Thread 24640426

>slop for kids. grow up anon
OR
>it takes a big soul to appreciate the art of worldbuilding. patrician-core

which one is it /lit/ ?

It's a great story and I think it belongs in the Western Canon.

What nobody tells you going in is how sad and melancholy the books are at places. There's an overwhelming sense of loss that pervades long stretches of LOTR, like when the Fellowship leaves Lothlorien.

>>24640426 (OP)
It is slop, but it is good, entertaining slop.

>>24640426 (OP)
lots of worldbuilding at the expense of a real story
The Hobbit is the better experience.

>>24640426 (OP)
It's German mythology repurposed to be Catholic and English
Hobbits are basically rural Englishmen lost in a German fantasy world. The various pagan races (elves, dwarves, goblins) become outlets to represent a holy war involving a Catholic cosmos

The Return of the King makes it all worth it.

>>24640426 (OP)
I read it as part of a reading list by veterans, read some World War I memoirs first and it will strike you differently then if you go in expecting something written by a geek
>>24640525
Yes, and I think that depth is coming from the author incorporating his experiences

>>24640570
He got the idea when he was part of an archeological deal

>>24640532
It is slop but it is boring slop

>>24640426 (OP)
Beautiful, and its closer in tone to a medieval ballad than a modern fantasy novel so it can be a little sad and slow to move in places.
Don't expect the Superhero-like traits that the elves have in the film

You're supposed to read it while you are too young to post on 4chan

>>24640426 (OP)
I miss this dude. He and Dunsany and Yeats were my favourites in my late teens and early twenties

>>24640426 (OP)
It's soulful for sure but I wouldn't call it patrician.

>>24640722
Strongly disagree. It's extremely entertaining if you have any proclivity at all for elves and dwarves and shit. They basically spelled out the blueprint for every single MMORPG.

>>24640426 (OP)
Incredible.

I hate modern covers and art designs so much. These can't be made by paid graphic designers, there's just no way.

>>24640818
I really don't get people who bitch at Tolkien for "ruining" fantasy. It's not like Tolkien ever forced anybody to copy him or ape him. If he's so overwhelmingly popular that every fantasy writer since has written in his shadow, I hardly think that's particularly malevolent of him. He just told a really good story. You don't like that, it's up to you to do better, or at least deliberately do something different. Reading writers like Moorcock or Mieville seethe at Tolkien just feels pathetic on their part.

>>it takes a big soul to appreciate the art of worldbuilding. patrician-core
BASED

>>24641185
post what you think is good cover design. I need a laugh

>>24640426 (OP)
It’s genuinely good and stands up to re-reading through life. You get different things out of it as a child and as an adult.
I will dare to say that The Hobbit doesn’t age as well. Frankly Tolkien wasn’t as good a writer when he wrote that book, nor was his aim in writing it very lofty.

>>24640426 (OP)
>world-building
How much longer will we have to endure the world-building meme? Tolkien's work isn't good by default purely because he autistically plotted out every detail of his setting. It's good because he repurposed a lot of folklore and mythological elements (in a similar manner to medieval epics) to tell a compelling story that, while it makes a clear distinction between good and evil, explores the nature of evil from a Christian perspective, its effects on each character, and its interplay against the good; this is far more nuanced, in truth, than any story a relativist could tell on the subject.
It's because of what happens in Tolkien's world and the characters who are placed in it that anyone cares to notice how well-thought-out it is.
It also has a dark-ages-like aesthetic where most of the great civilizations of the old world are long gone or will soon be gone, so a lot of it is hearing the stories of these civilizations. This also has great precedent in the Homeric epics as well as newer epics like Beowulf.
Tolkien fans are found at all levels, but you pretty much have to be a midwit to hate him.

>>24642507
Very true. People complain about the Hobbit movies being bad and deviating too much (as they do) but I wonder if a "faithful" adaptation would have been much better. It's a fun read when you're a kid, but you can tell he improved by leaps and bounds over the course of the writing of LOTR.

>>24642473

For Tolkien? Just don't be a subhuman "stand out at the beach" color vomit aficionado and you've done 80 to 90% of the job already. Also, obnoxious google image search results that have nothing, absolutely fucking nothing to do with the book they're printed on. Are you a subhuman with 0 taste?

It gets worse every year, look at this bullshit

>>24640426 (OP)
He tried to write an epic for the english

Worldbuilding is for autists no way around that. Every author has their little toxic habit that always seeps into their writing because they like it that way, maybe it's overly detailed descriptions of land and places they have been through or overly autobiographical archetypes and themes repeating all over their works or adding detailed grandiose descriptions for characters that really amount to bloody nothing in the grand scheme of things. Every great author has those things, they don't put them down, they're more something you have to keep in mind, it's perfectly natural for a artist. Worldbuilding is and always will be an author's pet project thingie, people care more about characters, unless you are making something like a videogame or a tabletop game where the worldbuilding is the story by itself
But it is pretty good and artistic and while Tolkien doesn't predate genre fiction I struggle to call LOTR that, even if it inspired 75% of all genre fiction ever it doesn't exhibit the same traits

>>24641191
You might as well seethe at Tolstoy for inspiring many historical fiction stories or at Hemingway for making brevity in fiction more popular. Moorcock and Mieville seethe due to politics and professional jealousy

>>24642535
>It's because of what happens in Tolkien's world and the characters who are placed in it that anyone cares to notice how well-thought-out it is.
At last someone gets it

>>24642548
A faithful adaptation would have been the Bakshi version with elves that looked more beautiful and ethereal instead of Goblinlite