Well, I’ve made quite enough sidelong references to the Grand Old Man of fantasy fiction that I thought I should meet him head on at some point (1) : JRR Tolkien, professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, friend of CS Lewis (2) and “father of modern fantasy” as he has been called.

 

There are few enough readers of fantasy who have not braved his epic, usually at quite a young age. The Hobbit, of course, is an extremely accessible entry-level fantasy, the Harry Potter of its day, perhaps, but Lord of the Rings is a much more serious piece, and I’m sure there are plenty of readers who have ground to a halt therein, perhaps some of these never to go back to the genre, seeing their way littered with swathes of Elven poetry, like caltrops (3).

 

You either love Tolkien, or you hate him, as a fantasy connoisseur. Or you come to terms with him. In fact, all of the above. Most readers tend to go through these three phases. When first introduced to heroic fantasy, Tolkien is awesome, in the strictest sense of the word. Then the reader spreads his net wider, and (or at least one hopes) starts reading works that are less influenced by Tolkien, and it is common, eventually, to treat the Old Man with a kind of rebellious, teenagery contempt. Then, usually, one comes back to the Rings at a later date, able to take in aspects of the work previously missed and, whether or not you actually like the book, as a book, you usually end up admitting that he did a good job there, and that the genre owes a lot to him. Even those writers who have set out deliberately to get out from under his shadow are still, in that negative way, influenced by his writing. As I’m in incipient danger of becoming part of the genre, I’d have to acknowledge that without Tolkien, the genre would be very different.  I’d buy him a drink, anyway (9).

 

Of course, as if often forgotten, the pulp story market had (re-?)invented the genre long before, with the work of Robert E. Howard and his peers, and if you doubt Howard’s influence on later work, look at David Gemmell and Michael Moorcock, the one very much writing in Conan’s image, and the other deliberately subverting the ‘mighty-hewed barbarian’ image with his sickly, pallid sorcerer hero who nonetheless lives through a lot of Conanesque situations.

 

But Howard doesn’t tend to get much of a look in, because it’s Tolkien that they all hark back to. Fantasy works are praised for resembling Tolkien (10). Fantasy works are derided for resembling Tolkien. So, how much is this the case? Are we all plodding in his footsteps?

 

Elves, dwarves, dragons and Middle-earth. These are probably the major bequests that people assume Tolkien left in his will to the genre. I’m not entirely sure this is being fair to later writers, or to Tolkien himself, necessarily – neither that they are so devoid of inspiration, nor that he is so impoverished by their tarnished reflection. (11)

 

What many people forget about Tolkien is hi academic background. The Lord of the Rings did not spring full-formed, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus (12). Tolkien was reconstructing an Anglo-Saxon world, and although he is ripe with invention, it is well-grounded. His elves are the Celtic Sidhe, the ancient, glorious and magical race that fought against a great evil in the dawn of time (formorians or orcs, take your pick) but are now giving way to the rise of mankind. His dwarves are the dwarves of Germanic mythology, mountain-dwelling, gold-greedy craftsmen. His trolls turn to stone, as Scandinavian legend demands. Smaug is close cousin to Fafnir. Even the Ring, the One Ring, is a direct descendant of the Rhinegold hammered out by Albrecht, spreading ruin wherever it goes. Tolkien’s intellectual property here runs thin, and it is perhaps unfair for a writer wishing to write of elves and dwarves to be hit with the Tolkien stick. Perhaps. On the other hand, and most especially with elves and dwarves, Tolkien’s words have worn a channel that makes following his lead the path of least resistance. You can see this most clearly in role-playing games. The dwarves and elves of, say, Dungeons and Dragons, Warhammer or World of Warcraft are wan reflections of Tolkien (13), but their heritage is clear. They all hold the same values (dwarves are dour, mountain-dwelling craftsmen who fight orcs and like a drink, elves are nature-loving, magical and artistic time-wasters who like twanging a bow, hugging trees and fighting orcs, and orcs get a fairly raw deal however you look at it), look the same, and fulfil the same function.

 

The world of Middle-Earth itself, however, is a curious appendix to this, because so few writers have actually copied it, and in some cases one wishes they had. Tolkien was writing his Anglo-Saxon myth-cycle set in a Dark Age world, where most of the land is mostly undeveloped, cities and states are separated by wilderness and not borders, and everything is on the sort of scale that a Saxon king could have dealt with from his long-house. This is not the “stock fantasy world” that a lot of his successors put into print. That world runs more like this:

 

One end of the map is reserved for the bad guys. Beyond that there is a patchwork of kingdoms. Each kingdom has a quirk, which is important to attend to because when you meet people from that kingdom they will almost all exhibit this quirk. Often each kingdom has its own geography, which need not be remotely continuous with its neighbours (“this is the swamp kingdom, we cross this to get to the desert kingdom”) (15). The kingdoms have kings and courts, of course. Several of them will be jovially at war for reasons of either no import, or reasons that are never satisfactorily explained. However, when they are made to kiss and make up, there will be a lot of backslapping. Everyone is very clean and the colours are very bright, and the peasants are salt of the earth. The major inspiration for all of this seems to be less Tolkien and more the sort of Prince Valiant/King Arthur films that MGM used to make, technicolour costumes and string chainmail. Tolkien would have had none of it.

 

(1)   Very brave of me, since he’s dead.

(2)   Who he converted to the Christianity that so markedly infuses Lewis’ writings, rather than, as I had supposed, the other way around.

(3)   It is a curious thing about Tolkien’s Elven poetry, it has a strange effect on the mind. There is never actually as much of it in the book as you remember. I recall an argument I had with a friend on the subject. I could actually picture in my mind’s eye the vast swathe of incomprehensible sylvan doggerel that got poured out in Lothlorien after Gandalf’s (4) snuffing it was disclosed. I could see it on the very pages of my extremely battered old second hand copy that I originally read at around age fourteen. We went to my friend’s edition to settle the matter. The morass of verse I recalled was not there. The recollection of such Elvish verse that was there had worked on my mind to fill all available space. (5)

(4)   Microsoft Office 2007’s version of Word will put a capital ‘G’ on ‘gandalf’ for you, which is about as endearing as Microsoft has ever been.

(5)   However, it gave me a moment’s mirth during the film (6). When Legolas announces that the elves of Lothlorien are singing “a lament for Gandalf” but. When asked “What do they say?”, demures from translating, I did wonder if someone else was thinking of the same immense, and apparently imaginary, wodge of Elvish poetry that I so erroneously recalled.

(6)   A word here for Peter Jackson’s magnum opus (7). Before his Fellowship I could be heard to say that nobody had ever made a good heroic fantasy film (8). When the film was first advertised, I dreaded the result. When I saw the trailer I held my breath. When I saw the film… well, let’s just say I was happy to be proved wrong. And I hummed the Uruk-hai theme all the way home from the cinema.

(7)   Magnum Opii, there being three of them?

(8)   Yes, yes, yes, but none of them are actually good. Being risibly entertaining in a coarse-acting kind of way is very enjoyable, but it’s not quality. And the rest were just too awful for words.

(9)   Very generous of me, since he’s dead. And probably wouldn’t take a drink off the likes of me in any event. After all, I went to Reading U. No self-respecting Oxbridge man would have anything to do with me.

(10) A poor enough thing to praise anyone for, surely. Whilst imitation may be the best flattery, it is surely the worst flattery to accuse someone of imitation.

(11)  All right, here we go. There is a certain book, the plot of which runs thusly: There is a young rustic type and his solid, supportive friend who come into possession of a magic artefact. They meet up with a magical fellow who guides them in a quest to defeat a dark lord. They accumulate allies including a dwarf and an elf. Halfway through the quest the magical chappie meets a huge demon, confronts it on a bridge, and appears to fall to his death, but turns out later to have got out of it. No, this is not Tolkien I’m talking about, but a different book entirely (save for the aforementioned outright theft of plot).

(12)  A strong contender for “most pretentious simile 2007”

(13) As the Dungeons and Dragons Movie is a poor reflection of actual good-old Dungeons and Dragons. In three words, “worst film ever”. Although a recent dragon-based film is a strong contender. (14)

(14)  What’s that? There are lots of nasty, cheapie bad films out there? The thing, is, to qualify for the very worst ever film, a project must have have all natural advantages, including an enormous budget, and still tank like a dog.

(15) RPGs have inherited this predilection, or at least the early game-worlds certainly did. An interesting addendum comes with MMORPGs where the various “zones” frequently succeed each other in a completely abrupt change in geography. Is this sloppy, or are they just being faithful to their roots?