Moorcock blasts Tolkien

[MerricB]

Basically, he comments Tolkien is "safe" by not challenging the social norms in his world (Aragorn is a fit ruler because he is born into it, Arwen never challenges her place in elf-society, Sam is a servant who never questions his lord, etc).

Heh. Aragorn is a fit ruler because he's been brought up right (by Elrond), not because anyone born to that bloodline is right for it. He's the descendant of Isildur who managed to make the terribly wrong decision of not destroying the Ring!

Arwen completely abandons Elf society to marry Aragorn.

What is also true is that Middle Earth at the start of the Lord of the Rings is in decline. All the great kingdoms have failed; those that remain are in decline. The wilderness is encroaching. After LotR you have the renewal of both the Rohan and Gondor cultures (and Shire likewise).

The social norms of the hobbits are to stay at home and ignore the world...

Cheers!

 

[Aus_Snow]

. . .

Well. This thread has made for some interesting work-time reading.

Some of Moorcock's statements remind me somewhat of Pullman's attack on the Narnia stories.

It's so very. . . predictable?. . . when self-styled 'anti-religious' types zealously crusade against the supposed evils of what they claim to be crusading zeal.

Perhaps it would be cute or amusing it it wasn't so ******* boring and cliche.

 

[Odhanan]

I actually had a few exchanges with Mike Moorcock on the subject of Tolkien.

I think that people are overblowing Mike's statement. He is a writer, and he has political opinions. Like any of us. From there, he can express his opinions, and he's conscious these opinions reflect his personal tastes in terms of literature and politics. He doesn't expect people to change their minds over what he says, and he's certainly not thinking of fans of Tolkien (such as I) as debilitated morons overly nostalgic and/or right wing.

So, I think one should just take a step back and look at his criticism as coming from someone who is on the opposite side of the fence on both style and political points of view. He does make some sound arguments, but it's not necessary to choose sides. I'm both a Tolkien and Moorcock fan, myself, and I like their writings and personalities for different reasons.

 

[Raven Crowking]

(Tolkien would have absolutely abhorred a distinctly French word like 'menu' sneaking its way into Middle Earth. One of his motivations in creating Middle Earth was to explore the pleasures of the particular sounds of English's pre-Norman roots, as well as create a mythology with the richness and appeal of, say, Arthurian England with none of the borrowed French trappings.)

Not at all....if the film was aimed at the French.

In his notes for translating LotR, Tolkein went to great pains to ensure that the translated names and languages would correspond not to his English, but to earlier forms of the language LotR was translated into.

 

[Gentlegamer]

The film attempts to be coherent to a viewer who has not read the book. Such changes are a necessity of the change in medium.

I undestand. I still think preserving more of the actual dialog in that scene would have been better.

One thing added that I think was actually better than in Tolkien was Boromir's final words to Aragorn in the film.

I am sure that Tolkien rolled in his grave when the Uruk barked "Meat is back on the menu, boys!" but the line works extremely well nonetheless.

(Tolkien would have absolutely abhorred a distinctly French word like 'menu' sneaking its way into Middle Earth. One of his motivations in creating Middle Earth was to explore the pleasures of the particular sounds of English's pre-Norman roots, as well as create a mythology with the richness and appeal of, say, Arthurian England with none of the borrowed French trappings.)

Accurate analysis. Tolkien was also quite good at coming up with a "logical" linguistic explanation for things, so for example:
the Uruk-hai was using words he learned from the language instruction of Sharkey (Saruman), who taught them a hodge-podge of vulgar Westron with foreign words from Rhun (where Saruman had traveled extensively) (such as the word "menu").

 

[Raven Crowking]

BTW, the two largest themes in LotR are:

(1) The world must be allowed to move forward, even if it means that we must decline and die.

(2) Sometimes, to achieve what is right for others, we must sacrifice the ability to enjoy it ourselves.

These are not "comforting" notions.

YMMV.

(BTW, Thanks ThirdWizard. Disagreeing on one or two topics doesn't mean we have to disagree on everything! )

 

[Nomad4life]

What if one likes shades of gray in one's fiction AS AN ESCAPE from the black and white (well, mostly black) of the real world?

You know, I feel just like that sometimes, especially as I get older; that R/L is mostly composed of slightly differing textures of black. Sometimes it’s nice to read fantasy just to go back to dealing with good ol’ college-days gray.

 

[Gentlegamer]

An interesting sidelight worth noting is that Lewis WAS an atheist until conversations with Tolkien turned him into a Christian. Now Lewis joined the Church of England, while Tolkien was a Roman Catholic, but Tolkien was definitely responsible for Lewis's conversion. So, I think it's fair to say that Tolkien may have known what he was talking about regarding the best way to convey the message.

If you can ever read any of it, their correspondence is quite fascinating.

Lewis wrote in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, that as a vaguly Protestant English Literature professor, he "had been warned explicitly against Catholics and implicitly against philogists. Tolkien was both." [paraphrase]

The protagonist of Lewis's "Space Trilogy," is Dr. Ransom, a philogist.

 

[replicant2]

Moorcock does have a point.

Tolkein's prose, plotlines, and characters are extremely safe. This has had an inordinate influence on so many writers who followed him, churning out their safe, predictable, trite trilogies in which the good guys are good, the bad guys are bad, and the Hero gathers his Seven Samurai of assorted characters who go on a Cook's Tour of a generic fantasy world which is exactly the right size to fit onto two facing pages of a standard paperback, their mission being to Collect the Plot Vouchers which they can turn in to the author at the end of the trilogy, at which time the Dark Lord is defeated and everyone lives Happily Ever After in your standard, safe and extremely dull eucatastrophe.

Sorry man, but you whiffed here.

Some (myself included) believe that a major theme of the Lord of the Rings is that there isn't a Happily Ever After for everyone. That's what the Scouring of the Shire is all about. It's what Frodo's scars--physical and psychological--symbolize.

Even though Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin "scour" the evil from the Shire, innocence has been lost for good.

Tolkien never portrayed war as an event that leads to a happy ever after, and if that's what you truly believe I suggest you read the books again. Either that or you might be confusing Tolkien with some of the hacks (admittedly numerous) that came after him, writers that copied his formula and archetypes but sorely lacked his depth of meaning.

 

[Ulrick]

Michael Moorcock "invented" the Chaos Symbol, and I love the Stormbringer quote in my sig. However, I do like LotR and Middle Earth. One can learn a lot as a DM on how to build a world with deep history. Moorcock's worlds are just invented for the sake of including them in the plot in that particular corner of the Mutiverse.

I like both authors. In many ways they represent extremes in the fantasy literature genre. And I think that people can learn important things from each. Moorcock has been "blasting" Tolkien for years now. It's just the way it is. I'm not going to let one author influence my judgement on another, particulary in this context. Moorcock is a prolific writer, period, but a lot of what he writes (in my opinion) doesn't have much substance to it (I have read all 15 of his ominbus' by the way, back when was a "neo-gothic college student"--as somebody put it earlier). I even read somewhere (on multiverse.org, I think) that Moorcock often has a goal of 60,000 words for a novel. He then breaks the novel down into three parts, 20,000 words each. Each part has roughly 4-6 chapters of 2000-5000 words long. Each chapter must have something magical or special happen roughly every 500 words so. Yes, he's written some good stuff with this technique, and it probably helps him meet deadlines, but I have to say that there's something good about letting a story evolve on its own like Tolkien did.