3 ms·

1000 years is a pretty long time. Looking at literature from the 11 century, Beowulf is the only thing that stands out as still having any impact and continuing

1000 years is a pretty long time. Looking at literature from the 11 century, Beowulf is the only thing that stands out as still having any impact and continuing to be adapted and widely read today. Information storage and transmission over the next 1000 years should be quite a bit better, so more work will survive and have a shot at continuing relevance, and Lord of the Rings certainly has a shot, provided epic fantasy keeps its popularity as a genre. Being fairly foundational is likely to keep it important to the genre to the point that I think we're just asking if humans in that future will still care to experience these kinds of stories at all, but you are pushing the point at which all that tends to still be read that far into the future are national foundation myths and religious scripture. It'll definitely last more than a century, though. The Hobbit was published in 1937. A century is only another 15 years away.

valarauko 4y ago
> Looking at literature from the 11 century, Beowulf is the only thing that stands out as still having any impact and continuing to be adapted and widely read today. It's also complicated since Beowulf was essentially lost for most of that time period, and is attested from a single manuscript. It's unlikely to be the case with LotR, short of massive civilizational collapse.
deltarholamda 4y ago
>Information storage and transmission over the next 1000 years should be quite a bit better Yeah, it's a bit of a stretch to compare 1000 years ago to 1000 years from now. Things are radically different, and using the past to judge the future is rife with opportunities to make mistakes. Some people have suggested that it may actually be worse, in that so much of our current knowledge is contained in non-durable formats (digital instead of hard copy, for instance), which is an interesting idea. Here a comparison could be made to inscriptions on stone and clay vs. on papyrus. It may be that when the Walking Dead happens, rebuilding our knowledge will depend on the large numbers of libraries that will still exist, but are less than up-to-date, since so much of the modern knowledge isn't contained there, but instead in a PDF on some cloud server.

valarauko 4y ago

> Looking at literature from the 11 century, Beowulf is the only thing that stands out as still having any impact and continuing to be adapted and widely read today. It's also complicated since Beowulf was essentially lost for most of that time period, and is attested from a single manuscript. It's unlikely to be the case with LotR, short of massive civilizational collapse.

deltarholamda 4y ago

>Information storage and transmission over the next 1000 years should be quite a bit better Yeah, it's a bit of a stretch to compare 1000 years ago to 1000 years from now. Things are radically different, and using the past to judge the future is rife with opportunities to make mistakes. Some people have suggested that it may actually be worse, in that so much of our current knowledge is contained in non-durable formats (digital instead of hard copy, for instance), which is an interesting idea. Here a comparison could be made to inscriptions on stone and clay vs. on papyrus. It may be that when the Walking Dead happens, rebuilding our knowledge will depend on the large numbers of libraries that will still exist, but are less than up-to-date, since so much of the modern knowledge isn't contained there, but instead in a PDF on some cloud server.