Brian Rosten's Blog - Posts Tagged "tolkien-high-fantasy-influences"
Influences: An Age of Men for All Seasons
In 1916 a young lieutenant in the British Army is writing to his wife. By Army law, he is not allowed to divulge the classified movements of his battalion via mail, and therefore his beloved has no idea where he is and whether he is heading into the thick of the squirmish. Luckily, this clever young man has been developing his own languages for almost a decade. So he invents a series of dots which can be decoded by his wife to track his whereabouts as he weaves through small towns around France. War takes its toll on him. He is horrified not only by the inhumane nature of the soldiers he is fighting with, but his body and spirit weaken in and around the events of the Battle of Somme. He develops trench fever and is eventually sent countryside. In his recovery, which lasts for the duration of the Great War, he begins to write novels. He has been a poet most of his life- a promising enough one that he deferred enlistment to finish a degree in literature. The young man begins work on a series of stories known as "The Book of Lost Tales." This takes him through the rest of the war, after which he begins a posting as a tutor for Leeds and thereafter Pembroke College. During his time in teaching, he begins composing mythology for a work later titled "The Silmarillion." As he and his beloved wife Edith settle into a quiet life in the world of English academia, the young solider-turned-professor begins a decades-long journey into the fantasy world of Arda, beginning with a work known as "The Hobbit" (or "There and Back Again"). The young man infuses his experiences with war, illness, familial separation, and the sometimes acutely thin line of hope, into his writings.
J.R.R. Tolkien was a man of faith before anything else. It was the single most important element in his writing, and the layers of complexity baked into both the fantasy world and the allegorical messaging was astounding, and still warrants multiple re-reads. Only literary giants like James Joyce and St. John can outclass Tolkien in levels of understanding within a text, and even they relied on the quite understandable crutch of not making up their own Universe or inventing their own languages and cultures.
Volumes have been written of Tolkien's life, his greatness, his contribution to literature, and analysis of the works themselves. I have not read nearly enough of them, but I will suggest one anyway. I am quite the fan of "On the Shoulders of Hobbits" by Louis Markos.
I consider Tolkien my greatest fictional influence. So even though I'm not in any way a Tolkien scholar, and everything I'm about to write has already been written (or mansplained to someone who just doesn't understand why it takes three movies to explain one camping expedition), I'd still like to share a few things about Tolkien's writing as it has influenced me:
First, the infusion of allegory at the core of a story is something I am awed by when I read Tolkien. It is so good and so seamless and so right that one gets the sense that J.R.R. Tolkien was put on this Earth to teach us about God and faith and friendship and war through the written word. As a result of this influence, I deviate from some writers in the respect that many story-tellers create a story first, and then upon editing the work, find the themes and reinforce them. I, because of the intricacy of allegory present in Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" (what I consider to be the greatest book/books I've ever read). find it impossible to build such a weighty foundation without some idea of the themes and symbolism beforehand. So I generate ideas for allegories, and then generate those into stories, instead of the other way round.
Second, Tolkien embraces the hardship of existence in a way that many writers fail to capture. Louis Markos in his analysis points out that for Tolkien, The Road itself is actually a character, with attributes and even some agency (see: The forest near Tom Bombadil's home). Tolkien does this because the Fellowship's path is arduous, as in life, and only by creating a deep texture to the world around the characters can this be embodied with any fidelity. It is a mark of mastership that Tolkien can take the dullness of long walk and use it as a way to make all of us marginally grateful for the mundane struggles we see in our day-to-day. So I also try to add particularity to a story in order to capture even a fraction of this same effect, though my approach focuses more on small insights as opposed to long descriptions. But I won't lie, I actually enjoy writing long, tedious, Tolkien-like descriptions, and I find it hard to edit them out afterward so my readers don't end up getting painfully bored.
Finally, Tolkien's Arda (Home of Middle Earth and the Lord of the Rings mythos) is constantly fueled by rules. This is slightly different than the allegory element, in that this is running all the time, whereas the allegories run in and out of the story arc. Each decision and contextual event and even some of the mild descriptions are powered by concepts Tolkien has carefully crafted so the story runs itself. From Tom the Barman's forgetfulness (powered the weakness of Men) to Gandalf's steadfastness (born of his heritage as a reincarnated Valar, a being of pure faith) to Pippin's shortsightedness (a representation of Hobbits as child-like, in the Beatific Virtue sense). I mean, damn, even the trees are powered by a sense of Natural Order and come alive to set things right at Isengard. A lot people complain about how the Ring gets to Mordor, but the truth is, for Tolkien, it doesn't matter who takes the Ring to Mt. Doom. A powerful force that is embedded to existence itself will implore someone to take it there, and some other, semi-connected force will corrupt the Hearts of Men to make that journey difficult. Everything else, at the risk of offending Samwise, is small potatoes.
I also try to set rules for my stories, however, unlike Tolkien, I try to only have two to three rules running at any given time (though you can have multiple rules for each individual character, if your story is set up that way). I can't keep track of much more in my head, and the story can get clunky if you add more constraints than your brain can handle.
It's also pretty cool that Tolkien invented an entire elvish language for the books, but I do not plan on creating an entire language for a book at any point in my career.
Tolkien turned his grief from WWI atrocities, intertwined it with his love of God and family, and made something revolutionary. There are a slew of writers who've tried to accomplish even a pale comparison of what he put together. I count myself among them. There's entire websites devoted just to the Tolkien-esque genre of literature (see: Beneath Ceaseless Skies).
If you've never read Tolkien because you don't think you could ever get into something with elves and castles and whatnot, I'd challenge you to give it a try. You may not like the winding prose. You may not enjoy the long descriptions of a craggy cliffside. You may be bored reading about Hobbits and knights chowing down on lembas bread for weeks on end. But The Road will always be there, waiting for you, even if you don't make it until your eleventy-first birthday.
As always, Happy Reading,
Frosty Rosty
J.R.R. Tolkien was a man of faith before anything else. It was the single most important element in his writing, and the layers of complexity baked into both the fantasy world and the allegorical messaging was astounding, and still warrants multiple re-reads. Only literary giants like James Joyce and St. John can outclass Tolkien in levels of understanding within a text, and even they relied on the quite understandable crutch of not making up their own Universe or inventing their own languages and cultures.
Volumes have been written of Tolkien's life, his greatness, his contribution to literature, and analysis of the works themselves. I have not read nearly enough of them, but I will suggest one anyway. I am quite the fan of "On the Shoulders of Hobbits" by Louis Markos.
I consider Tolkien my greatest fictional influence. So even though I'm not in any way a Tolkien scholar, and everything I'm about to write has already been written (or mansplained to someone who just doesn't understand why it takes three movies to explain one camping expedition), I'd still like to share a few things about Tolkien's writing as it has influenced me:
First, the infusion of allegory at the core of a story is something I am awed by when I read Tolkien. It is so good and so seamless and so right that one gets the sense that J.R.R. Tolkien was put on this Earth to teach us about God and faith and friendship and war through the written word. As a result of this influence, I deviate from some writers in the respect that many story-tellers create a story first, and then upon editing the work, find the themes and reinforce them. I, because of the intricacy of allegory present in Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" (what I consider to be the greatest book/books I've ever read). find it impossible to build such a weighty foundation without some idea of the themes and symbolism beforehand. So I generate ideas for allegories, and then generate those into stories, instead of the other way round.
Second, Tolkien embraces the hardship of existence in a way that many writers fail to capture. Louis Markos in his analysis points out that for Tolkien, The Road itself is actually a character, with attributes and even some agency (see: The forest near Tom Bombadil's home). Tolkien does this because the Fellowship's path is arduous, as in life, and only by creating a deep texture to the world around the characters can this be embodied with any fidelity. It is a mark of mastership that Tolkien can take the dullness of long walk and use it as a way to make all of us marginally grateful for the mundane struggles we see in our day-to-day. So I also try to add particularity to a story in order to capture even a fraction of this same effect, though my approach focuses more on small insights as opposed to long descriptions. But I won't lie, I actually enjoy writing long, tedious, Tolkien-like descriptions, and I find it hard to edit them out afterward so my readers don't end up getting painfully bored.
Finally, Tolkien's Arda (Home of Middle Earth and the Lord of the Rings mythos) is constantly fueled by rules. This is slightly different than the allegory element, in that this is running all the time, whereas the allegories run in and out of the story arc. Each decision and contextual event and even some of the mild descriptions are powered by concepts Tolkien has carefully crafted so the story runs itself. From Tom the Barman's forgetfulness (powered the weakness of Men) to Gandalf's steadfastness (born of his heritage as a reincarnated Valar, a being of pure faith) to Pippin's shortsightedness (a representation of Hobbits as child-like, in the Beatific Virtue sense). I mean, damn, even the trees are powered by a sense of Natural Order and come alive to set things right at Isengard. A lot people complain about how the Ring gets to Mordor, but the truth is, for Tolkien, it doesn't matter who takes the Ring to Mt. Doom. A powerful force that is embedded to existence itself will implore someone to take it there, and some other, semi-connected force will corrupt the Hearts of Men to make that journey difficult. Everything else, at the risk of offending Samwise, is small potatoes.
I also try to set rules for my stories, however, unlike Tolkien, I try to only have two to three rules running at any given time (though you can have multiple rules for each individual character, if your story is set up that way). I can't keep track of much more in my head, and the story can get clunky if you add more constraints than your brain can handle.
It's also pretty cool that Tolkien invented an entire elvish language for the books, but I do not plan on creating an entire language for a book at any point in my career.
Tolkien turned his grief from WWI atrocities, intertwined it with his love of God and family, and made something revolutionary. There are a slew of writers who've tried to accomplish even a pale comparison of what he put together. I count myself among them. There's entire websites devoted just to the Tolkien-esque genre of literature (see: Beneath Ceaseless Skies).
If you've never read Tolkien because you don't think you could ever get into something with elves and castles and whatnot, I'd challenge you to give it a try. You may not like the winding prose. You may not enjoy the long descriptions of a craggy cliffside. You may be bored reading about Hobbits and knights chowing down on lembas bread for weeks on end. But The Road will always be there, waiting for you, even if you don't make it until your eleventy-first birthday.
As always, Happy Reading,
Frosty Rosty
