Thread by @TimClarePoet

Today would have been JRR Tolkien's 127th birthday. He obviously has a huge legacy for Fantasy authors like me, & successive movements in Fantasy have largely sought to define themselves by how they're not Tolkien. New Weird, Grimdark, whatever we're doing now. I have thoughts!

There's no doubt there are lots of ways Fantasy can be Not Tolkien & very, very good. The success of the movies & the upcoming series show they're certainly the dominant lens through which the Western world views Fantasy. So I'm not saying his work is sacrosanct & above critique.

But amongst Fantasy authors it's something of a national sport to prove your credentials by asserting how shit/conservative/sentimental Tolkien is. That his work is some retrograde gravity well only the strong can resist. That being similar in any way is a failing.

Michael Moorcock's 'Epic Pooh' essay was one of the sacred texts of New Weird. He asserts Tolkien's prose is lazy, sentimental & coloured by conservatism. Motherfucker PLEASE.
revolutionsf.com/article.php?id…

Have you read The History of the Runestaff? Moorcock's tin ear for prose, dialogue, his cardboard characters & repetitive plotting, his racial essentialism... utterly forgettable, wretched writing, dashed off in a few afternoons.

I love pulp. Moorcock writes shit pulp masquerading as iconoclastic molotov-throwing. Is it fuck. I suppose it has the preposterous self-importance of certain mediocre UK punk outfits.

If you're going to criticise Tolkien's prose you'd better be at least somewhat as good as him on the line. Sure, he overwrites sometimes. He also has some masterful, flowing, gently heartbreaking lines. Often in very simple language.

Ursula Le Guin's essay From Elfland to Poughkeepsie is excellent on this (& unfortunately not available in its entirety online to my knowledge): google.com/amp/s/fairyspe…

New Weird was the Seinfeld movement - it wasn't about anything. 'We're not Tolkien' & 'we quite like Peake' is hardly the most inspiring aesthetic cri de coeur.

Most authors linked to it publicly disassociate themselves from it now. Which I suppose, to be fair, is true of a lot of movements. But New Weird, in retrospect, feels particularly empty as a label.

Grimdark often gets defined as anti-Tolkien. A reaction to sentimental, heroic cliches & I guess an ultimately conservative, establishment ideology of dulce et decorum est. More realistic. *removes spectacles, rolls up sleeves*

Tolkien came of age at a time when young men faced immense pressure from men & women to go to war, to kill & be killed. He fought at the fucking Somme. Some of his best friends were killed. Almost his entire unit was wiped out. He got trench fever.

The idea Tolkien had some rosy, patriotic, gilded conception of war is so far off as to make me actively furious. There's not a Grimdark author alive who has experienced half the hell he lived first-hand. How actually fucking dare you.

Grimdark divides the world into bastards & suckers. Tolkien presents us with a much harder, messier, painful prospect: there might be love, & hope, & weakness, & if we lose those things it might not have been inevitable.

'One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression... to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.'

Is Tolkien's presentation of orcs racist? Yes, a bit. Especially if you read off a one-to-one concordance with real world races. As psychomachia, they're less so. Though they come uncomfortably close to real world tropes of the other. They're stereotyped barbarian hordes, in part

But they also wriggle out of the legendarium's strict conception of them. Like Gorbag: "What d’you say?-if we get a chance, you and me’ll slip off and set up somewhere on our own with a few trusty lads, somewhere where there’s good loot nice and handy, and no big bosses."

The orcs are often fearsome & scary, but they also experience war weariness, & lots of feelings totally relatable to a veteran of trench warfare like Tolkien.

Contemporary Grimdark Fantasy yells 'you're not my real dad!' at Lord of the Rings, slams its bedroom door & puts on My Chemical Romance really loud. & thinks it's the rebel.

What contemporary authors do the work that Tolkien did? He learnt war by going to war & watching dudes die. Motherfucker learnt Finnish & Welsh, the two worst languages.

(I'm joking, Welsh friends, mae'n ddrwg gennyf! & especially to my Finnish in-laws)

Also, he just worked on his shit a long time. He put the hours in. He discovery-wrote & hit dead-ends & took breaks & puzzled & researched. He constructed languages & genealogies, histories & poetry. He didn't know the ring in The Hobbit was the One Ring until much later!

No contemporary Fantasy authors are bringing that to the table. That much scholarship, personal trauma, & raw *effort*. Who the fuck would? It's intimidating.

I cut THE ICE HOUSE down from a quarter of a million words. Added to the 115k of THE HONOURS, I've put 8 years of work into that world. Still nowhere *near* the work & scholarship that went into Lord of the Rings. He poured a life's expertise into those books.

It's fine not to like LotR. But if you're going to be a dick about it either bring something special or keep that shit in the guitar case.

I really like @mattcolville's astute video on Tom Bombadil & the Shire, by the way. He's my favourite YouTuber, all his videos are worth checking out, but this one is particularly relevant to Tolkien:

TLDR: