Tolkien started his worldbuilding from languages. Is it the thing that makes his legendarium so special...

I love LotR but I can understand why others would not. You can't make some one like a thing.

youtube.com/watch?v=lXAvF9p8nmM

>hardback costs a couple quid extra
>therefore the paperback version sells more

I never understood why this is how books work.

Especially since you can read them within 28 days then return them to Waterstones for free.

His writing works because all the worldbuilding stuff was just background. His stories aren't about what a wonderful world he'd created, they were focused narratives created to entertain his kids (at bedtime and later in the trenches).

All the worldbuilding work created a fine illusion of depth when a character made an oblique reference. That he could back in thousands of pages of notes was irrelevant.

>Tolkien is not Veeky Forums related

1/10 would not reply again

...

>revolutionsf.com/article.php?id=953

Veeky Forums cant handle my precious

Best Feanorian?

literally this entire essay can be boiled down to "I only read mature fantasy for mature readers such as myself."

If you want to talk about middle earth in the context of a tabletop war game, rpg, card game, board game, etc., then have at it, but Tolkien himself, his books, and general lore are not Veeky Forums.

With a healthy dose of "People like these authors who I hate more than these authors who I believe are clearly superior; therefore everyone is stupid, the world is getting dumber, and literature is doomed."

It is so special because he is one of the first, if not the first, to do that type and absolute depth of world building for his writing.

Not only was he one of the first, but his world building was extremely thorough and of excellent quality.

He basically did it sooner and better than everyone else. Now, this is not to say others have not also done excellent jobs at world building, but he set such a high standard long before others were even attempting the same

I always liked the Hobbit more myself.

>literature is doomed
well moorcock can thank himself for contributing to that one

Not Goddamn Epic Pooh again. I hate that fucking article and it seems to stick it's fucking head up every time I forget about it.

Well, there is this counter article.
>curtisweyant.com/blog/epic-pooh-pooh/

I think most of that is actually DnD and Warhammer ripping off his stuff and somehow making it worse.

>Quid
>Waterstones
Not English here but, I just buy paperback because they're cheaper. I can buy 2 paperbacks for almost the price of 1 hardback.

I find BL paperbacks to be somewhat price-inflated. Grabbing one at random, 400 pages of Dabnett jumping the Ghosts over a flaming vat of sharks is $8 cover price, the same as fucking Shogun.

This.

probably the best explanation youre gonna get itt

The difference is I wouldn't buy a book at random. I go in looking for books I've heard about that I think I'd like. I'm not a trend setter, I'm a sheep.

>" In Moorcock, I see nothing but a contemptuous man whose failures include, but are not limited to, a myopic assessment of Tolkien (and other writers) based on a perverted reading of their texts to suit his own caprice and disillusionment."

goddamn, that's some high-quality literary smackdown.

I don't know, it sort of struck me as someone typing with his toes whilst thumbing a thesaurus with one hand and gently fondling himself with the other.

Actually fuck off
>autism

That's the description of a "serious" literary critic.
It's the action to Veeky Forums's autistic reaction

based on some of Moorcock's examples of "good prose," I'd say that's incredibly fitting.

A perfect description of Moorcock, sir, well done.

I have read stories by Moorcock I enjoyed. Non of them included Elric, though, because Elric is shitty character.

Why are half of you getting but hurt about tolkien not being Veeky Forums related (He is, tangentially, anyways) when all you shits literally derail every other thread into non Veeky Forums territory.

Because they need something to bitch about being on Veeky Forums and campaign to kick off Veeky Forums.

That is literally the entire reason.

cut them some slack. They finally got the quest board they wanted, now they need to find a whole new reason to exist. Must be stressful.

what, are you a butthurt questfag or something?

>Veeky Forums in charge of liking books

Because we're physically incapable of staying on topic for more than couple dozens post. It's just sometimes repeated derails get thread back on the original track so the thread end matches the beginning.

Are you serious? It's an embarrassing sentence to have written.

Isn't this the russian artist tha draws sauron as some kawaii anime girl ?

Because each Tolkien thread develop into studying his worldbuilding, which is a creation process that's beyond Veeky Forums's interests.

OH YEAH NOT ENOUGH ELF TIDDIES

Not really. Howard at the very least was doing worldbuilding as we would recognize it before him.

Yeah, pretty much. All fiction, but especially speculative fiction, benefits from a grounding in serious scholarship. Like the ecology of sandworms in Dune is preposterous, but it's written by someone who knows what an ecological study should look like and it makes the invented world that much more convincing.

Howard just used the odd name from the real ancient world to give a sense of reality to the places he invented as he went along. It wasn't anything like what Tolkien did, inventing a world by beginning with its languages and proceeding into myths before working out what the 'present' of his setting would look like.

Nobody does what Tolkien did, it's not an efficient way to write a fantasy story. The only people that come close are the odd RPG writer like Greg Stafford and the guy that did Tékumel.

go to bed, Michael

Well... no.

I realize this isn't at all his doing, but he certainly already characterized countries and shit. Personally I think his approach, while naive and aborted by his death, was why better and livelier.

I mean, this already makes me see those people clearly:

>They came into these countries as Aryans. But there were variations among these primitive Aryans, some of which are still recognized today, others which have long been forgotten. The blond Achaians, Gauls and Britons, for instance, were descendants of pure-blooded Æsir. The Nemedians of Irish legendry were the Nemedian Æsir. The Danes were descendants of pure-blooded Vanir; the Goths — ancestors of the other Scandinavian and Germanic tribes, including the Anglo-Saxons — were descendants of a mixed race whose elements contained Vanir, AEsir and Cimmerian strains. The Gaels, ancestors of the Irish and Highland Scotch, descended from pure-blooded Cimmerian clans. The Cymric tribes of Britain were a mixed Nordic-Cimmerian race which preceded the purely Nordic Britons into the isles, and thus gave rise to a legend of Gaelic priority. The Cimbri who fought Rome were of the same blood, as well as the Gimmerai of the Assyrians and Grecians, and Gomer of the Hebrews. Other clans of the Cimmerians adventured east of the drying inland sea, and a few centuries later mixed with Hyrkanian blood, returned westward as Scythians. The original ancestors of the Gaels gave their name to modern Crimea.

(oddly enough I think Tolkien was way better at designing landscapes, so to speak, than cultures. Lorien is way more a place to me than a specific culture, really different from Rivendell. Kinda strange considering he was a linguist and all)

>Tolkien was way better at designing landscapes, so to speak
I think that makes a lot of sense, actually. Tolkien spent years building the Legendarium as a sort of private project before he even considered writing LotR. I wouldn't be surprised if he took his familiarity with the world for granted.

Tolkien didn't just come up with a fictional backdrop, he essentially created a pocket world with its own languages, cultures, and history, and then wrote Lord of the Rings as a legend that came out of that world after his publisher suggested he write a sequel to The Hobbit.

That wasn't exactly what I meant: the stories are good, it's just that I don't really feel that sindar are that different from silvan elves, etc. Hell, I think it wasn't his goal, but still, I dunno, I have the feeling he could've done it.

(actually, aside from hobbits, I don't really think races are that different from each other in general...)

I think that may be because Middle Earth is smaller in scope. Middle Earth is essentially Europe, because it all grew out of Tolkien's fascination with European legends and mythology. Whereas if you look at the map you posted, it's pretty easy to see where it's just a map of Europe, Africa, and Asia with the proportions stretched and skewed. So Howard's Hyborian writing was something of a fictional take on the different races of the world, while Tolkien's races are more similar to European tribes and nations.