Dateline 1916. A 24 year old soldier name Tolkien goes over the top. He catches a bullet and dies, bleeding, in the fields of France.
How is the world changed?
Humorous answer: Terry Brooks would be waiting tables somewhere.
More serious answer…
The face of the so-called science fiction and fantasy subculture would be very much different. While Science Fiction was fairly well established prior to the publication of The Hobbot (1937) with Campbell, Asimov (and very shortly Heinlein) I don’t get a proper feel for the place that fantasy writing had at that time.
The influence of the LOTR on all fantasy writing (defined for my purposes as ‘fantastic writer that feature magic and elves’ and so forth) that followed is immense and still felt today. While Tolkien might not have defined the ‘elves and beautiful’ and ‘dwarves have beards and live underground’ he certainly established the way in which those elements are handled in contemporary genre literature.
So how about it, friends? Suppose Tolkien never had the opportunity to exercise his literary talents? Would say, Fritz Lieber be considered the all time influential fantasy writer? Or John Norman? Maybe Edgar Rice Burroughs?
What do you all think? How much did Tolkien change the world?
How about C.S. Lewis? Of course, he was buddies with Tolkien, who supposedly helped reignite Lewis’ Christian faith, so there is a chance that without Tolkien the Chronicles of Narnia and the space trilogy would never have been written.
I’d say that Lewis was so influenced by JRRT that he couldn’t have written “Narnia” without him. He might have written something quite popular, but not “Narnia”.
What would Robert Jordan be doing? Certainly a far, far different WOT if any at all. Same with Goodkind’s “Sword of Truth”.
Also a MUCH different Discworld.
No “Memory, Sorrow & Thorn” from Tad Williams.
Could Donaldson have produced “Thomas Covenant”?
Heck, was any major fantasist not heavily influenced by JRRT? Even S. King says he was pivotal in his (King’s) development of “The Dark Tower”.
I don’t think things would have been all that all that different 'till the early '70s and all the horrid IN THE STUNNING TRADITION OF TOLKIEN knock-off types like Brooks.
Remember, Tolkien wasn’t published in “affordable” paperback editions 'till what…'66? '67 which was about the time he entered the public conciousness. Before then, he was only available in hardcover and wasn’t all that well known or influential. (I read somewhere that his idiot publisher had the idea that paperback editions were “undignified” :rolleyes: Thank heavens for A) a little-known loophole in the 1960s copyright laws, B) Donald Wollheim’s willingness to use it and C) Lin Carter’s willingness to publish “authorized editions” and spin a whole publishing genre off of the success. Without those three elements I suspect Tolkien would be the same sort of footnote that say, William Hope Hodgeson or William Morris are)
Besides, before the big Tolkien craze in the '60s, we had
Fritz Leiber doing his Fahfard(sp) and the Grey Mouser stuff circa 1942, so D&D would still exist. For that matter, Robert E. Howard was doing the same, and Moorcock’s Elric stuff (I think) appeared before the paperback editions.
James Branch Cabell was world-building long before Professor Tolkien ever started playing around with linguistics. (Ok, more accurately, country building, but much the same thing)…his stuff had like 20-some volumes.
There was tons of fantasy for kids, from Edith Nesbitt to L. Frank Baum.
There was the whole UNKNOWN school of fantasy that produced what today would be called “urban fantasy” (though it involved somewhat less moping around whilst wearing trenchcoats )
Lord Dunsany was writing fantasy works of lyrical beauty long before Bilbo ever had an unexpected party and Dunsany’s prose makes Tolkien, for all that I’m a fan of the Prof, read like Terry Brooks.
Granted, if there weren’t a Tolkien craze in the late '60’s, the Ballantine “Unicorn Fantasy” line wouldn’t have happened, which to a large part proved the ‘marketablilty’ of adult-fantasy and set off the first big fantasy boom of the mid-'70s, and without that, there wouldn’t have been a suitable environment for D&D to take off, but all the key elements of fantasywere there before the Tolkien craze hit.
If Tolkien hadn’t written anything, we’d have had a lot less Elves and Dwarves, but we’d still have had a fantasy genre. Much like: if there wasn’t a Star-Trek mini-craze in the late '60s, we’d still have had SF movies and TV shows, but not as much or perhaps as well done.
I’m not knocking Tolkien, who’s work I love and admire, but there was fantasy long before his stuff and there would have been fantasy long afterwards.
Aargh…on point 1) I left out that Vance had published his “Dying Earth” stories in the (IIRC) early '50s, so we’d certainly have had D&D, since huge chunks of D&D were swiped straight from Vance, and Vance owed some of his style to C.L. Moore.
While I have you here, anyone remember a fantasy novel about elves (great big ugly nasty mothers) living underground? One entered through tunnels in basements and stuff. Some luminous fungus that provided sustenance was halucinogenic.
Fenris, Lin Carter had nothing to do with Ballantine publishing authorized editions of The Lord of the Rings. Ian and Betty Ballantine did that four years before Carter came to work for them. Also, it’s perhaps not quite right to say that Cabell was world-building long before Tolkien started “playing around with linguistics.” Tolkien started creating Middle Earth in 1917. Cabell’s books in the Biography of Manuel series started coming out a decade before that and continued to come out for a couple of decades afterwards. It’s very unlikely that Tolkien read Cabell when the series came out. It’s more accurate to say then that Tolkien did his world-building at the same time as Cabell.
There’s no question we would have had fantasy books being published today even if The Lord of the Rings had never been published. The real question is whether there would have been a fantasy genre. I can’t imagine how there would now be a section of bookstores marked “Fantasy” if Tolkien hadn’t written The Lord of the Rings. Before Tolkien’s books caught on, writers did fantasy, of course, but they didn’t think of it as being aimed at a market looking specifically for fantasy.
I play D&D. I’ve read LOTR, and The Hobbit, repeatedly. I’m eagerly anticipating the adaptation of The Two Towers. And yet…
Lord Dunsany. Robert W. Chambers. H.P. Lovecraft. James Branch Cabell. They were all doing something special, something magical, something… hard to copy.
When Tolkien wrote, he was so adept at subtly redefining our mythologies, making his types of elves and dwarves so real that we had to believe in them, that after reading his books one comes away with a feeling that the creatures had always been described that way. He co-opted the archetypes, and made them his own. Which speaks, of course, volumes about the quality of his writing, his mastery of detail. But after endless imitators, it’s hard to imagine the gentler, altogether stranger fantasy of Dunsany.
Neil Gaiman revived a bit of that magic with the novel Stardust. But that just got me to wondering… if we didn’t have Tolkien’s redefinition of the nature of magic, would the world be more receptive to gentler, stranger fantasies? Bearded wizards and axe-weilding dwarves are all well and good, but what of the kingdom of Faerie, where mortals cannot partake of food or drink lest they be trapped there; what of the lost cities in the wilderness, home now only to mystery?
Tolkien redefined the archetypical fantasy story in such a way that it altered all that came after.
Would Lord Dunsany or the others been the sort of ‘formative’ influence that Tolkien was if the LOTR had never existed? If so, which one? I’ve read quite a bit of it and none of it leaps off the page as Tolkien’s writing does.
Admitedly, however, I’m primarily a hard-SF fan. People more into fantasy may find it easier to connect with the others.
If Tolkien had never written, we’d have lost the experience of reading a great book. Forget for a minute whether or not he influenced individual writers or founded a genre or swept away other trends in fantasy–we only get a handful of books like LOTR every century, and its loss in and of itself would be a Bad Thing.
LOTR can and does stand on its own–I predict it has the quality and creative vision to continue to enchant readers hundreds of years from now. Books are written to be read, and each individual reader reacts to a powerful book by some thought, even if it is never reflected in a tangible way. LOTR has a huge moral component. Who can tell what “influence” that will have on the individuals will someday read it?
I think it stands to reason that other writers would write fantasy novels inspired by ancient myths and legends, just as Tolkien did. It’s just that the actual canon of fantasy might never have existed, and if it did, it certainly would be different. Look at D&D, for example. The races (men, elves, dwarves, “halflings”, orcs) are all fantasy ideas that predated Tolkien but were heavily shaped by Middle Earth.
Yet, we’re not locked in Tolkien’s vision. For example, his view of magic was not carried through to later dominate the fantasy genre; people wanted to imagine themselves as sorcerers as well as warriors, and the idea of magic being off-limits to mortals was simply no fun.
All in all, I’ll say that I’m deeply grateful that Tolkien wrote his books, and there’s no real way to tell what would have happened if he hadn’t, but it stands to reason that fantasy would exist – just in a very different form.
Well, I would have had some valid comments here, but Fenris (amplified and corrected by Wendell Wagner) said most of what I would. (Most of the reason I rarely comment in Cafe Society is that his half of the brain we seem to share handles that department. :))
As a complete hijack, may I observe (mostly to Fenris that the similarities between SDMB and Dreamworld extend even to what Annie and Mike found was its major problem?
I think the popularity of Tolkien was largely a product of it’s times - there was a growing interest in magic, mysticism, and things medieval in the 60s and 70s, and LotR had all that. I suspect that had Tolkien never existed there still would have been a sudden boom in the popularity of fantasy fiction, and perhaps another book would have become the focus of that interest (though perhaps there would have been no one ‘Great Work of Fantasy’ and we would have a more diverse fantasy genre today).
I tend to think there would not have been one focus, and the fantasy genre would have been more diverse, and far, far more neglected. IMHO.
Part of JRRT’s mass appeal was in the completeness of his subcreation. Do you realize he spent a page and a half writing about speculation about what the actual pronunciation of Lobelia Sackville-Baggins’ first name was in the Common Tongue? And came up with 3 different versions of it? And related it to names of flowers in the common tongue? Which he then translated into a version of early Saxon to get “Lobelia”? That’s the kind of detail he went into! And that’s what drew thelarger audience to him! A sense of depth and permanency missing from the genre previously.
Anyway, my point, and I think I have one (although these days I’m never really sure anymore) is that while authors like Leiber and Clement and Eddison wrote some top-shelf fantasy more than once, they didn’t engage in the kind of universe-building which can engender a new paradigm from old legends.
Rather a difficult question, until isolating what it was that was special about Tolkien.
Theory 1: “The Lord of the Rings” was great because a man with considerable linguistic background dedicated a good part of his life to describing adventures formed around the cultures suggested by various contrived languages. None of the other authors mentioned here (to my knowledge) were scholars on the level of an assistant for the Oxford English Dictionary and an Oxford professor. Of course, one can’t judge the work by credentials or by level-of-effort, but it does suggest that if Tolkien hadn’t been there, somebody else wouldn’t just have popped up and done the same thing.
Theory 2: Neither Tolkien nor Lewis were exceptional authors, but by being associated with Oxford, and thereby with other quality writers (and publishers!) were at the right place at the right time. Tolkien’s association with Lewis, for example produced the widely quoted review calling LOTR “good beyond hope” which makes it sound more like the second coming than a work of fantasy. In the publishing community this is known as “log rolling” you say something wonderful about my book, and I’ll do the same for yours. It’s largely the reason such outrageous statements appear in quoted book reviews on paperbacks.
Theory 3: Tolkien’s LOTR had advantages and disadvantages like any major work, and overall happened to the best best of various alternatives. If Tolkien hadn’t been there, the next best person would have taken his place. Given equal market opportunities, and encouragement, they might have done just as well. (Mervyn Peake’s “Gormenghast” would certainly have been a better piece of literature if Peake hadn’t fallen ill toward the end of his life.)
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