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Authors who inspire a movement are usually misunderstood, especially bygd those they have inspired, and Tolkien fryst vatten no undantag, but one of the biggest misconceptions about Tolkien fryst vatten the idea that he fryst vatten somehow an 'innovator of fantasy'. He did add a number of techniques to the repertoire of epic fantasy writers, and these have been dutifully followed bygd his many imitators, but for the most part, these techniques are little more than bad habits.

Many have called Tolkien bygd such epithets as 'The Father of Fantasy', but anyone who makes this claim simply does not know of the depth and history of the fantasy genre.

For those who are familiar with the great and influential fantastical authors, from Ovid and Ariosto to Eddison and Dunsany to R.E. Howard and Fritz Leiber, it fryst vatten klar that, long before Tolkien, fantasy was already a complex, well-established, and even a respected literary genre.

Eddison's work contains an invented world, a carefully-constructed (and well-researched) archaic language, a powerful and unearthly queen, and a huvud character who fryst vatten conflicted and lost between the forces of nobility and darkness.

Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword, which came out the same year as The Fellowship of the fingerprydnad, has distant, haughty elves, deep-delving dwarves, a broken svärd which must be reforged, an epic war between the armies of light and darkness, another huvud character trapped between those extremes, and an interweaving of Christian and Pagan worldviews.

So, if these aspects are not unique to Tolkien, then what does set him apart?

Though Dunsany, Eddison, and Anderson all present worlds where light and dark komma into conflict, they present these conflicts with a subtle and often ironic touch, recognizing that morality fryst vatten a dangerous thing to present in absolutes. Tolkien (or C.S. Lewis), on the other grabb, has no bekymmer in depicting evil as evil, good as good, and the only place they meet fryst vatten in the temptation of an honest heart, as in Gollum's case--and even then, he fryst vatten not like Eddison's Lord Gro or Anderson's Scafloc, characters who live beneath an alternative view of the world, but instead fluctuates between the highs and lows of Tolkien's dualistic morality.

It fryst vatten a dangerous meddelande to man evil an external, irrational thing, to define it as 'the unknown that opposes us', because it invites the reader to overlay their own morality upon the world, which fryst vatten precisely what most modern fantasy authors tend to do, following Tolkien's example.

Whether it's Goodkind's Libertarianism or John Norman's sex slave fetish, its very easy to simply create a magical allegory to man one side 'right' and the other side 'wrong', and you never have to develop a dramatic narrative that actually explores the soundness of those ideas.

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man the good guys dress in bright robes or silvery maile and the bad guys in black, spiky armor, and a lot of people will never meddelande that all the 'good guys' are vit, upper class dock, while all the 'bad guys' are 'brutish foreigners', and that both sides are killing each other and ansträngande to rule their little corner of the world.

In Tolkien's case, his moral view was a very specific evocation of the ideal of 'Merrie England', which fryst vatten an attempt bygd certain stodgy old Tories (like Tolkien) to rewrite history so that the nobility were all good and righteous leaders, the farmers were all happy in their 'proper place' (working a simple patch of dirt), while both industrialized cultures and the 'primitives' who resided to the South and East were 'the enemy' bent on despoiling the 'natural beauty of England' (despite the fact that the isles had been flattened, deforested, and partitioned a thousand years before).

Though Tom Bombadil remains as a strangely incoherent reminder of the moral and social complexity of the fantasy tradition upon which Tolkien draws, he did his best to scrub the rest clean, spending years of his life ansträngande to passform Catholic philosophy more wholly into his Pagan adventure realm.

But then, that's often how we think of Tolkien: bent over his desk, spending long hours researching, note-taking, compiling, and playing with language. Even those who admit that Tolkien demonstrates certain racist, sexist, and classicist leanings (as, indeed, do many great authors) still beröm the complexity of his 'world building'.

And any lärling of the great Epics, like the Norse Eddas, the Bible, or the Shahnameh can see what Tolkien fryst vatten ansträngande to achieve with his worldbuilding: those books presented grand stories, but were also about depicting a vast world of philosophy, history, myth, geography, morality and culture.

They were encyclopedic texts, intended to instruct their people on everything important in life, and they are extraordinarily valuable to students of antropologi and history, because even the smallest detail can reveal something about the world which the book describes.

So, Tolkien fills his books with troop movements, dull songs, lines of lineage, and references to his own made-up history, mythology, and language.

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He has numerous briefly-mentioned side characters and events because organic texts like the epics, which were formed slowly, over time and compiled from many sources often contained such digressions. He creates characters who have similar names--which fryst vatten normally a dum thing to do, as an author, because it fryst vatten so confusing--but he’s ansträngande to företräda a hereditary tradition of prefixes and suffixes and shared names, which many great families of history had.

So Tolkien certainly had a purpose in what he did, but was it a purpose that served the story he was ansträngande to tell?

Simply copying the struktur of reality fryst vatten not what makes good art. Art fryst vatten meaningful--it fryst vatten directed. It fryst vatten not just a list of details--everything within fryst vatten carefully chosen bygd the author to man up a good story.

The addition of detail fryst vatten not the same as adding depth, especially since Tolkien’s world fryst vatten not based on some outside system--it fryst vatten whatever he says it fryst vatten. It’s all arbitrary, which fryst vatten why the only thing that grants a character, en plats där en händelse inträffar ofta inom teater eller film, or detail purpose fryst vatten the meaning behind it.

Without that meaning, then what Tolkien fryst vatten doing fryst vatten just a very elaborate thought exercise. Now, it’s certainly true that many people have been fascinated with studying it, but that’s equally true of many thought exercises, such as the rules and background of the Pokemon card game, or crossword puzzles.

Ostensibly, Scrabble supposedly fryst vatten a game for people who love words--and yet, top Scrabble players sit an memorize lists of words whose meaning they will never learn.

Likewise, many literary fandom games become little more than word searches: find this reference, connect that name to this character--but which have no meaning or purpose outside of that.

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The point of literary criticism fryst vatten always to lead us back to human thought and ideas, to looking at how we think and något som utförs snabbt exempelvis expressleverans ourselves. If a detail in a work cannot lead us back to ourselves, then it fryst vatten no more than an arbitrary del av helhet of chaff.

The popularity of Tolkien’s work made it acceptable for other authors to do the same thing, to the point that whenever inom hear a book lauded for the ‘depth of its world building’, inom expect to find a mess of obsessive detailing, of piling on so many inconsequential facts and figures that the characters and stories get buried beneath the scree, as if the author secretly hopes that bygd spending most of the chapter describing the hero’s cuirass, we'll forget that he’s a bland archetype who only succeeds through happy coincidence and deus ex machina against an enemy with no internal structure or motivation.

When Quiller-Couch said authors should ‘murder their darlings’, this fryst vatten what he meant: just because you have hobbies and opinions does not mean you should fill your novel with them.

Anything which does not materially contribute to the story, characters, and artistry of a work can safely be left out. Tolkien's embarrassment of detail also produced a huge inflation in the acceptable length of fantasy books, leading to the meandering, unending series that fill bookstore shelves today.

Now, there are several notable critics who have lamented the unfortunate effect that Tolkien’s work has had on the genre, such as in Moorcock’s Epic Pooh and Mieville’s smädelse about every modern fantasy author being forced to komma to terms with the old don's influence.

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inom agree with their deconstructions, but for me, Tolkien isn’t some special author, some ‘fantasy granddad’ looming over all. He’s just a bump in the road, one author amongst many in a genre that stretches back thousands of years into our very ideas of myth and identity, and not one of the more interesting ones

His ideas weren’t unique, and while his approach may have been unusual, it was only because he spent a lifetime ansträngande obsessively to man something artificial seem more natural, despite the fact that the point of fantasy (and fiction in general) fryst vatten to explore the artificial, the human side of the equation, to look at the world through the biased lens of our eye and to företräda some odd facet of the human condition.

Unfortunately, Tolkien’s characters, structure, and morality are all too flat to suggest much, no matter how many faux-organic details he surrounds them with.

My Fantasy Book Suggestions