Subject: Tolkien RULES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 ? ...

From: [email-masked] (John Dawson)
Date: 7 Jun 1992 01:47:52 -0500

[email-masked] writes:

>     Why is Piers Anthony getting his own group?  What about THE greatest
>fantisy writer of all time?   Who, you might ask?   J.R.R. Tolkien of
>course!!!!!!!!  "Lord of the Rings" RULES!!!!!!!!!

When I first read this, I got a chuckle out of it; I thought for sure
you were just kidding.  People who post that many exclamation marks are
usually doing it deliberatly to be silly and spoof what they are
talking about.  Thinking about this some more I've decided you're
serious.

Why would you say he is the greatest fantasy writer of all time?  The
only grounds I would rank him as the best of all time for, even in a
tie, would be because he was doing it before everybody else was.

I'm not much of a subscriber to the philosophy that our ancestors
were so superior to anything being done today.  I've heard literary
people make claims that Homer was the greatest epic writer who ever
lived (these are naturally the ones who hold to the idea that Homer
was an actual person), or that Shakespeare was the greatest writer
in any language who ever lived, or that Milton was supreme for some
reason.

Some people say that music today isn't as good as it used to be;
nobody can compare to Bach, or Beethoven, or Elvis Presley, or Led
Zeppelin, or the Beatles.

I say, Balls!  Hogwash!  There is plenty of good writing that's
been written in the last twenty years; the only difference is that
it hasn't had a chance to be venerated for centuries yet.  And
there's plenty of good *ORIGINAL* music out there, too; it just
doesn't get into rotation on the radio.  This really burns me up.
I used to like oldies stations, but after listening to them for a
few years it occurred to me, "They are playing the same damn music
they have been now for the past thirty years."  I finally realized
how totally stagnant they are and gave up on them.

For a while, I listened to AOR.  That's Album-Oriented Rock, and
it's those stations that play Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and Boston
and the Allman Brothers and Bad Company and Eric Clapton and the
list goes on and on.  They claim to play "new" music by bands like
Guns 'n' Roses, which are recording today but are rehashing the
same damn stuff over and over.  I don't want to go into any tirade
about GNR specifically, or any of the other rehash bands.  They are
competent musicians, and the music is good, except considered in the
context of being a rehash of stuff from "The Masters" twenty years
ago.

My old roommate has worked as a DJ on an AOR station and talked to
other AOR DJ's, and they have tried to play new music by new artists
producing different music.  When they do, they get calls, lots of
them, from people calling in and saying "What's this crap, man,
just play more Led Zeppelin!!!!!!  Stairway To Heaven is the best
song ever written!!!!!!!!!!"  If the DJ's try to play something
different, the audience dwindles, profits shrink, and the DJ's get
ordered to play more Led Zeppelin.  (As an aside, I almost fell out
of my chair laughing in the scene in Wayne's World when they started
to play Stairway to Heaven and the guy yells "READ THE SIGN" and the
camera pans over to the "ABSOLUTELY NO STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN ALLOWED"
(whatever) sign.)

Led Zeppelin was great.  At the time, what they did was relatively
new.  But they have spawned off generations of musicians who idolize
them and what they did and want to make more music just like it.
It's hard for new musicians to do different things because if they
stray from the mold they starve.

This situation sucks!  AOR sucks!  These days I prefer listening to
almost anything but the worst sampled top-40 synth rap pretty girl
harmony drum machine schlock than AOR.  The people that listen to
AOR probably laugh at their parents for listening to oldies stations,
but in twenty years their kids will be laughing at them.

Back to Tolkien.

Tolkien did stuff that was great, especially given the lack of
precedent for it.  But I think the people who worship him do so
generally because he is *J.R.R.*TOLKIEN* the deity and their parents
told them he was great, not because of the quality of his work.
They are venerating him because he's an Old Dead Dude and therefore
superior to what we have today since the world today sucks.

The analogy to AOR isn't very good I admit; you don't see authors
today trying to mold their fantasy to be just like him or face
total poverty.  (That is, poverty even greater than they would
otherwise face.)  Or do they?  Tolkien laid out his scheme of
elves and hobbits and dwarves and lots of other things, and they
are pretty much the basis for all fantasy today.  The modern idea
of an elf is of a thin diminutive magical creature, very refined,
usually long-lived or immortal, etc. etc. etc.  It would be
interesting to know how Tolkien's work has shaped the meaning of
"elf" and "dwarf" and "dragon".  It's hard to imagine the word
elf referring to a dark stocky creature today, but if Tolkien
hadn't written the virtual encyclopaedia of fantasy, perhaps we
just wouldn't have much information on what the word "elf" really
refers to.

I guess this really isn't that harmful; it's not a crime to define
what words mean.  If you want to write a story about some weird
beastie, you can still write it, you just probalby won't call the
beastie an elf.

Are there any non-historical grounds on which to claim Tolkien is
the greatest fantasy writer ever?

-- 
[email-masked] (John Dawson)

SF/misc