Moorcock blasts Tolkien

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reanjr said:
Wow. Editors would have ruined Tolkien's books. They tried hard to mess it up in little ways, but it was not allowed (Dwarfs and Elfs, anyone?). If Tolkien chose a way of saying something, you can be assured it was a conscious choice for which he understood the ramifications.

I disagree. I think he had a lot of well-thought ideas and was a masterful linguist and historian, but his writing reads like getting a wisdom tooth extracted whilst somebody quietly whispers really neat things into your ear to distract you.

I love the Lord of the Rings, but it's not because of the glacial movement and lousy structure of the books.

Cheers,
Cam
 

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I'll admit that I've only ever read some of Moorcok's Elric stuff, and none of his other books (couldn't stomach Elric), so my view isn't really comprehensive, but as things stand, my take is this:

I'd rather read through fifty "wasted" pages in which Tolkien goes off on a tangent about the history of his world, than five pages of Moorcock over-describing a guy swinging a sword or brooding. The former makes me feel like I'm there, whereas the latter just bores me.
 

Cam Banks said:
I disagree. I think he had a lot of well-thought ideas and was a masterful linguist and historian, but his writing reads like getting a wisdom tooth extracted whilst somebody quietly whispers really neat things into your ear to distract you.

I love the Lord of the Rings, but it's not because of the glacial movement and lousy structure of the books.
Absolutely. In the comics world, JRRT would have been a hell of a plotter, but they would have left the actual scripting to someone else.

I'm also surprised to see Ptolus offered up as something sharing LotR's flaws. I don't find the villains in Ptolus terribly appealing, which is unusual for me, but nor do I find the good guys particularly good. Monte explicitly set up many of the groups in the city as morally ambivalent, with the Shuul and the Brotherhood of Redemption getting explicit sidebars to that effect. Even the Fallen are led by a celestial.

The purely good groups, like House Dragon, read relatively thinly to me and seem intended more as plot devices than as tentpoles of the setting.

Even the future of the empire isn't set out in terms of black and white: Probably the best outcome for the empire lies with the claimant with the worst claim on the office (and who isn't likely to live many more years even if he does gain control), while those with the better claims have some serious issues in their visions of the future. It's all shades of gray, IMO.
 

I do agree with Moorcock's macro-point that too much fantasy fiction is safe and predictable and is mostly a bad regurgitation of better works. But honestly, that's the fault of the readers more than anything. If people stopped buying the tripe, the publishers would stop filling the damn shelves with it.
 

I've really only read Tolkiens work as pure entertainment and haven't read Moorcocks at all, so neither of them influence my view of fantasy much.

But may be being someone watching the issue from the outside is an advantage at times. So here's my "outsider view" for those that might consider it:

It seems to boil down to a conflict of save escapeism black and white fantasy vs. shades of grey more ambiguous and dark fantasy.

I'll take the part of Moderate Man(TM):

It's a thing of preferences, but to get the whole experience neither extreme is perfect.

Which means for my fantasy gaming (to get back to the purpose of this forum): My games contain both: true evil and good creature black/white conflicts and shining hope as well as shades of gray, moral dillemas and depressing darkness.
 

Tolkien has an editior: Christopher Tolkien (since 1972)

Moorcock and others miss an essential element of Tolkien's works: the art of sub-creation. That is one of the primary aspects that gives his works its force, energy, and entertainment value. Additionally, his prose and poetry is masterful and a joy to read in itself.
 
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dcas said:
How many major characters have to die for the plotline not to be "safe"?

Oh, I agree that Moorcock kills a whole lot more characters than Tolkein, but that wasn't really what I was talking about... character death doesn't make an edgy, challenging story.

Tolkein doesn't face his characters with difficult choices, so all the choices they make are predictable. It's all safely colour-coded: the good guys are white, and the bad guys are dark. (And I do mean guys - women in Tolkein aren't allowed to be evil, or elderly, or even ugly.) Even the accents are carefully sanitised; the good guys have a posh accent and the orcs talk like dock labourers.

Compare that against Moorcock, particularly the Elric stuff from before he tacked on the extra books...

Elric was the antithesis of the Sword & Sorcery hero. At the time the character was conceived, Conan was the archetype: muscular, unsophisticated, brave, violent, chivalrous towards women (whose job it usually was to swoon in Conan's arms, except for Valeria and Belit who are just man-manque Amazons). Elric was the perfect opposite: slim, weak, tends to kill women rather than save them, sophisticated to the point of decadence, drug-ridden, and instead of being the guy who kills the sorcerors from the mysterious alien elder race, he IS the sorceror from the mysterious alien elder race.

Elric's a parody and his function is to challenge your preconceptions about fantasy.
 

PapersAndPaychecks said:
Moorcock does have a point.

Tolkein's prose, plotlines, and characters are extremely safe.

In the Narn i Hin Hurin, Turin (the "hero") brings about the downfall of several Elvish nations, kills his best friend, unwittingly marries and impregnates his sister (who commits suicide when she finds out who he really is), and eventually kills himself when he realizes all that he's done.

In fact, Turin and Elric appear to both be based in part on the same figure, Kullervo, a tragic figure in Finnish mythology. Tolkien's writings cover a pretty wide range of plotlines and characters, many of them not very "safe" at all. Moorcock's disagreement with Tolkien is, IMHO, mostly political, on artistic grounds he doesn't have much of a point at all.
 

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? :D

Anyway, I actually don't much like LotR OR what I've read of Moorcock's work. The latter is too high-powered for my tastes, the former too bloody long. Leiber and especially Howard pwn, as the saying goes, the pair put together as both storytellers and ESPECIALLY as writers. Howard's ability to combine lyrical prose, intensity of feeling and economy of words on a consistent basis ranks him among the best in the English language, regardless of genre, something I wouldn't say of any other fantasy writer. CS Lewis was also a great writer, but his skill with words was shown to better effect in other works. I wouldn't call either Moorcock or Tolkien a great WRITER, although the latter might count as a great AUTHOR for the detail and subtlty of his work.

Moorcock's comments, directed as they are against the originators of the genre he dislikes, come off as snarky and purely political/ideological. If he were restricting his complaints to the stagnant, superficial epic fantasy genre BASED on those earlier writers' work, I'd be in total agreement (although most 'modern' epic fantasy seems to be slanted, albeit clumsily and inconsistently, toward an ideology he probably likes better).
 

PapersAndPaychecks said:
Even the accents are carefully sanitised; the good guys have a posh accent and the orcs talk like dock labourers.
The accents are a "translation" into English of the original languages to suggest the mindset and content of the "original" speaker. You should note that Sam and other rustic hobbits don't have "posh" accents, rather accents appropriate to their learning and culture. Similarly, the language of the Rohirrim was deliberately stylized as "middle English" to suggest its linguistic place in relation to others, such as the common Westron tongue.
Compare that against Moorcock, particularly the Elric stuff from before he tacked on the extra books...

Elric was the antithesis of the Sword & Sorcery hero. At the time the character was conceived, Conan was the archetype: muscular, unsophisticated, brave, violent, chivalrous towards women (whose job it usually was to swoon in Conan's arms, except for Valeria and Belit who are just man-manque Amazons). Elric was the perfect opposite: slim, weak, tends to kill women rather than save them, sophisticated to the point of decadence, drug-ridden, and instead of being the guy who kills the sorcerors from the mysterious alien elder race, he IS the sorceror from the mysterious alien elder race.

Elric's a parody and his function is to challenge your preconceptions about fantasy.
No argument on how Elric was made different from the standard swords & sorcery "hero." I'd say his most important difference was the Elric, as the "protagonist," made use of sorcery. His genre predecessors almost exclusively made use of the sword.

One would think, though, that the primary function of a story is to entertain. That was certainly JRRT's and REH's purpose.
 

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