Is the Third Age in Lord of the Rings low fantasy?

Is the Third Age in Lord of the Rings low fantasy?

Why don't you come up with your definition for the divide between low and high fantasy FIRST and then apply various settings to it instead of asking a meaningless question like that?

Magic is not so common/powerful like in D&D. Even Gandalf usally uses his sword in combat.

Are you retarded? Are you trying to say that the definition of the divide is "How much magic there is vis a vis DnD?" If so, why even ask the question? If not, what the hell is your definition? You do know what a definition is, right?

This is not what low fantasy means, you absolute twat

>Classic Definition: High Fantasy, simply because its not on our world.
>Gurps Definition: Bit of Low Fantasy and Dark Fantasy. Power is evil, it corrupts, a dark force amassing and such.
In particular, i like Gurps definitions more, since its better applied to RPG games instead of fiction books.

Lord of the Rings, if you accept its own internal reality, is a legendary telling of events in the far (mythic) past of our world. It's no further removed from Earth than say, King Arthur stories.

For most people yeah. For the fellowship? Na.

It would be odd if it was, since LotR is considered one of the defining works of high fantasy, in much the same way as Neuromancer relates to cyberpunk.

Genres are a meta definition, not in-universe. Middle-Earth was created wholesale by Tolkien and is, for all intents and purposes, a seperate world.

but definitons change over time.

Firstly, despite some semantic autists clinging to the "classical" meaning of the term, "low fantasy" already means a "fantasy with lower power-level and less/more subtle supernatural elements" than "set in our world"

Secondly, the scale of "highness" is prone to inflation. In a time of Lord of the rings it was very magical world, with lot of supernatural as compared to Conan or other examples of american S&S. Nowadays, we have things like Forgotten Realms of Warcraft, which pusthed thew upper limit of the "fantasy highness" scale bar by several orders in magnitude. And because of that LotR, and fuck, even most of the middle parts of Silmarilion (those where Valar aren't directly involved), sit much, much closer to the lower limit than upper on that scale.

>but definitons change over time.

They can but they haven't, Lord of the Rings is still considered high fantasy pretty much everywhere.

Maybe we could come up with a different term for Warcraft instead of changing the existing term. How about "cartoon fantasy"?

american fantasy

How much did Valar fuck up?

It's a High Fantasy story in a Low Fantasy world

i'm probably retarded, but i always look at high vs low fantasy as partially about prevalence of magic, but largely about tone and stakes.

a world with minimal/rare magic but continent-spanning campaigns that involve the fate of the world, in which the heroes have to rise to the challenge, feels like high fantasy to me. likewise, you can set a game in a world where there are scads of different intelligent races and magic is common and powerful, but make the adventure personal (revenge, rescue, etc.) and it doesn't feel like high fantasy.

i'm almost certainly an idiot though

Guys what's the upcoming book called?

Xenoblade Chronicles, if you accept its own internal reality, is set in the future of our world after a god-machine erased and rebooted the universe with different laws of physics. It's no further removed from Earth than say, King Arthur stories.

For the intellectually deficient, my point is, a setting probably should stop being "literally IRL Earth plus magic and monsters" when it's impossible to place geographically on IRL continents.

The problem with that kind of definition is then you get weird conclusions like Sinbad being High Fantasy, since half of those islands he visits are clearly geographically impossible and not on earth except by "author fiat", same as any Arthurian adventure that goes to Faerie (but not the ones that don't), the Phantom Tollbooth, or Alice in Wonderland all become equally "not really on earth", which especially for using such as the defining point between high and low fantasy, seems to yield bad results.

Beren and Edith, I mean Luthien's, Magical Metal Odyssey the Musical, featuring Sauron from the shadow of war games.

Low fantasy with strokes of high magic on the background.

Ps: my definition is how far it's from problems and situations of real life (from the present of the past).
For example, magic without real cost automatically falls into high.

Don't start this shit again....

How retarded are you? Lord of the Rings is like literally the definition of high fantasy.
Low fantasy does NOT equal low magic. In high fantasy, the heroes battle for the fate of the world (like in the Lord of the Rings), in low fantasy, the stakes are much more personal (like in Conan the Barbarian).
So no, Lord of the Rings is the exact opposite of low fantasy.

burn

cartoon fantasy seems like a good term

If I heard "cartoon fantasy", I would think of something like My Little Pony or Shantae.

I say no. It's just that the people in the setting don't really know it.

The hobbit:
At the start, we hear about were-worms in a far off desert. We encounter trolls, wargs, orcs, giants, a dragon, whatever the fuck gollum is, ettercaps, a were-direbear, talking birds, elves, dwarves, giant intelligent eagles, and gandalf supposedly casts a huge destructive spell after bilbo blacks out. They also find several named magic swords in the trolls loot. Granted, gandalfs fire/light spells come from his ring; he can't actually cast spells AFAIK, but he is an angel. In the movie(s), we see galadriel teleport.

Lotr:
A farmer who knows about magical/eldritch stuff. An evil huorn (intelligent tree) wizard, wraiths, wights, a ranger who "protects villages like bree from horrors they can't imagine that live barely a day away", an epic bard, an elven spell that causes a river to suddenly flood, a flock of birds that spy for a wizard, said wizard and his obsidian tower, a different wizard who lives on a mountain and can cause blizzards, a kraken in a mountain lake that swam up there from the underdark somehow, the balrog, uruk-hai, a swamp full of ghosts, wyverns, a ghost army, pirates, intelligent tree people (ents), dire elephants, a giant intelligent spider, the light crystal thing galadriel gives to frodo, gunpowder, and most importantly, a disembodied epic fiendish cleric with a mile-high tower.

Keep in mind, they encounter ALL of this one *two* linear trips across one part of one continent. The world is brimming with magic shit.

close enough

>Granted, gandalfs fire/light spells come from his ring; he can't actually cast spells AFAIK
This is something often asserted and never once substantiated. The source of Gandalf's minor magic is far from clearly attributable to Narya. And he most definitely casts spells, like that time he snuffs out all the lights in Theoden's hall, or when he shoots the white beams of light at the Nazgul over Pelennor, or when he does whatever it is he does to strive with Sauron trying to influence Frodo on Amon hen.

Yeah, the far east has four more clans of dwarves, truly ancient wood elves that have lived in the shadow of hell on earth forever, giant fossilized trees the size of mountains, Black Numenorean outposts from when they circumnavigated the globe looking for lost Numenor, mage orders run by the blue wizards in opposition to Sauron, and tons more crazy shit there's never been tell of.

Or when he and the Balrog have a contest of warding spells cast on the door before the chasm, or his non-visibility in situations throughout the hobbit.

all of those are "light" spells, from his ring

Prove it. Hell, cite ANYTHING from the books that supports that view.

All of this preceded by thousands of years of war between angelic demigods who used the world as a stage for their power contests with the good side defeating the bad side only through horrible losses and leaving Arda a scarred and miserable place because the bad guy was so powerful that his hatred alone made everyone unhappy and have evil tendencies and his demon creatures live on while the good demigods are sick of it all and just sit across the sea which itself is infested with horrific and nameless creatures that neither the good or bad guys know about that are older than time itself and to even mention them is to draw sorrow, horror, and insanity.

>mfw reading unfinished tales and in tuor's trip to gondolin it's explained that literal lovecraftian creatures live in the oceans

fite me

dagor dagoroth when?

shantae is too lewd to be in a moving picture show

Hell, it probably even has kitsune

The definition that I've always heard is that low fantasy settings exist alongside our "real" world, like Harry Potter and Narnia. In low fantasy, the fantasy setting IS the "real" world and our world doesn't exist, so Middle Earth is high fantasy. When the setting is "earth, but with magic" that is alternate history and technically would fall under the umbrella of science fiction

Middle Earth is our earth though. The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings are in universe books written by Bilbo and Frodo, that were "found and translated" by Tolkien in the modern day.

Also, high and low fantasy have literally nothing to do with whether the setting is our earth or another world or w/e and also have nothing to do with how magical it is.

In high fantasy, the stakes are the high, good guys battle bad guys for the fate of the world. In low fantasy, the stakes are more low and personal eg barbarian fights to plunder kingdom.