Doing Tolkien Wrong

[truepenny]

[first published on Reflection's Edge in March 2005; thank you to the Wayback Machine for helping me rescue it]

I was given The Hobbit for my sixth birthday, The Lord of the Rings for my ninth. I’ve read The Silmarillion. I own the extended edition DVDs of The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King–even though I don’t own a DVD player. In other words, I love Tolkien as much as the next really geeky person.

So when I say that Tolkien is an affliction and a curse, you understand that I’m saying it for a reason.

Specifically, Tolkien is an affliction and a curse to fantasy writers. This is a horribly ungrateful thing to say, when it’s largely thanks to Tolkien that fantasy writers can exist as a sub-species today at all. Certainly it’s thanks to Tolkien that so many fantasy novels, especially series of novels, can get published. But, nevertheless, the genre has reached a point where Tolkien causes more problems than he solves.

The reason for this is that, while Tolkien was a genius and a godsend to readers prepared to love secondary-world fantasy, he is a terrible model for writers. And that for a number of reasons, ranging from, on the macro level, his use of the quest plot to, on the micro level, the nature of his prose style. Imitating Tolkien – in and of itself, not a bad idea – has become mired down in slavish adherence to his product, rather than careful attention to his process.

We Can’t All Be Geniuses – Or Even Philologists

J. R. R. Tolkien was a scholar, a philologist (linguist), steeped in the literature on which he modeled The Lord of the Rings. Few (if any) modern fantasy writers can say the same, and this is where the mistake in imitating Tolkien begins.

When Tolkien drew for inspiration on the folklore and mythology of England and Scandinavia and Germany, he was doing so from a position of extreme and encyclopedic familiarity. He makes it look easy, unthinking, because what isn’t visible in the story is the years of academic training and reading and research behind it. When we (meaning modern fantasy writers) do research for world-building, we are attempting to create artificially what Tolkien had naturally.

The same is true of constructed languages (also called conlangs). Famously, Tolkien invented Elves so that he would have someone to speak the languages he created. But again, so little of the work involved is actually visible on the surface of the story that writers following in Tolkien’s footsteps are tempted to imitate the end result without understanding the years of foundational work behind it. This is not to say that conlangs are verboten in fantasy writing, merely that you have to be prepared to put a certain amount of work into it. There are resources online for anyone interested, either to improve one’s writing or simply for the fun of it; a good place to begin is the Language Construction Kit.

Elves and Dwarves and Hobbits, Oh My!

Another major problem – and this one not at all intrinsic to Tolkien’s work – is that much of Tolkien’s world-building has become cliché. Thirty years of D&D means that everyone expects elves in a fantasy world. We all know what they look like, what they act like. The same goes for dwarves, as Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books use to shamelessly good advantage. Perhaps because so much of modern fantasy is inspired or influenced by Tolkien, the elements of his world-building have become part of the genre’s common language – leading to the feasibility and hilariously painful accuracy of parodies like Diana Wynne Jones’s The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. And thus, what for him was merely a choice, about how best to tell the story he wanted to tell, has become for us a kind of black hole in our mental living room, something we get sucked into whether we want to or not.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the arena of the plot-arc. Tolkien chose a quest-plot. He did this, I suspect, for a number of reasons. He wrote a great deal about traveling, so the quest came naturally to him. It was also familiar from the tradition of literature he was evoking in his stories of Middle-earth. Grail-quests and quests to slay monsters and quests for all sorts of other reasons – those are the building blocks of Old English and Middle English narratives. And finally, the quest-plot was the shape best suited to the story he wanted to tell.

And now, fifty years later, the quest-plot is impossible to escape. It isn’t merely a convention of the fantasy genre; it’s a stereotype. It’s hard (not impossible, but hard) to imagine a story-shape that doesn’t involve some sort of questing motif. And it has, all too clearly, been done to death. When I started writing fantasy as a teenager, I tried to write quest-plots, not because I had ideas well-suited to them, but because I didn’t have any other model for how a fantasy story ought to be told.

The choices made by Tolkien to tell a particular story have been warped and magnified into conventions of an entire genre – and not to the genre’s benefit. When Tolkien set up his dichotomy of capital-G Good and capital-E Evil, he did so because he was interested in exploring how many ways there were to fall from the side of Good into the darkness of Mordor. Boromir, Denethor, Saruman, Wormtongue, Gollum, most crucially and painfully Frodo: each of these characters follows a different path into the same moral abyss, just as Aragorn, Galadriel, Faramir, Gandalf, Théoden, Sam, and the other characters who choose the side of light each has a different moment of crisis, a different strength that keeps them from falling. Sauron and the Ring are static, symbolic entities whose function in the story is to provide a fixed point of reference, a reminder of where bad choices are going to lead. In other words, Tolkien doesn’t create a Dark Lord because it’s a requirement of the genre; he creates a Dark Lord because it’s a requirement of the story.

So You Want To Write An Epic

The final way in which fantasy writers do a disservice to themselves in imitating Tolkien is in matters of prose and narrative style. As I mentioned above, many of Tolkien’s stories, and not just the most famous ones, are travel narratives. To him, this style seems to have come naturally, and thus he makes it look simple to write journeys that are compelling reading. But few people have the gift for travel narrative that Tolkien does, and thus the impression one gains from many fantasy novels of the characters wandering haplessly across the author’s carefully constructed map.

Moreover, Tolkien’s prose style (which is not always his strong point) is itself the result of careful choices made in the service of the story. He was writing epic in the old-school definition of the word–not merely a story that goes on for thousands of pages, but a story with a particular kind of thematic structure, a particular kind of character, a particular kind of mood. The Latin word gravitas, meaning both “dignity” and “weight,” suits exactly the prose style of The Lord of the Rings. But few writers nowadays (and few readers) have any interest in that kind of epic, and fewer still have the gift that Tolkien did for cadence and meter in his prose. Attempts to write Tolkienesquely generally founder and fall flat on the writer’s failure to understand either the skill or the purpose behind Tolkien’s exceedingly stately prose.

My point is not that one should not imitate Tolkien. Rather, it is that one should do precisely that: imitate Tolkien. Love the secondary world you create, understand the story you want to tell, choose your prose techniques and world-building tricks accordingly. Imitate the process, not the product. The story you write will most likely have nothing in common with The Lord of the Rings. Except, perhaps, that readers will love it.

Comments

[heartofoshun.livejournal.com]

Thanks so much for retrieving this article. Off to read it (for the first time!).

[heartofoshun.livejournal.com]

Great article! You are, however, preaching to the choir with me. You make a whole lot of points I have been trying to make within the community of Tolkien fans and scholars for years, but make them more eloquently and succinctly.

I really love and endorse this excerpt:

The Latin word gravitas, meaning both “dignity” and “weight,” suits exactly the prose style of The Lord of the Rings. But few writers nowadays (and few readers) have any interest in that kind of epic, and fewer still have the gift that Tolkien did for cadence and meter in his prose. Attempts to write Tolkienesquely generally founder and fall flat on the writer’s failure to understand either the skill or the purpose behind Tolkien’s exceedingly stately prose.

Nice job! and thank you so very, very much for tracking it down and re-posting it here.

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much! I tried to find this yesterday and I couldn't. Thank God for the Wayback Machine.

[leoboiko2.livejournal.com]

As a linguist, I wish there were more people trying to imitate Tolkien—as in designing full languages complete with historical changes and areal influences, and infusing them on a background modeled on actual epic songs of antiquity, and telling the story with the severely underrated care that he had with words in his prose (for example, he avoided words of Latin or exotic origin in his mythical pre-England, using pipeweed rather than tobacco and ’taters for potato; and deliberately made the wording of hobbits modern, to stand in contrast with the heroic register of others, just like the Shire is petite-bourgeois and anachronistic; for a long discussion, cf. Tom Shippey's The Road to Middle-Earth). On that note, the finely-crafted register of The Goblin Emperor was just delightful—"an"! proper T-V distinction! I loved Eťuveražin too, obviously.

But yeah, this hope of mine is predicated on the writer actually having a passion for linguistics and philology. Lacking that, superficial imitation of Tolkien's mere veneer won't do anybody any good. It's best when an author focus on their own interests, which then become strengths. GRRM clearly likes history a lot more than song; The War of the Roses stands in the background of his work as Beowulf looms over LotR, and this set it apart. Peter S Beagle didn't want to subtly encode historical depth into throwaway place names; but he took pleasure in making his words melodic and sing-song. You've delved deep in themes that would just be anathema to Tolkien's project, and that's why we readers love your stories.

[marycatelli]

o yes, those elves. . . .

In my midteens I started to notice that the standard fantasy races were not contributing, and I devised myself a new rule:

Is this elf necessary?

I soon found that all my stories could be written with a purely human cast.

(Took a long time before non-human characters started to come back in.)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

"Tolkien doesn’t create a Dark Lord because it’s a requirement of the genre; he creates a Dark Lord because it’s a requirement of the story."

Very well put. I've often seen Tolkien criticized for not exploring the mind and motivations of Sauron, but - despite the title of the book - it's not about Sauron, but about characters like Frodo, Sam, Aragorn, Gandalf, Faramir, Eowyn: exploring their minds and motivations. Sauron is, as you say, a fixed reference point on the map of good and evil - an excellent way of putting it.