When I began reading SF, critics spent much time and effort trying to define its role in literature. SF wasn’t just a made-up universe, because, after all, that can be said of ALL fiction. SF, or speculative fiction, created an artificial universe in order to examine some issue relevant to the “real world”.

For example, “Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea” was NOT science fiction simply because he had inserted a submarine into the 19th century. The book was more a psychological study of Captain Nemo, with slight digs against “the hated race” (The British Empire). His technical description of the Nautilus was scientifically rigorous, but it was incidental to the story. Now if Verne had speculated on the role of submersibles in modern warfare, how it might affect conflict and military strategy, THAT would have been true science fiction. Most of Verne’s science fiction was not really about social themes, even though his science was excellent.

HG Wells, OTOH, cavalierly incorporated very questionable pseudo-science into his stories, such as Cavorite and time machines, but his stories were built around some contemporary political or social theme. “War of the Worlds”, for example, was a not-so-subtle dig at British colonial aggression and imperial economic exploitation.

The critical interpretation of SF that most appealed to me back then was that it was an attempt to understand or predict the effect of new technology on the human condition. How will space travel affect history? What will be the social consequences of a vaccine against aging? How will those consequences change if that immortality drug is made freely available, or if it is restricted to an elite? How will a peaceful contact with benign extra terrestrials affect human history and development? How will abundant, cheap, clean fusion power change the world? How would a perfect telepath function in contemporary society, for good or evil.

The ideal SF tale studied the effect and result of one, or just a few, technological explosions on the world, or on a single human being. It was like a controlled experiment: Keep everything the same but change just this one thing.

In this model, the program of SF was to insert a technological innovation into society, or into our life, and try to predict the consequences. The new tech was not what the story was about, it was about us, and how we responded to it. It was an attempt to understand us, not the technology.

I believe that is the role of fantasy as well. And I don’t believe I agree with Tolkien on that.

I’m only halfway through it myself. While likewise overwhelmed, it is apparent that we have been judging his work as mythology, which, by his definition, it is not. He’s making a very academic argument for the definitions of a “Fairy story” which may be what we now call fantasy, but I think he’d refute that, pipe in hand, tweed jacket and all, and cut my presentation to pieces.

He talks about the realness of the created world. It must be believable – not a dream.

I think Tolkien’s scholarship is what sets his works apart from his imitators. He knew this genre backwards. and way back at that. He said that creativity was the mold on a compost pile. All that you learn is the detritus that builds the pile. The mold is something new.

I got halfway through it, and finally gave up. It made no sense to me. I’m not saying it was poorly written, or nonsensical, just that I could not follow his train of thought.

Perhaps if I re-read, and took my time, and took notes, I might make sense of it (it is very difficult material, although his language is clear and simple). But I simply don’t want to. Its just too hard.

I got the same feeling I got as a child when I tackled a book that was well within my reading level, but totally beyond my level of comprehension. After a while it was just words, each recognizable individually, but strung together, impenetrable.

I didn’t feel that way at all plowing through The Silmarillion. I enjoyed that, I understood it. His critical work simply overwhelmed me.

Elrond is how I hope others see me, wise, virtuous, complex, sophisticated, powerful.

Sam is how I hope I really am, decent, simple, reasonable, and when it really counts, brave.

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As for your comparison of the mythic tales, it is no coincidence they also seem to follow a pattern. We’ve talked about this before…

Luke Skywalker, Arthur Pendragon, Frodo Baggins, Harry Potter

Light saber, Excalibur, Sting, the Elder Wand

Obi-Wan, Merlin, Gandalf, Dumbledore

Darth Vader, Mordred, Sauron, Valdermort

The Falcon Crew, the Round Table, the Fellowship, Dumbledor’s Army

The wise and good old man selects and mentors the young champion (although he has an agenda of his own) to fight the forces of evil. Add a motley crew of sidekicks, some magick, and its the same archetypal tale. It was first written in Medieval France. I suspect this is what Tolkien is going to say, I’m going to read his essay now…

David Brin has written extensively about feudal fantasies on his blog (link). You should read how he rails on Star Wars for this reason. The older I get, the more it bothers me. That, and having a “Chosen One”. Tolkien carefully danced this trope with Frodo being “meant” to have the Ring.

Tolkien often wrestles with the free-will / destiny coin in his mythologies. Since the whole of space and time was first sung into existence and then set into motion. Suggesting that everything is pre-ordained by the song of the Valar. Yet Frodo’s quest “stands on the edge of a knife.”

I recommend that you read Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories”. (http://brainstorm-services.com/wcu-2004/fairystories-tolkien.pdf). I haven’t read it in years, printing it out now to read in the tub. (my other guilty pleasure)

I’m curious who your favorite character is and why.

And of course, there is the language. There is an Elizabethan sound and rhythm to it, and it never comes across as stilted or cliched. Tolkien simply wrote beautiful prose. Others have attempted to write in the style of Shakespeare and the KJV, but, in my opinion, only Tolkien has pulled it off successfully.

But I also see in Tolkien an example of what I call Medieval Mellerdrammer. There is nothing new about this, he is not the only modern writer who attempts to mine the ethos of the Middle Ages for esthetic purposes, he is just one of the few that can get away with it.

I have my own theories about this. We have romanticized this historical era. The Empire has collapsed and we take comfort in a land dominated by fair and noble Lords and Ladies, Chivalric knights, spooky wizards and sturdy yeomen. Look at the role the Teutonic Knights played in NAZI iconography. It is one of the comforting myths of our age, and it isn’t only the fantasy of Western, European man. We have the tales of the Shogunate in Medieval Japan, the time of the Warlords in Ancient China, the fall of the Mycenaen Empire (the Greek Dark Ages) is the setting of the Odyssey and Iliad. Those were feudal societies too, and subsequent ages seem nostalgic for the idealized version of those times we have devised.

These are worlds dominated by small local lords, and they are times of strong men and easily identified villains and heroes. It survives today, much disguised, as States’ Rights and Federalism. It is not the stultifying oppression of the Empire, but it is not the chaos of barbarian invasion, either. The men with the horses and swords live in the castle and they take good care of us.

We all may intellectually realize it wasn’t like that at all, that the medieval aristocracy was little better than bikers on horseback, wearing mail and plate instead of leather and denim. But deep inside us is a nostalgia for that paternalism. The lot of the peasant was little better than slavery. But feudalism works, when it really hits the fan its about the only form of social organization that really can hold things together.

In our fairy tales, in our children’s stories, in our national myths, even in our Dungeons and Dragons video games, the trope of medieval chic holds. This goes way deep into the psyche, the misty land where anthropology and psychology overlap. This is the landscape Tolkien explores, and I just don’t feel comfortable there.

Frankly, I prefer the Empire. With all its flaws, it has plumbing and it has roads, the fighting is mostly far away in the provinces and unless you’re a slave, its not too bad.

The first two times I read it I enjoyed it but couldn’t wrap my head around it. The syntax can be frustrating. My brain does pick up on it like other authors’ syntax can.

I have heard as well that Tolkien wanted to create a mythos for Britain an complete agree on the unavoidable hollowness of the task.

Still, since I love LOTR (I used to read it every June for about 25 years), the Silmarillian gave me a greater appreciation of the characters deep motivations. I think having that multi-thousand year history makes LOTR enjoyable even if you don’t know it. You feel it the very first time you read LOTR, this sense that this is a small part of a very big story.

As for the other books that Christopher Tolkien has edited and published, I really haven’t read them. Bits and pieces here and there, but that’s it.

However, I must be honest with you. I’ve read The Silmarillian more than three times. Re-reading really good books is my personal guilty pleasure.

(note: original comment was trashed and reposted to fix subject line typo.)

I read somewhere that Tolkien created his mythology because Britain didn’t have one, and he felt it needed one. The earliest mythic tales of the British Isles were imports, from the Anglo-Saxons and the Danes (Beowulf), and later the Norman French. Even the Arthurian Legend, although set in Britain, was based on the French Troubador/Chivalric literature, the same one that fell into disrepute when Cervantes skewered it in Don Quixote. The Medieval tales of Arthur were from Christian Britain, Geoffrey of Monmouth was a monk, and he wrote in Latin in the 12th century. They were just that, Medieval, they did not go back to pagan Britain.

Tolkien was an expert in the misty beginnings that dominated the mythic origins of Finnish, Icelandic, and Germanic/Scandinavian literature, all the way back to bardic, oral times. He felt England lacked that tradition. Some early literature survived from the Celts in Ireland and Scotland, but they were not English, were they? That may seem like just a technicality to us, but it is a big deal if you’re English.

My own experience with this type of ancient writing is limited to Homer and the Old Testament, and I confess I too am fascinated by it. It is a wonder to view from afar the earliest expressions of our parent cultures, perhaps transcribed long after they were orally compiled in pre-literate times. I read them not as history, but as a cultural and psychological glimpse into the thought of our most distant ancestors, and the communities and societies they lived in. In the Bible and Homer we get eyewitness testimony from our dimmest and most ancient tribal and Bronze Age memories. It may be highly edited, distorted, and difficult to interpret from the viewpoint of modernity, but it is the only eyewitness testimony we have. Other than the meager fragments archaeology can give us, it is the only knowledge of our past we have direct access to. That makes it precious.

But that’s the whole point, isn’t it? We read these works to get a sense of our beginnings. But Tolkien’s mythology is not that of the early Britons, it comes solely from his own mind and personality and his academic pursuits. The wanderings of the ancient Jews and Odysseus, the Mycenaean Mediterranean and the creation myths of the Hebrews may not be actual history, but they were the legitimate memory of that history for our ancestors. It affected them, and they affect us. We are connected. These memories may be culturally distorted and, from a modern perspective, difficult to interpret, but they are at least authentic. They are all we have from that ancient time, and they must be studied, and treasured even if we choose not to accept them as some ultimate and definitive truth.

There is nothing wrong with creating an alternate reality and setting our stories in it, science fiction writers do it all the time. We are all familiar with the idealized (and often totally unrealistic) universes of modern authors; the Frontier of Western Fiction, the mean streets of our noir detectives, even the sterile suburban landscapes or Machiavellian executive suites of contemporary novels. But we create these alternate universes as a model to contrast and compare with our own, to examine our own times and thought, as Tolkien did himself so effectively in the LOTR trilogy. But I find his obsession with his created universe a bit disorienting.

I have much more to say about this, I may write about it later, and I am very interested in your views on it. If you read the Silmarillion three times, then there may be a good reason why I should too.

First time I read it, I had a similar reaction. Pretty much “What the hell was that all about?” The second time was a little better. It was the third read that left me in awe.

The Silmarillion is not a novel. It is a collection of stories distilled from the huge trove of writings Tolkien left behind. These stories were his passion. Of course, his experiences in the Great War helped shape the tenor of the tales, but I believe it was more his love of mythology that drove his creative endeavors. He loved language.

He began writing these stories when he was a young man. Decades later he wrote the Hobbit for his son. It was a story that was set in his created universe, but far distant than the mythology he was really interested in, the First Age.

The Hobbit was so successful, the publisher wanted more. And they wanted hobbits. So he, over many years, wrote The Lord of the Rings. But they were always an add-on to his older tales.

So while this is a collection of stories there are some arcs that are woven though out.

What would it be like to be an Elf, immortal but not invincible? To possess almost magical skills of creation but faced with a force that is always trying to destroy what they create.