LotR vs. ASoIaF, which novel series do you prefer?

[IronWinter]

“Blasphemers!” shrieked Tolkien, First of his Name and King of the Fantasy Genre, “bring me their heads, these ungrateful fools wouldn’t even be reading about cripples, bastards and broken things if it wasn’t for me!”

Just joking. :lol:

Fantasy generally doesn’t interest me which is saying a lot, because I am a child of the late-90s and grew up with Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, yet these did nothing to stimulate my literary interest.

Then Game of Thrones happened and at first I stayed away because I thought it would be a poor imitation of LOTR (the ad for the show had Sean Bean sitting on a throne with a sword and I read the summary which spoke about Kings and dragons, and I thought don’t these fantasy nerds get enough, they’ll never be able to improve on LOTR, so why even bother).

Then out of shear boredom I watched GOT one day and everyone knows how the story goes from there …

After I had read all the ASOI&F novels I tried to read other books in the fantasy genre, even LOTR but I just couldn’t stomach the lack of realism and the predictability of the Good vs. Evil^TM storyline.

When Middle Earth returned to the big screen I was mildly excited, but while watching The Hobbit, I just couldn’t suspend my disbelief long enough to enjoy the movie. I kept comparing it to GOT and ASOI&F and thinking, GRRM would never do that and this is a blatant deus ex machine plot device (yes, eagles I’m looking at you) and OK trolls, orcs and goblins, but no one will die or get injured, right?.

However, having said that I can appreciate what Tolkien’s work achieved for the fantasy genre and the subsequent impact he made on literature and I feel that GRRM’s work will leave the same kind of legacy in our expectation of how fantasy is written in the future.

[PrimeRhaegar]

damn i love them both but nothing beats the mythos of arda not even HP Lovecraft. All of toilken books are my fave and especially since more magic and epic battles are involved so i always loved them better. But martin just has better and more interesting characters for his.

[Stannis Eats No Peaches]

I read LOTR when I was 12 and couldn't appreciate it. I'm now rereading it and enjoying it a lot more. Which do I prefer? Story: ASoIaF; Setting: LOTR. Tolkein's world is so much...more than Martin's, it's awesome. However Martin's story telling is better (Tolkein is a bit slow) and ASoIaF has Stannis.

[Corvo Attano]

The sheer volume and detail of information given about Middle-Earth & its inhabitants takes the cake. GRRM had better characters & such, but the ammount of time & effort Tolkien poured into detailing every single aspect of Middle-Earth, with all the maps, timelines, family trees, and such like. Everything from the details of the founding of the first Elven city, all the way down to the intracies of Hobbit birthday parties.. *drools*

I'm a huge sucker for History & Lore, and nobody does that better than Tolkien.

Credit also, because ASOIAF wouldn't exist without LOTR (and neither would Discworld, Wheel Of Time, and every other Fantasy novel or series in existence pretty much)

And when LOTR came out, Tolkien was pretty much reinventing the wheel

[Corvo Attano]

As for the adaptions, LOTR Trilogy > GoT > Hobbit Movies (but its all very narrow margins)

[The Drunkard]

ASOIAF.

However, I've read none of the extra stuff, only The Hobbit and LOTR novels. Maybe that plays a part.

[conon394]

I would agree with others here (hmm that comes across odd given the context) - there is simply no good way to compare its like saying do you think Moby Dick or Pride and Prejudice or which is better etc...

LOTR is as noted an epic and written under the conceit of being a abstract of a recorded history and set in what might be called a relatively high magic setting. GRRM is writing a rather different kind of story. Interestingly JRRT did start and abort a novel set after the LOTR that looks surprisingly looks a lot more like GRRM's series - first person and set in the political machinations of new world of Gondor... but its just not the story he wanted to tell.

[DExit]

LOTR because of nostalgia: was around 9-10 when my uncle gave me a book called 'The Hobbit' I read it in a couple of days- missing all the important things as every 9-year-old-and rushed into LOTR, same story actually. I rereaded them like 5 or 6 times before turning 16. It always felt warm and safe: you knew who was good and who was evil and you knew the good guys where going to win.

ASOIAF for everything else.

[The Marquis de Leech]

Credit also, because ASOIAF wouldn't exist without LOTR (and neither would Discworld, Wheel Of Time, and every other Fantasy novel or series in existence pretty much)

ASOIAF wouldn't exist, but fantasy would. It'd just be much more in the tradition of Robert E. Howard and Jack Vance, and largely overshadowed by science-fiction.

[The Unborn]

ASOIAF for me. I never was able to go through the first LOTR book and never appreciated the movies to be honest. I did like The Two Towers though.

[Mark Antony]

Love them both tbh, I think ASOIAF has more re-read value or whatever but i really have been wanting to read the Silmarillion again.

[Lord Reaver]

Nothing compares to the works of Tolkien to me. While GRRM writes good novel with interesting characters, Tolkien wrote an epic.

As for who started building fantastical worlds in their minds first, that's been with us for as long as people have existed, it seems. Certainly we have stories much, much older than Eddison or Tolkien.

Perhaps it's my being scandinavian and having grown up reading the norse sagas which makes me apprechiate him more. Certainly coming to Tolkien that way really makes you recognize and apprechiate the ties he has to those older stories.

Also, one cannot fully judge the work of Tolkien from reading (or even worse watching !) the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Tolkien's life's work was not those novels, but the entire mythos of which they only give a glimpse. Sadly for us, he spent more time imagining it than he did writing it out, which leaves us with most of it in the form of Unfinished tales.

[Naathi Prince]

I used to think that Tolkien was all about world building, legend compiling, language inventing and sucked at writing decent characters. Then i started reading Silmarillion, CoH etc and realized that he's almost as good as GRRM. So for me Tolkien:3 GRRM:1. GRRM's score may rise depending on his later reveals of about the world he created.

and yes, absolutely. How can you read the Children of Hurin without feeling heartbreak the entire time?

[Lord Reaver]

Agreed. Narn i Hin Hurin is by far his best work.

[Ser Uncle P]

I prefer ASOIAF by a mile. But i'd argue that as a writer JRRT better conveys a sense of wonder and mysticism, covertly in LOTR and overtly in the Silmarillion and the "history of middle earth" drafts underlying that book.

Many ASOIAF readers use the Peter Jackson characters as a stick to beat Tolkien with, to accuse Tolkien of shallow characterisation, but the likes of Feanor, Smeagol and Turin Turambar are anti-heroes every bit as grey as GRRM's pantheon.

The appendices of LOTR also contain a quick history of Gondor and Arnor's Kings and reveal an invented history every bit as complex as GRRM's. likewise the Unfinished Tales show a subtelty of plot and characterisation absent in LOTR. As Tolkien himself said of LOTR "the book is way too short"

[Sun]

It's not even a contest, for me it will always be LOTR.

[StannisandDaeny]

Both. After all, without the one the other wouldn't exist. You can't have the one without the other.

[Lord Reaver]

Wait, without ASOIAF, we wouldn't have LOTR ?

Does. Not. Compute.

[Naathi Prince]

People also criticize Tolkien for "his beliefs", but while he was certainly anti-technology (Saruman and the scouring of the Shire is the prime example of this), but if anything, that lack of a conservationist stream is something keenly lacking in Tolkien's modern ideological descendants. I also think a lot of the criticism regarding race and gender is overblown. There is no Brienne of Tarth in the Tolkien world, but characters like Finduilas, Luthien, Arwen, and Eowyn exist as strong women with agency. It is a little unrealistic to expect an equal number of male and female characters in a fantasy epic set during a massive war, and I think Tolkien does a good job of showing the plight of women in warfare in a sympathetic light. Even in the story of Smeagol, you see that he came from a village run by his grandmother. If you are going to start criticizing authors based on not having a post 1960s attitude on gender relations, don't bother reading pretty much anything.

The other main criticism is based on race, which is again I think overblown. The primary examples given of Tolkien's racism is the "Jewishness" of the dwarves and the Easterlings and Haradrim. Reading the Silmarrillion, however, gives you perspective on these human groups. As for the dwarves, Tolkien wrote them as a mostly good group of people, if somewhat standoffish. There are good dwarves and bad dwarves, just like there are good men and bad men.

Reading the Silmarrillion is great for perspective on the different groups of men. The Dunlendings, for example, are villains in the books, but their descent is from the Edain tribe of Haleth, originally a protagonist group in the First Age. The "Evil" Easterlings and Haradrim similarly war against "good" Gondor because of the history of oppression from the Numenorian ancestors. Gondor itself goes through stages of good Kings and bad kings.

[StarkDragon]

Wait, without ASOIAF, we wouldn't have LOTR ?

Does. Not. Compute.

GRRM is a Time Lord.

For me, I like ASOIAF just because the hero doesn't always win, or die and then get back up again.

E's either dead, or worse.

Thus far.