would argue also that i can see at least one clear post-LOTR addition to the fantasy genre, and that is the idea of Place subsuming/encompassing Characters/Events. altho i suppose it’s arguable that the Silmarillion was the place, LOTR&THobbit were the two riffs on the Place. but the counter-argument was that THobbit was only written as backstory, so lotr is THE story and silmarillion is just jrr’s own preparation for that one-off.
Roger Zelazny’s Lhankmar stories and Howard’s Conan stories are quite similar in that the main characters are small fish in a much bigger and heavily developed world (LOTR’s background by comparison is quite a light or stagey or melodramatic context)(think soap opera versus hollywood blockbuster), and in that they are not heroes or even the main players in what’s going on (think soap opera versus hollywood blockbuster). (conan is interesting btw, as a meme: howard continually described him as a thief, but his surviving meme is that of all-conquering warrior. (my personal framework: the latter best fits some widespread aspirational ur-memes so that subset survived in the popular mind)) and both are similar to Judge Dredd. judge dredd is NOT the main character in his strips: he is just a principal supporting actor. the main character is Mega City One. zelazny’s Faffhyrd and Grey Mouser are actors on the stage of Lhankmar, and Conan is an actor on the stage of a conflated EurAfrica. Salinger writes similarly: repeatedly riffing on the same few characters in the same restricted context, but his “Place” is “current” society/the social framework of his characters.

an interesting deliberate extension of this was the fantasy series “Thieves’ World”, where instead of one author riffing repeatedly on a set of characters in A Place, a large number of authors each riffed ONCE on the same characters in the same Place (city).

interestingly, this arose from a particular roleplaying event which happened to include some fantasy authors. who were so taken by the depth and richness of the backstory that they wanted to add to it.

interestingly, this concept arose from another roleplaying game that was fundamentally different from any other: RuneQuest. (which also was the source of the name for Honda’s revolutionary lightweight mega sportsbike: the FireBlade). there, the backstory was vast and deep and was driven by fiction writers and mythology students. and the core contributor was a passionate student of meta-mythology : what DRIVES myths, how do they EVOLVE, what EFFECT does that have. and similar to tolkien, he wrote his own universe. differently, he then invited others in, rather than simply showing them the result.
you can get lost for hours in the explanations of the myths, in the rolling balances of power, in how the myths both create and are created by the societies and their conflicts. trolls are autistic humans: more honest, more brutal, less cruel; elves are vicious mobile plants, dwarves love clockwork, chaos is a tool, death is a power, gods are variable.
also interesting: that world’s progenitor moved on to create a sequel game that was essentially competitive story-telling. which i believe cuts at one key aspect of the very essence of which fantasies survive and propagate and which whither. religions, for example.

• Joe Haldeman’s “All My Sins Remembered”
• John Sladek’s “Tik Tok” (which, among other satires, predicted in the 50s the precise behaviour of today’s HMOs in the US)

I don’t think that fantasy ends with LOTR. Not at all. But it does represent the first consolidation of the epic fantasy form. Look at the structure and the themes. Trilogic structure, good versus evil, a weapon of power, a quest, an unlikely band of brothers, reluctant hero versus all powerful nemesis etc etc…

And now spring forward to…

The Sword of Shangalangalangalanglang

(for example)

It’s no secret that Tolks used his academic resources and personal interests to shape and create the narrative. The philologist professor in him created the (working) languages he ascribes to various races, giving them a linguistic history and concomitant cultural history; the literature prof in him readily ransacked the literature he loved most for inspiration. The lonely mountain? Mirkwood? The Misty Mountains? They’re all geographical landscapes lifted straight from Norse literature of the dark ages/early medieval period. The dwarves names in The Hobbit? Lifted wholesale from the Dvergatal of the Prose Edda. Dvergatal? Dwarves List - List of names. His insistence (an insistence which cost his publisher a fortune as the first print of The Hobbit had to be scrapped when the proofers changed his spellings) on using the plural ‘Dwarves’ and ‘Elves’ was explicitly to align his races to those found in Sir Gawain and the Green Night and Beowulf rather than Spensers dwarfs and elfs. Old pre medieval literature and language rather than medieval/romantic. Old English rather than bastardised Norman Latinate English. His meshing of his academic and professional interests and passions with his personal vision makes it such a compelling work. The themes have been done before. He knew this. He used them, borrowed them, reworked them and welded them together. He always wanted to create his own mythology. That turned out to be The Silmarillion - which he couldn’t get a publisher interested in. So he wrote LOTR’s as a recovered fragment of the history of Middle Earth as a bridge to that mythology. His idea was that each would lend the other credence. He wasn’t a man of letters in the sense of being able to bang out a book about whatever was ‘in’. He was a man who had one great project in his life which he spent a lifetime working on. The result is what he left behind. Fantasy has moved on but it is most interesting in areas that have escaped his shadow. Moorcock, for example. Those who retread him are doing a disservice to the labour of love he undertook and the breadth of knowledge, learning and craft he brought to the task.

hey hb: i am uncomfortable with your statement above: that fantasy ends with LOTR. jrr deliberately wrote lotr as an agglomeration of gothic/celtic fantasy in a victorian-reconstructed-celtic-fantasy milieu, as part of and accompanying his teaching of same to uni students. he was unusual for his dedication to back-story and to language, and he salted his creations quite nicely with out-of-milieu words to keep it from bogging down while remaining familiar (the romantic “Smaug” for example).
but, could you say he did anything new? could you say he did anything different in nature (NOT scale) from what was written before or since?

i’d argue quite the opposite. he deliberately rewrote previous fantasies (and myths — e.g. shebol’s stabbing/thingummy’s poison-spitting dragon slaying). he just added a rich backdrop. (and some literary ability

i would definitely agree that, by its sheer depth and sheer scale, subsequent fantasy fiction has very often been measured against it, and hence held to conform to its elements. that is: it has become a benchmark. like the bible versus all the other books written 2000+ years ago.
but lotr was itself conforming to those same pre-existing ur-elements.

lotr was unusual re its richness of backstory and meta-unusual in that it deliberately played on existing memes.
but i regard it as only a landmark on pretty flat timeline.

• calvin and hobbes– tick tick tick! i have the lot.

• Dickens– if you have any interest in history or sociology, or people, i unreservedly recommend his non-dickens-genre collection of snippets: “Tales by Boz”. similar to the scintillatingly powerful Ambrose Bierce’s “Devil’s Dictionary” (”Year: a period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments”) in that these are the snippets that dickens wrote to pad out the blank pages in the magazine he was running. they are not stories; they are blog-entries describing a moment or evening or morning in london. and they are a tremendous and tremendously pungent insight into the day-to-day dailiness of 19th century london’s real people (especially the poorer).

• on top of PG Wodehouse, if you haven’t already, you MUST read “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde. an absolute confection of prickling delight.

• Wodehouse wodehouse wodehouse. he only has a handful of characters so you tend to love most whichever you hit first. for me it was bertie and jeeves, and i was hooked halfway down page 1. here’s the opening lines:

I shall always remember the morning he came. It so happened that the night before I had been present at a rather cheery little supper, and I was feeling pretty rocky. On top of this I was trying to read a book Florence Craye had given me. She had been one of the house-party at Easeby, and two or three days before I left we had got engaged. I was due back at the end of the week, and I knew she would expect me to have finished the book by then. You see, she was particularly keen on boosting me up a bit nearer her own plane of intellect. She was a girl with a wonderful profile, but steeped to the gills in serious purpose. I can’t give you a better idea of the way things stood than by telling you that the book she’d given me to read was called “Types of Ethical Theory,” and that when I opened it at random I struck a page beginning:–

_The postulate or common understanding involved in speech is certainly co-extensive, in the obligation it carries, with the social organism of which language is the instrument, and the ends of which it is an effort to subserve._

All perfectly true, no doubt; but not the sort of thing to spring on a lad with a morning head.