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One fascinating aspect of Tolkien’s oeuvre is that his writings are, how to put it, endlessly derivative. Not only did he use words from different languages, mo

One fascinating aspect of Tolkien’s oeuvre is that his writings are, how to put it, endlessly derivative. Not only did he use words from different languages, motifs from different mythologies, and images from different poetical traditions. He also mercilessly raided the writings of George MacDonald for characters and plot elements (try reading ‘Phantastes’ or ‘The Princess and the Goblin’ to appreciate just how freaking much he is indebted to him). And still the end result feels somehow original and fresh. Perhaps, one can say that Tolkien is 20th century‘s Shakespeare: a writer who invented nothing but who was absolutely unrivaled in re-arranging things.

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Cthulhu_ 6y ago
He did it so well that most "high" fantasy that came out after him felt derivative of Tolkien. I'd really like to see counter-examples though; I feel like I haven't dived into the genre enough, in part because I'm turned off by the sheer volume of some book (series) on the one hand, and the juvenile tropes (generic hero's journey formula) on the other.
- macleginn 6y ago
  One way to avoid Tolkien’s shadow was to branch into related genres. Cue weird/ubran fantasy (e.g., Perdido Street Station), historical fantasy (e.g., The Spirit Ring), or pseudo-fantasy (the Ghormengast series, The Buried Giant). Interestingly, it seems that only works from last category have some real literary value.
  - saalweachter 6y ago
    I've fallen for the LitRPG genre, in all its variety. A lot of it is very Tolkien-esque, given Tolkien's influence on D&D and its influence on RPGs that followed, but it has a different feel than the fantasy of the 70's-90's that lived deep in his shadow.
- pjc50 6y ago
  If you don't like hero's journey, you're probably going to struggle to like fantasy; on the other hand, both of Tolkein's most popular works embed the moral journey in a very literal, physical journey and do just fine. UKLG's Earthsea is the series that I hear most often loved by other authors, although I'm not familiar with it myself. Then there is Pratchett, who set out to do simple parody of high fantasy and ended up creating a deeply humanist character-driven universe.
  - gvjddbnvdrbv 6y ago
    You should read UKLG's Earthsea. They are objectively quite simple books (targeted at teens) but they are fantastic. As a side note in my opinion this series is an example of how the current phase of thinking someone has to be of a group to understand the group is wrong. The female author brilliantly captures a young male's journey towards a strong, compassionate, brave and very masculine manhood with all the mistakes along the way. As I grew up (and indeed still grow up) I often reflect on what Ged would do at different phases of his growth. So essentially the female UKLG is guiding me in my life. (Or maybe men and women are even more similar than I'm accounting for and a young woman's journey is just that similar to a man's).
    - pjc50 6y ago
      > the current phase of thinking someone has to be of a group to understand the group is wrong. > Or maybe men and women are even more similar than I'm accounting for and a young woman's journey is just that similar to a man's You're almost there; the point is not that you have to be in a group to understand a group, but that because of the power structure some are much more visible and celebrated than others. A female writer is more likely to be able to see what the male journey is like (due to thousands of examples) than a male writer, who is in turn more likely to project his own prejudices than actually find out what it might be like. (In turn, there have been a number of literary fights lately about white female authors doing terribly bad racial stereotypes of their nonwhite characters...)
      - arkades 6y ago
- riffraff 6y ago
  I would think "high fantasy" to be defined as "tolkienesque" (great evil to defeat and save the world). But there's a ton of fantasy where the other important tropes of Tolkien (great lost past, the dark empire, all good on one side and all bad on the other, the pure heroes) is missing. The first that come to mind are "the wheel of time" and "the chronicles of Thomas covenant". Also if you move from high fantasy there's a ton more interesting stuff, imvho :)
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    > there's a ton of fantasy where the other important tropes of Tolkien (great lost past, the dark empire, all good on one side and all bad on the other, the pure heroes) is missing. The first that come to mind are "the wheel of time" We must see different things. As I see the wheel of time: - Great lost past. This one's obvious; the Age of Legend is a huge focus of the books. - The dark empire. Doesn't exist in the present, but it is a feature of the great lost past. - All good on one side and all bad on the other: this seems to describe the wheel of time well? The whole story arc is Rand fulfilling the separate prophecies of every ethnic group in the world, bringing them all under the same government (his), and taking them to battle the even more unified forces of evil. - The pure heroes. Not sure what this means.
    - riffraff 6y ago
      Yes, the age of legends is the same trope, but I don't think the rest matches. There is one Big Evil but the lesser ones are all scheming against each other. In Tolkien there's just a bit with Saruman and the spiders, but you don't really have factions amongst the ringwraiths, for example. It's all just a battle between Sauron/everyone or Melkor/everyone. The good ones in WoT don't simply start separated but actively hating and fighting each other, Rand has to go to war with many nations and specific groups within nations, and some of them just split and start killing each other. This is not the same as Gondor and Rohan being on bad terms, or some elven clans just standing on the sides. In Tolkien's universe you 99% of the time know who is evil and who is not (elf, dwarf, hobbit, ent, eagle, northern man = good; orc, goblin, troll, dragon, great spiders, eastern man= bad). Yes, a couple human characters are ambiguous, but it's a pretty small minority. In WoT you have a couple evil races and you, the reader, have a clear view of who is good and who is bad. But in-world people want to kill other people because each thinks the other is evil: that looks a substantial difference to me. Re: pure heroes, I meant that the main characters basically are all 100% good. This is the same in both universes too, just not a constant in all high fantasy. At least I think, I didn't finish the wheel of time ;)
- simonh 6y ago
  For post-Tolkien fantasy with little or no Tolkien influences or tropes, the most obvious recent example is Game of Thrones. I suppose it's arguable whether it's High Fantasy, but looking at the character arcs of John Snow and Daenerys I think it clears the bar.
  - danans 6y ago
    > For post-Tolkien fantasy with little or no Tolkien influences or tropes There's perhaps no direct borrowing of names and character types, but by George R.R. Martin's own attestation, he sought to write a story with a scope approaching Tolkeins but disposing of Tolkiens idealism and dualism. He was deeply influenced by Tolkiens writing, and sought to correct it's flaws. https://www.tolkiensociety.org/2019/09/george-r-r-martin-i-keep-wanting-to-argue-with-professor-tolkien/ https://www.tolkiensociety.org/2019/09/george-r-r-martin-i-k...
    - einpoklum 6y ago
      So, an unoriginal _scope_ ? Hmm... I don't know about that.
- BolexNOLA 6y ago
  You should check out the “Mistborn” series by Brian Sanderson. You’ll recognize some tropes/themes but it’s really different from what I’ve usually read and the characters are absolutely fantastic. It’s 3 books and they’re a bit lengthy but it’s a self-contained, satisfying story. Elevator pitch for you: you know the epic good vs. evil showdown where the good guys charge epically against the likes of Sauron and his evil army? Well, the good guys lost. It’s 1,000 years later and the evil dark lord is running the show. Now a team of magic wielding (illegal) misfits is planning an ocean’s 11 style heist to get filth rich and topple the evil empire at the same time! Again, fantastic series. I was hooked just a few dozen pages in. The Magic also has a crazy interesting mechanic/rule set that makes it more of a strategy issue in some ways.
  - jhauris 6y ago
    Minor correction, it's Brandon Sanderson. He is a fantastic fantasy author. The Stormlight archives is another series by him that is really good.
    - BolexNOLA 6y ago
      Ahhh good catch. Thanks! I always do that with his name. And I started stormlight recently!
  - frabbit 6y ago
    Out of interest do you dis/like Tolkien's work?
    - BolexNOLA 6y ago
      Love the movies, mixed on the books. They’re obviously classics and have a lot of beauty but I don’t feel the need to revisit them. I like a little faster pacing in what I read.
- BolexNOLA 6y ago
  You should really check out Brian Sanderson’s “Mistborn” trilogy
- zipwitch 6y ago
  Malazan Books of the Fallen by Steven Erikson. They've got more than a few roots in fantasy gaming, which in turn does owe something to Tolkien, but they're unquestionably high fantasy, and they certainly struck me a very diffent from Tolkien.
- atombender 6y ago
  Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun would be a great counter-example. The novel owes absolutely nothing to Tolkien; it's entirely its own thing, subverting generic fantasy tropes left and right, while providing a clever variation on the classic hero's journey. And the same time it has this magnificent aura of otherwordliness, like a mythological narrative written thousands of years into the future (which it purports to be). It's an absolute masterpiece. Wolfe really made a career out of subverting fantasy tropes. His Latro series [2] (Soldier of the Mist, etc.) is set in Ancient Greece, and features an amnesiac mercenary whose memory resets every day. The Wizard Knight is another good one; essentially a riff on Tolkienesque Norse mythology and Medieval romances, it features a prepubescent boy who is accidentally transported to a fantasy dimension, and then into the body of an adult knight. It's absurd, but also deliciously weird, just like some of Wolfe's other books (the Long Sun and Short Sun books, etc.). [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B075JL493G https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B075JL493G [2] https://www.amazon.com/Soldier-Mist-Latro-Book-1-ebook/dp/B009E6VSBG https://www.amazon.com/Soldier-Mist-Latro-Book-1-ebook/dp/B0... [3] https://www.amazon.com/Wizard-Knight-Gene-Wolfe-ebook/dp/B086S3X5CP https://www.amazon.com/Wizard-Knight-Gene-Wolfe-ebook/dp/B08...
thaumasiotes 6y ago
> try reading ‘Phantastes’ or ‘The Princess and the Goblin’ to appreciate just how freaking much he is indebted to him You know, I did try to read The Princess and the Goblin. I think I got through it. There is a sequel, The Princess and Curdie. I tried, but failed, to read that. They aren't books I would recommend. I do like the animated film.
- macleginn 6y ago
  I totally agree that MacDonald is not a good fantasy writer. Phantastes are especially horrible (and derivative in their own way). However, he clearly had a strong and original imagination.
have_faith 6y ago
I think we have an unhealthy obsession with trying to achieve 100% original thoughts and ideas, to the point that people often hide their influences unless they feel people will understand that they didn't borrow too much. Feels like a psychological trap.
- bjz_ 6y ago
  Yeah, it's not an uncommon to feel this way, especially if you've not learned the humanities formally. Pretty much the first thing I learned in art theory at university was how much art depends on influence and appropriation, and that it's important to accept and embrace this. It was a hard lesson to learn as a young person striving to be original, but it's served me really well. Even as I now move into programming, computer science, and industrial programming language research, I'm still grateful for that small amount of art theory I did at university. You don't need to try to be original - rather it's important to seek wide and varied influences, develop your sense of taste, and from that will flow seemingly unique and varied insights.
  - rwnspace 6y ago
    "The key to originality is hiding your sources." Adding on to this, the evolution of modern music, particularly sampling and DJing, is a very visceral example of how originality doesn't just appear in what sources you approach, it can also come from the /way/ you approach them.
  - setr 6y ago
    If you take enough sources, any particular combination of them is very likely to be unique -- but anyways uniqueness never mattered; everything interesting in CS was discovered in the 70s. Even cloning & updating a forgotten paper can be of extremely high value. The bigger risk is that by not knowing your sources, you end up repeating the same work from the same start, and end contributing little
- pjc50 6y ago
  > I think we have an unhealthy obsession with trying to achieve 100% original thoughts and ideas This is pretty much forced on people by the nature of the intellectual property system. If it's ""derivative"" of something written in living memory, you have to pay.
ttctciyf 6y ago
"Endlessly derivative" aligns pretty well with Tolkien's idea of the "Cauldron of Story": > Speaking of the history of stories and especially of fairy-stories we may say that the Pot of Soup, the Cauldron of Story, has always been boiling, and to it have continually been added new bits, dainty and undainty. > For this reason, to take a casual example, the fact that a story resembling the one known as The Goosegirl (Die Gänsemagd in Grimm) is told in the thirteenth century of Bertha Broadfoot, mother of Charlemagne, really proves nothing either way: neither that the story was (in the thirteenth century) descending from Olympus or Asgard by way of an already legendary king of old, on its way to become a Hausmärchen; nor that it was on its way up. The story is found to be widespread, unattached to the mother of Charlemagne or to any historical character. [...] > The historian would be likely to say that [...] “the Goosegirl Märchen became attached to Bertha.” [But] I think it would be nearer the truth to say that the Archbishop became attached to the banana skin, or that Bertha was turned into the Goosegirl. Better still: I would say that Charlemagne's mother and the Archbishop were put into the Pot, in fact got into the Soup. They were just new bits added to the stock. A considerable honour, for in that soup were many things older, more potent, more beautiful, comic, or terrible than they were in themselves (considered simply as figures of history). - from Tolien's essay/credo "On Fairy Stories" ( https://coolcalvary.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/on-fairy-stories1.pdf https://coolcalvary.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/on-fairy-sto... )
- macleginn 6y ago
  Yes, so I hope it was okay with him when Lloyd Alexander took LOTR, watered it down, combined it with everything he could profitably extract from Mabinogion, and published the end result as the Chronicles of Prydain. On a more serious note, I would suggest that Tolkien with his unabashed traditionalism was actually a major figure in the 20th c. postmodernist tradition. The "Cauldron of Story" is not very far removed from "Death of the Author" or "Primacy of Language". Tolkien was just peculiar in his choice of source material. He also managed to make his texts not look like romanticised folkloristic pseudomedieval fare of the early fantasy writers by adopting the technique of realist writers of the 19th century.
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
7thaccount 6y ago
I didn't know this yet it doesn't bother me. In fact, my favorite fantasy series is "the Dresden Files" which is not very poetic, but has an amazing story (you could call it derivative in a sense) where pretty much everything exists (vampires, werewolves, ghosts, ghouls, Norse gods, Greek gods, Queen Mab, wizardry, native American skinwalkers, Grendel, Cthulhu, angels... etc). The universe is huge and it feels like we're just getting started when were at book 14 (still quite a few more planned in the arc with books 15 & 16 coming out in a few months). It seems to follow the classic heroes journey as well, but doesn't suffer from it, but manages to create a deeply moving story.
dash2 6y ago
> Perhaps, one can say that Tolkien is 20th century‘s Shakespeare Hmm, I doubt it. The Hobbit is fun, but many adults returning to LOTR think "gosh, this is long, dull and badly written". Here's an example, which is also a more interesting review than the unherd one: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n22/jenny-turner/reasons-for-liking-tolkien https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n22/jenny-turner/reasons...
- jfengel 6y ago
  It's not uncommon for great literature to also seem long, dull, and badly written. And everybody is entitled to their taste. I don't like lots of great literature. But Tolkien is uncannily like Shakespeare in that it appeals both to people who come looking for Dungeons and Dragons, and also to academic literary scholars. There are academic conferences, and one literature professor has been doing a close reading of Lord of the Rings as a podcast for five years... and has only made it to the Council of Elrond. (https://mythgard.org/lotro/exlotr/ https://mythgard.org/lotro/exlotr/) For that matter, many people find Shakespeare long, dull, and badly written. I think Tolkien has a chance of being remembered as long as Shakespeare, and revisited in every generation the same way. We've already come a long way from the hippies seeing psychedelia in The Hobbit (which annoyed Tolkien no end). I don't believe Tolkien is quite so flexible as Shakespeare, but his work was consciously written to harken to very long traditions of English literature (going back to Anglo Saxon), and that could give it durability. That is, by the way, an excellent and insightful review. Thanks.
  - amyjess 6y ago
    Finding out that hippies in the '60s were into The Hobbit was a huge headtrip. For example, Leonard Nimoy sung a ballad about it in 1967, with a music video full of dancing hippies. It's a lot of fun! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BC35cQKHwzg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BC35cQKHwzg
- BolexNOLA 6y ago
  Wow that was a fascinating read. Thanks for sharing it, I’ve never seen a take quite like it.
yters 6y ago
How much does MacDonald rely on medieval literature for his characters and plots? I've read a fair amount of both Tolkien and MacDonald, and I can see some similarities, but nothing obviously stands out as Tolkien copying wholesale from MacDonald. OTOH both of their writings remind me of medieval stories, e.g. faerie queen, arthurian legends, beowulf, etc.
- macleginn 6y ago
  Moving sentient malevolent trees (from Phantastes) are, AFAIK, MacDonald’s own invention. Also the depiction of the goblin kingdom under the mountain is deeply original, even though the idea itself is older. Tolkien copied both. There are other examples.
  - yters 6y ago
    The tree thing in MacDonald seems pretty different. In MacDonald's story it looks like a normal person. In Tolkien, we have ents, which are treelike moving giants. The idea of sentient trees in general is very old and appears in a lot of folklore. The root of goblin is kobold and the name means hollow in a rock, and goblins are also a very old and widespread folklore trope. But, perhaps an entire underground kingdom is unique to MacDonald, so Tolkien took that idea.
    - macleginn 6y ago
      I meant the tree from early on in LOTR that tried to swallow the hobbits.
      - yters 6y ago
        Ah, that makes more sense. I would still say they are both drawing on common mythic material, e.g. myths of daphne, narcissus, and I think in the odyssey there are bleeding reeds. However, the tree smoothering is similar, so I can grant Tolkien was inspired by MacDonald.
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jkingsbery 6y ago
Sometimes, authors take their influence and create something greater (as Tolkien did with MacDonald), and sometimes the derivative work doesn't understand what made the original great so falls flat. Also, to say Tolkien re-arranged things is true as far as it goes, but look at how much he re-arranged: he used his knowledge of several languages to create several other languages; he used his knowledge of several myth systems; he used his own personal experience in war.
- dougmwne 6y ago
  Yes, that seems like a harsh perspective. We are all rearranging preexisting symbols, information and experiences to create something new. If a program is made up of preexisting syntax, is it not really new? If a person is made up of preexisting atoms, are they not a new person? Is this comment derivative because it's a rearrangement of existing words? Would it help if I invented a new Florgunob or does using preexisting letters invalidate my creation? I don't intend to tear down the grandparent, but I thought their perspective was surprising and it brought up the philosophical meaning of newness and what constitutes creation for me.
Angostura 6y ago
From the article: "Garth makes clear that Tolkien’s approach was that of the magpie. Rather than drawing on one particular place or one particular tradition, he drew on all sorts of landscapes and legends. "
jeffreyrogers 6y ago
Didn't Shakespeare invent a bunch of words? I'm not sure if Tolkien did or not, but it wouldn't surprise me if he did too (I mean real words that get used by normal people, not fantasy words). Shakespeare also had an attunement to people's emotions and underlying drives that few writers match (maybe Dostoevsky and some others). But I agree with your larger point.

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Cthulhu_ 6y ago

He did it so well that most "high" fantasy that came out after him felt derivative of Tolkien. I'd really like to see counter-examples though; I feel like I haven't dived into the genre enough, in part because I'm turned off by the sheer volume of some book (series) on the one hand, and the juvenile tropes (generic hero's journey formula) on the other.

macleginn 6y ago
One way to avoid Tolkien’s shadow was to branch into related genres. Cue weird/ubran fantasy (e.g., Perdido Street Station), historical fantasy (e.g., The Spirit Ring), or pseudo-fantasy (the Ghormengast series, The Buried Giant). Interestingly, it seems that only works from last category have some real literary value.
- saalweachter 6y ago
  I've fallen for the LitRPG genre, in all its variety. A lot of it is very Tolkien-esque, given Tolkien's influence on D&D and its influence on RPGs that followed, but it has a different feel than the fantasy of the 70's-90's that lived deep in his shadow.
pjc50 6y ago
If you don't like hero's journey, you're probably going to struggle to like fantasy; on the other hand, both of Tolkein's most popular works embed the moral journey in a very literal, physical journey and do just fine. UKLG's Earthsea is the series that I hear most often loved by other authors, although I'm not familiar with it myself. Then there is Pratchett, who set out to do simple parody of high fantasy and ended up creating a deeply humanist character-driven universe.
- gvjddbnvdrbv 6y ago
  You should read UKLG's Earthsea. They are objectively quite simple books (targeted at teens) but they are fantastic. As a side note in my opinion this series is an example of how the current phase of thinking someone has to be of a group to understand the group is wrong. The female author brilliantly captures a young male's journey towards a strong, compassionate, brave and very masculine manhood with all the mistakes along the way. As I grew up (and indeed still grow up) I often reflect on what Ged would do at different phases of his growth. So essentially the female UKLG is guiding me in my life. (Or maybe men and women are even more similar than I'm accounting for and a young woman's journey is just that similar to a man's).
  - pjc50 6y ago
    > the current phase of thinking someone has to be of a group to understand the group is wrong. > Or maybe men and women are even more similar than I'm accounting for and a young woman's journey is just that similar to a man's You're almost there; the point is not that you have to be in a group to understand a group, but that because of the power structure some are much more visible and celebrated than others. A female writer is more likely to be able to see what the male journey is like (due to thousands of examples) than a male writer, who is in turn more likely to project his own prejudices than actually find out what it might be like. (In turn, there have been a number of literary fights lately about white female authors doing terribly bad racial stereotypes of their nonwhite characters...)
    - arkades 6y ago
riffraff 6y ago
I would think "high fantasy" to be defined as "tolkienesque" (great evil to defeat and save the world). But there's a ton of fantasy where the other important tropes of Tolkien (great lost past, the dark empire, all good on one side and all bad on the other, the pure heroes) is missing. The first that come to mind are "the wheel of time" and "the chronicles of Thomas covenant". Also if you move from high fantasy there's a ton more interesting stuff, imvho :)
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > there's a ton of fantasy where the other important tropes of Tolkien (great lost past, the dark empire, all good on one side and all bad on the other, the pure heroes) is missing. The first that come to mind are "the wheel of time" We must see different things. As I see the wheel of time: - Great lost past. This one's obvious; the Age of Legend is a huge focus of the books. - The dark empire. Doesn't exist in the present, but it is a feature of the great lost past. - All good on one side and all bad on the other: this seems to describe the wheel of time well? The whole story arc is Rand fulfilling the separate prophecies of every ethnic group in the world, bringing them all under the same government (his), and taking them to battle the even more unified forces of evil. - The pure heroes. Not sure what this means.
  - riffraff 6y ago
    Yes, the age of legends is the same trope, but I don't think the rest matches. There is one Big Evil but the lesser ones are all scheming against each other. In Tolkien there's just a bit with Saruman and the spiders, but you don't really have factions amongst the ringwraiths, for example. It's all just a battle between Sauron/everyone or Melkor/everyone. The good ones in WoT don't simply start separated but actively hating and fighting each other, Rand has to go to war with many nations and specific groups within nations, and some of them just split and start killing each other. This is not the same as Gondor and Rohan being on bad terms, or some elven clans just standing on the sides. In Tolkien's universe you 99% of the time know who is evil and who is not (elf, dwarf, hobbit, ent, eagle, northern man = good; orc, goblin, troll, dragon, great spiders, eastern man= bad). Yes, a couple human characters are ambiguous, but it's a pretty small minority. In WoT you have a couple evil races and you, the reader, have a clear view of who is good and who is bad. But in-world people want to kill other people because each thinks the other is evil: that looks a substantial difference to me. Re: pure heroes, I meant that the main characters basically are all 100% good. This is the same in both universes too, just not a constant in all high fantasy. At least I think, I didn't finish the wheel of time ;)
simonh 6y ago
For post-Tolkien fantasy with little or no Tolkien influences or tropes, the most obvious recent example is Game of Thrones. I suppose it's arguable whether it's High Fantasy, but looking at the character arcs of John Snow and Daenerys I think it clears the bar.
- danans 6y ago
  > For post-Tolkien fantasy with little or no Tolkien influences or tropes There's perhaps no direct borrowing of names and character types, but by George R.R. Martin's own attestation, he sought to write a story with a scope approaching Tolkeins but disposing of Tolkiens idealism and dualism. He was deeply influenced by Tolkiens writing, and sought to correct it's flaws. https://www.tolkiensociety.org/2019/09/george-r-r-martin-i-keep-wanting-to-argue-with-professor-tolkien/ https://www.tolkiensociety.org/2019/09/george-r-r-martin-i-k...
  - einpoklum 6y ago
    So, an unoriginal _scope_ ? Hmm... I don't know about that.
BolexNOLA 6y ago
You should check out the “Mistborn” series by Brian Sanderson. You’ll recognize some tropes/themes but it’s really different from what I’ve usually read and the characters are absolutely fantastic. It’s 3 books and they’re a bit lengthy but it’s a self-contained, satisfying story. Elevator pitch for you: you know the epic good vs. evil showdown where the good guys charge epically against the likes of Sauron and his evil army? Well, the good guys lost. It’s 1,000 years later and the evil dark lord is running the show. Now a team of magic wielding (illegal) misfits is planning an ocean’s 11 style heist to get filth rich and topple the evil empire at the same time! Again, fantastic series. I was hooked just a few dozen pages in. The Magic also has a crazy interesting mechanic/rule set that makes it more of a strategy issue in some ways.
- jhauris 6y ago
  Minor correction, it's Brandon Sanderson. He is a fantastic fantasy author. The Stormlight archives is another series by him that is really good.
  - BolexNOLA 6y ago
    Ahhh good catch. Thanks! I always do that with his name. And I started stormlight recently!
- frabbit 6y ago
  Out of interest do you dis/like Tolkien's work?
  - BolexNOLA 6y ago
    Love the movies, mixed on the books. They’re obviously classics and have a lot of beauty but I don’t feel the need to revisit them. I like a little faster pacing in what I read.
BolexNOLA 6y ago
You should really check out Brian Sanderson’s “Mistborn” trilogy
zipwitch 6y ago
Malazan Books of the Fallen by Steven Erikson. They've got more than a few roots in fantasy gaming, which in turn does owe something to Tolkien, but they're unquestionably high fantasy, and they certainly struck me a very diffent from Tolkien.
atombender 6y ago
Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun would be a great counter-example. The novel owes absolutely nothing to Tolkien; it's entirely its own thing, subverting generic fantasy tropes left and right, while providing a clever variation on the classic hero's journey. And the same time it has this magnificent aura of otherwordliness, like a mythological narrative written thousands of years into the future (which it purports to be). It's an absolute masterpiece. Wolfe really made a career out of subverting fantasy tropes. His Latro series [2] (Soldier of the Mist, etc.) is set in Ancient Greece, and features an amnesiac mercenary whose memory resets every day. The Wizard Knight is another good one; essentially a riff on Tolkienesque Norse mythology and Medieval romances, it features a prepubescent boy who is accidentally transported to a fantasy dimension, and then into the body of an adult knight. It's absurd, but also deliciously weird, just like some of Wolfe's other books (the Long Sun and Short Sun books, etc.). [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B075JL493G https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B075JL493G [2] https://www.amazon.com/Soldier-Mist-Latro-Book-1-ebook/dp/B009E6VSBG https://www.amazon.com/Soldier-Mist-Latro-Book-1-ebook/dp/B0... [3] https://www.amazon.com/Wizard-Knight-Gene-Wolfe-ebook/dp/B086S3X5CP https://www.amazon.com/Wizard-Knight-Gene-Wolfe-ebook/dp/B08...

thaumasiotes 6y ago

> try reading ‘Phantastes’ or ‘The Princess and the Goblin’ to appreciate just how freaking much he is indebted to him You know, I did try to read The Princess and the Goblin. I think I got through it. There is a sequel, The Princess and Curdie. I tried, but failed, to read that. They aren't books I would recommend. I do like the animated film.

macleginn 6y ago
I totally agree that MacDonald is not a good fantasy writer. Phantastes are especially horrible (and derivative in their own way). However, he clearly had a strong and original imagination.

have_faith 6y ago

I think we have an unhealthy obsession with trying to achieve 100% original thoughts and ideas, to the point that people often hide their influences unless they feel people will understand that they didn't borrow too much. Feels like a psychological trap.

bjz_ 6y ago
Yeah, it's not an uncommon to feel this way, especially if you've not learned the humanities formally. Pretty much the first thing I learned in art theory at university was how much art depends on influence and appropriation, and that it's important to accept and embrace this. It was a hard lesson to learn as a young person striving to be original, but it's served me really well. Even as I now move into programming, computer science, and industrial programming language research, I'm still grateful for that small amount of art theory I did at university. You don't need to try to be original - rather it's important to seek wide and varied influences, develop your sense of taste, and from that will flow seemingly unique and varied insights.
- rwnspace 6y ago
  "The key to originality is hiding your sources." Adding on to this, the evolution of modern music, particularly sampling and DJing, is a very visceral example of how originality doesn't just appear in what sources you approach, it can also come from the /way/ you approach them.
- setr 6y ago
  If you take enough sources, any particular combination of them is very likely to be unique -- but anyways uniqueness never mattered; everything interesting in CS was discovered in the 70s. Even cloning & updating a forgotten paper can be of extremely high value. The bigger risk is that by not knowing your sources, you end up repeating the same work from the same start, and end contributing little
pjc50 6y ago
> I think we have an unhealthy obsession with trying to achieve 100% original thoughts and ideas This is pretty much forced on people by the nature of the intellectual property system. If it's ""derivative"" of something written in living memory, you have to pay.

ttctciyf 6y ago

"Endlessly derivative" aligns pretty well with Tolkien's idea of the "Cauldron of Story": > Speaking of the history of stories and especially of fairy-stories we may say that the Pot of Soup, the Cauldron of Story, has always been boiling, and to it have continually been added new bits, dainty and undainty. > For this reason, to take a casual example, the fact that a story resembling the one known as The Goosegirl (Die Gänsemagd in Grimm) is told in the thirteenth century of Bertha Broadfoot, mother of Charlemagne, really proves nothing either way: neither that the story was (in the thirteenth century) descending from Olympus or Asgard by way of an already legendary king of old, on its way to become a Hausmärchen; nor that it was on its way up. The story is found to be widespread, unattached to the mother of Charlemagne or to any historical character. [...] > The historian would be likely to say that [...] “the Goosegirl Märchen became attached to Bertha.” [But] I think it would be nearer the truth to say that the Archbishop became attached to the banana skin, or that Bertha was turned into the Goosegirl. Better still: I would say that Charlemagne's mother and the Archbishop were put into the Pot, in fact got into the Soup. They were just new bits added to the stock. A considerable honour, for in that soup were many things older, more potent, more beautiful, comic, or terrible than they were in themselves (considered simply as figures of history). - from Tolien's essay/credo "On Fairy Stories" ( https://coolcalvary.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/on-fairy-stories1.pdf https://coolcalvary.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/on-fairy-sto... )

macleginn 6y ago
Yes, so I hope it was okay with him when Lloyd Alexander took LOTR, watered it down, combined it with everything he could profitably extract from Mabinogion, and published the end result as the Chronicles of Prydain. On a more serious note, I would suggest that Tolkien with his unabashed traditionalism was actually a major figure in the 20th c. postmodernist tradition. The "Cauldron of Story" is not very far removed from "Death of the Author" or "Primacy of Language". Tolkien was just peculiar in his choice of source material. He also managed to make his texts not look like romanticised folkloristic pseudomedieval fare of the early fantasy writers by adopting the technique of realist writers of the 19th century.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago

7thaccount 6y ago

I didn't know this yet it doesn't bother me. In fact, my favorite fantasy series is "the Dresden Files" which is not very poetic, but has an amazing story (you could call it derivative in a sense) where pretty much everything exists (vampires, werewolves, ghosts, ghouls, Norse gods, Greek gods, Queen Mab, wizardry, native American skinwalkers, Grendel, Cthulhu, angels... etc). The universe is huge and it feels like we're just getting started when were at book 14 (still quite a few more planned in the arc with books 15 & 16 coming out in a few months). It seems to follow the classic heroes journey as well, but doesn't suffer from it, but manages to create a deeply moving story.

dash2 6y ago

> Perhaps, one can say that Tolkien is 20th century‘s Shakespeare Hmm, I doubt it. The Hobbit is fun, but many adults returning to LOTR think "gosh, this is long, dull and badly written". Here's an example, which is also a more interesting review than the unherd one: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n22/jenny-turner/reasons-for-liking-tolkien https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n22/jenny-turner/reasons...

jfengel 6y ago
It's not uncommon for great literature to also seem long, dull, and badly written. And everybody is entitled to their taste. I don't like lots of great literature. But Tolkien is uncannily like Shakespeare in that it appeals both to people who come looking for Dungeons and Dragons, and also to academic literary scholars. There are academic conferences, and one literature professor has been doing a close reading of Lord of the Rings as a podcast for five years... and has only made it to the Council of Elrond. (https://mythgard.org/lotro/exlotr/ https://mythgard.org/lotro/exlotr/) For that matter, many people find Shakespeare long, dull, and badly written. I think Tolkien has a chance of being remembered as long as Shakespeare, and revisited in every generation the same way. We've already come a long way from the hippies seeing psychedelia in The Hobbit (which annoyed Tolkien no end). I don't believe Tolkien is quite so flexible as Shakespeare, but his work was consciously written to harken to very long traditions of English literature (going back to Anglo Saxon), and that could give it durability. That is, by the way, an excellent and insightful review. Thanks.
- amyjess 6y ago
  Finding out that hippies in the '60s were into The Hobbit was a huge headtrip. For example, Leonard Nimoy sung a ballad about it in 1967, with a music video full of dancing hippies. It's a lot of fun! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BC35cQKHwzg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BC35cQKHwzg
BolexNOLA 6y ago
Wow that was a fascinating read. Thanks for sharing it, I’ve never seen a take quite like it.

yters 6y ago

How much does MacDonald rely on medieval literature for his characters and plots? I've read a fair amount of both Tolkien and MacDonald, and I can see some similarities, but nothing obviously stands out as Tolkien copying wholesale from MacDonald. OTOH both of their writings remind me of medieval stories, e.g. faerie queen, arthurian legends, beowulf, etc.

macleginn 6y ago
Moving sentient malevolent trees (from Phantastes) are, AFAIK, MacDonald’s own invention. Also the depiction of the goblin kingdom under the mountain is deeply original, even though the idea itself is older. Tolkien copied both. There are other examples.
- yters 6y ago
  The tree thing in MacDonald seems pretty different. In MacDonald's story it looks like a normal person. In Tolkien, we have ents, which are treelike moving giants. The idea of sentient trees in general is very old and appears in a lot of folklore. The root of goblin is kobold and the name means hollow in a rock, and goblins are also a very old and widespread folklore trope. But, perhaps an entire underground kingdom is unique to MacDonald, so Tolkien took that idea.
  - macleginn 6y ago
    I meant the tree from early on in LOTR that tried to swallow the hobbits.
    - yters 6y ago
      Ah, that makes more sense. I would still say they are both drawing on common mythic material, e.g. myths of daphne, narcissus, and I think in the odyssey there are bleeding reeds. However, the tree smoothering is similar, so I can grant Tolkien was inspired by MacDonald.

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jkingsbery 6y ago

Sometimes, authors take their influence and create something greater (as Tolkien did with MacDonald), and sometimes the derivative work doesn't understand what made the original great so falls flat. Also, to say Tolkien re-arranged things is true as far as it goes, but look at how much he re-arranged: he used his knowledge of several languages to create several other languages; he used his knowledge of several myth systems; he used his own personal experience in war.

dougmwne 6y ago
Yes, that seems like a harsh perspective. We are all rearranging preexisting symbols, information and experiences to create something new. If a program is made up of preexisting syntax, is it not really new? If a person is made up of preexisting atoms, are they not a new person? Is this comment derivative because it's a rearrangement of existing words? Would it help if I invented a new Florgunob or does using preexisting letters invalidate my creation? I don't intend to tear down the grandparent, but I thought their perspective was surprising and it brought up the philosophical meaning of newness and what constitutes creation for me.

Angostura 6y ago

From the article: "Garth makes clear that Tolkien’s approach was that of the magpie. Rather than drawing on one particular place or one particular tradition, he drew on all sorts of landscapes and legends. "

jeffreyrogers 6y ago

Didn't Shakespeare invent a bunch of words? I'm not sure if Tolkien did or not, but it wouldn't surprise me if he did too (I mean real words that get used by normal people, not fantasy words). Shakespeare also had an attunement to people's emotions and underlying drives that few writers match (maybe Dostoevsky and some others). But I agree with your larger point.