Was Tolkien a hack?

The most based linguists were the guys doing reconstruction of Sumerian spoken language.
A bored Britbong creating artificial language?
That would make the guy behind Atlantean ofr "Atlantis: Lost Empire" 2nd best, due to actually making it a language and providing it with proper scripture. Bonus points for using boustrophedon, since it's mind-numbing to people not used to it.
And I guess the 3rd best is the guy who worked for Cameron on "Avatar".

That's exactly how "high" Tolkien ranks.

If you're a moron and you don't have any perspective, then Tolkien might look like a hack to you. He has been copied so, so many times, sometimes well and sometimes badly, that his work might seem cliched. But you have to remember that he was breaking new ground, and his stuff was incredibly fresh and original when it was written. It was so appealing and successful that it spawned ten thousand imitators - they are the hacks, not JRR.

Can we fucking stop having this thread at least once per week? I know it's middle of the summer, but come on!

>This thread again

He was the opposite of a hack, although that doesn't necessarily make him a good writer.

This meme thread must die

there is more to it than that.
He wrote out notes that would become the Simarilian to create the languages, but he wrote the Hobbit because he wanted to write a children's story because a who was a publisher (Tolken was friends with a lot of people in the writing and publishing world, even if he didn't write fiction).

He started Lord of the Rings as a follow up, but because he wasn't a professional writer, meaning someone who writes novels for a living, he didn't know that's normally done and just started writing.

In part he was trying to a make truly English mythology and legend, even if it wasn't set in England.
There was a lot going on.

He did a lot more with the language, and it's development and interaction with culture, than most who followed.
Partly because he had the time, as he was doing on his own and didn't have a production schedule to meet. Also bonus points for starting that thing.

He also had a lengthy, if not exceptional career, as a linguist before even starting on fictional languages.

And fuck the people trying to reconstruct the spoken language, compared to the people trying to reconstruct how much mathematical knowledge the Sumerians have off of what's basically the high school worksheets of their clerks.

Those people are the same doing the spoken reconstruction.
Because they've realised it's easier to recreate a language dead for 3000 years than decipher single "page" from accountant's book, due to the rollercoaster of units and numbers Sumerians used.
I mean - 3 chickens and 3 oxen using two different signs to describe "3" and another for 3 jars of oil. And another for 3 brothers.
And then counting everything in 60. And grouping it in cones that can in the same time, depending on the context, mean 1, 4, 12 or 30. Or 5, for some reason.

Sounds like the work of El Contador.

No he was Slash.

>truly English mythology

By taking 80% of it from Germanic mythology?

Yeah, that's pretty English.

Modern English mythology for his time. Which actually does take a lot of cues from the Germans.

It's almost unbelievable that all of this was done by one man
one man only

>The most based linguists were the guys doing reconstruction of Sumerian spoken language.

Is this very subtle stealthy b8? Tolkien didn't create a language called the Dark Speech. Instead, he used ancient hurrian, which sounds pretty fucking dark. His work in his area of linguistics was very influential, and his translations of old english epic poems are classics.

Oh, and he didn't just create a language. He created a language family, with several dialects and divergent languages, all of which evolved and changed over time.

Just because imitators appeared years later to each do caricatured, simplified imitations of single facets of his work, doesn't make him a hack. What he was doing was new, fresh, brightly creative, and brilliantly executed.

There are better linguists and literature scholars and theologians. But he was still in the top tier of each. Name one world-builder who did a better job than Tolkien.

he once dressed as a huscarl and chased his students to their midterms with a battle axe, but that's not the sort of hack you're interested in

Anglo-Saxons are Germanic in origin, and English is a Germanic language.

>Name one world-builder who did a better job than Tolkien.

None of them, because "world-builders" are the dregs of the fantasy genre.

Fantasy is the dreg genre of literature. Other than Tolkien's work there nothing in the genre the least bit interesting or captivating.

>None of them, because "world-builders"
Unimaginative, butt-hurt pseudo-intellectual Veeky Forumsfag detected

I mean, has anyone ever seen both of them in the same room before?

And why is that?

You left out that they had a decimal system, but didn't have anything to indicate the decimal other than a slightly longer space. So telling if something was 306 or 3.06, or 30.6 is such a bitch sometimes.

the archeologists are working together.
The mathematics is a bit different, as they had to what those numbers in that context meant.

So figuring out that the summerians defined geometric shapes based on their exterior properties, rather than their interior, that was pretty simple. Because every shape had numbers corresponding to the length of sides or circumference, rather than angles or radius.

Figuring out how much they understood about the square roots, the Pythagorean theorem, or the quadratic equation required a bit more knowledge about the fundementals of mathematics.

FYI, knew that the hypotenuse of a 1,1 right triangle was square root of 2. Fair bit of evidence of square roots in general, but none for general form of Pythagorean theorem. No on quadratic, thought there is some debate.
Or at least that was true last time I studied this about 8 years ago.

Probably because user can't do it well, and is butthurt people don't like his worldbuilding, therefore all worldbuilers are shit so he can feel better about himself.

This. People that hate worldbuilders either can't worldbuild, created a setting that people didn't like, or are a combination of the two.

If you think that, you completely misunderstand his influence on the genre. Before Tolkien, no one took fantasy seriously - it was literary trash.

He was black, he was whack and he was probably on crack, but he wasn't a hack.

>Peter Pan
>Alice in Wonderland
>Terry Pratchett
>The Neverending Story
>Inferno Cop
>Not interesting or captivating
This is some seriously weak bait.

He did it pretty much by accident too, that's the funny thing. Fantasy writing had been going on for decades before Tolkien was published but when one is mass consumption pulp magazines sold at comic stands and the other is a respected linguist from Oxford's pet project, there's a shift in how it's perceived.

And yet all the fantasy today is just the same old pulp magazine shit that tries to claim descent from Tolkien to gain some form of legitimacy.

I would leave out Pratchett and Inferno Cop if you're talking about value strictly as works of literature. Not that I have anything against Pratchett mind you, it just doesn't fit with the rest.

People who say Tolkien is genre fiction don't understand large chunks of the fantasy genre as is commonly understood today did not fucking exist before Tolkien. It's like saying Diablo is a Diablo clone

>large chunks of the fantasy genre as is commonly understood today did not fucking exist before Tolkien
Yes, humanity didn't develop shitty heroic epics beofre Tolkien

Try harder

>Y-you are just jelly!

Did you just implied anyone treats fantasy seriously today? Or that Tolkien was taken seriously by just about anyone till about mid 70s, where he gained a cult following in States by bunch of proto-nolifes?

Is your reading comprehension REALLY that piss-poor?

(You) again?

Here, I replied, you can be less miserable now.

Until next week.

Please explain to me why you think worldbuilding is so bad then.

Because it serves no real purpose for the story.

It's that fucking simple. Tolkien is a prime example of a guy who can't write for shit, but is a great world-builder. Does it makes his prose any better? Of course fucking not, because it's just one long-ass description after another that serves absolutely no fucking point aside throwing more and more setting informations on the reader for the sake of doing so. It also completely kills any imagination, because everything is already described to the point of trithe.
If I would like to read encyclopedia, I would do so.

Compare it with the way Strugatsky brothers wrote their stuff. Complex worlds with rich backstory that interlock with each other over most of their works... and info-dumps are rare and sparse, usually existing because plot demands them and not because they felt like gushing pointless informations.
Or just take Howard and his Conan. Rich, complex world. Are we drowned in pointless data? No, because why should we?

World-building is just retarded whe it's get tangled into prose. Because it serves no fucking purpose. It's like world-building in TTRPG. It doesn't fucking matter you created a fictional and complex story for a minor race that dwells in that far away land, because players don't give a single fuck about some meaningless detail. And it's not a problem. Not until you start gushing it out like a fucking geyser.

And most world-builders do.

Give me some examples of Tolkien's infodumps that aren't in chapters about the Shire.

>it's just one long-ass description after another
Opinion discarded.

Find me where in Lord of the Rings that Tolkien describes Legolas' hair and we'll talk. Specifically, the color. Surely something as standard as a description of a main character is something someone who describes too much would at least mention?

No, now stop being such a bender

>because players don't give a single fuck about some meaningless detail
Until you have to visit said race or one of the players wants to learn about them.
>And most world-builders do.
Nice generalizations there pal.

Having an internal logic and reasoning to a world makes for a much more immersive and believable setting.

His post is 80% memes about Tolkien. I doubt he has actually read him.

Tolkien's notorious for being very VAGUE about many details of his world, even more so compared with people who imitate him

And while his prose isn't the best and wouldn't be any better if he would have dropped the world-building entirely, people to this day get lost in his world he created, beyond the books he has written.

there were massive info dumps.
In the appendixes after the story proper.

He did have some pacing issues, but that's not the same thing.

No.

Stop. Asking.

Just because you dont give a shit about your GM's work doesn't mean that no one does.

>tfw when writing a fantasy novel and know no matter how hard I work I will never be as good as Tolkien

The first example of his prose is a children's story that works very well. The second example of his prose was trying to emulate medieval authors.

start with short stories or other writings.

Tolken had been writing for a very long time before he even wrote the hobbit. And talking with a group of other writers.

Don't try to do the fantasy epic as your first shot. Tolken and Rothfuss are the exceptions, most of your favorite authors started smaller.

reminder

youtube.com/watch?v=lXAvF9p8nmM

I've had short stories published in the past. Mostly in my Alma Maters student news letters. Also I write painfully slow, about a page an hour.

feel that.
Then I'll go with the other advice that always true.

Write. Write more. You won't get better unless you write.

He's saying that there are enormous infodumps at random and that everything is so extensively described that there's no room for imagination. That's pretty different from having appendices at the end of the book giving background to the story. The criticism about everything being extensively described is not true even of the fucking silmarillion let alone LotR or The Hobbit

>Because it serves no real purpose for the story.

Tripped on your first hurdle.

Worldbuilding is literally the bedrock of what makes your story enthralling and interesting.

>Anglo-Saxons played no part in English History

Not neccessarily. To keep the example with Tolkien, he only put that much focus in worldbuilding because he didn't expect much commercial success. He didn't realize such a large audience would read his autism. Worldbuilding is something that's mostly glorified by fantasy writers who attempt to imitate older writers without understanding why the elements of their stories were there. All worldbuilding and no actual writing and you end up with a RPG setting, which may be interesting to read about but which almost never have any real literary value

name a single book without any worldbuilding in Fiction.

Worldbuilding doesn't mean you need to ALWAYS go into creating your whole new setting.

That's my point. Pretty much only fantasy and science fiction writers fixate on worldbuilding as a unique and important part of writing. In other genres you mostly infer details about the story's setting naturally without there being any focus in particular on it.

>Fixate

Ah yes the Autistic elitist trying to make it sound like Fantasy and Science Fiction are somehow doing something "Different" to other writers.

It's not different, there just just more to infer because you can't introduce concepts or characters in a story without having a decent solid groundwork for them.

If I was writing say, a Story of a Roman Soldier talking to his fellow guardsmen, I need to establish where they are and what he's actually doing if I want it to have any depth.

Fiction set in a version of reality doesn't require world building, because the world is already built, and you've already read the wiki. Hell, you probably know the Terran pantheon like the back of your hand!

I'll be honest, I zoned out after about 2 sentences of the assholes post.

not that guy, but technically Alice In Wonderland, as it was stream of consciousness writing.
But that's also not a cohesive narrative.

The debate between how much worldbuilding prep, vs writing the story and filling in the world as you go doesn't have as clear of answer. Most writers do at least some worldbuilding, and long stories with minimal worldbuilding up front typically result in some retconning of early writing as the world starts getting fleshed out.

>It's not different, there just just more to infer because you can't introduce concepts or characters in a story without having a decent solid groundwork for them.
You can. You just do it. There is nothing prohibiting you from doing so.
>I need to establish where they are and what he's actually doing if I want it to have any depth.
No, you don't. Literature doesn't even need to be always perfectly consistent or logical

Not him, but you can easily trim out 1/3 of LotR without any loss for the plot.
Which means one book in the trilogy is nothing else than padding

And where did you get that number from?

>Worldbuilding is literally the bedrock of what makes your story enthralling and interesting.
My fucking sides.

Unless you have a good story to tell and decent characters in it, no amount of pointless analysis of the setting will save it. Who gives a fuck about recreating entire economy of fictional post-colonial country in a book that is in its core is just badly written noir criminal? No amount of world detail will make wooden dialogues pallable nor bad story structure entertaining.

If you are reading belles-lettres for the world-building, I suggest switching entirely the scope and go for non-fiction. Because you are wasting time.

that would consist of sidequests, character interactions, songs, dialogue. Not lengthy info dumps.

So pacing issues, not world building issues.

>name a single book without any worldbuilding in Fiction.
>I know shit about literature
It's like you even can't into Proust or Mann. Or Llosa.

If you mean the appendices, sure. If you mean the actual contents of the books, I'm sure a modern editor would go on a rampage with LotR, but then it arguably wouldn't be as iconic as it has become as most of its stylistic quirks would be lost

I bet LotR isn't the only well-received work of literature you could say that about.

Yes, because it's so fucking important for the plot to inform the reaser who created that song they are singing right now and what abilities said bard had.
That's both bad pacing and awful structure. In short - padding, that bombards you with useless informations.

Of course not.
But only Tolkien fandom tries to pretend world building can cover for absolutely abysmal writing skills, shit pacing, repetitive language, bad story structure, one-dimensional characters that lack any personality beyond single sentence and so on and forth.

>that bombards you with useless informations.
no. It's a song.
Padding; yes. Info dump; no. Overdone worldbuilding; no.

>In other genres you mostly infer details about the story's setting naturally
That's exactly how Tolkien does it, though. Because he attempted to replicate medieval texts things aren't described unless characters within the story specifically asks about them, and even them the people they do ask aren't too keen about going into specifics. It's like the story assumes the reader is already familiar with the laws and customs of the lands it takes place in.

Some of it is implied, some you can infer, and a whole lot is left intentionally vague and unexplained. Now, some of the things that weren't explained in the book are explained in the appendices, where they don't disrupt the story and can be safely ignored by anyone not interested, but even the appendices aren't particularly detailed and again often leave things vague and up to interpretation.

This is also the reason Tolkien is the only fantasy author I can stand. Other authors hear 'show, don't tell' and think they have to show everything. Tolkien understood to show what he had too and leave the rest to the reader's imagination.

You are a bit too harsh here.

Tolkien very rarely does that. In fact, a lot of important people are only mentioned in passing and if it weren't for the Silmarillion (which wasn't even MEANT to be ever published and which required a lot of editing on Christopher's part) nobody would have any idea who the fuck they were.

Why are you even trying?
No matter how many gymnastics you are going to perform and word-twists apply, the point still stands - there is shitload of unnecessary narrative that explains shit that has nothing to do with the plot or any events of it, but is there for the sake of being there and wanking about self-created world.

Which is the main sin of world-building done for world-building sake in general. And Tolkien is patron saint of this shit.

No

But if you want to know who was a hack, it's literally everyone who sculpted their fantasy around Tolkien

It became the WoW of the 50s: At first everyone was doing their own take on the genre, but now everyone is trying to do their own spin on what was essentially the tits at the time.

> What are the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes
> What are the Norse

He's not being harsh, he's just incredibly mad

>abysmal writing skills

Are you insane?

You still haven't gave any examples of Tolkien's infodumps, if you're who I think. You could also just give some examples of pages that could be cut from the book at no loss, which I would agree in the case of a lot of the Tom Bombadil stuff but little else

I'm just stating the obvious truth. It might sound harsh mostly due to the fact English is not my first nor even second language.
But consider this:
Tolkien is just bad at pacing and probably nobody is going to deny this, so not even a point to argue about it.
It's not just translations, it's the original that has very repetitive language, constantly using the same words to describe the same things, resulting in situations where you can already know when something is mentioned how it will be described.
Both Hobbit and LotR suffer from extremely linear stpry structure that drives the point from point A to B and from B to C with nothing more than build momentum from previous "stop". The story just doesn't flow. It acts like a raft over rapids - just going aimlessly with the current, from time to time bouncing from something hard and gaining momentum to bounce from the other shore.
The characters lack any personality and if they are female you can absolutely forget about them the moment they are introduced. It's not about SJW bullshit, but simple fact that his male characters are all one-note and his female characters could pretty much be removed from the story without anyone noticing. I mean Eowin literally exists to mock Shakespearian "no man born from a woman" - that tells something about the writer and his goals.
And we can keep going with this.

But in the end, the point remains. Tolkien was a really, really bad writer with really good world-building skills. The glorification he gets for his writing skills is just laughable, because it clearly shows people don't even understand what they really praise about the guy

World-building =/= writing skills.

Read some other literature than fantasy trash. And before you run with Veeky Forums memery - go read some decent "entertainment prose". Chandler. Lem. Howard. Dick. Shelly. Stevenson. Dumas senior.

Then tell me how Tolkien's world-building makes him a good writer.

Because translating him into TTRPG terms. he's that extremely autistic GM that will spend hours discussing the history of the cult of Ninkil and influnece it had over the setting, but will be unable to run any other campaign than most simplified and uninspired cliches based on fetch quests.

The "truth" is only obvious to you, apparently, so I'll ask you to provide proof again.
>Both Hobbit and LotR suffer from extremely linear stpry structure that drives the point from point A to B and from B to C with nothing more than build momentum from previous "stop"
"Linear plot structure" is not a term of derision

>It might sound harsh mostly due to the fact English is not my first nor even second language.
okay, but it does explain why you are missing the beauty of the language.
There is a flow and style to the language that gives those sections more.

It's not quite to the level of say, Poe, but it's the same idea. Most Poe short stories are a couple of short paragraphs long in terms of plot, the rest is "padding", often repetitive. But to complain about that is to miss the point of Poe.

Not him, but nice cherry picking you've got out there

LotR has a linear plot structure. My water is wet too, and sugar cubes are really cubic.

He also hasn't adressed any of the posts asking him to illustrate his points.

>Y-you are missing the point
>It's supposed to be badly written!

If it was /tv/, I would call you out for using the infamous "It's not supposed to win Oscars" argument idiots use to defend some shitty film they like a bit too much for their own good.

Have it ever occured to you for a second there is more than a single person going after Tolkien's skin here?

And he pretty much explained what part of LotR linearity is bad. If you had just a little reading comprehension you would get that. But instead you focused on "HURRR HE CALLED LINEARITY BAD DURRR" and here you are, shitposting in a bait thread.

>supposed to be bad writing
No, plot driven is not the only way to have good writing. The aesthetics of the language itself is another form of writing.

It's like people who think The Fountain is bad because it's plot is too complex (it's not), or too simple (it is, but that's the point). It's supposed to be gorgeous visuals meditating on a simple concept.