Moorcock blasts Tolkien

[Doug McCrae]

There is a central theme to his work (individuals vs systems, personal responsibility etc) but I don't see how these make his books "the same book". How can you compare Gloriana to Stormbringer, or Warhound and the World's Pain to Behold the Man, or even the Hawkmoon books to the Corum books? I'd be interested in seeing someone back this assertion up with concrete examples.

Moorcock certainly doesn't always tell the same story, but sometimes he does, particularly in the Eternal Champion cycle. The classic example is the killing of the twin sorcerer/buildings Agak and Gagak, the same events being retold from different perspectives in Sailor On The Seas Of Fate and The Quest For Tanelorn. A second example of repetition is the first Jerry Cornelius book, The Final Programme, which has a plot segment, the attack on the French chateau, which is an exact duplicate of Elric's attack on Melnibone in The Dreaming City.

There is repetition of a lesser degree throughout the Eternal Champion series which is made explicit in the books, the champion himself being aware of this repetition. The champion is doomed to constantly battle (usually against chaos) to preserve the Cosmic Balance. He often has a companion, a jovial less brooding person than the champion, and a lover. The champion often fights for healthy cultures, ie those closer to a balance between law and chaos, versus unhealthy cultures. (I gave examples of these in a previous post). The book's climax is often the healthy culture being under seige or direct attack by enemy forces while the champion goes on a quest for a power source or other means by which to lift the seige. This occurs in Phoenix in Obsidian (the scarlet fjord is attacked by the silver warriors), Dragon in the Sword (the bear-like creatures city being attacked by the forces of chaos) and many others.

 

[replicant2]

He also despises Anne McCaffrey, H.P. Lovecraft, Poul Anderson, and just about any other science fiction of fantasy author who had the temerity to write about anything other than the wonderousness of an anarchist society.

On a tangental note, Anderson's The Broken Sword is much, much better than any of Moorcock's Elric stories, IMO. Read this story and tell me that he doesn't explore the themes of an all-powerful but ultimately corrupting weapon much more effectively than Moorcock did with Mournblade.

For the record, I would also put Anderson in the big four.

 

[Mark Hope]

Moorcock certainly doesn't always tell the same story, but sometimes he does, particularly in the Eternal Champion cycle. The classic example is the killing of the twin sorcerer/buildings Agak and Gagak, the same events being retold from different perspectives in Sailor On The Seas Of Fate and The Quest For Tanelorn. A second example of repetition is the first Jerry Cornelius book, The Final Programme, which has a plot segment, the attack on the French chateau, which is an exact duplicate of Elric's attack on Melnibone in The Dreaming City.

There is repetition of a lesser degree throughout the Eternal Champion series which is made explicit in the books, the champion himself being aware of this repetition. The champion is doomed to constantly battle (usually against chaos) to preserve the Cosmic Balance. He often has a companion, a jovial less brooding person than the champion, and a lover. The champion often fights for healthy cultures, ie those closer to a balance between law and chaos, versus unhealthy cultures. (I gave examples of these in a previous post). The book's climax is often the healthy culture being under seige or direct attack by enemy forces while the champion goes on a quest for a power source or other means by which to lift the seige. This occurs in Phoenix in Obsidian (the scarlet fjord is attacked by the silver warriors), Dragon in the Sword (the bear-like creatures city being attacked by the forces of chaos) and many others.

Agreed. As I mentioned above, there is an element of this in his work, and the above are good examples of that kind of thing. I just dispute the claim that most or all of his writing falls into this category. It's in the minority.

 

[PapersAndPaychecks]

Moorcock's up there with Lovecraft and Leiber and Howard and Tolkein in that narrow category of people who've had popular fantasy games written around their material. There's a major film in the works too, and they don't make films out of the work of minor fantasy authors. After Tolkein himself and Terry Pratchett, it's hard to think of a better-selling British fantasy author than Moorcock, and Moorcock's been immensely influential over the writers who followed.

I'm not saying Moorcock's necessarily terribly original -- all the law/chaos theme flowing through Moorcock's work comes from Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions -- and neither am I saying that it's always terribly good. The fact is that Moorcock lived through a longish time when he had to write a novel every three or four months to pay the bills. To do that, he wrote to a very disciplined and structured plan, beginning with an outline and working back to the details, and he did reuse very similar elements time and again, and this is glaringly obvious to anyone familiar with the Moorcock corpus.

Moorcock's fairly transparently a liberal (in the British sense of the word, not the American one) and seemingly a humanist or atheist. By wordcount he's had at least twice as much material published as Tolkein did. Actually, I think I've got more than sixty Moorcock novels on my shelves.

Compare this against Tolkein's slow, undisciplined way of writing, his relatively comfortable circumstances (and yes, I know Tolkein's parents weren't rich and I know he went to war, but when he was writing he didn't have to write to pay the bills), and his conservative catholicism and you've got two almost diametrically opposite writers.

You might be moved by Tolkein's imaginative sweep, but Moorcock's much better at the technical side of writing. He writes deliberately simple, direct prose in short, active voice sentences. His words are often chosen with great precision and there's a consistent style. Tolkein experiments with various styles - in LOTR, pastoral for the hobbits in the Shire, right through to epic, particularly for the later battle scenes - and he overwrites nearly as badly as Donaldson or Jordan.

 

[Storm Raven]

What about Phillip K. Dick? I'm not familiar with him myself (my girlfriend raves about him, though) but he seems to have been pretty influential.

I'd put him in the list of "good science fiction authors" along with, say, Pournelle, Brin, and Haldeman.

Oh, and when I was contemplating my "big four" of fantasy, I forgot to mention Andre Norton, who someone might reasonably choose to stick in that group.

 

[Raven Crowking]

The hobbits certainly didn't get "hosed" -- in fact the events set in motion by the end of the War of the Rings ushered in a Renaissance age in hobbit culture. OK, so I'm exaggerating, but the hobbits of the Shire (with the exception of Frodo) seemed ultimately to profit from the destruction of the Ring.

And of course the Ents are brown-skinned, so of course they got hosed.

First off, what makes you think that the hobbits are not brown-skinned?

Second, the destruction of the One Ring ushers in the Age of Men....The Fourth Age (which is our age) of Middle Earth. Saruman takes over the Shire, Wormtongue eats a few hobbits, and they are generally ruled by orc/human crossbreeds until the Scouring. Thereafter, Sam makes a fine mayor, and the King loves the Shire, but the seeds of its destruction have been sown. How far beyond that generation does the Shire prosper? Sam's dust from the Lady Galadrial helps, but is the Shire ever what it was before Saruman razed parts of it?

Paradoxically, the "growth" of the hobbits is also their tradgedy. Merry and Pippen die, and are buried far from home. Eventually even Aragorn dies, and then Arwen wills herself to die as well. Legolas and Gimli depart. The Shire is subsumed by the men Frodo and Sam helped to preserve.

In order to understand how deeply the Free Peoples of Middle Earth are hosed, it is essential to realize that we live in Middle Earth. Tolkein isn't talking about some other fantasy planet; his work is a fantasy history of our world (much in the same way that Howard's Cimmeria was in our remote past). In LotR, our world is the end result of the War of the Ring.

You merely have to examine the world of our time (or especially, the world of Tolkein's time) in relationship to the world of the Third Age to see how deeply, and how enduringly, the Free Peoples sacrificed in order to thwart Sauron.


RC

 

[Raven Crowking]

You might be moved by Tolkein's imaginative sweep, but Moorcock's much better at the technical side of writing. He writes deliberately simple, direct prose in short, active voice sentences. His words are often chosen with great precision and there's a consistent style. Tolkein experiments with various styles - in LOTR, pastoral for the hobbits in the Shire, right through to epic, particularly for the later battle scenes - and he overwrites nearly as badly as Donaldson or Jordan.

Well, here we disagree.

For example, the change in styles as the hobbits move farther and farther from the Shire isn't experimenting with various styles. It is part of an overarching style; Tolkein is changing his language to reflect the unfamiliarity of the hobbits with the peoples and cultures they are encountering. This was a very deliberate choice, and is explained in his Note to Translaters.


RC

 

[JohnSnow]

You might be moved by Tolkein's imaginative sweep, but Moorcock's much better at the technical side of writing. He writes deliberately simple, direct prose in short, active voice sentences. His words are often chosen with great precision and there's a consistent style. Tolkein experiments with various styles - in LOTR, pastoral for the hobbits in the Shire, right through to epic, particularly for the later battle scenes - and he overwrites nearly as badly as Donaldson or Jordan.

That's a stylistic difference.

Moorcock, from what I've read, writes mostly journalistic-style fantasy. Which involves simple, directive prose in active voice. It's very descriptive and to the point, I'll give him that.

Tolkien, by contrast, doesn't write that way. He wasn't TRYING TO. He was trying to write epic prose fantasy. That's something other writers try to do as well. Some of them succeed admirably most of the time, like George Martin. Others succeed some of the time, like Robert Jordan. And still others fail miserably most of the time, like Donaldson.

Tolkien's work feels like it came out of a previous era. The pastoral stuff in the shire shares more in common with Don Quixote than any recent work. Basically, as a piece of 20th-Century literature, The Lord of the Rings is a throwback. It's a celebration of language and a deliberate attempt to create Epic literature - not marketable "fluff."

Given its success, Tolkien could just have chosen to write 20 sequels to The Hobbit, cranking them out like bad spinoffs. But he chose to do something VERY different instead. He challenged himself, because he could. The end result was The Lord of the Rings, an experiment at writing the grand epic of a fictional world by a professor of literature and language. Its style is quite deliberate.

You may not like epic prose, but you shouldn't criticize it just because it's not journalism fantasy.

I'd definitely put Moorcock behind Leiber in the "ranking" of great fantasy writers. Being a prolific writer doesn't make you a great writer. Writing about things other people find controversial and uncomfortable doesn't make you a gifted artist. What it may make you is a disciplined tradesmen with pretentious notions that your writing is all about the "craft." That may not be the case with Moorcock, but it might be. I'd say he's been successful because his work strikes a chord with some people.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I own Elric of Melnibone and I've read it in its entirety. Since completing it, I've looked at some of Moorcock's other works and chosen to pass. His anarchistic nihlism bores me. His plots bore me. I find his prose descriptive, but not particularly evocative.

I'm not saying Moorcock is a bad writer. He's just not my cup of tea, so far as I've seen. But critiquing a work you haven't read in its entirety...

That says it all I think.

Obviously, he doesn't like The Lord of the Rings. Maybe he doesn't get it because he disagrees with its philosophy. Maybe he doesn't get it because he just doesn't like the style. Maybe he doesn't get it because he just doesn't want to.

But he absolutely, most assuredly, CAN'T get it if he hasn't read it. It's one book, published in three volumes by the publisher. I wouldn't dare critique a work of Moorcock's I'd only read through chapter 4, on any grounds other than "plot" or "style," and then all I could say would be very limited.

So, not having read the entire book, Moorcock is entitled to the following opinions:

"I don't like Tolkien's writing style."
"I didn't agree with the themes."
"It didn't grab me."

And that's pretty much all he's qualified to say, by his own limited familiarity with the work.

Anything more is...well, I'll leave that unsaid.

 

[eyebeams]

Except that what you actually said was:

Which is a different thing entirely, wouldn't you say?

Actually, no, since he's said both things to characterize his association with them. It is sometimes difficult for people to remember -- particularly if they are not well versed in the history of the genre -- that Moorcock is pretty aged now and has been published and working as a writer since he was 17 years old.

As for me, I have a sneaking suspicion that many people actually like the culture around Middle Earth fandom and the world's trivia and structure instead of the actual writing. I rarely see even Tolkien fans actually quote Tolkien's descriptive prose for appreciation. They repeat pithy dialogue and such but I rarely see anyone quote Tolkien describing somebody actually doing something. One of the reasons the Peter Jackson films were an overdue idea is that Tolkien's descriptions of anything living and not made of wood are vague enough to allow great leeway. Consider that fact that nobody knows what the balrog really looks like, and not because of Lovecraftian fiat. Consider, also, the difference between how battles are described in Tolkien and how they are portrayed.

In terms of creating a mythology, Tolkien certainly can't be beat. The trouble is that this was not really the defualt objective of fantasy literature. If you're coming into fantasy literature to be immersed in a mythology, you probably aren't actually interested in what Moorcock had to say in an essay that's nearly 30 years old. But if you're interested in fantasy as literature after the fashion of other forms of literature, where prose, layered symbolism and social context are accepted elements, Tolkein just isn't going to cut it. That wasn't his personal objective and Tolkien scholarship is so corrupt with the influence of fandom little depth can come of it.

As for other authors, Niven and Heinlein combine interesting speculation with infantile politics. Niven is not quite so bad, though his sheltered upbringing as the beneficiary of his grandfather's profits from business fraud leads him to say extremely stupid things about normal people, as Niven is not really acquainted with anyone like that. (Example: One of his books features the brutally oppressed, impoverished underclass of a colony planet whiling away the time at a fancy cocktail party, possibly because Niven has probably not been to other sorts of parties). Heinlein is the more interesting of the two and pioneered the idea of science fiction as a genre of social import. He also used that insight to say some very dumb things and entertain some fairly strange thoughts about women.

 

[Storm Raven]

Example: One of his books features the brutally oppressed, impoverished underclass of a colony planet whiling away the time at a fancy cocktail party, possibly because Niven has probably not been to other sorts of parties).

Which book was that? I've read a fair amount of Niven, and I don't recall this.

Heinlein is the more interesting of the two and pioneered the idea of science fiction as a genre of social import. He also used that insight to say some very dumb things and entertain some fairly strange thoughts about women.

And yet, in many of his novels, he was able to say some very interesting things about women. Versatility means being able to say many different things about a given topic.