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Post by Reba on Mar 7, 2020 9:39:48 GMT -5
I am relieved to hear you were not comparing anything to fairy tales to disparage the latter. I don't have much stakes in the Tolkien debate, but I've read The Fellowship of the Ring &The Hobbit, and found them worthwhile lit back when I was interested in fantasy... If you're claiming that Tolkien is merely folklore fan-fiction (i.e. derivative), couldn't you also say (with the disclaimer that I haven't read Alighieri yet) that Dante's Divine Comedy is merely Bible fan-fiction? After all, he did not invent the world he's set his story in, having adapted it from Christian mythology. ummmmmmmm well let us note that tolkien wrote a fiction adventure story for children. its sources are construed purely for entertainment purposes. whereas dante wrote a mystic poem which was meant to catalog and analyze the philosophical, historical, and scientific understanding of his time. the existence of a setting and a narrative to frame these purposes is not at all the crowning merit of the poem, though that may be all that some modern readers can get from it. moreover, he largely adapted his ideas of hell, purgatory, and paradise from classical sources like Plato and Aristotle, not christianity. most christian aspects are theological rather than mythological. Paradise Lost, on the other hand, is most certainly bible fan-fiction
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Post by Reba on Mar 7, 2020 12:25:32 GMT -5
if a single word of that was Tolkien’s intent then he was the dumbest motherpotato er who ever lives, but it sounds like pure quisbyism to me 😂😂😂
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Post by Hermes on Mar 7, 2020 17:21:22 GMT -5
This reminds me of the old days!
Quisby: Certainly his original plan was to create a mythology for England, but I think that had rather receded into the background by the time he wrote LOTR, which is not explicitly English in the way that his early writings were. But in any case, I think that this can still be called entertainment, in a broad sense; the aim was to produce a significant and moving story, not to tell the truth about the world, as Dante's was.
Bear: Of course Tolkien is drawing on existing material. No work exists in a void. The kind of world he is writing about has roots in Norse mythology, and the general idea of mediaeval-ish fantasy, and the theme of quests, had been around for a while, with William Morris as probably the first person to put them on the map. But Tolkien did something new with it. Brooks and Eddings and Paolini, and other authors even less memorable than them, are imitating Tolkien. Tolkien isn't imitating folklore in the same way; he's drawing inspiration from it, which isn't the same thing. Folklore isn't a novel.
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Post by Reba on Mar 7, 2020 18:37:35 GMT -5
Paolini claims to be influenced by the same stuff tolkien was. beowulf and all that. and like thathoboravioli said, the story might as well be more similar to Star Wars than to LotR specifically (or any other "hero with a thousand faces"-type formula). so how can you really say "He is the real thing. When he conceived that kind of world, it was new." for a genre so willfully founded on archetypal storytelling, set in a familiar world, full of traditional creatures? of course i know that, simply, Paolini is much worse at constructing a sentence than tolkien, but what could possibly be so NEW about tolkien that automatically makes his dragons and boy-heroes more "the real thing" than Paolini?
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Post by Poe's Coats Host Toast on Mar 7, 2020 20:55:24 GMT -5
i think pasolini ripped off the marquis de sade, not tolkien
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Post by thathoboravioli on Mar 18, 2020 16:10:18 GMT -5
I myself am writing a D&D/Tolkien-style fantasy story in a generic as *potato* fantasy world, though I kinda did that on purpose and wanted to sort of jab at or satirize tropes or common traits of said fantasy worlds (i.e. there are constructed languages but they are all based on real languages i.e. elves speak a Celtic-esque language, dwarves and giants speak Old English and Old Norse, cat and dog people speak a Semitic language that resembles Hebrew and Arabic thrown in a blender with the other "semlangs", and human languages tend to be either Romance languages or Middle English).
I haven't thought much on the story yet besides a water goddess choosing an elf lady to prevent a world war and defeat a dark lord who ultimately turns out to be a role-playing farmer, but for the most part I made it about how generic fantasy works have tended to be, how utterly stupid societies can be, and how imperialism is bad. However, the execution is what matters, so I don't know how to handle that.
I still haven't read Paolini's works, but from what I hear they are kind of typical fantasy stories in a typical fantasy world, though the first one is less of a LOTR rip-off and more of a Star Wars rip-off.
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