A Lovely Tribute to Tolkien

[cressidarambles]

Over the past several months, I've been working my way through a friend's collection of Knights of the Dinner Table gaming magazine. It includes a column by Paul Westermeyer devoted to reviewing fantasy and science fiction novels. For the 150th issue special, that column listed Westermeyer's picks for the top twenty most important fantasy writers

Comments

[lilan14]

"The style and tone is often at odds with modern tastes, but I say the fault lies in modern tastes."

*grins and applauds*

[cressidarambles]

*grin* I liked that too!

(And yay for your "Varda" icon!!)

[roh_wyn]

I say the fault lies in modern tastes

Hear, hear! I was part of a recent discussion on LJ about how it was impossible to emulate Tolkien's style in fanfic. While some were appropriately respectful of the way Tolkien wrote, one person said it would be a bad idea to try to emulate his style because it was terrible.

I just don't get that. Isn't style pretty subjective, so one person's horrible is another person's epic, etc? *sigh*

[cressidarambles]

it would be a bad idea to try to emulate his style because it was terrible.

Wha...? *shakes head*

Mind you, I do think it's very, very difficult to emulate Tolkien's style without sounding pompous, but I think that's just because most people nowadays can't write that way with a straight face. Which is another way of saying the fault lies in modern tastes, I guess!

I also love the acknowledgment that Tolkien's characters are both archetypes and individuals. It's fashionable among detractors to claim that the characters are just archetypes, meaning boring cardboard cutouts, and I have never thought that was true.

[roh_wyn]

Mind you, I do think it's very, very difficult to emulate Tolkien's style without sounding pompous

Oh, I agree. In fact, I think my response to the other post was that I don't try to write like Tolkien for precisely that reason (and also because I'm just more at home writing like me).

But if the complaint is that Tolkien is long-winded and stuffy, then so be it. As I see it, he's not writing the daily news. He's writing a fantasy epic and his style is perfect for the genre. If I wanted to write a fantasy ballad, I'd be hard-pressed not to at least try to do what Tolkien does with language in The Lay of Leithian, for example.

(Also, even Tolkien doesn't always write like Tolkien in Lord of the Rings. I remember reading On Fairy-stories and thinking I could clearly hear his academic voice rather than his authorial one. Know your audience, lol).

[lilan14]

Yeah, well, you do need to know, or be willing to learn, a fair amount of vocabulary to read Tolkien. Maybe that's the horror of it?