Tolkien is not a good writer

TJ

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TJ
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:duck:

I will give him all of the kudos he deserves for inspiring my favorite genre of fiction. Truly, I will. His LOTR books also yielded some of the best movies ever made.

When I was a boy, I made it through The Hobbit, but couldn't get into the trilogy.

As an adult and a several-thousand-books more experienced reader. I tried again. I read the hobbit, I forced my way through Fellowship, and made it about 1/3 of the way through The Two Towers before I had to throw the book down in disgust.

The story is brilliant and very creative, but it is so poorly written that I can't stand it. He goes on about pointless minutiae and skips across important parts. 7 pages, people. 7 pages about the origins of Bilbo's tabac. WTF?

Seriously, I think he's a great author, but a terrible, awful, sub-mediocre writer.
 
He purposely wrote in a style and to sensibilities that were archaic when he wrote them. He was also less interested in telling the adventure story the movies followed than he was creating a fully immersive world with it's own culture, history, literature and mythology. Judge it on those terms, not on the standards of current adventure and fantasy stories.
 
Piscivore said:
He purposely wrote in a style and to sensibilities that were archaic when he wrote them. He was also less interested in telling the adventure story the movies followed than he was creating a fully immersive world with it's own culture, history, literature and mythology. Judge it on those terms, not on the standards of current adventure and fantasy stories.
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I've heard this before, and I've tried to follow this advice. I've read books that are much newer and much older. There are other books that I also feel are poorly written, but that's not important right now.

To write a book poorly and blame it on the story's thematic nature seems like merely an excuse to me.
 
IMO, LOTR was one of those rare instances where the movies were better than the books.

But that's just my opinion. I know people love the universe he created with all its intricancies but I really don't care much for hobbit poetry or how to pronounce words in Elvish. (The Silmarilllioilioliioiln (sp?)...ugh)

My favorite part about reading the trilogy was realizing the ROTK story was only half the volume and the other half were appendices I could completely skip.

JRRT...Brilliant mind who was in need of a competent editor.
 
Yes and no.

He was an excellent writer in that he conceived a fantastically detailed world, interesting charaters and a (for the time) highly original plot.

He sucked as far as style goes. It's plodding, dull, and broken up by entirely too much bad poetry.

If he had an editor who could have kept the plot elements but made the style 'snappier' he could have been a top-notch writer.
 
TJ Stough said:
The story is brilliant and very creative, but it is so poorly written that I can't stand it. He goes on about pointless minutiae and skips across important parts. 7 pages, people. 7 pages about the origins of Bilbo's tabac. WTF?

Seriously, I think he's a great author, but a terrible, awful, sub-mediocre writer.
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What are you talking about ? I thought his descriptions were very long-winded, but I mean, you can't possibly be saying he's got bad english, or something.
 
Sorry, don't agree. I have been reading through LOTR on the average of every few years since my initial exposure to Tolkien in 1964.
I have always enjoyed not only the story, but his word creation and prose, and found some of the passages (like the battle on the Plennor fields) to be worth re-reading by themselves.

Of course, I'm one of those odd ducks that rather enjoys such things; another of my favorite (and oft re-read) books is The Worm Oroborous, written in what is close to Middle English.
Kinda like Willie Shakespeare too...
 
TJ Stough said:
I've heard this before, and I've tried to follow this advice. I've read books that are much newer and much older. There are other books that I also feel are poorly written, but that's not important right now.

To write a book poorly and blame it on the story's thematic nature seems like merely an excuse to me.
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It's cool that you don't like it- a lot of people don't. But there's a huge gulf between "poorly written" and "written in a style I don't like."

There's a reason most of popular versions of the old mythologies are heavily edited- they are often slow, overly detailed, and meander through extensive subplots that don't engage a reader interested only in the main thread of the story. Look at the bible, it's one of them- does anyone ever read the Psalms as entertainment, let alone all those chapters of "begats?"

But those were Tolkien's models. Not adventure stories. Consider this; his artificial mythology is as pervasive and deeply rooted into our culture as our original mythologies, yet they are not even a century old. Power like that does not come from poor writing. One offers the utter failure of L Ron Hubbard's epics in contrast.

ETA:
Nyarlathotep said:
If he had an editor who could have kept the plot elements but made the style 'snappier' he could have been a top-notch writer.
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A top-notch adventure writer, but not myth-builder.
 
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Belz... said:
What are you talking about ? I thought his descriptions were very long-winded, but I mean, you can't possibly be saying he's got bad english, or something.
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I'm talking about the sentence structure, flow, cogence and all around readability.

His choice of verbiage, and how they were put together were incredibly awkward and hard to follow. It's very, very hard to read.


Nyarlathotep - yes, it was his conception, which is why I say he was a good author, but a poor writer.
 
TJ Stough said:
I'm talking about the sentence structure, flow, cogence and all around readability.

His choice of verbiage, and how they were put together were incredibly awkward and hard to follow. It's very, very hard to read.
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Sure, but he was deliberatly using an already outmoded style. If I wrote a book today in Shakespeare's English, or even Dickens', you could make similar criticisms.
 
Piscivore said:
It's cool that you don't like it- a lot of people don't. But there's a huge gulf between "poorly written" and "written in a style I don't like."
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Point taken. Yes, I'm expressing an opinion here, but for the purpose of this argument, poorly written and written in a style that I don't like are ostensibly the same thing.

Piscivore said:
There's a reason most of popular versions of the old mythologies are heavily edited- they are often slow, overly detailed, and meander through extensive subplots that don't engage a reader interested only in the main thread of the story. Look at the bible, it's one of them- does anyone ever read the Psalms as entertainment, let alone all those chapters of "begats?"

But those were Tolkien's models. Not adventure stories. Consider this; his artificial mythology is as pervasive and deeply rooted into our culture as our original mythologies, yet they are not even a century old. Power like that does not come from poor writing. One offers the utter failure of L Ron Hubbard's epics in contrast.
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I see you point here too, and I'm not necessarily comparing JRRT's books to other books in the genre, but really to any work of fiction. I suppose the bible is one of the few works of fiction that was as poorly written, and we see where that ended up.

Tolkien was incredibly influential, his imagination changed the literary world forever. I acknowledge this. Maybe, like Shakespeare, his work was better to be watched than to be read.
As far as Hubbard
 
Piscivore said:
Sure, but he was deliberatly using an already outmoded style. If I wrote a book today in Shakespeare's English, or even Dickens', you could make similar criticisms.
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So...he could have written his books to be read but instead he wrote them to be suffered?
 
Piscivore said:
Sure, but he was deliberatly using an already outmoded style. If I wrote a book today in Shakespeare's English, or even Dickens', you could make similar criticisms.
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Which doesn't necessarily make those criticisms invalid. A writer can be criticized for using the wrong model and/or style just as he can for using the wrong speling.

As a more recent case in point, consider The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco -- which Eco himself proudly proclaims he wrote in a deliberately outmoded style. Many readers find the style -- a pastiche of the sort of writing that might be expected of a 12-th century monk, to be disconcerting and offputting. I also find it to be heinously, heinously false, because the tradition of first-person narrative itself is so anachronistic. On the other hand, I think it does a good job of capturing the "feel" of a 13th-century monastery in terms of the language that would actually be used by the monks in their speaking, so it's less effective as a historical novel, and more effective as a roman-a-clef.

Unfortunately, he also committed an atrocious anachronism by putting Sherlock Holmes into the story, and the combination of a 20th century rationalist detective in the 13-th century monastery is absolutely jarring, and considered by most critics to be the weakest feature of the book.
 
I think it depends on the mood of the reader. I love HP Lovecraft, but sometimes his style is too ponderous. I've actually fallen asleep over some of his short stories, even ones I like. I have to be in the right mood for his style, that's all. I think Tolkien is the same way. Certainly his going for a hundred pages with no conversation is daunting. And I'll admit I've skipped the songs and poetry more often than not.

As for Tolkien's influence, yeah, he did a lot for fantasy (just judge by the number of authors who ripped off his work) but he didn't really invent the genre of modern fantasy. He was influenced by Lord Dunsany, another author whose style you have to be in the mood for. (Although Dunsany was much, much better at creating the right mood than Tolkien was, and as such, is far more readable today.)
 
drkitten said:
Unfortunately, he also committed an atrocious anachronism by putting Sherlock Holmes into the story, and the combination of a 20th century rationalist detective in the 13-th century monastery is absolutely jarring, and considered by most critics to be the weakest feature of the book.
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Well, it is a novel. If I can suspend disbelief long enough to enjoy ghost stories (which I love, especially MR James's) I can also accept a ridiculously out-of-time monkish detective. You're allowed to switch skepticism to "off" while reading fiction.
 
Tolkein was a wonderful writer of juveniles. The "Hobbit" is for children; "The Lord of the Rings" for adolescent boys. It's not intended for adults. Like most fantasy and science fiction, it's really a fairy tale.
 
TJ Stough said:
Point taken. Yes, I'm expressing an opinion here, but for the purpose of this argument, poorly written and written in a style that I don't like are ostensibly the same thing.
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Sure. That's valid. As someone who is trying to be a writer, I look at Tolkien with much different perspective than someone who is just reading for entertainment.

Tolkien was incredibly influential, his imagination changed the literary world forever. I acknowledge this. Maybe, like Shakespeare, his work was better to be watched than to be read.
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To my mind, the best way to experience Tolkien would be huddled up next to a fire while someone verbally recites it from memory.

And I'm in complete agreement on Shakespeare.
 
Piscivore said:
Sure, but he was deliberatly using an already outmoded style. If I wrote a book today in Shakespeare's English, or even Dickens', you could make similar criticisms.
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Don't agree as far as Dickens is concerned... his English is wondefully funny and rich.
 
drkitten said:
. . . As a more recent case in point, consider The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco -- which Eco himself proudly proclaims he wrote in a deliberately outmoded style. . . . .
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I've often wondered, as a direct result of reading Eco, just how much the stylistic elements of literature are tweaked and outright omitted in translations.

I assume there has to be something lost in translation (to coin a phrase), but I admittedly don't always know what.

I find portions of the translated Eco to be brilliant in its English form, and then other portions to be a bit tedious. The question is, are the brilliant parts the result of translation or are the tedious parts the result of translation? Or are the translations dead on, and Eco himself just all over the page at times?
 
Similarly, read Hugo - he does much the same thing. You're reading about Jean Valjean and Cosette entering Paris and boom suddenly you're knee-deep in Parisian architectural history.
 
Phil said:
I find portions of the translated Eco to be brilliant in its English form, and then other portions to be a bit tedious. The question is, are the brilliant parts the result of translation or are the tedious parts the result of translation? Or are the translations dead on, and Eco himself just all over the page at times?
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My understanding is that the translations are spot-on, and the stylistic flaws are Eco's himself.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Well, it is a novel. I
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So is Lord of the Rings. I'll even go so far as to say that Name of the Rose is a good novel, as is LotR.

The problem isn't the skepticism, but the culture and style clash. I'm also a tremendous fan of potboiler detective novels... but if the first two chapters of the book are written in "a straight line is the shortest distance between a blonde and a bed" style, then I would consider it to be a flaw for the third chapter to be straight out of "A Room with a View."
 
drkitten said:
The problem isn't the skepticism, but the culture and style clash.
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I like it when the style is inappropriate for the culture. Fantasy books set in medieval-style worlds (although actually, what most fantasy authors seem to think is "medieval" is actually quite late Renaissance, from a technology standpoint) where the people speak and act in a modern way, Gothic horror settings with inappropriately Wodehousian dialogue...I enjoy the mix.

I'm also a tremendous fan of potboiler detective novels... but if the first two chapters of the book are written in "a straight line is the shortest distance between a blonde and a bed" style, then I would consider it to be a flaw for the third chapter to be straight out of "A Room with a View."
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Well, inconsistency within the book itself might be irritating. Although if it were done right, it might be a neat gimmick. Tell the story from the viewpoint of several different characters, and each with a different style. Juxtapose a lighthearted comedic style with Grand Guignol ("that's foreign for 'blood all over the stage'"--Nanny Ogg)....it could work.
 
TJ Stough said:
When I was a boy, I made it through The Hobbit, but couldn't get into the trilogy.

As an adult and a several-thousand-books more experienced reader. I tried again. I read the hobbit, I forced my way through Fellowship, and made it about 1/3 of the way through The Two Towers before I had to throw the book down in disgust.
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Serious question: Why do you consider this to be a measure of Tolkien's ability, rather than of your taste?
 
When I re-read it at 35, it wasn't nearly as good as it had been when I was 12. But I still liked it a lot. Don't know if I'll ever read it again. Best part of the whole trilogy: Ents.
 
TJ Stough said:
:duck:
Seriously, I think he's a great author, but a terrible, awful, sub-mediocre writer.
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Thank you! I liked The Hobbit well enough, but my God, getting through LOTR was the literary equivalent of a root canal. I forced myself to read each of the books before seeing the movie (I didn't think the movies were that great, either), but only with great effort and little reward. I realize that most fantasy readers adore him, but it's time to admit that the emperor has no clothes.

*gritting my teeth and bracing for inevitable assault*
 
I'm currently listening to a reading of Lord of the Rings, unabridged.

I've read LOTR many times. However, the reading is much, much better. I think that Tolkien wrote for the ear, not for the eye. Even portions that I had considered dull and plodding came alive when they were read aloud.
 
I've read the Tolkein books probably 20 times or more. I love them. I will admit that, at one time, I could read and write in elvish.

What he really did was create a world, and, what's more, a believable world. In the real world people have discussions about the nature and history of growing tobacco. Even for seven pages. Tolkien's stories are in a voice as to be told by a bard. It makes sense, especially when you count the songs in. And, always remember, that the story was 'written' by a hobbit, who will, with little provocation, go about telling the doings of his fathers and forefathers for hours on end.

The only books I have read that I found could be improved by skipping large swaths of the book is the Robert Jordan Wheel of Time series.

Oh, and the bible, of course. That book can be improved upon by using it to even up an end table. Of course, I may be biased in that respect.

Like a lot of things, one man's p!$$ is another man's beer.
 
Tolkien like Shakepeare is renowned as a writer not because everything he wrote was great but because some of what he wrote was great. The trilogy is huge and there are certainly ponderous parts in it. But, there are also parts that are genius. As was pointed out they were intended for young people.

I also agree that while they are great books, the movies are superior to the books. This has more to do with the sheer excellence of the movies than it is a knock on the books however.
 
There are two types of people in the world.
There are those who have read the LOTR books, love them to pieces, and keep reading them.
And then there are those who got less than 100 pages into the first book before throwing it into the "one of these days" pile.
 
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