: In the time "The Lord of the Rings" was
: published there was no such successful genre called
: fantasy.
: Well, the genre may not have been called fantasy but,
: call it what you will, it's been around as long as
: literature has been around. Orcs, elves, and hobbits
: may be fairly recent creations as far as literature is
: concerned but, the idea of supernaturally endowed
: heroes going on epic quests for the purpose of
: fighting monsters and destroying ultimate evil goes
: back well beyond Beowulf, beyond the Iliad, and
: probably far beyond Gilgamesh. Even that hack, Joseph
: Campbell, recognized this in his theory of the
: "Journey of the Epic Hero."
Er, actually, those aren't fantasy. They don't fit in the fantasy genre at all. See, those are what we call mythology, folklore, and lengends, which is different from fantasy, see, because of a few major points. First? Well, we can more or less accurately say that such "writing" had stopped being created by about, oh, 600 years ago. Certainly, some was still created afterwards, but to no significant degree. Second? People of the time actually believed them. They weren't fiction, and last I checked, that's what the genre known as fantasy was classified under. Third? Except for mythology, which was more or less the religious beliefs of a culture, they were all based on real events, and real people, the stories of whom, as the centuries went by, were blown out of normal proportion into the world of legend. King Arthur was real. He wasn't a king, and there was no round table, or search for the Holy Grail (I don't think he was even Christian), but instead, he was a general somewhere around the middle of the first millenium, CE. Beowulf was based on true people, as was Gilgamesh. The Iliad is Greek, of course, and the Greeks did experiment in fiction, but, for the most part, it was supposed to be true. Fourth? They were compiled by many different people, passed down verbally, until people during the second millenium (for the most part) finally got the bright idea of writing them down. Even then, they continued to be distorted more and more (Le Morte d'Arthur comes to mind). They were never written to be published until centuries after the original bard or whoever who made it into legend, and the original people who did the actions, died. I seriously doubt that any intelligent, sane person can seriously consider these the forerunners of modern Fantasy.
: You try to compare Tolkien and Twain (for example) when
: you don't understand that they wrote about fully
: different things!
They wrote about different things, yes. Guess what? Hawthorne and Melville wrote about totally different things. Melville focused on shipping, and whaling, while Hawthorne focused on Puritanic America. And yet they've been compared, contrasted, and grouped together probably as much as any two other authors. And do you know why? It's not because they were contemporaries. It's not because they were friends. It's not because of similar characters, or similar plots, or similar styles, or any such thing. It's because their works contain many of the same themes. It's because they're the single two best examples of Anti-Transcendental literature in America. And it's because they were both literary greats.
: DON'T JUDGE A BOOK BY A LACK OR A PRESENCE OF DEEP
: PHILOSOPHYC IDEAS!
: Then, what should a book be judged by?
Yes, here I must agree. However, you obviously cannot detect the presence of deep philosophic ideas in Tolkien. I'd explain it to you, but such is beneath my dignity. Try checking out, I don't know, some kind of book notes site sometime, and look up Tolkien. They'll put it in nice big, obvious print for you.
: That's exactly what I did. And, as I've said, I did
: enjoy the books. But they weren’t great books.
: Clearly, you thought they were. But then, there's no
: accounting for taste, or rather lack of taste, is
: there?
And there's no accounting for lack of grey matter, either, I suppose...
Doom
