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Tolkien also created complete Languages for each race of his stories.
Sometimes I think he just liked world-building, and writing stories about his world came second.
From reading his biography, it seemed he mostly liked creating languages and then crafted stories and worlds based off them.
Tolkien’s the GOAT.
He was a philology teacher, so that’s indeed the case. You see it with how much details the language have, like real languages dialects and evolution. It was really his craft.
Philology Professor at Oxford, no less.
He only wanted to create languages, for fun… but he wanted to do it properly, so he needed full cultural backgrounds for his languages, including epic poetic sagas written in said languages… and to do that properly he needed a whole history of the world said languages and cultures had developed in… so the maniac built that. And then he wrote a children’s book set in that world, for his kids, as one does.
He was truly a mad lad
They are called Paracosms. He was writting languages during his teens long before he got to stories.
Middle earth is the first item on the list of examples on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracosm
It’s not impossible! It’s fairly niche and finding others who appreciate it before the age of the internet would’ve been tough.
Modern Tolkien would’ve probably been part of the various conlang communities, doing challenges and whatnot.
Not only the languages but also an etymology for them to explain, how they developed.
Wish he was better at naming characters though. Not every son needs a name that starts with the same letter as his father’s.
What, you aren’t a fan of Aenor, son of Agenor, son of Agenar, son of Agenup, son of Ageflip, son of Agintur, Slayer of B’Thal’Muun?
B’Thal’Muun was a peacemaker!
B’Thal’Muun was a tyrant and you know it!
Nuh-uh!
Tell that to my 2nd degree aunt
Frank Herbert: Giant sandworms lol. /j
Frank Herbert: … and dogs that are also chairs… rips bong… chairdogs
Duncan, Duncan, Duncan, Duncan
lol Herbert had some weird fantasy about a guy named Duncan from Idaho. Only explanation for some of that stuff.
He got a flat tire once in Duncan, Idaho. It was the early 60’s so things got freaky fast when he was picked up by a colorfully painted bus . . .
Let’s just say the memories will never die.
Frank Herbert is what happens when a genius writer takes too much shrooms while studying dunes. Like that is literally what happened.
Calling him a genius writer is probably being a bit too generous, what with all the beefswellings and all that
Cmon, you just gotta do more shrooms and re-read Dune bro.
Fuckin Herbert just decided to write philosophy disguised as a sci-fi story lol
Tolkien is clearly the best, but I don’t have a problem with Martin borrowing from real-life history. History is incredibly cool, and full of amazing stories. Stealing from other authors is bullshit, though.
To be fair the children’s story came first. In that regard Tolkien and Rowling had something in common, their first books were written for a much younger and simpler audience. It wasn’t until they took off commercially that the more adult and deep lore was developed.
EDIT: I’m wrong
What? No. First was the story of Arda in a prototype version of the Silmarillon and Unfinished Tales.
Huh, interesting, I didn’t realize Tolkien had started writing portions of the Silmarillion in 1914. I had to do some looking based on your response and learned something.
From what I know, he never really wrote “for” the silmsrillion either. He wrote stories for him to flesh out the history of the world but not with the intention of publishing such stories. Some of them were even just notes about what happened in the world and some weren’t finished.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong
According to the Tolkien Professor (during his YouTube streams on the History of Middle Earth series) there was always the intent to publish the Quenta Silmarillion (the central tale of the Silmarils) as a First-Age story of the Elves, but it kept getting revised and rewritten and never reached a publishable form.
Until Tolkien’s son wanted to complete that piece of the legacy, and found multiple (sometimes contradictory) sets of notes and mostly-finished stories, and Editorial Decisions had to be made.
Until Tolkien’s son needed more cash …
FTFY
I’d need to look up the dates, but he might’ve started creating the languages even earlier than that
Upvote because somebody online admitted they were wrong.
No they didn’t!
EDIT: I’m wrong
…?
Still a little ambiguous…
/s
Then you have the author of Twilight that started world building after the first book, created a number of characters with interesting background lore, then proceeded to do nothing with any of it.
It’s even worse than that - Twilight was originally fanfic for Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles series, so it’s all just Lestat with a fake mustache and sparkles.
And 50 shades was a Twilight fanfic…
And Interview with the Vampire was fanfic based on a cross between Blacula and the David Frost interview of Richard Nixon…
And the very existence of Richard Milhous Nixon was a protest against the statehood of Arizona and New Mexico gone horribly wrong.
Nah man. Nixon was a product of Dr. Killinger who specializes in creating supervillains.
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Good bot.
I read that series out of spite when it was popular, and actually started getting interested in the lore and world when she started introducing fucking X-Men powers. Huge build up, huge hype, and then… fucking nothing. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but alas.
Same.
George Lucas: Let someone else handle it.
Removed by mod
“There’s no underwear in space.”
George Lucas: I like money
Also, fun fact: Tolkien converted C.S. Lewis to Christianity, who almost immediately disappointed him by adopting Anglicanism instead of Catholicism and then decided Tolkien’s stories weren’t Christian enough, so he basically wrote the Narnia books out of spite.
Tolkien is the best ever, but a lot of his stuff is inspired or ported directly from Catholicism.
This but also various mythological bits and pieces from England, because Tolkien wanted to create an English mythology akin to the Odyssey, Edda or Niebelungen.
Yeah, Martin learned the “cribbed from history” trick from Tolkien
Its good stuff. We dont know history anyway.
There’s an idea. A fantasy for American audiences using geography from South America. They’ll never know unless you show them a map that includes opposite coasts.
A lot of that Catholicism stuff is just Christianity with local gods and figures retconed in using saints expansions.
And that whole Christian thing is just a Mediterraneanised/Latinized Zoroastrianism.
… And Zoroastrianism is just hyped up druidism. The Persians were part of that Indo-European world.
I don’t know what drugs the Persians were into, but now I’m imagining a priestess ripping a massing bong and saying
“Okay, what if instead of alllll the trees, it’s just about one tree?.. And the tree is a dude”
It’s all fanfiction all the way down from the original cave drawings anyway
deleted by creator
Steven Erikson: here’s a world that contains millennia of anthropologically grounded cultures that got spiced up by some interdimensional elves, orcs, gods & dragons that me and my buddy use to play D&D in, have fun reading through the eyes of over 1000 characters lol
Erikson ruined fantasy novels for me. Book of the Fallen was the most challenging and rewarding read of my life. It made almost everything else feel like YA fiction.
Seriously. I only finished the main Book of the Fallen series this early this year and just can’t get interested in anything else fantasy now.
It’s one thing to make you feel something when a character you’ve been with for 10 books dies, but when an author can do the same with a character you’re with for a handful of pages, it’s something else.
!Abasard’s death in Reaper’s Gale still resonates with me. !<
I assume you were trying to add a spoiler, but it did not come through correctly and is visible
Felt the same when I finished that series. Didn’t feel that I could read fantasy again.
Currently in book 9. Moving ever so slowly so it doesn’t end too quickly, cause then what will I read? 😭
Not a native english speaker, but these books are so hard to read.
GRRM wrote “Sandkings” which is one of my favorite novellas ever. He gets a pass from me.
I think he stole this from an episode of Outer Limits.
The novel is ~15 years older than that show…?
He used time travel to steal it.
Using a time machine stolen from HG Wells
He might have written that ep of Outer Limits, he worked a ton in TV back in the day.
In 1995, “Sandkings” was adapted into a television film that served as the first episode of The Outer Limits relaunch. The script was adapted by Melinda M. Snodgrass, Martin’s co-editor for the Wild Cards series.
Honestly I prefer the Outer Limits version, the novel is a little too busy and the ending is a bit silly.
And people wonder why I have no respect for George R R Martin. Why I have no respect for JK rowling, destroyer of her Legacy is self-evident at this point
I respect Martins approach. Not every fantasy writer has to be a Tolkien.
Tolkien: Writes a complex, multifaceted story set in a rich universe in a single elegant novel across three volumes.
Martin: Is five books into his trilogy with at least two more to go and still has no idea where the story is going.
I think I know which approach I respect more…
Totally fair criticism but I think there is value to GRRMs writing that lies outside his ability to contain his story and marshal it towards a satisfying conclusion.
There is something very captivating about his writing despite its many flaws.
What I mean is, Einsteins existence doesn’t have to make me lose respect for other physicists. You don’t have to be one of the absolute legendary best to achieve something valuable.
Not every writer has the fantasy that Tokien had.
GRRM is great at giving input and following the formula, as evidenced by Elden Ring. Not so much with creating an enormous, generational body of work.
Elden Ring was Namco, not GRRM…
Miyazaki says that the pair had “many free and creative conversations… which Mr Martin later used as a base to write the overarching mythos for the game world itself.” So by this he’s responsible for the world’s founding lore. “This mythos proved to be full of interesting characters and drama along with a plethora of mystical and mysterious elements as well,” added Miyazaki. “It was a wonderful source of stimulus for me and the development staff. Elden Ring’s world was constructed using this mythos and stimulus as a base.”
From an interview.
Yeah the Hobbit was the first book I ever read, at six years old, lucky me I became a lifetime nerd
“Then write a children’s book in it.”
That is exactly why Stephen Colbert, king of LOTR trivia, does not like The Hobbit.
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“Damn the boy”
Didn’t he write the Hobbit first and then everything else around it?
No, not really. It was his first book that was supremely popular, but it was written for his children. His main body of work (which was later published in part in the Silmarallion) was started in WWI and was never really completed. The Hobbit and then to a far greater extant LotR were pulled into the preceding work.
He already hada lot of stories and ideas about Middle Earth before. When he wrote the Hobbit for his kids, he placed it in this world and it became the first book to be published. Lord of the Rings he wrote as a sequel to the Hobbit, but added a lot of hints and references to his other stories of his world.
He set The Hobbit (which he wrote for his kids) in the world he’d already built… not because he particularly enjoyed worldbuilding, but because a culturally complex fantasy world with a rich history and mythology was a prerequisite for the epic poetic sagas he felt needed to write in order to properly develop his fantasy languages, which is what he really liked to do, as a philologist.
