A rising dislike of Tolkein?

[Queen of Whores]

Ever since GoT started - and subsequently made aSoIaF more popular - people have started to criticise Tolkien, and more specifically tLotR, because of it's lack of "realism." Apparently realism is graphic sex and violence, I suppose. I don't see why people would say sex and violence make a story better. If you're so interested in sex, why not keep it in your own personal life, and if you're so interested in graphic violence, then.... why?

Another criticism of Tolkien is his lack of "complex" characters. They say they are very two-dimensional and boring and the book is about clear cut "good guys vs bad guys." While this is partly true, there are still various examples of interesting and complex characters, such as Boromir, Denethor, Gollum and Frodo. The themes underlying the book are very deep and thought-provoking, and it's a shame that most people just overlook them.

[Darth Richard II]

the silmarillion is so hardcore it transforms qualitatively into nerdcore.

Preach it brother!

Good Lord, criticizing Tolkien is nothing new. Paging Michael Moorcock...

[Dhana]

Ever since GoT started - and subsequently made aSoIaF more popular - people have started to criticise Tolkien, and more specifically tLotR, because of it's lack of "realism." Apparently realism is graphic sex and violence, I suppose. I don't see why people would say sex and violence make a story better. If you're so interested in sex, why not keep it in your own personal life, and if you're so interested in graphic violence, then.... why?

Another criticism of Tolkien is his lack of "complex" characters. They say they are very two-dimensional and boring and the book is about clear cut "good guys vs bad guys." While this is partly true, there are still various examples of interesting and complex characters, such as Boromir, Denethor, Gollum and Frodo. The themes underlying the book are very deep and thought-provoking, and it's a shame that most people just overlook them.

for me the problem is not that the characters are one-dimensional, it's that they are all male. The lack of female characters just seems old fashioned and boring. I like the story but at the same time what I think makes LOTR seem "dated" is the very conservative morals and gender roles in the books. This just makes the trilogy less appealing to (especially female I guess) readers nowadays.

[maarsen]

Do people complain about the lack of modern gender roles for women in Beowulf? How about in the Epic of Gilgamesh?

[Darth Richard II]

Do people complain about the lack of modern gender roles for women in Beowulf? How about in the Epic of Gilgamesh?

Actually yes, sometimes. :(

[Dhana]

Do people complain about the lack of modern gender roles for women in Beowulf? How about in the Epic of Gilgamesh?

I'm not really complaining as such. It's just that I find the books not very interesting for that reason.. and I can imagine that other people (women?) feel that way too. I'm not saying that there should be more female characters, I understand that it would be anachronistic given the age Tolkien lived in etc. I'm merely stating that for me as a female reader it makes LOTR less interesting.

I can still admire LOTR for the story (I do quite like the books). But I will just never love it as much as I love certain other books.

[Dhana]

Actually yes, sometimes. :(

I think there is a difference between complaining that sagas like Beowulf should have modern gender roles (which is just stupid and doesn't make sense given the time those sagas come from) and saying that you can still enjoy the story but aren't really able to connect with it or really love it for the lack of interesting female characters? Although Beowulf might actually be a bad example here, Grendel's mum is a very interesting female character ;)

[maarsen]

I think there is a difference between complaining that sagas like Beowulf should have modern gender roles (which is just stupid and doesn't make sense given the time those sagas come from) and saying that you can still enjoy the story but aren't really able to connect with it or really love it for the lack of interesting female characters? Although Beowulf might actually be a bad example here, Grendel's mum is a very interesting female character ;)

[Dhana]

But was she a modern mother?

[A Man Reads]

Tolkien was my first love. From the plot to the characters to his writing style. I'm fine with the story being his story, and with him being a creature of his time. They also helped inspire me to study medieval history, so my loyalty runs pretty deep.

What I can't stand are The Hobbit movies. There's that constant, never ending, mind-numingly tedious "the little guy is the true hero!" didactic running through every second of them. I remember noticing it during Return of the King, but it is never-ending in The Hobbit. The whole thing comes off like a children's movie for kids suffering from low self-esteem. There's a time and place for it, but it's not every single second.

[1918me]

Do people complain about the lack of modern gender roles for women in Beowulf? How about in the Epic of Gilgamesh?

Well, I think we can all agree that Ishtar could have been a little more three-dimensional :P

[Ninefingers]

My unscientific observation is that the delineation of LOTR lovers/haters tends to hinge on one key thing: How old a person was when they first read it.

Of course it's not a hard and fast rule, but most people I know who love the series first read it as kids/teens and most people I know who are more meh about it first read it as adults.

EDIT: To be clear, this is not a value judgment either way - I think many of the things we read when young and fall in love with help define our tastes for the rest of our lives.

[Stannis Eats No Peaches]

I'm one of those people who read the books after watching the LOTR films and while I love the world, I found Tolkien's writing style tedious at times. The Hobbit was fine because it was relatively short, but LOTR really drags in places and I don't like the switching between Frodo and Sam and the others, which seems more jarring in the books than in the films. That said, I love the Silmarillion. :dunno:

What I can't stand are The Hobbit movies. There's that constant, never ending, mind-numingly tedious "the little guy is the true hero!" didactic running through every second of them. I remember noticing it during Return of the King, but it is never-ending in The Hobbit. The whole thing comes off like a children's movie for kids suffering from low self-esteem. There's a time and place for it, but it's not every single second.

Um...it's been a while since I've read it, but isn't that a major theme in the book? Of all the complaints you could have about the Hobbit adaptations, that seems like an odd one to have at the top of your list.

[A Man Reads]

Um...it's been a while since I've read it, but isn't that a major theme in the book? Of all the complaints you could have about the Hobbit adaptations, that seems like an odd one to have at the top of your list.

[Kalbear]

But was she a modern mother?

I like the notion of people complaining about the total lack of women in LotR as 'complaining about a lack of modern women roles'. Because, ya know, those are the same thing.

GRRM doesn't have modern roles for women. He has hugely antiquated roles for women. Of his PoV characters three are perfect examples of classical women - women that are destined for or part of an arranged marriage, expected to have as many children as they can even if it means dying in the process, who have no power of their own and rely heavily on their relationships or what they can get men to do for them to achieve any real power.

GRRM occasionally veers from that in certain ways - Brienne is probably the biggest - but it's all based on historical evidence. The reason that GRRM feels more realistic is that women are a part of the world. That they have thoughts and views and are actual, real characters. Another reason is that there is no such thing as 'absolute evil and good'. It's not about the rape and the sex and the murder and the food, it's about people going about their lives in an actual realistic way, being realistic characters, and living in a fairly realistic world as humans.

[Guerillacropolis]

Haven't read through the entire thread, so sorry if this has been stated before, but the most credible criticism of Tolkien (in my opinion) is the racism inherent in how the elves and orcs are portrayed. There is very little gray in middle-earth. Most characters and even races are completely good or evil. In terms of mid-twentieth century racism, especially as expressed by colonian Britain, one can see how this is problematic. Of course, this was also in the era of Nazism and fascism, so the world probably appeared a little more black and white then too.

That being said, there are exceptions like Boromir, but for the most part, the morality is much less complex in Middle-Earth than in Westeros.

In terms of writing style, that's more of a matter of taste. Tolkien is an incredibly good writer in terms of the quality of his prose. Every word makes each description crystal clear, he has an excellent ear for dialogue, and he is simply a joy to read. As an adult, this is what stuck out the most to me: how damned good Tolkien's prose is.

People are also turned off by the pacing. In book one of The Fellowship of the Ring (each volume is comprised of two individual books), the first half is only the hobbits leaving the Shire. The story doesn't even really get cooking until they meet Aragorn at the Inn in Bree. Even in The Return of the King, there are hundreds of pages left after the One Ring is destroyed.

The final aspect readers might find off-putting would be the poems and songs. I absolutely loved them and was sad to see them mostly left out of the Peter Jackson films. But I imagine most contemporary readers would be puzzled. To me, that's where Tolkien injected some of his best humor and world-building, and they were an excellent way to reduce the tension that was amped up incredibly high for those reading them for the first time without ever having seen the movies.

[Shryke]

I think it's more that Tolkien is less of a sacred cow among the SFF audience. Mostly due to a change in both that audience and the SFF literature-scape.

Tolkien was basically THE pillar of fantasy for a long damn time. These days, it's a much wider and leveller field. I mean, how many SFF readers these days would have grown up with WOT or ASOIAF or any of the other big 90s series instead of just Tolkien? And LOTR stands really distinct from the newer movements in fantasy literature.

I think if we are seeing anything, it's a change where people can easily be fantasy fans without liking anything about Tolkien and so that's what you start seeing.

[bloodsteel bitterraven]

I tried reading the Fellowship of the Ring, and I couldn't get into it at all. After reading about 100-150 pages, I gave up.

I tried watching the movies too, and they were so laughable, I fast forwarded through the whole thing just to see what happened at the end.

Sorry but I'm not a Tolkien fan at all.

[Myshkin]

Well the thing is that Tolkein wasn't that great a writer, by which I mean that his prose is nothing special. Not bad, decent even, but not some glorious stylistic achievement as some would have you believe. I like LotR, I've read it several times, but I get a bit annoyed when it's held up as the be-all-end-all of literature. It is not. Not even close. Perhaps this is where some of the backlash comes from.

[Larry.]

Although I read his Middle Earth books first, as an adult I've come to appreciate Tolkien more as an adapter of alliterative Anglo-Saxon verse into modern English than as a prose writer. His incomplete verse The Fall of Arthur I thought, if completed, would have been a wonderful reimagining of his downfall and death. I'm a quarter of the way through his "working notes" translation of Beowulf and I bought two other verse translations of it because Tolkien's reads better to me than Heaney's verse translation.

I think there are some flaws in his prose when he's writing in the Middle Earth setting, but when he's writing commentaries and verse renditions of medieval English epic poetry, his verse far outlines his prose.