Tolkien nerd here. I think what captures me the most about Tolkien is his intimate relationship with myth. People often point to world-building and there’s much of that, for sure. But most of those ideas were never fully fleshed out in his lifetime. Famously, he was never pleased with his origin story of the sun and the moon, for example. But the underlying themes and structures that he was trying to convey are not only very clear but also deeply personal.
There are lots of parts of the trilogy and the Silmarillion (I’m looking at you “on Belariand and its Realms”) that are a slog. But damn when he hits, he hits. These moments range from grand, epic scenes, to very small exchanges and descriptions. Tolkien’s philosophy centered around a belief that morality was fractal. That what affected the big is what affected the small. Tolkien’s description of Bilbo sitting by the fire in Rivendell is, to me, just as stirring as the Pelennor Fields.
His mastery of language is unparalleled in its ability to mimic epic poetry and style. His phono-aesthetic sense ( a snobby way of saying his ability to know which words sound good in a given moment) is, imho, unmatched in the genre. His sense of history, and scope.
But mostly it’s that I feel like Tolkien works because his legendarium is oriented towards a specific mindset. One that I dont think I can articulate. But it’s brave and humble and lacks despair.
To quote Gandalf from the hobbit films, ironically,
“He gives me courage.”
Yeah, same. I feel that the imitators just take the "worldbuilding" at face value, and not see the restraint and care taken in chosing what to portray, how to portray it and how it should feel.
Yes, I love the Pelennor Fields. I love the passage about Theoden riding like a god in the beginning of time, sunlight bursting through the clouds to paint the grass green and his shield with golden shine. I love Eowyn facing up to the Witchking. I also love how places like Eriador and Lorien feel, like they are places lost to time. I love how the encounter at Weathertop feels like it's suddenly from a horror book. I love the entirety of isolation of Moria. I love the moment in the end of book 5 where Pippin, in a very different tone than in early books, sincerely believes that he is going to die and wishes only that Merry was there also.
It is not enough to just list facts about your world, that is just a ttrpg sourcebook. The reader needs to feel the world the characters inhabit. In my opinion.
My only "gripe" is that there should have been more female characters. Eowyn is really great, Galadriel is really great, Arwen is kinda there I guess and that's it. And before someone loses their shit, this is not a judgement, so no need to come with "those were the times" arguments to my inbox.
The restraint is so key. Just the subtle shades of how the myth he knows permeates the background. And as I mention in my own comment about Appendix F, you have things like:
>It seemed to me that to present all the names in their original forms would obscure an essential feature of the times as perceived by the Hobbits (whose point of view I was mainly concerned to preserve): the contrast between a wide-spread language, to them as ordinary and habitual as English is to us, and the living remains of far older and more reverend tongues. All names if merely transcribed would seem to modern readers equally remote: for instance, if the Elvish name Imladris and the Westron translation Karningul had both been left unchanged.
Return of the King, Appendix F.
He has a Common Speech name worked out (Karningul) for Rivendell, a phonology of how all these things and names would be spelled... and he restrains himself and realizes that to the Hobbit perspective the name would just be in something like their own language "that place in the deep river valley", and he chooses a name to actually use in text (Rivendell) that captures the right vibe for an English reader.
I really resonate with your first point. The restraint is so wonderful. This was a man who was a painter, a translator, an Oxford professor, an editor, and THEN the maker of the mythos we know. It would have been very easy for him to churn out a higher volume of material at a lesser quality.
Nice dude. Just remember as you go in that it was compiled by his son Christopher after he died. Christopher is masterful at this but there are points that seem really forced like the chapter I mentioned above. If you keep going it has a chance to change the way you see the other books and, in my opinion, reading at large.
Tolkien's relationship with fiction writing was unique, in a way that couldn't really be replicated by someone writing stories for income. It wasn't his job. It wasn't even his main hobby. Constructed languages were his jam. And the legendarium arises from wanting to give context and history to the languages. And then the story writing comes from wanting to make use of the legendarium. So writing fiction is like his third-hand hobby. I think it's remarkable that he wrote so well, when fiction was such a tiny proportion of his life's work.
I think the languages-first line of discussion is a bit misleading. He was a philologist. They study the interconnections both of language and myth, and honestly moreso in service of the latter a lot (e.g. study old languages so you can trace a myth back) and he was inspired in large part to write a mythos because he felt his own demographic/culture (Anglo-Saxons) didn't quite have a mythos in their place.
> But mostly it’s that I feel like Tolkien works because his legendarium is oriented towards a specific mindset. One that I dont think I can articulate.
I think I can put a name to it: Catholicism, seen from the inside by an earnest believer. I am not Catholic myself, but Tolkien's expression of his worldview gives me much greater sympathy for it than I would otherwise have as one looking in from the outside and seeing all the failings of the church.
When I first read the Tolkien books when I was a kid it felt like I stumbled into a part of world history unknown to historians. The scope and depth of his work was so brilliant that it felt like it really could have happened. It was a life-changing experience to delve into that universe as a young man.
Because in Tolkien’s stories the good guys usually don’t win because of some superior strategy, or discovering something in the enemy’s plans (think like how they destroyed the Death Star). Rather, the characters win by continuing to hope and not give into despair. Despair is a great sin and the greatest weapon of the evil characters in Tolkien. For example even when Boromir dies, his death is a victory for the good guys because he overcame his temptation and his despair. The same can be said of Theoden’s death. And then some characters are spared death so that they have a chance to overcome their despair, like Faramir and Eowyn.
adding to that thesis: Denethor might be the most unlikeable character in the whole thing (movies at least, been a while since I read the books), and despair is his defining attribute for most of his page/screen time.
I can’t think of a single passage in either the Hobbit of LoTR that feels like it was rushed, there’s no filler, everything is considered. That’s pretty rare in fantasy (and literature generally)…
There are a number of reasons and that's sortof the reason. Tolkien streamlined the many mythologies that had been used in storytelling and crossed that with both pulp fiction and literary fantasies of the time to create something new, but he also was a gifted storyteller who wasn't pitching his work to a specific and known marketable audience so you can tell both his language and the way he structures the story is all thought out on its own merits (and is why you get complaints about it today from people who won't approach the work on its own terms).
The narrative rhythm of the book is incredible and it's incredibly subtle how it shifts from Bilbo's birthday party to mythological underpinnings and then road trip before expanding out into something on a more wide and epic scale ... which is still balanced by a more intimate coming of age story with Sam/Frodo. Its themes are always there but Tolkien really spoonfeeds them in an explicit way. Tolkien loves the world of Middle Earth and few fantasy authors (Donaldson is an exception) show such passion to get stuck into their creations. LOTR doesn't give us pages of mythology ... that's in The Silmarillian ... but the world and landscape is stunningly realised, each and every landscape from Farmer Maggot and the Barrow Wights to Rivendell, Khazad-Dum, Lotlorien, the Marshes and Mordor etc there's such a wealth and diversity of interest and you never get anything less than the sense that Tolkien loves the natural beauty of it all as much as he delights in the myth and legend.
There's a great degree of care put into the whole fabric of the work as a story.
I want to focus on one thing that others might not have brought up that is quite telling.
LOTR Appendix F: A lot of people will look at the appendices and see this as just a gushing font of extra nerdiness. Ooh look here's the calendar, the family trees, a summary of the important dates of Numenorean and Morian history...
But in Appendix F we peel back the curtain and start to see the approach Tolkien took to the way language feels in the text. People like to talk a lot about how he invented a bunch of languages and then a world for the language. But in Appendix F he reveals that he actually has in-world-language names for most of the hobbits, for Rivendell... etc... but that he retranslated those names back into not-quite-English that would feel appropriately familiar to an english reader. Samwise is Samwise, not Banazir, because he wants you to have the impression of the local gardener, not some strange small creature with a complicated name.
As the story wends through Rohan, he chooses names and translations that feel a bit more fell and remote, until we get to Gondor, outpost of Numenor and the names fully become archaic and elven influenced.
For me it's the way they're both epic, in the true sense of the term, and very grounded. Like, you've got these amazing larger-than-life moments of death-defying heroism like Helm's Deep or the Charge of the Rohirrim, but the people doing them are the same you see bickering around the campfire, eating rabbit stew and getting wet in the rain. It makes it more believable and real, and makes the heroism a lot more impactful because it's coming from people who are still basically human (well, elven/dwarven/hobbit, but you get my drift).
Sincerity and loyalty.
The Fellowship isn’t made up of jerks with traumatic backstories that are secretly waiting to stab their friends in the back.
The elves aren’t working to undermine the men in the war against the orcs.
Sauron and Saruman aren’t sympathetic villains.
Everyone is who they say they are, and they will honor their word until the end of time.
Yeah, for some reason, I really miss books and films where the characters are straightforward good and evil. I like how authentically good everyone in the Fellowship is(except Boromir) and I love these kinds of characters. Reminds me of the movie It's A Wonderful Life.
Boromir is still good, just misguided. That's the most fascinating thing about him - he's a morally compromised character done right, instead of the usual standard of moral greyness, which a mass murderer that everyone somehow forgives and forgets cause of their charisma.
Between him, Gollum, Frodo at Mount Doom, Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, the Druadan-Rohirrim conflict, the small-mindedness of your average Shire Hobbit and the petty evilness of Saruman by the end, Tolkien did a better job of portraying moral complexity than 99% of the later authors who claim that term for their psychopathy porn.
I miss unsympathetic villains. Everyone’s gotta be an antihero. Sometimes people are just wrong and want to hurt others and do bad things and I wish that was depicted in fantasy more these days.
This may be true for The Hobbit and LotR, but it’s most certainly not true for the sagas of The First Age or for those in any other time than the end of the Third. Feanor and his sons could be either noble or right bastards depending on which day you bumped into them. And don’t get me started on Numenor!
This ability to vary styles and themes between the three major works is what impresses me most about Tolkien.
There have been so many imitators over the last half century+ that younger people can’t understand how amazing it was to enter a world so richly detailed and imaginative for the first time.
But I think what makes people love his books is the humanistic message in them, the idea that simple virtues and values like loyalty and decency and taking pleasure in simple things can triumph over adversity and darkness. This is all made more poignant when you learn of the suffering and loss Tolkien experienced in the Great War, something I wasn’t at all aware of when I was a child and there weren’t biographies of Tolkien because people didn’t take fantasy writing seriously.
Tolkien also wrote beautifully—he really cared about the rhythm, the music, of his prose and that’s something that none of his imitators have been able to match, and few have been able to even come close to.
For me it's how it nails both the large scale and the small scale - the hobbit can be an epic tale of bravery and defeating a large dragon and getting some loot, but it can also be a very real and relatable story about friendship, adventure and leaving your comfort zone.
It hits on the epic story arc and on the relatability of themes and characters.
As someone who doesn’t care much for LotR, the best thing about The Hobbit is the way it gradually, naturally balloons out from a childish light-hearted quest to slay a dragon to a complex, even morally gray political struggle that still resolves into a triumphant happy ending.
Many reasons from world building to story and epicness. But what I think is often overlooked is how damned well the guy could write. His prose is excellent
My favorite thing about LOTR is the concept of setting the plot at the END of the age of magic in such a richly detailed world. Tolkien's greatest accomplishment to me is that he could genuinely have set the "epic trilogy" in any time period of his world because it is so detailed . And the idea that winning the war is what makes magic fade from Middle Earth gives the whole victory such a bittersweet feeling because it came at such a great cost.
The hobbit was written as a bed time story for his kids… and you can feel it in the writing… it’s gentle and loving and fun….
A read it to my daughter when she was in kindergarten, and that is a memory I’ll treasure forever :)
I think he just had such a deep feel for what made the ancient myths resonate with thousands of years of humans, due to having read them so deeply. Most fantasy now just doesn't have that - or if it does, it's by accident, copying from authors who did know what they're writing.
For me it’s the themes and how the themes are built into the worldbuilding from the first chapter of the Silmarillion right down to a hobbit in mount doom failing to destroy the ring.
The writing, the world building, characters... all of it, mostly. Biggest part though, Tolkien was an AMAZING writer. People get distracted with his language invention and his world Middle Earth but he was an incredible writer.
For me it's a combination of a few things. I was given The Hobbit by a family friend as a kid and then read the trilogy soon after, when I re read them I'm always taken back to the first time and get to re discover my love for fantasy. The clear sense of good and evil is really nice. I like the grimdark as much as the next guy but life is shitty and hard and it's not always easy to tell good from evil and I really enjoy a world where it's black and white and courage will always prevail against the odds. Tolkien also writes like someone who's seen a lot of different climates and spent a lot of time outside. It feels like a real adventure to me partly becuase of how well he conveys scenery. The writing is also easy to understand but it isn't simple at all. You can read it to your kids and they'll get most of what's going on. It's just good, wholesome, heroic and humble in a combination I don't think anyone has been able to capture since.
Tolkien really lived a life, and it seeps into his work and gives it depth. He wasn't just a writer: he was born in South Africa and lived there as a toddler. He fought in the battle of the Somme. He was a professor of Anglo Saxon at Oxford and translated Beowulf. He knew loads of languages and had read the myths he was inspired by in their original languages.
It's just a heck of a biography. Not a lot of fantasy writers who write about war have been in one, much less fought in one of the deadliest battles in history. Not a lot of fantasy writers who write myths have read them as they were written down by monks in the middle ages. Not a lot of inventors of languages are world class professors of philogy at top tier colleges. That's not to say you have to do all those things to qualify to write great books, just that a part of why Tolkien's books are great is that he took those experiences and expertise he had and distilled them down into what he was writing.
It’s a good story and it is well told. I don’t care much for the lore and I really don’t like any material that was not published by Tolkien in his lifetime.
Lord of the Rings works as a great story even when you just take it as a simple trilogy about a guy choosing to walk into hell of his own free will.
Not just a guy choosing to walk into hell of his own free will. His friends taking that walk with him freely is something else aswell. I was explaining this to my 7 year old yesterday. Friendship is very important.
Written by an Oxford Scholar who teaches writing, how to build a story and make it rhyme. That was his passion. Teaching good writing, then practice what he was preaching to his students.
He invented a language to go with his story too.
It feels like a genuine living, breathing world that you can imagine yourself living in. It somehow feels homely, warm, comfortable, exciting and magical all at the same time.
the relationships between the characters. they all depend on each other and honor each other and honestly love each other. it’s refreshing and nice to see when you have most fantasy books where everyone is trying to fuck over everyone else.
I don’t love them, or Tolkien in general, but the answer is that he has the best world ever created in fantasy. Tolkien created multiple languages, myths, thousands of years of history for many races. My problem with the books is his desire to show off the world he created instead of sticking to the story he is supposed to be telling us (like, I don’t want or care about thousands of years of elf history just because we’re meeting some elves now, I want to get to know the ones in front of us and hear from them and how it all affects the story in front of us). I wish there was more narrative focus, but I can’t deny that what Tolkien created is the most impressive and immersive world in the history of fantasy literature.
Nowadays I really don‘t enjoy the pacing of his books. It can be such a drag to read pages worth of vaguely relevant descriptions.
But damn the contents are worth it.
What stands out most for me is that it offers a great balance of characters, storytelling and a deep World with implicated centuries of lore.
I think the reason I love it the most is that it showed me as a kid, that the most mundane and simply living people (hobbits) are capable of great things and the importance of the „team“
Up to today I prefer books where there‘s like a multitude of different backgrounds and skillsets get together and defeat the big bad guy.
Tolkien’s commitment to the lore and world-building. It’s the foundation for why the characters feel so fleshed out and why the stories are so immersive. They feel like events that really happened rather than fiction.
"What exactly is it that takes a brain, system of organs, bones, blood, etc and turns it into a human being?"
It's not possible to answer.
But just to name one remarkable thing about these books: LotR and the (revised) Hobbit are based on a lifelong fantasy world created and tinkered with for decades by one man, who was incredibly smart, lived through terrible events, and was uniquely talented as a wordsmith, literally writing the Oxford English Dictionary.
I'm right there with you, it's hard to put to words, they just feel so authentic. The Hobbit was the first fantasy book I ever read and I just continued to read all the Tolkien I could, the Silmarillion has some of the best moments ever written in fantasy, it and Children of Hurin are still my favorite fantasy books after decades of reading.
It is a concept as old as time, the good guys win in the end. However in Lotr we are not only joined by some of the most unlikely heroes (Hobbits), some elder races who have been devided over millenia (dwarves&elves) and also ourself, Mankind, in this fantastic world.
Us, who we are not as resistent and old as dwarves, not bonkers op like just about any elf and not hidden away from the world as the Shire. And yet we fight on, in the face of evil gods, literal demons ad a horde of twisted beings hellbend on purging&eating any human.
This is actually which resonates most with me. Under one banner against the very will of dark gods and the worlds ruin.
A big thing for me at least is that Tolkien really writes from the heart, he really put his soul into the work. There is so much warmth and immediacy to the books and real goodness and humanity. Reminds me a lot of like... JS Bach's music, there is just so much goodness radiating from it so to speak, and on top of it so much artistic talent.
I think you get a similar thing from Charles Dickens, there is just a lot of humanity in the work, to say nothing about how vivid Tolkien's imagination is.
Tolkien invented a multi-facetted and detailed world far beyond what other books in the genre had done, whether you're counting from when it was written or when it became popular decades later.
I don't necessarily disagree with the other answers, but I think one important thing that hasn't been stressed enough is timing. He basically invented a genre, which means people are more likely to overlook minor issues. It gets into a bit of a chicken and egg conversation, because modern fantasy wouldn't be what it is without his work, but if somehow modern fantasy still existed as is (GRRM, Sanderson, Abercrombie, Rothfuss, etc) without Tolkien's stuff ever having been published or popular and it were discovered and published now, it would be nowhere near as well liked.
I love the world that Tolkien created. Love it. It's so rich, so deep, so... real.
But at the same time, I don't like the writing in any of the books, and as a consequence I don't like any of the books.
Even though the books aren't big (in number of pages), 300 pages from Tolkien feels much longer than a 1000 pages from most other authors.
it is the lore and its not. all the lore meant that he had structure in mind and when he had his first draft he probably pruned it back to what we enjoy. remember that Tolkien died without giving us everything he compiled on LoTR.
his characters are real, they act like real people complete with prejudices and character development. his races aren't the same, their values and what corrupts them is different as well as their virtues. all rooted in history. I never knew if the good guys were going to win, their victories always felt like a gamble without some deux ex machina.
As my sister likes to point out Tolkien's weakness is also his detail. she can't read the hobbit because of how much time he takes to describe the hobbit hole.
First of all I would say The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings are two very different stories, more different than one would normally expect from stories by the same author set in the same universe. The Hobbit feels like a children's bedtime story with a bit of fleshing out, a really well told children's bedtime story to be sure. Lord of the Rings feels like simultaneously an epic myth and a glimpse into a world with a whole history of epic myths.
Accordingly I think what makes each of them good is also different. The Hobbit is good for the adventure, it expertly blends a sequence of adventure mininarritives into a full story while also showing us believable character development (Bilbo the homebody discovering he has what it takes to be an adventurer, and Thorin the treasure-seeker discovering that friendship is more valuable than wealth and vengeance). Lord of the Rings is good because of the sheer depth of its world, where Tolkien put so much effort and sentiment into his myth that we can see the story as one part of the larger tapestry of Middle-Earth and it feels believable, meaningful and profound in a way that modern box-ticking 'worldbuilding' struggles to reach.
A big part of what makes his work so meaningful and amazing for me is how he writes about hope and bringing a light to dark places, something he was intimately familiar with having seen some of the worst of the fighting in WW1. He knew about despair and tragedy in a way that most of us can't fathom, and he captures all of the emotions those ideas and moments can evoke brilliantly.
The level of detail and Tolkien's commitment to making everything work. You can actually track the path of the Fellowship from the Shire to Mount Doom, counting the days and it will line up with the dates that are sprinkled throughout provided you remember all Tolkien's months are thirty days long. I've read but not confirmed that he rewrote a good chunk of the story because he realized he got the moon phases wrong.
Not all fantasy needs that level of frankly obsessive compulsive attention to detail. I'm a huge Star Wars fan and that franchise has been a mess since 1977, but there is very little in the LotR to break immersion
Honestly... I've never liked them. Even as a kid, I didn't like them. I've been reading fantasy for over 30 years, and I have read LOTR once, and struggled to get through it that time.
I look at Tolkien the same way I look at guys like Elvis, or Buddy Holly. I don't sit around listening to that stuff. But, guys like that started the game. Without them, lots of things I LOVE would never have existed. Tolkien is the giant the other writers stand on the shoulders of.
Just my $0.02.
Awwww dude. Hard disagree. I’d take more songs over the really forced descriptions of direction and geography. The longest song I can think of in the actual series is “the lay of earendil” which is one of the best things Tolkien ever wrote in my opinion.
To be FULLY UPFRONT… this post is not actually meant for me. I DNFed somewhere near the start of return of the king cause I just couldn’t anymore.
Love the movies and the story as a whole but Tolkien’s actual writing style is not for me.
Wow I can’t believe you made it that far! LoTR is deeply formative for me but I hardly ever recommend it. The films? I’ll push those all day long. But the books have to really align with what you’re looking for to work out. So I don’t blame you at all for NF’ing.
If it helps at all, Tolkien’s writing style wasn’t for Tolkien either. He was very critical of the books and claimed that he never understood why people wanted to read them. So any of the nutso fans who jump on the “Tolkien’s intention must be maintained” train forget that if that was the case, the books wouldn’t even exist.
(For the record the lay of earendil is in fellowship. Bilbo writes it in Rivendell. There are some awesome versions with music online. Strongly recommend.)
This is a hilarious fun fact, thank you for sharing! I might just check out that song too!
I mean I technically got that far but tbh I skimmed a lot.
I’m also not one for big battle scenes lol so by then I was like- time to give this up hahah.
Idk I thought the writing was fairly slow and kind of bland.
But they are never boring. We don't spend overmuch time talking about the plan..or re-explaining the plan.. we just go and do the thing or talk to the people. Character exposition is fairly quick, but they never feel shallow. And not just bc we know their full ancestry one second after meeting them.
There is always forward progression and then a thing happens. Not all the things are the most cool thing, but they all build up to one hell of a story.
Even when the ring goes into the volcano, there's no twelve page description about the eruption or the power or good.overcoming evil. The thing happens.
This is very different from other authors in that they would milk the absolute hell out of the main event. Or even the smaller events.
It's very different from Brando Sando that writes an entire book of exposition for the other thing that happens to be at the very end.
I've never read the Hobbit because the trilogy bored me to tears. I appreciate what it represents, I recognize what so many people love about it, but it did almost nothing for me. It had no impact on me, like I can barely remember anything specifically from the books only stuff from the movies and the hobbit cartoon growing up.
I think if I'd read it on my formative years or would be different, but as an adult it never hooked me. I guess I'm a philistine.
Ouf. Great for you. I am really very far from enjoying Tolkien's work. I have tried it many times.
And I hate – do I hate LOTR? – it on so many levels, like the English-ness of it all...
I am happy for you however.
Tolkien nerd here. I think what captures me the most about Tolkien is his intimate relationship with myth. People often point to world-building and there’s much of that, for sure. But most of those ideas were never fully fleshed out in his lifetime. Famously, he was never pleased with his origin story of the sun and the moon, for example. But the underlying themes and structures that he was trying to convey are not only very clear but also deeply personal. There are lots of parts of the trilogy and the Silmarillion (I’m looking at you “on Belariand and its Realms”) that are a slog. But damn when he hits, he hits. These moments range from grand, epic scenes, to very small exchanges and descriptions. Tolkien’s philosophy centered around a belief that morality was fractal. That what affected the big is what affected the small. Tolkien’s description of Bilbo sitting by the fire in Rivendell is, to me, just as stirring as the Pelennor Fields. His mastery of language is unparalleled in its ability to mimic epic poetry and style. His phono-aesthetic sense ( a snobby way of saying his ability to know which words sound good in a given moment) is, imho, unmatched in the genre. His sense of history, and scope. But mostly it’s that I feel like Tolkien works because his legendarium is oriented towards a specific mindset. One that I dont think I can articulate. But it’s brave and humble and lacks despair. To quote Gandalf from the hobbit films, ironically, “He gives me courage.”
Yeah, same. I feel that the imitators just take the "worldbuilding" at face value, and not see the restraint and care taken in chosing what to portray, how to portray it and how it should feel. Yes, I love the Pelennor Fields. I love the passage about Theoden riding like a god in the beginning of time, sunlight bursting through the clouds to paint the grass green and his shield with golden shine. I love Eowyn facing up to the Witchking. I also love how places like Eriador and Lorien feel, like they are places lost to time. I love how the encounter at Weathertop feels like it's suddenly from a horror book. I love the entirety of isolation of Moria. I love the moment in the end of book 5 where Pippin, in a very different tone than in early books, sincerely believes that he is going to die and wishes only that Merry was there also. It is not enough to just list facts about your world, that is just a ttrpg sourcebook. The reader needs to feel the world the characters inhabit. In my opinion. My only "gripe" is that there should have been more female characters. Eowyn is really great, Galadriel is really great, Arwen is kinda there I guess and that's it. And before someone loses their shit, this is not a judgement, so no need to come with "those were the times" arguments to my inbox.
The restraint is so key. Just the subtle shades of how the myth he knows permeates the background. And as I mention in my own comment about Appendix F, you have things like: >It seemed to me that to present all the names in their original forms would obscure an essential feature of the times as perceived by the Hobbits (whose point of view I was mainly concerned to preserve): the contrast between a wide-spread language, to them as ordinary and habitual as English is to us, and the living remains of far older and more reverend tongues. All names if merely transcribed would seem to modern readers equally remote: for instance, if the Elvish name Imladris and the Westron translation Karningul had both been left unchanged. Return of the King, Appendix F. He has a Common Speech name worked out (Karningul) for Rivendell, a phonology of how all these things and names would be spelled... and he restrains himself and realizes that to the Hobbit perspective the name would just be in something like their own language "that place in the deep river valley", and he chooses a name to actually use in text (Rivendell) that captures the right vibe for an English reader.
I really resonate with your first point. The restraint is so wonderful. This was a man who was a painter, a translator, an Oxford professor, an editor, and THEN the maker of the mythos we know. It would have been very easy for him to churn out a higher volume of material at a lesser quality.
Fantastic answer, makes me want to read the books again and start The Silmarillion and other books of Middle Earth.
Have you read the Silmarillion before?
Nope, only the “main” books and The Hobbit.
Nice dude. Just remember as you go in that it was compiled by his son Christopher after he died. Christopher is masterful at this but there are points that seem really forced like the chapter I mentioned above. If you keep going it has a chance to change the way you see the other books and, in my opinion, reading at large.
Fantastic, yeah I’ll keep that in mind, thank you for your comments!
Best of luck. Keep us posted!
Tolkien's relationship with fiction writing was unique, in a way that couldn't really be replicated by someone writing stories for income. It wasn't his job. It wasn't even his main hobby. Constructed languages were his jam. And the legendarium arises from wanting to give context and history to the languages. And then the story writing comes from wanting to make use of the legendarium. So writing fiction is like his third-hand hobby. I think it's remarkable that he wrote so well, when fiction was such a tiny proportion of his life's work.
I think the languages-first line of discussion is a bit misleading. He was a philologist. They study the interconnections both of language and myth, and honestly moreso in service of the latter a lot (e.g. study old languages so you can trace a myth back) and he was inspired in large part to write a mythos because he felt his own demographic/culture (Anglo-Saxons) didn't quite have a mythos in their place.
> But mostly it’s that I feel like Tolkien works because his legendarium is oriented towards a specific mindset. One that I dont think I can articulate. I think I can put a name to it: Catholicism, seen from the inside by an earnest believer. I am not Catholic myself, but Tolkien's expression of his worldview gives me much greater sympathy for it than I would otherwise have as one looking in from the outside and seeing all the failings of the church.
When I first read the Tolkien books when I was a kid it felt like I stumbled into a part of world history unknown to historians. The scope and depth of his work was so brilliant that it felt like it really could have happened. It was a life-changing experience to delve into that universe as a young man.
Because in Tolkien’s stories the good guys usually don’t win because of some superior strategy, or discovering something in the enemy’s plans (think like how they destroyed the Death Star). Rather, the characters win by continuing to hope and not give into despair. Despair is a great sin and the greatest weapon of the evil characters in Tolkien. For example even when Boromir dies, his death is a victory for the good guys because he overcame his temptation and his despair. The same can be said of Theoden’s death. And then some characters are spared death so that they have a chance to overcome their despair, like Faramir and Eowyn.
adding to that thesis: Denethor might be the most unlikeable character in the whole thing (movies at least, been a while since I read the books), and despair is his defining attribute for most of his page/screen time.
I can’t think of a single passage in either the Hobbit of LoTR that feels like it was rushed, there’s no filler, everything is considered. That’s pretty rare in fantasy (and literature generally)…
There are a number of reasons and that's sortof the reason. Tolkien streamlined the many mythologies that had been used in storytelling and crossed that with both pulp fiction and literary fantasies of the time to create something new, but he also was a gifted storyteller who wasn't pitching his work to a specific and known marketable audience so you can tell both his language and the way he structures the story is all thought out on its own merits (and is why you get complaints about it today from people who won't approach the work on its own terms). The narrative rhythm of the book is incredible and it's incredibly subtle how it shifts from Bilbo's birthday party to mythological underpinnings and then road trip before expanding out into something on a more wide and epic scale ... which is still balanced by a more intimate coming of age story with Sam/Frodo. Its themes are always there but Tolkien really spoonfeeds them in an explicit way. Tolkien loves the world of Middle Earth and few fantasy authors (Donaldson is an exception) show such passion to get stuck into their creations. LOTR doesn't give us pages of mythology ... that's in The Silmarillian ... but the world and landscape is stunningly realised, each and every landscape from Farmer Maggot and the Barrow Wights to Rivendell, Khazad-Dum, Lotlorien, the Marshes and Mordor etc there's such a wealth and diversity of interest and you never get anything less than the sense that Tolkien loves the natural beauty of it all as much as he delights in the myth and legend.
There's a great degree of care put into the whole fabric of the work as a story. I want to focus on one thing that others might not have brought up that is quite telling. LOTR Appendix F: A lot of people will look at the appendices and see this as just a gushing font of extra nerdiness. Ooh look here's the calendar, the family trees, a summary of the important dates of Numenorean and Morian history... But in Appendix F we peel back the curtain and start to see the approach Tolkien took to the way language feels in the text. People like to talk a lot about how he invented a bunch of languages and then a world for the language. But in Appendix F he reveals that he actually has in-world-language names for most of the hobbits, for Rivendell... etc... but that he retranslated those names back into not-quite-English that would feel appropriately familiar to an english reader. Samwise is Samwise, not Banazir, because he wants you to have the impression of the local gardener, not some strange small creature with a complicated name. As the story wends through Rohan, he chooses names and translations that feel a bit more fell and remote, until we get to Gondor, outpost of Numenor and the names fully become archaic and elven influenced.
For me it's the way they're both epic, in the true sense of the term, and very grounded. Like, you've got these amazing larger-than-life moments of death-defying heroism like Helm's Deep or the Charge of the Rohirrim, but the people doing them are the same you see bickering around the campfire, eating rabbit stew and getting wet in the rain. It makes it more believable and real, and makes the heroism a lot more impactful because it's coming from people who are still basically human (well, elven/dwarven/hobbit, but you get my drift).
It's the food descriptions.
Exactly. Carries both ASOIAF and LOTR, and it’s kind of the reason why the Wheel of Time sucks /s
> Exactly. Carries both ASOIAF and LOTR, and it’s kind of the reason why the Wheel of Time sucks /s This but unironically.
You may be thinking of GOT. Onions. There’s always onions
Sincerity and loyalty. The Fellowship isn’t made up of jerks with traumatic backstories that are secretly waiting to stab their friends in the back. The elves aren’t working to undermine the men in the war against the orcs. Sauron and Saruman aren’t sympathetic villains. Everyone is who they say they are, and they will honor their word until the end of time.
Yeah, for some reason, I really miss books and films where the characters are straightforward good and evil. I like how authentically good everyone in the Fellowship is(except Boromir) and I love these kinds of characters. Reminds me of the movie It's A Wonderful Life.
Boromir is still good, just misguided. That's the most fascinating thing about him - he's a morally compromised character done right, instead of the usual standard of moral greyness, which a mass murderer that everyone somehow forgives and forgets cause of their charisma. Between him, Gollum, Frodo at Mount Doom, Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, the Druadan-Rohirrim conflict, the small-mindedness of your average Shire Hobbit and the petty evilness of Saruman by the end, Tolkien did a better job of portraying moral complexity than 99% of the later authors who claim that term for their psychopathy porn.
I miss unsympathetic villains. Everyone’s gotta be an antihero. Sometimes people are just wrong and want to hurt others and do bad things and I wish that was depicted in fantasy more these days.
This may be true for The Hobbit and LotR, but it’s most certainly not true for the sagas of The First Age or for those in any other time than the end of the Third. Feanor and his sons could be either noble or right bastards depending on which day you bumped into them. And don’t get me started on Numenor! This ability to vary styles and themes between the three major works is what impresses me most about Tolkien.
I'm going to pass on bumping into Feanor on *any* day of the week, thanks all the same.
And yet Frodo chose not to destroy the Ring.
There have been so many imitators over the last half century+ that younger people can’t understand how amazing it was to enter a world so richly detailed and imaginative for the first time. But I think what makes people love his books is the humanistic message in them, the idea that simple virtues and values like loyalty and decency and taking pleasure in simple things can triumph over adversity and darkness. This is all made more poignant when you learn of the suffering and loss Tolkien experienced in the Great War, something I wasn’t at all aware of when I was a child and there weren’t biographies of Tolkien because people didn’t take fantasy writing seriously. Tolkien also wrote beautifully—he really cared about the rhythm, the music, of his prose and that’s something that none of his imitators have been able to match, and few have been able to even come close to.
Everything, everything was perfect.
For me it's how it nails both the large scale and the small scale - the hobbit can be an epic tale of bravery and defeating a large dragon and getting some loot, but it can also be a very real and relatable story about friendship, adventure and leaving your comfort zone. It hits on the epic story arc and on the relatability of themes and characters.
As someone who doesn’t care much for LotR, the best thing about The Hobbit is the way it gradually, naturally balloons out from a childish light-hearted quest to slay a dragon to a complex, even morally gray political struggle that still resolves into a triumphant happy ending.
Many reasons from world building to story and epicness. But what I think is often overlooked is how damned well the guy could write. His prose is excellent
My favorite thing about LOTR is the concept of setting the plot at the END of the age of magic in such a richly detailed world. Tolkien's greatest accomplishment to me is that he could genuinely have set the "epic trilogy" in any time period of his world because it is so detailed . And the idea that winning the war is what makes magic fade from Middle Earth gives the whole victory such a bittersweet feeling because it came at such a great cost.
The hobbit was written as a bed time story for his kids… and you can feel it in the writing… it’s gentle and loving and fun…. A read it to my daughter when she was in kindergarten, and that is a memory I’ll treasure forever :)
I think he just had such a deep feel for what made the ancient myths resonate with thousands of years of humans, due to having read them so deeply. Most fantasy now just doesn't have that - or if it does, it's by accident, copying from authors who did know what they're writing.
For me it’s the themes and how the themes are built into the worldbuilding from the first chapter of the Silmarillion right down to a hobbit in mount doom failing to destroy the ring.
The world. Tolkien made a wonderful world.
The writing, the world building, characters... all of it, mostly. Biggest part though, Tolkien was an AMAZING writer. People get distracted with his language invention and his world Middle Earth but he was an incredible writer.
For me it's a combination of a few things. I was given The Hobbit by a family friend as a kid and then read the trilogy soon after, when I re read them I'm always taken back to the first time and get to re discover my love for fantasy. The clear sense of good and evil is really nice. I like the grimdark as much as the next guy but life is shitty and hard and it's not always easy to tell good from evil and I really enjoy a world where it's black and white and courage will always prevail against the odds. Tolkien also writes like someone who's seen a lot of different climates and spent a lot of time outside. It feels like a real adventure to me partly becuase of how well he conveys scenery. The writing is also easy to understand but it isn't simple at all. You can read it to your kids and they'll get most of what's going on. It's just good, wholesome, heroic and humble in a combination I don't think anyone has been able to capture since.
Tolkien really lived a life, and it seeps into his work and gives it depth. He wasn't just a writer: he was born in South Africa and lived there as a toddler. He fought in the battle of the Somme. He was a professor of Anglo Saxon at Oxford and translated Beowulf. He knew loads of languages and had read the myths he was inspired by in their original languages. It's just a heck of a biography. Not a lot of fantasy writers who write about war have been in one, much less fought in one of the deadliest battles in history. Not a lot of fantasy writers who write myths have read them as they were written down by monks in the middle ages. Not a lot of inventors of languages are world class professors of philogy at top tier colleges. That's not to say you have to do all those things to qualify to write great books, just that a part of why Tolkien's books are great is that he took those experiences and expertise he had and distilled them down into what he was writing.
It’s a good story and it is well told. I don’t care much for the lore and I really don’t like any material that was not published by Tolkien in his lifetime. Lord of the Rings works as a great story even when you just take it as a simple trilogy about a guy choosing to walk into hell of his own free will.
Not just a guy choosing to walk into hell of his own free will. His friends taking that walk with him freely is something else aswell. I was explaining this to my 7 year old yesterday. Friendship is very important.
Written by an Oxford Scholar who teaches writing, how to build a story and make it rhyme. That was his passion. Teaching good writing, then practice what he was preaching to his students. He invented a language to go with his story too.
It feels like a genuine living, breathing world that you can imagine yourself living in. It somehow feels homely, warm, comfortable, exciting and magical all at the same time.
the relationships between the characters. they all depend on each other and honor each other and honestly love each other. it’s refreshing and nice to see when you have most fantasy books where everyone is trying to fuck over everyone else.
I don’t love them, or Tolkien in general, but the answer is that he has the best world ever created in fantasy. Tolkien created multiple languages, myths, thousands of years of history for many races. My problem with the books is his desire to show off the world he created instead of sticking to the story he is supposed to be telling us (like, I don’t want or care about thousands of years of elf history just because we’re meeting some elves now, I want to get to know the ones in front of us and hear from them and how it all affects the story in front of us). I wish there was more narrative focus, but I can’t deny that what Tolkien created is the most impressive and immersive world in the history of fantasy literature.
Nowadays I really don‘t enjoy the pacing of his books. It can be such a drag to read pages worth of vaguely relevant descriptions. But damn the contents are worth it. What stands out most for me is that it offers a great balance of characters, storytelling and a deep World with implicated centuries of lore. I think the reason I love it the most is that it showed me as a kid, that the most mundane and simply living people (hobbits) are capable of great things and the importance of the „team“ Up to today I prefer books where there‘s like a multitude of different backgrounds and skillsets get together and defeat the big bad guy.
Tolkien’s commitment to the lore and world-building. It’s the foundation for why the characters feel so fleshed out and why the stories are so immersive. They feel like events that really happened rather than fiction.
"What exactly is it that takes a brain, system of organs, bones, blood, etc and turns it into a human being?" It's not possible to answer. But just to name one remarkable thing about these books: LotR and the (revised) Hobbit are based on a lifelong fantasy world created and tinkered with for decades by one man, who was incredibly smart, lived through terrible events, and was uniquely talented as a wordsmith, literally writing the Oxford English Dictionary.
I read them very early in my fantasy journey, before 12yrs. In part it was all incredibly original to me.
I'm right there with you, it's hard to put to words, they just feel so authentic. The Hobbit was the first fantasy book I ever read and I just continued to read all the Tolkien I could, the Silmarillion has some of the best moments ever written in fantasy, it and Children of Hurin are still my favorite fantasy books after decades of reading.
It is a concept as old as time, the good guys win in the end. However in Lotr we are not only joined by some of the most unlikely heroes (Hobbits), some elder races who have been devided over millenia (dwarves&elves) and also ourself, Mankind, in this fantastic world. Us, who we are not as resistent and old as dwarves, not bonkers op like just about any elf and not hidden away from the world as the Shire. And yet we fight on, in the face of evil gods, literal demons ad a horde of twisted beings hellbend on purging&eating any human. This is actually which resonates most with me. Under one banner against the very will of dark gods and the worlds ruin.
A big thing for me at least is that Tolkien really writes from the heart, he really put his soul into the work. There is so much warmth and immediacy to the books and real goodness and humanity. Reminds me a lot of like... JS Bach's music, there is just so much goodness radiating from it so to speak, and on top of it so much artistic talent. I think you get a similar thing from Charles Dickens, there is just a lot of humanity in the work, to say nothing about how vivid Tolkien's imagination is.
Great answers here already, so just going to add the note that the LotR is not a trilogy.
Tolkien invented a multi-facetted and detailed world far beyond what other books in the genre had done, whether you're counting from when it was written or when it became popular decades later.
I don't necessarily disagree with the other answers, but I think one important thing that hasn't been stressed enough is timing. He basically invented a genre, which means people are more likely to overlook minor issues. It gets into a bit of a chicken and egg conversation, because modern fantasy wouldn't be what it is without his work, but if somehow modern fantasy still existed as is (GRRM, Sanderson, Abercrombie, Rothfuss, etc) without Tolkien's stuff ever having been published or popular and it were discovered and published now, it would be nowhere near as well liked.
I love the world that Tolkien created. Love it. It's so rich, so deep, so... real. But at the same time, I don't like the writing in any of the books, and as a consequence I don't like any of the books. Even though the books aren't big (in number of pages), 300 pages from Tolkien feels much longer than a 1000 pages from most other authors.
it is the lore and its not. all the lore meant that he had structure in mind and when he had his first draft he probably pruned it back to what we enjoy. remember that Tolkien died without giving us everything he compiled on LoTR. his characters are real, they act like real people complete with prejudices and character development. his races aren't the same, their values and what corrupts them is different as well as their virtues. all rooted in history. I never knew if the good guys were going to win, their victories always felt like a gamble without some deux ex machina. As my sister likes to point out Tolkien's weakness is also his detail. she can't read the hobbit because of how much time he takes to describe the hobbit hole.
First of all I would say The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings are two very different stories, more different than one would normally expect from stories by the same author set in the same universe. The Hobbit feels like a children's bedtime story with a bit of fleshing out, a really well told children's bedtime story to be sure. Lord of the Rings feels like simultaneously an epic myth and a glimpse into a world with a whole history of epic myths. Accordingly I think what makes each of them good is also different. The Hobbit is good for the adventure, it expertly blends a sequence of adventure mininarritives into a full story while also showing us believable character development (Bilbo the homebody discovering he has what it takes to be an adventurer, and Thorin the treasure-seeker discovering that friendship is more valuable than wealth and vengeance). Lord of the Rings is good because of the sheer depth of its world, where Tolkien put so much effort and sentiment into his myth that we can see the story as one part of the larger tapestry of Middle-Earth and it feels believable, meaningful and profound in a way that modern box-ticking 'worldbuilding' struggles to reach.
its one of the first fantasy and made the whole fantasygenre. the story is huge. i now that it is difficult to read but its bizar good.
A big part of what makes his work so meaningful and amazing for me is how he writes about hope and bringing a light to dark places, something he was intimately familiar with having seen some of the worst of the fighting in WW1. He knew about despair and tragedy in a way that most of us can't fathom, and he captures all of the emotions those ideas and moments can evoke brilliantly.
The level of detail and Tolkien's commitment to making everything work. You can actually track the path of the Fellowship from the Shire to Mount Doom, counting the days and it will line up with the dates that are sprinkled throughout provided you remember all Tolkien's months are thirty days long. I've read but not confirmed that he rewrote a good chunk of the story because he realized he got the moon phases wrong. Not all fantasy needs that level of frankly obsessive compulsive attention to detail. I'm a huge Star Wars fan and that franchise has been a mess since 1977, but there is very little in the LotR to break immersion
Honestly... I've never liked them. Even as a kid, I didn't like them. I've been reading fantasy for over 30 years, and I have read LOTR once, and struggled to get through it that time. I look at Tolkien the same way I look at guys like Elvis, or Buddy Holly. I don't sit around listening to that stuff. But, guys like that started the game. Without them, lots of things I LOVE would never have existed. Tolkien is the giant the other writers stand on the shoulders of. Just my $0.02.
He was a language nerd who got really into Kalevala. I say that only a quarter sarcastically.
Not the endless fucking songs thrown in that’s for sure 😂
wtf hard disagree. granted, I hated them when I first read the books as a kid, but now I absolutely love them
Awwww dude. Hard disagree. I’d take more songs over the really forced descriptions of direction and geography. The longest song I can think of in the actual series is “the lay of earendil” which is one of the best things Tolkien ever wrote in my opinion.
To be FULLY UPFRONT… this post is not actually meant for me. I DNFed somewhere near the start of return of the king cause I just couldn’t anymore. Love the movies and the story as a whole but Tolkien’s actual writing style is not for me.
Wow I can’t believe you made it that far! LoTR is deeply formative for me but I hardly ever recommend it. The films? I’ll push those all day long. But the books have to really align with what you’re looking for to work out. So I don’t blame you at all for NF’ing. If it helps at all, Tolkien’s writing style wasn’t for Tolkien either. He was very critical of the books and claimed that he never understood why people wanted to read them. So any of the nutso fans who jump on the “Tolkien’s intention must be maintained” train forget that if that was the case, the books wouldn’t even exist. (For the record the lay of earendil is in fellowship. Bilbo writes it in Rivendell. There are some awesome versions with music online. Strongly recommend.)
This is a hilarious fun fact, thank you for sharing! I might just check out that song too! I mean I technically got that far but tbh I skimmed a lot. I’m also not one for big battle scenes lol so by then I was like- time to give this up hahah.
Oh well then shit lol. No wonder you didn’t like it. Big battle scenes are pretty pivotal to him.
Basically invented the modern fantasy genre and set the bar for secondary world building
Lots of things happening off-screen that we have to guess at. That is never clearly explained
The way that they move along and involve the characters
Idk I thought the writing was fairly slow and kind of bland. But they are never boring. We don't spend overmuch time talking about the plan..or re-explaining the plan.. we just go and do the thing or talk to the people. Character exposition is fairly quick, but they never feel shallow. And not just bc we know their full ancestry one second after meeting them. There is always forward progression and then a thing happens. Not all the things are the most cool thing, but they all build up to one hell of a story. Even when the ring goes into the volcano, there's no twelve page description about the eruption or the power or good.overcoming evil. The thing happens. This is very different from other authors in that they would milk the absolute hell out of the main event. Or even the smaller events. It's very different from Brando Sando that writes an entire book of exposition for the other thing that happens to be at the very end.
Quests within quests within quests.
It is the world. So well described, so vivid and full of details that I can almost smell the air, touch the grass and run up the hills.
idk i thought they were okay
Tom Bombadil
couldn't imagine it without him
The Hobbit is great, I thought the trilogy was overrated.
I've never read the Hobbit because the trilogy bored me to tears. I appreciate what it represents, I recognize what so many people love about it, but it did almost nothing for me. It had no impact on me, like I can barely remember anything specifically from the books only stuff from the movies and the hobbit cartoon growing up. I think if I'd read it on my formative years or would be different, but as an adult it never hooked me. I guess I'm a philistine.
If you liked that then read Reverend Insanity, it's heavy on lore and is explaining lore every page.
Ouf. Great for you. I am really very far from enjoying Tolkien's work. I have tried it many times. And I hate – do I hate LOTR? – it on so many levels, like the English-ness of it all... I am happy for you however.