rants

I am rare among those who enjoy reading fantasy, in that I don’t like the work of J. R. R. Tolkien.

In some circles, merely breathing those words is total heresy, a complete break with the One True Way. Those who hear this shocking viewpoint ask how I could possibly not like Tolkien, who must be heralded by all as the true master of fantasy and its greatest author of all time. Anyone who knows me well knows I don’t deal well with rabid fandom. People who lose the ability to talk rationally about something are useless. But I digress.

I did, in fact, go see the Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring movie. I enjoyed it quite a bit. The visuals were fantastic, an excellent rendition of Tolkien’s world. I’m looking forward to the next two movies. But the excellence of the movies will be only partly due to Tolkien’s story, less rather than more. So far the movie has managed to avoid some of the detractions of the book.

I sometimes wonder if my distate for Tolkien might be lessened had I chanced upon his works earlier. I knew of his books but didn’t get around to reading them until after I’d read a lot of other material. Perhaps this robbed me of a fondness for them I might have developed had they been among my first fantasy books. But they weren’t, so I don’t automatically love Tolkien just because it was the first thing I read. Tolkien’s works, to me, have to be weighed against other fantasy authors.

Character Development

This is probably my biggest beef with the Lord of the Rings book. Most of the characters in the book are very flat; that’s fine, most of the time, but there are so many bit parts that it draws your attention to the few characters you have a chance to know well. And when I last read it, it seemed like they stayed flat throughout the entire book.

Consider this: Frodo and Samwise go through the entire book being frightened out of their wits and almost unable to do anything for themselves. Yet at the very end of the book, they return to the Shire and kick ass. No longer a bunch of frightened wimps, now all of a sudden they’re tough guys who aren’t afraid of anything. The change is sudden and, to me, not well-developed.

Plot

Some of my friends have a term that they apply to silly movies where things just happen to work out: “plot-convenience playhouse.” There is far, far too much of this in Lord of the Rings for my tastes. The characters get in trouble, and they have some mystical talisman to save them, or Gandalf casts a lovely spell to wipe out the bad guys, or some birds come to carry them away. Maybe Tolkien was trying to make a point here (that nobody saves themselves) but this goes hand-in-hand with the first problem: the characters never seem to change, because they never figure out how to deal with their problems.

Bulk

Yep, bulk. Tolkien is wordy. He manages to say in 1,000 words what other authors can say in 200. This is probably one reason I didn’t mind the movie: what Tolkien describes in painstaking detail, taking the reader a long time to wade through, the movie manages to convey in an instant, simply because it’s an immediately visual medium. Hooray for movies. But the balance in the book is clearly tilted towards slow scene-painting and less towards actual events. Some people like that sort of thing. I prefer a quicker pace.

Coherence

Among Tolkien’s fans, he is considered a world-builder without equal. So much detail, the genealogies of kings and hobbits, the bits and pieces of history. Great for detail-freaks, but not terribly relevant to the story. (So I am thankful it is an appendix.)

But the real problem here is that this is a strange world, with all sorts of bizarre things in it, and they don’t seem to fit together all that well. The things you do learn a little bit about—elves, Entings, for example—are going away, disappearing from the world. You never really find out why.

Relax, It’s a Rant

Obviously I’m not impressed with Lord of the Rings, nor was I impressed by The Hobbit for similar reasons. I was probably spoiled by things like Raymond E. Feist’s Riftwar and David Eddings’ Belgariad, which I read long before Tolkien. (Not that I don’t have issues with those, but those are topics for another time.)

Perhaps at some point I’ll return to this topic and actually fill in some references from the book. But I loaned out my copy to a friend, so she could read it. She says she’ll return it soon; she’s switching from an all-in-one volume to a three-book set, just so she can feel like she’s making some progress… because, well, it’s a big, bulky book.