2023-09-01 20:56:58
Edward James, English medievalist and fantasy and science fiction expert, explains that the impact of JRR Tolkien’s work on all fantasy authors who have come after him is such that “They either imitate him or desperately try to escape his influence.” On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the death of the creator of The Lord of the rings, that is this Saturday, we have looked back and reviewed the interviews published in EL PERIÓDICO DE CATALUNYA, from the Prensa Ibérica group, in recent years to some of the great living authors of the fantastic genre. And in a few of them the figure of Tolkien as an inevitable influence.
Tolkien (Bloemfontein, South Africa, 1882-Bornemouth, United Kingdom, 1973), a philologist specializing in Nordic literature from the High Middle Ages, made the medieval imprint almost natural to the genre of epic fantasy. Another RR, George R. R. Martin, explained in an interview with our colleague Ricardo Mir from France that when he went from science fiction to fantasy with his Game of Thrones, the medieval setting was already incorporated with the genre. For him “Tolkien is the giant from which all modern fantasy derives” but it is inevitable that his followers would be distinguished from someone who was “born in the 19th century” and was an academic, linguist, product of “Britain of the time” . And a veteran of the trenches of Flanders. “He was a man from a different era (…) I am a product of the generation of baby boomers, son of a working class family from New Jersey. I’m trained as a journalist, I come from the science fiction subculture, I was a conscientious objector in Vietnam. All these differences are reflected in our literature, although without its precedent my books might never have materialized.”
But even those who work against Tolkien, like Martin, with anti-heroes instead of heroes and endings that have little to do with the “eucatastrophe”, the very Christian cataclysmic but salvific end of the British, play in his field, according to us. said today more than powerful Brandon Sanderson. For him, authors like Martin or Rothfuss “try to give another direction to books that are still Tolkienian in a certain way. What I try to do is look for worlds that fantasy has not yet shown. Take it further. Build science fiction worlds in which that fantasy stories take place, not medieval worlds”. “Fantastic literature should be the most imaginative genre by definition, and instead we are seeing the same world recycled over and over again,” he lamented in another interview. According to Sanderson, “Tolkien wrote the first epic fantasy book and we have spent 20 or 30 years taking it as a reference. Only in the last few decades has fantasy begun to emerge from Tolkien’s shadow and grow as an adult genre.”
Yes, Sanderson, a Mormon believer, stands next to Tolkien when it comes to how to reflect their religion in their literature. “CS Lewis believed that he should teach lessons with his literature, Tolkien that morality should manifest itself only through history. I am more on Tolkien’s side.”
Speaking of Patrick Rothfuss, with whom we shared a few days in his native Wyoming in 2011: In the name of the wind y The fear of a man wise, two novels called to be classics, he explained to us how he felt distant from Tolkien. “For a long time fantasy has focused on kings and queens, their politics and empire building… and that’s great. If you want to create a tragedy you need a hero. But I wondered if the protagonist couldn’t be a person normal for interesting things to happen to him”. That was his Kvothe, a seductive minstrel inspired more by Casanova and the world of Ursula K. Le Guinn.
Rothfuss also bets on female characters and for breaking the “great clichés and stereotypes in fantasy literature”, so in his books there is a dragon… but it is a clumsy and drugged beast. The role of sex, thinking of a young reader, is another point of distance for him. “In urban fantasy, real world vampire stories and things like that, sex is more accepted, but in epic fantasy, it’s not. Here this brings us back to Tolkien… But it’s impossible for him to explain the story of someone who is 16 or 17 years old and pretending that sex is not important to him”, he told us, after leaving a talk with students from a high school of Clear Water.
Sex appeared also talking to the Polish volcano Andrzej Sapkowski, the father of the saga of Geralt of Rivia (The Witcher for those who know him via Netflix or video games). The passive role of women in gender comes, told us, from the source of the legends, “where usually the woman is a lady waiting to be saved, a foolish creature without initiative who cries and cries, and (he added) from Tolkien, who took two chapters to explain that Eowin is in love with Aragorn “Probably due to lack of experience with women. But times are changing. In a Joe Abercrombie novel, a couple can go to bed after simply saying what the fuck”.
It was perhaps Michael Moorcock who very early led the anti-idealist reply to Tolkien, whose literature he described as “nursing prose”, with his amoral albino Eric of Melniboné. In this line we find precisely, this Joe Abercrombie of the what the fuck, King of grimdark with his long saga of The first law. In a talk at Celsius in Avilés (with Rothfuss and Sanderson, and about Tolkien) he highlighted above all how the genre has redefined the role of the hero. “Aragorn had heroic intentions, he did heroic actions and as a result he achieved heroics. But true heroes are not so pure, there are people who carry out heroics for selfish reasons, or without meaning to, or who lead a heroic charge that leads to a disaster”. By the way, that day they were asked to identify themselves with a character from The Lord of the rings. Rothfuss chose Gandalf, Abercrombie Saruman, and Sanderson Sam. Look at their faces and you will understand.
On another occasion, he took advantage to lament the idealization of violence in Tolkien’s epic. “He Lord of the Rings He is very violent, most of his heroes are violent male types, noble and dashing heroes who after ending up on piles of dead and betting on how many orcs they will kill like psychopathic killers, when they are done for the day they are good friends, wonderful lovers and kind kings. It’s very comfortable to kill like that. Violence has consequences on oneself. And of course, about the victim. But in fantastic literature there is no cost. I want to be honest, I am obsessed with showing the mental and physical wounds left by violence.”
We also talk about Tolkien with three-time Hugo Award winner, NK Jemis, with his The fragmented earth trilogy. “What lies behind all the elements of the post-Tolkien fantastic narrative is nothing more than the progress of society. Tolkien wrote in the 1940s and 1950s, before the sexual revolution, before the civil rights era, he wrote for a very specific audience made up mainly of Brits of a certain age and generation.Once the fantasy has been integrated into the mainstream It can no longer be insular, it can’t be a specific product for that type of reader. Most of them are women, and if you want their money it’s probably a good idea if there are at least one woman in the book passing by. And even that she is the protagonist! Or that women do women’s things!”
That Tolkien’s work took place in an imaginary universe (secondary world, in his terminology), in a universe created by the author completely separate from ours, has become so common that, Edward James points out in his essay dedicated to JRR Tolkien and C. S. Lewis in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, “it is not easy to understand to what extent this was unusual before Tolkien”. “From 1955 [año de publicación de El Señor de los Anillos]fantasy writers do not have to explain their worlds by showing them as dreams, or traveler’s tales, or by providing them with some fictional link to our own world,” recalls John Clute in turn. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. But that secondary world does not stop being inspired by a real one. And more and more authors decide to use other construction elements other than those of the Oxford professor.
It is the case of the Sino-American Ken Liu, author of the still unfinished tetralogy of The dandelion dynasty. Epic, dynastic fantasy, in an imagined continent, with the intervention of gods in the lives of men. Tolkien, but also Homer. And the legends of the Han dynasty. “I write with and at the same time against the tradition of epic fantasy started by Tolkien. We have to recognize the debt we owe to him, anyone who writes fantasy follows in his footsteps, but there must not be a single tradition, connected with the European perspective”. He sees a connection: both he and Tolkien, he considers, wanted to “rejuvenate a tradition that had been excluded from literature”, be it the Anglo-Saxon epic in the case of the former or the Oriental in his, and make it “universal”.
And we come to a delicate point. Was Tolkien racist? “There are racist elements towards Asian characteristics, for example, but he was limited by his historical circumstances and that doesn’t stop me from admiring the greatness of his work,” Liu said.
The historian specializing in African-American cultures P. Djèlí Clark, fantastic author to follow and blogger with the very alter-Tolkienian name of The Discontented Haradrim, this summer in Avilés we he talked about his ambivalent feelings. “In Tolkien, light and good are associated with white and dark, with evil. There are black men who are half trolls, monsters that are not human… I love Tolkien’s books. But I can’t help but see that, it’s a love-hate relationship. It is also true that those who have studied him remember that he was a linguist, who tried to reflect on the medieval world, including his fear of Islam. And in reality he was not a fascist at all, he refused to let the Nazis will use The Hobbit But that they found it interesting and thought it could be used as a white supremacist thing means something, right?”
By the way: rereading what other first-rate authors explained to us, it also means something that some of them did not mention Tolkien. Like Philip Pullman, whose antagonist in his atheist crusade is rather CS Lewis or the Trotskyist China Mieville, with whom a reference to Brexit and the hobbits of the region took half a second to become a diatribe against neoliberalism.
#Tolkiens #footprint #great #fantasy #authors #face #face #master