A king and his subjects sure seems like a society to me.
When I went to college, 50 years ago, LotR was ubiquitous. Everyone read it, everyone knew who Frodo was. See Bored of the Rings. I even have LotR jigswa puzzles.
But I wouldn’t call it a franchise. There might be a bookshelf full of LotR related books, but there is a bookstore full of Star Wars books. If LotR was a franchise there would be an Orc Hunters series and set of movies, there would be Gandalf the early years, there would be something about Bilbo’s early adventures, there would be something about Bilbo’s grandfathers early adventure, and there would be sequels with Sam fighting off leftover orcs. And video games. And theme parks.
At least we have something to be grateful for.
To be fair, there have been a number of successful Middle-Earth video games, including the long-running Lord of the Rings Online MMORPG. But, point taken. 
If you’re saying that three guys qualifies as a “society” I’m thinking my original impression of “deliberately obtuse” was spot on.
I would disagree on a number of counts.
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All but the hardest of hard SF basically uses magic. It’s dressed up in the trappings of Sufficiently Advanced Technology, but when you get right down to it, it’s magic. Faster-than-light travel is possible because something something dark matter something engines, say. Or laser-swords end in a discrete point rather than the light beams continuing into infinity because shut up, it looks cool. How is a lightsaber really any different than a magic sword? That being said…
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Just because a story has explicit magic doesn’t mean things happen “just because” or that problems get deus-ex-machina’d away. Yes, there are lazy fantasy authors-- and lazy sci-fi authors, and lazy romance writers, etc-- but the good ones work hard on making an internally-consistant world. There are fantasy writers whose magical systems are more scientific than anything in Star Wars-- not in the sense of relating to physics and chemistry, but in the sense of foundational rules that are used in an understandable way to build the whole system. Brandon Sanderson exemplifies this approach, especially in Mistborn. Fans were able to figure out what some of the metals did that even the characters didn’t know, because it all followed a logical progression.
Speaking of Sanderson, Sanderson’s First Law is “An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic.” In other words, if your magic system is rigorously defined and the Hero finds a clever way to use magic to save the day, you have a clever hero. If your magical system is vague and mysterious and the Hero uses magic to save the day, you (often) have a deus ex machina. Vague mystical magics are better employed as a source of problems rather than solutions.
So, I don’t know how many non-human humanoids there are in this world (and I’m only part way through, and trying to avoid spoilers) but the world clearly has a history of non-humans. Giants helped build the wall. A treaty was made between the first men of Westeros and the Children of the Forest. The carvings the Children made are still present, all over the place, in most every godswood.
Humans didn’t see a lot of non-humans in LotR, either. And as someone pointed out, the other types were going away at the end of the story.
I mean, if you are just saying that you prefer fiction where the POV characters are all human, sure, that’s a difference between GoT and LotR. But if you are arguing that the worlds are somehow different, and GoT isn’t in the tradition of LotR, I have to strongly disagree with you.
(Oh, and the others/white walkers aren’t all that different from the wraiths in the barrow downs, if you want to look at the bad guys.)
We don’t know that three is the entire number of giants in that world, just that three is the number of giants we know of. The fact that they appear to have a complex social structure certainly suggests they’d be part of a larger society. But I guess you’re the kind of person that requires every single thing be spelled out to them.
We know it’s only three because [spoiler]the army of the dead drove every living thing south of the wall with Mance Rayder’s army, except of course the ones they killed outright and conscripted. We saw Mance Rayder’s army had three giants.
It was kind of the whole point of the Night King story, and the whole reason for Mance Rayder’s existence in the story: The dead killed EVERYONE north of the wall. That’s how they formed their army, and that’s also why it took so long to head south. We know this because Hardhome is way out of the way; the dead wouldn’t have gone in that direction unless they were clear-cutting every breather north of the wall.[/spoiler]
The show never established that the Giants helped build the wall, but let’s grant that.
The people in the show say the wall was built 10,000 years ago. The children of the forest are also thousands of years old. Saying that the carvings are still present and therefore GoT depicted that society is like saying cro-magnon and neanderthal societies are depicted in a story where we see modern day people discover cave paintings. Such an assertion would be absurd.
Remember, the point was not that non-humans never existed in the GoT universe. The point is that part of the Tolkien legacy is DEPICTING non-human societies. We meet the hobbits, and learn all about their houses, social interactions, and society as a whole in loving detail. We meet the dwarves. We meet the elves.
That legacy of depicting non-human humanoid SOCIETIES is wholly absent from GoT.
I think children were different in terms of reading levels decades ago.
I could well imagine them missing a few places, especially since the area above the Wall is basically the size of Canada. Besides, there’s that whole other continent that’s significantly larger than Westeros which also has several mentions of giants.
Do you have any cites at all to show that Tolkien specifically had children or young adults in mind when he wrote The Lord of the Rings?
He explicitly said otherwise in a 1950 letter to his publisher (Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, p. 136): “an immensely long, complex, rather bitter, and very terrifying romance, quite unfit for children”.
Well, if we had cro-magnon paintings all over the place, and they were the standard iconography used by a major religion, then it would be sort of comparable.
If you read the appendices of GoT, or if you watch the bonus features in the blu-ray disks (both of which I’ve done some of) you kinda DO meet the Children of the Forest and the Giants. Maybe that didn’t make it into the main TV show, but it’s part of the GoT universe in an important and integral way.
J. R. R. Tolkien discussing The Lord of the Rings (1960s Interview)
“BBC Archival Footage-In Their Own Words British Authors J.R.R. Tolkien Part 1”
BBC Archival Footage-In Their Own Words British Authors J.R.R. Tolkien Part 2
Thank you for the links. I don’t have time to listen to the interviews, but while the article above notes that he didn’t necessarily exclude children from being the audience for the books (and that his own children were an inspiration for the books), it also doesn’t say that they were his primary audience.
I think we may ultimately need to agree to disagree on this one. As I noted earlier, I think that The Hobbit was written more in a style like a fairy tale (and, thus, more accessible to children), but that The Lord of the Rings, with its length, complexity, and dark themes, wasn’t really written with children in mind as the audience (as Kimstu’s quote notes).
The article shows that the books were not only inspired by his children, but that one even helped him with the content. Also, I think one of his first publishers gave the go-signal for publishing his first book thanks to feedback from one the latter’s children. Finally, the interviews show that young adults were enthusiastic about it. All of these show that Tolkien had children in mind when he wrote them, and that young adults followed because that were the same kids who were moving towards young adulthood (together with the author’s) as the LOTR (which started off as a sequel to The Hobbit but ended up otherwise) was written in stages across more than a decade.
About the quote, if you read the words of the letter before and after it, you will see that Tolkien was writing to the publisher, complaining about the cost of typing the manuscript and the “magnitude of disaster” because he had created something out of his control, leading to a work that is “quite unfit for children (if fit for anybody).” He continues by saying that it contains around 600,000 words, that it has become “impracticable,” and that he is tired of it.
In response, the publisher suggested that the two books (i.e., including The Silmarillion) be divided into three or four volumes, a point that the author addresses in a letter written a few days after. No point was made by either about unsuitability for children due to the content. It seems that their concern was the sheer length of the project, worries about typing and even revising, and how to publish the material.
Finally, this is a difficult point because one can always redefine the meaning of a child, what is suitable or not (too dark?) for children, etc. Given that, if one’s standards are high enough, then even a work like LOTR (compared to several of the European myths and oral literature that inspired it) can be considered for adults only.
One thing is star wars was a light in what had become a very dark era in America … One that wouldn’t be over until after a sequel that was dark its self
I mean if you ask someone if there were any cultural bright spots in the 70s and you’ll get Americas bicentennial and star wars …
What was so dark about 1977? Disco, certainly. Anything else?
I think there’s confusion here that stems from your lumping “the books” together as a single unified creation, when Tolkien’s correspondence and interviews over many years show that they were quite different strands of his lifelong “Middle-earth” worldbuilding, emerging at quite different times.
To summarize very briefly: Tolkien began constructing his imaginary languages and a mythical realm for their context during his late adolescence. This was the background that ultimately grew into what was published posthumously as The Silmarillion and all the other supporting “tales” of Middle-earth. Nothing about it was originally intended for children: in fact, Tolkien was rather fiercely antagonistic to the Victorian notion that “Faerie” or fable containing what we now refer to as “fantasy” should be relegated to kiddie-lit.
According to Tolkien himself, when he spontaneously started the story of The Hobbit in deliberately “kiddie-lit” form as a family man in his thirties, it took him a while to figure out that it could actually be part of his far more complex and erudite Middle-earth storyverse:
This is only partly true, in that Tolkien had children (especially his own, along with a received idea of what a “children’s story” should be like) in mind when he wrote The Hobbit. He began the overall worldbuilding of Middle-earth decades before The Hobbit, and did not have children in mind as a potential audience at all. He originally attempted to get these earlier legends published as his proposed sequel to The Hobbit. And he completed LotR decades after The Hobbit, deliberately choosing to make it “not addressed to children at all”.
:dubious: I don’t see how you can look at the words “complex, rather bitter, and very terrifying” in that sentence and say that it’s not making a point about the content.
And if you look at the rest of what Tolkien wrote about his work (especially his letters), it’s quite clear that he did consider, and intend, the content of LotR to be fundamentally unsuitable for children.
So getting back to your original claim:
He was definitely inspired throughout by European epics and legends, and you can argue that there’s a sense in which the “children’s story” genre of The Hobbit is “watered down somewhat for kids”. But that does not at all apply to the rest of the stories, most of which were originally conceived long before The Hobbit.