Matt Colville, and Most Tolkien Critics, Are Wrong

cbwjm · Jan 6, 2019

I loved Tigana, I'd actually forgotten about it until just now when reading this post. From memory my mum bought, lent it to my nan, and then I read it. We all really enjoyed it. I remember the ending being kinda sad with the brother and sister so close to reuniting.

Umbran · Jan 6, 2019

Mercurius said:
So again, it depends upon what you mean by "novel." I'm OK saying that LotR is a great book but problematic as a novel. I'm not quite ready to say it is a "poor novel."

Really. If nothing else, one man's "tightly plotted and well-paced" is another's "rushed and frantic." But, let me include some other relevant thoughts....

Back in the 1980s, people wore acid wash jeans, and mullet haircuts. At the time, they were awesome. Today, we laugh at them. There is no absolute high or low artistic quality to a mullet, or a powdered wig, or a hightop fade. They are all different fashions, and fashions change.

Art is a part of culture. And culture changes. And any given piece of art is made within its culture, for a particular audience. Remove it from its culture and it loses impact. You can see this trivially in, say, Shakespeare, in that language change has made most of the puns in his plays absolutely opaque to a modern reader, and students need annotations to understand what is going on. But beyond plain language change, there's a host of tropes and structural conventions that come and go with time. And LotR was written in the 1930s and 40s.

How many of you who have not taken art courses can honestly say you actually know what Jackson Pollock is trying to get across to you?

I, myself, am a middle-class white American. I do not have the cultural referents to understand rap music - most of the meaning in it just goes by me unrecognized. I could not begin to claim I could say what is good or bad about a given piece, because I know diddly about the musical genre.

If you think Tolkien reads like a travelogue, with long slow boring bits that bore you to tears and you see no point to them, you have two possibilities: 1) You know more about writing than Tolkien, and he's just bad, or 2) those passages actually serve a purpose in the book, and are meant to convey meaning to the reader, but that the use of the conventions he's employing is so rare in modern works, that you are missing the point of them?

Consider, for example, that the modern audience is habituated to television programs, paced so that something like a full story is now delivered in 40 minutes, beginning, middle, and end - and not for any reason of that being a better way to do art, but because of the economics of television, and the power of the money of those trying to sell advertising to you. Have you not considered that this relentless pacing might leech into other art forms, and that doesn't make the pacing "better" so much as, "what you are used to"?

In the final analysis - you do happen to be talking about a work that's sold 150 million copies. In the 2003 "Big Read" survey conducted in Britain by the BBC, The Lord of the Rings was found to be the "Nation's best-loved book". In similar 2004 polls both Germany and Australia also found The Lord of the Rings to be their favourite book. In a 1999 poll of Amazon.com customers, The Lord of the Rings was judged to be their favourite "book of the millennium". And it rated in the top five in PBS's "Great American Read" polling over this summer.

Not that the masses have some sort of final say, or a lock on The Truth. But there might be some strength to saying that you don't like it so much, rather than calling it a "poor novel".

KahlessNestor · Jan 6, 2019

I haven't watched Matt's video yet (I am behind on watching his channel), but I think a lot of it has to do more with Matt's own style and writing philosophy than anything about the merits of Tolkien. Matt describes his own style (in Priest and Thief) as "hardboiled". He is very terse and to the point.

I agree with Umbran that many people's trouble with Tolkien is likely more a result of modern people's lack of attention span due to television and screens than anything to do with his writing. I saw the same thing when Chris Claremont came back to the X-Men in 2000. Fans have the attention span of squirrels on crack and couldn't handle his deliberate story pacing, so he was out within six months and they brought in some people to hack out some terrible wrap ups.

I had no trouble being engrossed in LOTR in 8th grade. I had a lot of trouble with The Scarlet Letter and The Count of Monte Cristo at the same time. None of that reflects on the talent of Hawthorne or Dumas. These books are and remain classics for a reason well beyond my puny existence and are worth the trouble to read. The same can be said for probably the best novel ever written, "The Brothers Karamazov" by Dostoyevsky. It isn't easy, what with the different cultural milieu and the dense themes. I always tell people to read it twice, the first time for character names (they all have 3, because Russian) and plot. The second to really luxuriate in the themes. Not easy, but well worth the effort. I have the same problem with Victor Hugo, who I think is an objectively bad novelist but good storyteller, and Les Miserables is probably my third favorite book, beaten by Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities and a much better novelist, though they were writing at the same time and in the serialized style.

Imaculata · Jan 6, 2019

Blue said:
That said, when describing any scene I try and invoke at least one sense outside sight and have gotten a lot of positive feedback from players about it over the years. The sharp smell of copper from the copious amounts of spilled blood at the murder scene, the ragged panting of the abomination, the stomach churning motion of the rope bridge.

I've been trying to do this more often lately. I've noticed that it really helps the players fill in the details of the scene for themselves when you describe a smell they are familiar with. For example, I described a dimly lit tavern that smelled of old wood, roasted pig and heavy spices.

Sometimes describing a strange smell is a perfect way to build up suspense for a scene. Such as the pervasive smell of a wet dog, yet probably not a dog. When you're trying to convey the feeling to your players that there is a scary monster nearby, describing its smell (and also its sounds) are a great way to set the scene. In one occasion, I even played the strange distant cries of a yeti to my players, and the table got really quiet...

Eltab · Jan 7, 2019

One of the scenes in LotR that I most remember (not word-for-word) has no action at all: Samwise Gamgee (later honored as The Gardener) spends two pages looking at the flowers in a meadow, and is able to guess the season and his travel distance north-south since leaving the Shire. He is re-orienting himself after experiencing the timeless quality of the elves.

I know a grade-school student who was told he could not read LotR as part of his school's Advanced Reading Challenge, because that book alone would have given him all the points he would need for the year. (It was that far above his expected reading level.) He therefore read LotR - the whole trilogy - during summer vacation.

doctorbadwolf · Jan 7, 2019

Umbran said:
Really. If nothing else, one man's "tightly plotted and well-paced" is another's "rushed and frantic." But, let me include some other relevant thoughts....

Back in the 1980s, people wore acid wash jeans, and mullet haircuts. At the time, they were awesome. Today, we laugh at them. There is no absolute high or low artistic quality to a mullet, or a powdered wig, or a hightop fade. They are all different fashions, and fashions change.

Art is a part of culture. And culture changes. And any given piece of art is made within its culture, for a particular audience. Remove it from its culture and it loses impact. You can see this trivially in, say, Shakespeare, in that language change has made most of the puns in his plays absolutely opaque to a modern reader, and students need annotations to understand what is going on. But beyond plain language change, there's a host of tropes and structural conventions that come and go with time. And LotR was written in the 1930s and 40s.

How many of you who have not taken art courses can honestly say you actually know what Jackson Pollock is trying to get across to you?

I, myself, am a middle-class white American. I do not have the cultural referents to understand rap music - most of the meaning in it just goes by me unrecognized. I could not begin to claim I could say what is good or bad about a given piece, because I know diddly about the musical genre.

If you think Tolkien reads like a travelogue, with long slow boring bits that bore you to tears and you see no point to them, you have two possibilities: 1) You know more about writing than Tolkien, and he's just bad, or 2) those passages actually serve a purpose in the book, and are meant to convey meaning to the reader, but that the use of the conventions he's employing is so rare in modern works, that you are missing the point of them?

Consider, for example, that the modern audience is habituated to television programs, paced so that something like a full story is now delivered in 40 minutes, beginning, middle, and end - and not for any reason of that being a better way to do art, but because of the economics of television, and the power of the money of those trying to sell advertising to you. Have you not considered that this relentless pacing might leech into other art forms, and that doesn't make the pacing "better" so much as, "what you are used to"?

In the final analysis - you do happen to be talking about a work that's sold 150 million copies. In the 2003 "Big Read" survey conducted in Britain by the BBC, The Lord of the Rings was found to be the "Nation's best-loved book". In similar 2004 polls both Germany and Australia also found The Lord of the Rings to be their favourite book. In a 1999 poll of Amazon.com customers, The Lord of the Rings was judged to be their favourite "book of the millennium". And it rated in the top five in PBS's "Great American Read" polling over this summer.

Not that the masses have some sort of final say, or a lock on The Truth. But there might be some strength to saying that you don't like it so much, rather than calling it a "poor novel".

Wonderfully put! You expressed much better than I the effect of modern media (and postmodernism defines much of modern story telling, which is why I brought it up) on readers' attitudes toward a fictional than I did. Thank you.

I will say, though, that I don't think it's just TV and short-form programming. People are, more and more, enjoying long form programming, after all, and TV shows are becoming more and more serialized rather than purely episodic. As well, movies become longer and longer, and in fact the LoTR movies were enormous films without any lack of popularity.

I think that part of it is the effect of writers like Hemingway, and the growing ideal of brevity as a Good in writing. I once had a creative writing teacher tell me that Tennyson was garbage, because he couldn't get to the bloody point! An extreme case, but certainly tastes began to shift toward brevity before the ubiquity of the home television set.

Imaculata said:
I've been trying to do this more often lately. I've noticed that it really helps the players fill in the details of the scene for themselves when you describe a smell they are familiar with. For example, I described a dimly lit tavern that smelled of old wood, roasted pig and heavy spices.

Sometimes describing a strange smell is a perfect way to build up suspense for a scene. Such as the pervasive smell of a wet dog, yet probably not a dog. When you're trying to convey the feeling to your players that there is a scary monster nearby, describing its smell (and also its sounds) are a great way to set the scene. In one occasion, I even played the strange distant cries of a yeti to my players, and the table got really quiet...

I have grown very fond of giving some of those queus, and then asking a player who hasn't spoken up in a bit what else they see, smell, hear, or otherwise notice in the space.

Also, I will often tell them that there are X people in the room, Y of them are of Z categorization, and ask them who they are.

Eltab said:
One of the scenes in LotR that I most remember (not word-for-word) has no action at all: Samwise Gamgee (later honored as The Gardener) spends two pages looking at the flowers in a meadow, and is able to guess the season and his travel distance north-south since leaving the Shire. He is re-orienting himself after experiencing the timeless quality of the elves.

I know a grade-school student who was told he could not read LotR as part of his school's Advanced Reading Challenge, because that book alone would have given him all the points he would need for the year. (It was that far above his expected reading level.) He therefore read LotR - the whole trilogy - during summer vacation.

I love that, had forgotten it, and now am going to have to reread the trilogy. I just reread Kay's Tigana and Fionavar Tapestry, and am reading something new that I am blank on the name of ATM, but I'll have to fit LoTR in after that.

Moments like that bring us into the novel, alongside the characters, and help us understand them. This is why i scoff at people who claim there is little character development in the work.

Jhaelen · Jan 7, 2019

doctorbadwolf said:
Asking why you should care who the guy in the video in the OP is, is a useless post. If you intended to find out who he is beyond being a guy in a video, you could have actually asked that.

I just tried to reply to Morrus in kind.

I was only interested in learning if there was anything that qualified this Matt guy in any particular way to make a judgement on Tolkien's work. Apparently, that's not the case, so this is simply a case of:

doctorbadwolf · Jan 7, 2019

Jhaelen said:
I just tried to reply to Morrus in kind.

I was only interested in learning if there was anything that qualified this Matt guy in any particular way to make a judgement on Tolkien's work. Apparently, that's not the case, so this is simply a case of:

Two things:

A, what useful thing do you think you're contributing with this?

2, no. Matt is an extremely popular voice in nerd circles, who last year broke 1 million dollars with a kickstarter for a 3pp dnd product. You unfamiliarity doesn't indicate anything about the value of his criticism of a thing. He's also a writer with a dedicated following, who wrote the first run of the Critical Role graphic novelisation. There just...isn't really a context in which he's just some random yahoo talking about LOTR.

3, even if he was just some rando, you're aggressively missing the point of this thread. If you don't care about what the thread is about, go find one that you do care about the topic of.

Umbran · Jan 7, 2019

doctorbadwolf said:
I will say, though, that I don't think it's just TV and short-form programming. People are, more and more, enjoying long form programming, after all, and TV shows are becoming more and more serialized rather than purely episodic. As well, movies become longer and longer, and in fact the LoTR movies were enormous films without any lack of popularity.

I wasn't intending that comment to be the end-all, be-all of why genre fiction today doesn't match Tolkien's style. I was trying to be a bit more demonstrative of how times can change what we prefer in our various media.

What you note about short-form programming is relevant, and the causes of that are fairly new. The episodic short form is decades old. The technology to easily time-shift (in the DVR and streaming) and to break away from advertising as the sole basis for revenue (mostly in streaming), have removed barriers that drove the format before. It may take some time before that change influences our written fiction (as, for example, there are more content providers looking to license, will writers start writing with *intent* to license, and what will that mean?).

I think that part of it is the effect of writers like Hemingway, and the growing ideal of brevity as a Good in writing.

Well, my point is that ideal is not just a free-floating ideal, unconnected to other developments, nor is it The Truth about writing. I'd reiterate that all our art and media is created within a context, and that movements in the arts are going to be connected to movements in the context.

For example, we can turn to demographics. What have been the socio-economic changes in the population of pleasure-readers since the time of Tolkien and Hemingway? If more people are reading, but those people have less time for reading, that will put a pressure on the written form - books you can choke a horse with won't sell so well. Similarly, sequels and series are apt to sell better, for as time to read drops, desire for surety that you'll like the resulting work would probably rise.

Similarly, economics of the book trade probably matter - Tolkien took 12 years to finish the LotR Trilogy. Today, unless youa re George RR Martin, no publisher is going to wait on you that long. A writer more like Scalzi, who can crank out a book or more a year on a schedule, are likely more what the publishers want to see, and so the forms that allow for this faster production pace are apt to dominate the market, and become what we are used to.

But, those are today's socio-economics, and today's market. In another couple of decades, those things may shift again, to favor some other conventions. This is part of the basis of fashion.