English medievalist, fantasy and science fiction expert Edward James explains that the impact of JRR Tolkien’s work on all fantasy writers that came after him was:They’re either imitating him or trying desperately to escape his influence.” To mark the 50th anniversary of the creator’s death Lord of the Rings, This Saturday, we looked back and reviewed interviews published in recent years with some of the great living authors of the fantasy genre in EL PERIÓDICO DE CATALUNYA from the group Prensa Ibérica. And a few of them Tolkien as an inevitable influence.
Tolkien (Bloemfontein, South Africa, 1882-Bornemouth, United Kingdom, 1973), a philologist specializing in medieval Scandinavian literature, made traces of the Middle Ages almost natural for the epic fantasy genre. another RR George R.R. Martin announced In an interview with our colleague Ricardo Mir from France when you switch from sci-fi to fantasy Game of Thrones, The medieval setting was already included in the genre. For him, “Tolkien is the giant from which all modern fantasies derive”, but his followers are bound to be separated from someone “born in the 19th century” who is a scholar, a linguist, a product of “the Britain of his time”. . And veteran of the trenches of Flanders. “He was a man of a different age (…) I am the product of a generation babyboomers, He is the son of a working-class family from New Jersey. I studied journalism, I come from the science fiction subculture, I was a conscientious objector in Vietnam. All these differences are reflected in our literature, but my books would never have been brought to life if it weren’t for it.”
But in our view, Britain’s Christian catastrophic but redemptive end plays in his field, even those who work against Tolkien like Martin, using anti-heroes instead of heroes and endings that have little to do with “eucatastrophe”. said more than strong today Brandon Sanderson. According to him, writers like Martin or Rothfuss “are trying to give another direction to books that are still somewhat Tolkienan. What I’m trying to do is look for worlds that fantasy hasn’t shown yet. Take that further. Build worlds of science fiction.” fantasy stories take place, not medieval worlds.” According to Sanderson, “Tolkien wrote the first epic fantasy book and we spent 20-30 years referencing it. It’s only in the last few decades that fantasy has come out of Tolkien’s shadow and started to grow as an adult genre.”
Yes, he stands by Sanderson Tolkien, who believes in Mormon As for how they will reflect their religion in their literature. “CS Lewis believed that he should teach through literature, Tolkien believed that morality should only emerge through history. I’m more on Tolkien’s side.”
talking about Patrick Rothfuss, Here’s who we shared a few days in his hometown of Wyoming in 2011: name of the wind And a man’s fear Bilge told us how far he felt from Tolkien with his two classic novels. “For a long time fantasy has focused on kings and queens, their politics and empire building… and that’s great. If you want to create a tragedy, you need a hero. But I wondered if the hero could be a normal human being for interesting things to happen to him”. This was her Kvothe, a seductive bard more inspired by Casanova and the world of Ursula K. Le Guinn.
Rothfuss also bets on female characters and for breaking “the big clichés and stereotypes in fantasy literature” there is a dragon in his books… but he is a clumsy and drugged beast. In the opinion of a young reader, the role of gender is another point of distance for him. “Sex is more accepted in urban fantasy, real-world vampire stories and stuff like that, but not in epic fantasy. That brings us back to Tolkien… But for him, it’s impossible to explain the story of someone like that. He’s 16 or 17 and she acts like sex isn’t important to her,” he told us after speaking to students from a university. high school From Eau Claire.
Sex also appeared while talking to the Polish volcano Andrzej Sapkowski Father of the epic Geralt of Rivia (witcher For those who know him through Netflix or video games). The passive role of women in gender, tell us, From the source of the legends, “here the woman is usually a lady waiting to be rescued, a stupid creature without initiative, who cries and cries, and (he added) Aragorn from Tolkien, who took two episodes to explain that Eowin had fallen in love with him “probably because of his lack of experience with women. But times are changing. In a Joe Abercrombie novel, a couple can go to bed simply by saying: What’s happening”.
Perhaps it was Michael Moorcock who very early spearheaded the anti-idealist response to Tolkien, whose literature he described as “nursing prose,” along with the wanton albino Eric of Melniboné. In this line we find exactly this: Joe Abercrombie between What’s happening, King of gloomy darkness with its long saga First law. In a talk at Celsius in Avilés (about Rothfuss and Sanderson and Tolkien), he emphasized above all how the genre redefines the role of the hero. “Aragorn had heroic intentions, took heroic actions, and as a result achieved heroism. But true heroes are not so naive; there are people who, for selfish reasons or unintentionally, perform heroic acts or lead a heroic attack that leads them to a catastrophe”. Meanwhile, they were asked to identify themselves with a character that day. Lord of the Rings. Rothfuss chose Gandalf, Abercrombie Saruman, and Sanderson Sam. Look at their faces and you will understand.
He took advantage of another opportunity Worrying about the idealization of violence in Tolkien’s epic. “HE Lord of the Rings He’s very violent, most of his heroes are the violent male types, the noble and dashing heroes are done for the day they become good friends after they bet on how many orcs they’ll get themselves into and kill like psychopathic killers. , wonderful lovers and gentle kings. It’s very comfortable to kill that way. Violence has consequences for itself. And of course about the victim. But there is no price in fantasy literature. To be honest, I’m obsessed with showing the mental and physical scars that violence leaves.”
We also talk about Tolkien three-time Hugo Award winner, NK Jemycin, with him The shattered world trilogy. “What lies behind all the elements of the post-Tolkien fantasy narrative is nothing more than the advancement of society. Tolkien wrote for a very specific audience in the 1940s and 1950s, before the sexual revolution, before the civil rights era. generation British. mainstream It can no longer be narrow-minded, it cannot be a product specific to that type of reader. Most women, and if you want their money, it’s probably a good idea to have at least one woman passing by in the book. And even be the protagonist! Or women doing women’s things!”
It has become so common for Tolkien’s work to take place in an imaginary universe (the secondary world, according to his terminology), a universe the author has created entirely separate from ours, that Edward James points out in his article dedicated to JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis. inside The Cambridge Companion of Fantasy Literature,”It is not easy to understand how unusual this was before Tolkien”. [año de publicación de El Señor de los Anillos]Fantasy writers don’t need to explain their world by portraying them as dreams or traveller tales, or by offering them a fictional connection to our own world,” recalls John Clute. Fantasy Encyclopedia. But this secondary world does not cease to be inspired by the real. And more and more writers decide to use other building elements other than those of the Oxford professor.
It’s a Sino-American thing ken liu, author of the as yet unfinished tetralogy Dandelion dynasty. An epic, heraldic fantasy about gods intervening in people’s lives on an imaginary continent. Tolkien but also Homer. And the legends of the Han dynasty. “I write with and against the epic fantasy tradition Tolkien started. We must be aware of our debt to him, everyone who writes fantasy follows in his footsteps, but there has to be a way. There cannot be a single tradition connected with a European perspective”. He sees a connection: he thinks that both he and Tolkien want to “revive a tradition excluded from literature”, whether it’s the Anglo-Saxon epic for the former or the Eastern epic for itself, and call it “universal”.
And we come to a sensitive point. Was Tolkien racist? “There are racist elements to Asian features, for example, but it was limited by its historical circumstances, and that doesn’t stop me from admiring the enormity of his work,” says Liu.
Historian specializing in African-American cultures Father Djeli Clark, A great writer to follow and blogger with a rather distinctive Tolkien name The disgruntled Haradrim, we in Avilés this summer He talked about his conflicting feelings. “In Tolkien, light and good are associated with white and darkness, with evil. There are black men who are half-trolls, monsters who are not human… I love Tolkien’s books. But I can’t help seeing that it’s a love-hate relationship. It is also true that he remembers that he was a linguist, trying to reflect the medieval world, including the fear of Islam. Actually, he was not a fascist at all. He did not allow the Nazis to use it. hobbit But it makes sense for them to find it interesting and think it could be used as an advocacy for white supremacy, right?”
By the way: rereading what other top-notch writers have told us also means that some don’t mention Tolkien. Like Philip Pullman, whose atheist crusader opponent was CS Lewis or Trotskyist China Mieville; It took half a second for references to Brexit and the hobbits in the region to turn into a critique of neoliberalism.