Did you like the LOTR trilogy? (Books)

[One-Winged Balrog]

19 hours ago, Werthead said:

I always thought this somewhat overstated. There are vast, vast numbers of fantasy works before LotR, many of them resembling modern fantasy as we know it: Howard's Conan the Barbarian stories, Vance's The Dying Earth, Leiber's Lankhmar stories, Lord Dunsany, Hope Mirrlees, George MacDonald, L. Frank Baum etc. There's entire branches of modern fantasy (Moorcock, Erikson, Cook) which descend from those sources rather than Tolkien, and in some cases reject Tolkien.

LOTR is possibly the best-selling single novel of all times (novel, not book), and certainly one of the best-selling. More people read it than the rest of the books you mention combined. It's a single book that is in the same sales figures category as the entire outputs of Agatha Christie or Danielle Steel. I'd say it has a pretty outsize influence.

[The Marquis de Leech]

13 hours ago, Werthead said:

That's true. They're even called Ents in the very first edition of D&D from 1974, and halflings are called hobbits. Both were renamed after a threatened legal action by the holders of the Middle-earth gaming licence.

Funny thing: Ent is Old English for giant. Having Ents as a name would presumably be fine, so long as they're not tree-people.

[Werthead]

1 hour ago, One-Winged Balrog said:

LOTR is possibly the best-selling single novel of all times (novel, not book), and certainly one of the best-selling. More people read it than the rest of the books you mention combined. It's a single book that is in the same sales figures category as the entire outputs of Agatha Christie or Danielle Steel. I'd say it has a pretty outsize influence.

Agatha Christie has sold ~6-10 times as many copies as LotR, Danielle Steel has sold around 3-5.  So not really.

LotR is certainly the best-selling individual SFF novel all time, but that's not really relevant. The point is whether the fantasy genre would exist as we know it without LotR and, given that fantasy existed as a healthy genre long, long before LotR and whole subgenres of fantasy have descended from authors who had nothing to do with Tolkien, it's safe to say it would.

[The Marquis de Leech]

1 hour ago, One-Winged Balrog said:

LOTR is possibly the best-selling single novel of all times (novel, not book), and certainly one of the best-selling. More people read it than the rest of the books you mention combined. It's a single book that is in the same sales figures category as the entire outputs of Agatha Christie or Danielle Steel. I'd say it has a pretty outsize influence.

I think you're underestimating Agatha Christie, whom I am pretty sure remains the best-selling novellist of all time. Christie's And Then There Were None has sold over 100 million copies alone (as per wikipedia). And she wrote some 80 books in the course of her life (plus nineteen plays, and six romance novels under a pseudonym) - her overall sales would be over a billion.

[The Marquis de Leech]

5 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Agatha Christie has sold ~6-10 times as many copies as LotR, Danielle Steel has sold around 3-5.  So not really.

LotR is certainly the best-selling individual SFF novel all time, but that's not really relevant. The point is whether the fantasy genre would exist as we know it without LotR and, given that fantasy existed as a healthy genre long, long before LotR and whole subgenres of fantasy have descended from authors who had nothing to do with Tolkien, it's safe to say it would.

I'd argue it'd exist, but it wouldn't exist as we know it.

[Werthead]

4 minutes ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

I think you're underestimating Agatha Christie, whom I am pretty sure remains the best-selling novellist of all time. Christie's And Then There Were None has sold over 100 million copies alone (as per wikipedia). And she wrote some 80 books in the course of her life (plus nineteen plays, and six romance novels under a pseudonym) - her overall sales would be over a billion.

The figures I've seen for Agatha Christie put her sales at comfortably above 2 billion, and Danielle Steele around 1 billion.

As usual, a humbling reminder that even the biggest and most successful fantasy authors are absolutely buried by true crime and romance. And the two biggest-selling SF novels of all time, Dune and The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, have sold less than 25 million copies apiece, which is virtually non-existent in comparison.

2 minutes ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

I'd argue it'd exist, but it wouldn't exist as we know it.

I'm not sure about that. A lot of modern fantasy descends from the pulp sword and sorcery field. NK Jemisin won three Hugo Awards for her very Jack Vance-inspired trilogy and D&D has been a huge impact on the modern genre. We might not have gotten the school of big epic fantasies with extensive worldbuilding (the Williams/Jordan school), and we certainly wouldn't have gotten The Iron Tower or The Sword of Shannara, but we might have gotten ASoIaF, as the Tolkien influence on George was underplayed at the start and only got more pronounced later on.

Also, the original point was what fantasy would look like without The Lord of the Rings. If the question was without Tolkien (so no Hobbit either, which influenced a lot of things and people as well), that might be a somewhat different question.

[One-Winged Balrog]

11 minutes ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

I think you're underestimating Agatha Christie, whom I am pretty sure remains the best-selling novellist of all time. Christie's And Then There Were None has sold over 100 million copies alone (as per wikipedia). And she wrote some 80 books in the course of her life (plus nineteen plays, and six romance novels under a pseudonym) - her overall sales would be over a billion.

 

I said "in the same category". I should've said "in the same order of magnitude". The numbers I've seen are 4 billions sales for Christie, and 600 million for Tolkien. But Tolkien gets almost all of his sales from just two books, The Hobbit and LOTR, and most of these from LOTR.

[The Marquis de Leech]

3 minutes ago, Werthead said:

The figures I've seen for Agatha Christie put her sales at comfortably above 2 billion, and Danielle Steele around 1 billion.

As usual, a humbling reminder that even the biggest and most successful fantasy authors are absolutely buried by true crime and romance. And the two biggest-selling SF novels of all time, Dune and The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, have sold less than 25 million copies apiece, which is virtually non-existent in comparison.

I'm not sure about that. A lot of modern fantasy descends from the pulp sword and sorcery field. NK Jemisin won three Hugo Awards for her very Jack Vance-inspired trilogy and D&D has been a huge impact on the modern genre. We might not have gotten the school of big epic fantasies with extensive worldbuilding (the Williams/Jordan school), and we certainly wouldn't have gotten The Iron Tower or The Sword of Shannara, but we might have gotten ASoIaF, as the Tolkien influence on George was underplayed at the start and only got more pronounced later on.

Also, the original point was what fantasy would look like without The Lord of the Rings. If the question was without Tolkien (so no Hobbit either, which influenced a lot of things and people as well), that might be a somewhat different question.

I don't think we get ASOIAF. No The Lord of the Rings means no Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, which was the big influence on ASOIAF (I think Martin sticks to science-fiction in this version of the timeline).

As for pulp sword and sorcery - the likes of Moorcock were influenced "against" Tolkien. Take out Tolkien's gravitational effect, and even Moorcock might wind up different. Meanwhile, the notion of publishing fantasy trilogies would be out too. It'd be a genre of stand-alones. 

[One-Winged Balrog]

I think without Tolkien there would be no genre of Fantasy, and instead there would be a vaguer and more diverse genre of Weird Fiction.

Of course, something else could rise to fill the niche of LOTR and push history in a different direction.

For example, perhaps someone would have written an hit epic magic novel based on/inspired by the Three Kingdoms era of China, and as a result Fantasy as a genre would have been forever associated with Asian, and not European history.

This reminds me of the Watchmen universe, where superhero comics were replaced with comics about pirates...

[Ser Drewy]

18 hours ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

The greatest problem with The Silmarillion: the book really is too short.

I'll say. I re-read it in 2020 and honestly came away  wishing we'd had full novel-length treatments of the stories.

[Werthead]

1 hour ago, One-Winged Balrog said:

I said "in the same category". I should've said "in the same order of magnitude". The numbers I've seen are 4 billions sales for Christie, and 600 million for Tolkien. But Tolkien gets almost all of his sales from just two books, The Hobbit and LOTR, and most of these from LOTR.

The 600 million figure was a joke made by the One Ring.net for some obscure reason. The real figures are unclear, with 150 million for LotR and 100 million for The Hobbit being commonly cited, but that's a compression of figures because of the oddity of LotR being a single novel published in three books. When you untangle that, the most reliable figures seem to be 300-400 million sales for Tolkien as a whole (including the 1 and 3-volume editions of LotR, all his other books etc). Still highly significant, of course.

1 hour ago, One-Winged Balrog said:

I think without Tolkien there would be no genre of Fantasy, and instead there would be a vaguer and more diverse genre of Weird Fiction.

Again, fantasy existed long before Tolkien started publishing. Conan the Barbarian, Oz, Lud-in-the-Mist, The King of Elfland's Daughter, Phantastes and The Worm Ouroboros all predate The Hobbit. The Dying Earth,  Lanhkmar, Gormenghast and The Broken Sword all predate The Lord of the Rings.

[The Marquis de Leech]

Though I should note that The Worm Ouroboros has a science-fiction framing device (it ostensibly takes place on Mercury), and The Dying Earth concept is stolen from Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique, and thence from William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land, and thence from the last section of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. Meanwhile both Smith and Howard were looting early twentieth century Theosophy (occultism) for setting ideas, while Charles Williams (the "third Inkling") was writing philosophical/mystical fantasy thrillers.

Pre-Tolkien fantasy was arguably a weirder genre than anything we've seen since, with the science-fiction and dream-fiction overlaps on one hand, the symbol-heavy philosophy section on the other, William Morris' love affair with Malory, and Lord Dunsany's playful myth-making. 

[One-Winged Balrog]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

Again, fantasy existed long before Tolkien started publishing. Conan the Barbarian, Oz, Lud-in-the-Mist, The King of Elfland's Daughter, Phantastes and The Worm Ouroboros all predate The Hobbit. The Dying Earth,  Lanhkmar, Gormenghast and The Broken Sword all predate The Lord of the Rings.

I don't deny that these books exist, or they are important, or that they influence books that come after them, but I think they predate the genre of fantasy as we commonly understand it today. We classify them as fantasy today, but the reason we do it is because of LOTR.

Similarly, A True Story by Lucian of Samosata, from 2nd century CE (!), features space travel and aliens, but nobody called it Science Fiction at the time. It didn't start a genre.

[SeanF]

Without Tolkien, I doubt that fantasy would be considered respectable.  Pre-Tolkien (and for some time afterwards) it was just not considered worthy of serious literary analysis.  Some critics might enjoy Conan the Barbarian, or Leiber, but very much as one might enjoy an airport novel. 

[Werthead]

1 hour ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

Though I should note that The Worm Ouroboros has a science-fiction framing device (it ostensibly takes place on Mercury), and The Dying Earth concept is stolen from Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique, and thence from William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land, and thence from the last section of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. Meanwhile both Smith and Howard were looting early twentieth century Theosophy (occultism) for setting ideas, while Charles Williams (the "third Inkling") was writing philosophical/mystical fantasy thrillers.

Pre-Tolkien fantasy was arguably a weirder genre than anything we've seen since, with the science-fiction and dream-fiction overlaps on one hand, the symbol-heavy philosophy section on the other, William Morris' love affair with Malory, and Lord Dunsany's playful myth-making. 

Yup, those pre-Tolkien works were also looting earlier, pre-pre-Tolkien works to create the underpinnings of modern fantasy. Tolkien came in and added a huge amount to that, but he was not the sole foundation stone of it.

15 minutes ago, One-Winged Balrog said:

I don't deny that these books exist, or they are important, or that they influence books that come after them, but I think they predate the genre of fantasy as we commonly understand it today. We classify them as fantasy today, but the reason we do it is because of LOTR.

Similarly, A True Story by Lucian of Samosata, from 2nd century CE (!), features space travel and aliens, but nobody called it Science Fiction at the time. It didn't start a genre.

Several of the books mentioned had maps, worldbuilding notes, fictional races, allusions to fictional languages and other elements also present in Tolkien. Howard even wrote an entire article about his world, its races, languages and other worldbuilding information as early as 1932.

Tolkien himself also noted the importance of several of those writers as inspirations on his own work, including George MacDonald  and E.R. Eddison (he also ready Lord Dunsany but was not really impressed, and apparently only read one Howard story long after LotR was published).

[Werthead]

1 minute ago, SeanF said:

Without Tolkien, I doubt that fantasy would be considered respectable.  Pre-Tolkien (and for some time afterwards) it was just not considered worthy of serious literary analysis.  Some critics might enjoy Conan the Barbarian, or Leiber, but very much as one might enjoy an airport novel. 

Tolkien was not really considered respectable in a critical manner in his lifetime (one of the reasons Tolkien later ruefully said there was much to be said for the "grosser forms of literary success" instead), and the struggles between the literary establishment (who held him in disdain) and contemporaries who rated him, like Lewis and Auden, were quite striking.

Tolkien himself is now considered respectable of course, but then so are MacDonald, Morris, Dunsany and most of the other pre-Tolkien authors, and pre-LotR authors like Peake. Even Robert E. Howard, who never pretended to write anything other than pulp adventure, now probably has the most widespread and fervent "scholarship" following of any fantasy author bar Tolkien himself.

[Jaxom 1974]

2 hours ago, One-Winged Balrog said:

I don't deny that these books exist, or they are important, or that they influence books that come after them, but I think they predate the genre of fantasy as we commonly understand it today. We classify them as fantasy today, but the reason we do it is because of LOTR.

Similarly, A True Story by Lucian of Samosata, from 2nd century CE (!), features space travel and aliens, but nobody called it Science Fiction at the time. It didn't start a genre.

I feel like the first comment is contradicted by the second.  

Because the stories that pre-date LOTR weren't classified as fantasy at the time they came about, that means they made less of an impact?  "They exist, but because we hadn't coined the term for what they were yet, they can't be credited as a starting point!"  That seems odd. 

I'm generally on board with Wert's assessment. 

[The Marquis de Leech]

7 minutes ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

I feel like the first comment is contradicted by the second.  

Because the stories that pre-date LOTR weren't classified as fantasy at the time they came about, that means they made less of an impact?  "They exist, but because we hadn't coined the term for what they were yet, they can't be credited as a starting point!"  That seems odd. 

I'm generally on board with Wert's assessment. 

The point is that retrospectively claiming works for a genre can be a dangerous exercise in anachronism. Shelley's Frankenstein is a Gothic Horror novel - it only gets lumped into science-fiction because a recognised genre of science-fiction arose many decades later (courtesy of H.G. Wells). Though I do not consider Lucian of Samosata to be science-fiction in any sense, since at no point is it actually engaging with science (either Aristotle or Lucretius). It's basically a second-century Gullivers Travels, a social satire with copious silliness, and the inclusion of Sun and Moon people is neither here nor there.

(Another example of retrospective shoe-horning would be people who claim Voltaire's Zadig as a detective story, when the genre really got going with Poe).

In the case of fantasy, I personally consider Morris in the 1890s to constitute the birth of the modern genre - MacDonald is arguably closer to dream-fiction than a setting in a "real" secondary world. By the time you hit Dunsany, you're dealing with invented pantheons of gods, and Tolkien found himself getting compared to E.R. Eddison.  

[The Marquis de Leech]

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

Tolkien himself also noted the importance of several of those writers as inspirations on his own work, including George MacDonald  and E.R. Eddison (he also ready Lord Dunsany but was not really impressed, and apparently only read one Howard story long after LotR was published).

I think that's being a bit harsh on Dunsany. Dunsany's Gods of Pegana is a clear influence for Tolkien's Valar, and the goofiness of The Book of Lost Tales is very, very Dunsany. Tolkien nabbed the Hobbit goblins from MacDonald, but other than that MacDonald was a bigger influence on Lewis than Tolkien.

[The Marquis de Leech]

3 hours ago, SeanF said:

Without Tolkien, I doubt that fantasy would be considered respectable.  Pre-Tolkien (and for some time afterwards) it was just not considered worthy of serious literary analysis.  Some critics might enjoy Conan the Barbarian, or Leiber, but very much as one might enjoy an airport novel. 

While I wouldn't call Charles Williams respectable-at-the-time, his works are not exactly light reading, requiring a fair amount of appreciation for philosophy and/or religion to follow. I mean, one of his novels literally posits the world getting invaded by Plato's World of Forms. In his case, the issue was more that, well, you were dealing with literature as produced by a bona fide Occultist (albeit this was not something the other Inklings were aware of at the time).

The other one would be David Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus, a sort of Gnostic Pilgrim's Progress from 1920. Profoundly weird, but with some seriously deep symbolism.