While it’s possible historic patriarchy is exaggerated, we actually have really strong historical records from like 1700+ and things like William Blackstone saying things to the effect of “women have no legal existence outside of their husbands” that suggests up until quite recently women had virtually no agency in society by any modern standards. I find it unlikely it was dramatically different in the Middle Ages, the era of history that directly lead into the times of Blackstone’s writing.
I guess you can rate it on two metrics:
- If he wrote the books today.
- If he wrote the books in 1954 (publishing date…not sure when he started).
And consider he was born in 1892.
I don’t plan to rate it on either of those metrics. Instead, there’s a third metric that I’ll use:
- If I read it today.
Again, this isn’t about giving some dead dude a grade. It’s about talking about how his book holds up when read today. It’s about what conversations it engenders when I read it to my daughters, and what I think about when I read it, and what other people think about when they read it, and how it influences modern literature, and stuff like that. The historical conversation is interesting inasmuch as it provides insight into how a specific kind of man thought about women in the mid-twentieth century, but that’s not my main interest in the books.
Yes, by “couldn’t” I really mean “couldn’t be bothered to”. He literally thought trees made more interesting characters than women.
I dunno, for me at least and I say this as someone who has read a lot of fantasy, I view fantasy as dime store level writing. It’s mostly trash. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy it. I’ve been known to enjoy pro wrestling, but pro wrestling is trash. I don’t expect to learn life lessons or find inspiration in modern literature from trashy writing.
Now Tolkien, who isn’t even the most entertaining fantasy writer I’ve read, I do think is in a literary sense one of the “highest quality”, and he has kind of a background that makes that not too surprising. But at the end of the day despite loving Lord of the Rings, I don’t think I’d even rate it in the top 100 of books I’ve read, if we’re talking about things like literary quality, how much it has influenced other great writers, how much it has influenced society etc. Tolkien’s great legacy is a lot of nerds enjoying stuff like D&D and computer RPGs, and a bunch of lesser quality dime store-style fantasy writers like Terry Brooks, Robert Jordan, George R. R. Martin, Mercedes Lackey, etc etc.
I don’t know the reasons why but for fictional literature fantasy is almost a cultural literary wasteland when compared to science fiction. I can name a lot more science fiction writers who I think would be broadly respected outside of their genre for pure writing skill, and far more examples of science fiction influencing society in various ways, than I can with fantasy.
Have you considered that there are almost no evil females in LotR?
If we include all of it (Silmarillion) we have what…Ungoliant and Shelob? Evil massive spiders? Every other evil thing is portrayed as male. If we look at the whole text females are a good presence in Middle Earth.
I certainly will not suggest what you should or should not let your daughters’ read but if good female role models are important to you then you could do worse than LotR.
Yeah, that’s also a problem. I don’t want Precious Moments figurines, I want good meaty characters that are male and female.
Excellent choice.
Sturgeon’s law, man. I don’t find that fantasy is trashier than mimetic fiction on the whole. And definitely not trashier than science fiction.
Some top-tier fantasy authors:
- Ursula K. Le Guin (you knew I was gonna say that)
- NK Jemisin
- Lois McMaster Bujold
- China Mieville
- Nghi Vo
- Neil Gaiman
- Claire North
- Catherynne M. Valente
- Susanna Clarke
- Phillip Pullman
- Seth Dickinson
- Katherine Arden
- James Marlon
- Carlos Hernandez
- Naomi Novik
- Ann Leckie
- Alix E. Harrow
This is just going through my Goodreads list and taking some of the folks who I gave 5 stars to–not all of them, just some. I don’t know that they’re the greatest authors of all time or anything, but they’re far from trashy, and their contributions certainly aren’t those of a literary wasteland.
(edit: my list is heavily biased towards authors from the last decade or so. If you’ve not been reading much fantasy recently, I definitely encourage you to check some of these folks out).
I’m sorry to say you have missed a lot of really good fantasy then.
Is there is a lot of crap fantasy? Sure! Same as any other genre you care to choose.
But there is plenty of great stuff too. Sorry you have missed it.
I’ve considered it. One of my half-finished (well, more like quarter-finished) projects is a Lord of the Rings chess set. On the white side, I had multiple options, and ended up choosing female characters for four of the 16 pieces, not just the queen (Arwen as queen, Galadriel as a bishop, Eowyn as a knight, and Lobelia as one of the pawns). But on the black side, there was no option for the queen other than Shelob, and for the other pieces, fuhgettaboutit.
I guess a lot of those authors aren’t what I would consider fantasy authors. I’ve read books by a good 2/3rds of those authors and never really thought of them in that way.
I guess for me I’m stuck in maybe a pre-2000s bookstore mindset. In that vein I remember books by people like Le Guin and Bujold and Gaiman being on shelves with “real” fiction literature, and books like Lord of the Rings being on shelves with Sword & Sorcery pulp ala the old Conan novels and shit like that. Maybe most people mean fantasy to mean a larger genre than what I do, at least back when I used to buy books in stores the “fantasy” section contained almost nothing but pulp. Most of the authors you listed would’ve been somewhere else in the store.
Thank you! Will do. I don’t even recognize most of those names, but the ones i recognize are all ones i like.
Really?! I think of then as genre writers.
A couple of those authors–NK Jemisin, Carlos Hernandez, Phillip Pullman, Seth Dickinson–write something that’s either fantasy or ultrasoft science fiction. Like soft to the point of talking animal spirits and ghost mamis and wizards who can call up earthquakes using the power of their brains. I feel pretty comfortable considering them fantasy.
I definitely mean it as something more than pulp. Given that science fiction and fantasy tend to be shelved together, I’m not sure how I’d show that this is a common meaning; but that might be a discussion for another thread, as this is getting pretty far afield :).
If you learn how to walk that tightrope please share it with us.
Excellent! The list is all over the place, from children’s lit to novellas to freaky weird stuff that’ll traumatize most adults to satire to classical fantasies, but all of them are great writers doing interesting stuff.
I think the positioning (like physical positioning) in book stores of fantasy with “Sword and Sorcery pulp” probably has created a bias in my mind. I realized this when I saw Le Guin at the top of your list, I’ve always thought of her as either a science fiction author or “supernatural” fiction (ala Stephen King I guess, who I also don’t consider a fantasy writer, but on reflection that is probably a bias as well); but it’s quite likely I think of her as not a fantasy writer because in my mind fantasy is pulp, and I don’t view her stuff as pulp so I naturally gravitate to think of it as science fiction or another type of fiction. There is probably no intrinsic reason you couldn’t view it as fantasy, just in my own mind I’d never categorized it like that.
Really not getting what you’re saying. Plenty of authors do a great job at having
meaty characters male female and otherwise. No tightropes are involved.
Not sure it helps but don’t forget Ungoliant (you may have to expand your dataset for your chess set).
She was Shelob’s mother.
I think there is a flaw in the premise. Germanic fairy tales are full of strong female characters (The Robber Bridegroom comes to mind) and if fairy tales aren’t the forerunner of fantasy with their witches and magic as much as Beowulf is, then the word has no meaning. And the Mabinogion has strong female characters in it (and Tolkien leveraged a lot of it apparently for the Silmarillion).
I’m not a huge Tolkien fan (I have read the books through more than once, even the Silmarillion), but that doesn’t have to do with gender representation. Lawrence of Arabia is a great movie, even if there isn’t a woman in it other than in the background.
Oh, I know about Ungoliant, but my set was to be specifically Lord of the Rings, not Middle-Earth, and besides, how does a depiction of one giant spider differ from a depiction of any other, anyway?