http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/201406 ... to-tolkien

Do you agree with the article?

I can't access the article. Saying it's part of the international service. I'm in the UK, so I don't see why it shouldn't work?

Anyway of solving this?

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It sort of then became a Hobbit

Could you quote the entire article here please?

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While I can't read the article, I wouldn't say Game of Thrones is in debt to Tolkien in any way. Certainly, Tolkien laid out the foundations for 'high fantasy' or 'epic fantasy' as we know it today, so if this argument is being played out then every fantasy work of literature, art and film since 1955 owes a huge debt to Tolkien.

In general, every fantasy work will borrow and bend elements from other works, that's a natural convention of the genre. Even Tolkien's literature is hugely inspired by Norse and Celtic mythology, so equally Tolkien owes a huge debt to the unnamed author of Beowulf, and others such as Snorri Sturluson (Prose Edda), Marie de France (Lanval), and Chrétien de Troyes (Perceval, le Conte du Graal), for inspiring his works. What readers must understand is that nothing in fantasy is original, and this is probably the same for most genres. More than often, if modern literature leaves no influence in a fantasy work, then the author will revert to ancient mythology, taking themes or even characters and creatures from classical tales and making them relevant to a contemporary reader.

Also, sorry for the length of this post, but my final BA dissertation specialised in this exact field, it's a subject saddeningly close to my heart.

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GOT definitely owes much to LOTR. The author (idk his name nor do I care) wrote them because of LOTR. He's a nihilist who disliked the triumph of good over evil (or even such concepts) and decided to write his own in response. He's not been shy about this either

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GRRM likes to subvert classic Fantasy tropes and cliches. His opinion is that no-one is wholly evil or wholly good. And he's right. The good guys rarely win in real life, too often it is the most violent and ruthless who rise to the top and survive.

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That's odd with the link. Sorry guys, here's the article:


Why can’t fantasy authors escape from Tolkien’s shadow?

That question is more relevant than ever as Game of Thrones concludes its fourth season on US TV, becoming the highest-rated series ever for broadcaster HBO. More than 18.4 million viewers have tuned in each week this year. The series, which features the epic battle for the throne of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, has driven readers back to George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series (five books so far, with another two or three promised), just as Peter Jackson’s films brought a new audience to JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

In early June Martin promised to name a character after anyone who donated $20,000 to a wolf sanctuary. A linguist is now developing language lessons, based on the tongue of one of Westeros’ fictional cultures. And Northern Ireland, where the series is filmed, is benefiting from tourism in the same way New Zealand did from The Lord of the Rings.

It reminds me of a time 40 years ago, when you could find slogans like “Frodo lives!” scrawled on the walls of the New York City subway. In the 1970s, the idea of Middle Earth and the hobbits’ Shire, with its greenery, feasting and furious smoking, chimed with the counterculture. Tolkien’s fantasy, written in the 1930s, as World War II loomed, flourished in popularity as a “green alternative to each day’s madness here in a poisoned world,” as the novelist Peter Beagle put it in 1973.

Now once again, we are enthralled by tales of kings and queens, ladies and knights, wizards and dragons, elves and giants, animated trees and zombie warriors. Once again, we are immersed in battles and court intrigue as kingdoms vie for power. Once again, a unifying enemy looms in the distance. For Tolkien, evil crept in from the East; for Martin, the danger is in the frozen North, beyond the 700-ft wall erected 8,000 years ago to keep out an invasion by the White Walkers, essentially a horde of zombies.

Creators of worlds

Tolkien’s central hero is an Everyman – a humble hobbit, of an ancient people noted for loving “peace and quiet and good tilled earth”. Martin hones in on the royals, targets for other crowned heads in the Seven Kingdoms, as well as their own family members. And when a king is beheaded, woe be upon the land.

Granted, Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice novels are tonally different from Tolkien. On behalf of Elven-kings, Dwarf-lords, and mortal men, Tolkien’s sunny hobbit Frodo Baggins takes on the burden of keeping the “Master-ring, the One Ring to rule them all” from the Sauron the Great, Dark Lord in the Land of Mordor who would rule over all. Frodo is even capable of partially resisting the power of the Ring in ways humans cannot. Tolkien’s tone in The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings novels, can even be romantic, as Elven maidens fall in love with human men and give up their birthright of immortality.

Martin’s darker, grittier fantasy claims the medieval turf of blood and gore, infanticide and incest. The great dynastic houses are weakened, and petty fights for the throne undermine the need for a united defence against the looming enemy beyond the Wall. He emphasises the worst in his characters, gives even the most ethical humans impossible choices, and kills them off capriciously. In Martin’s world, ruthlessness wins.

But the basics in The Lord of the Rings and A Song of Ice and Fire are the same. Like Tolkien’s Sauron, willing to slaughter however many it takes to gain power of the ring, Martin’s fantasy series is fueled by a primitive motivation: killing something to get something. And, as Martin puts it, “When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground.”

The plot in each series contains a ticking timebomb. The One Ring, Tolkien has said, is a mere mechanism that "sets the clock ticking fast”. “Winter is coming” is the line that launches the action in Martin’s universe – the promise of what will be a long frost settling over all the land.

Both authors write scenes that resemble Shakespearean history plays, interspersing swordplay with intricate dialogue, false charges of treason and beheadings. HBO’s Game of Thrones episodes have spectacular fight choreography, from flaming swordplay in the round to head-cracking and eye-gouging. Tolkien’s Gandalf, the last wizard to appear in Middle Earth, uses fire and a staff in supernatural battles. He was, Tolkien wrote, “the enemy of Sauron, opposing the fire that devours and wastes with the fire that kindles, and succours in hope and distress”. Gandalf blows whimsical smoke rings and creates breathtaking fireworks displays in the Shire. By contrast, Martin’s diversions are X-rated (brothels, threesomes, incest and gallons of sour red wine).

Both The Lord of the Rings and A Song of Ice and Fire are epic cycles: they offer plenty of escapism through dragons and direwolves, seductions and duels. Good and evil are more clearly defined in Tolkien’s vision, shaped by closeness to the two world wars of the 20th Century. Martin’s jaded view may be better suited to this era of overlapping and interlocking conflicts. And his fantasy novels also evoke more ordinary and familiar tensions, in an age when office politics and personal relationships can be vicious, even to the point of inciting revenge.

There and back again

By definition, fantasy should be a limitless genre of unbounded imagination. Isn’t it time we came up with something new?

There are two reasons for this. To start with, it’s about sequels. In the age of algorithm-assisted online shopping and ‘if you like that, you’ll like this’ recommendations, the gatekeepers at the biggest publishing companies tend to choose the tried-and-true over the quirky or original. The five novels in Martin’s series to date have topped bestseller lists and sold more than 15 million copies in all.

And secondly, the familiar prevails. Readers often gravitate toward the childhood obsessions they love, which include games like Dungeons and Dragons and books involving swordplay and witchery. And the swords-and-dragons tale works in any century, because of commonalities across Western history.

Both Tolkien and Martin relied upon Britain’s rich and brutal past, and medieval history in particular. Both drew upon cornerstones of Anglo-Saxon literature: Beowulf and Arthurian fantasy legends. Beowulf defined a heroic code of honour; the great hero fought Grendel and Grendel’s mother, and that final dragon. The Hobbit, which involves a great battle against a dragon, was published in 1937, not long after Tolkien’s Oxford lectures on Beowulf and the monsters. And for centuries, fantasy writers have drawn upon Arthurian lore arising from two 14th Century classics: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. Tolkien and Martin’s work also connects to TH White’s The Once and Future King and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon series, which told of Guinevere, Morgan le Fey and the great wizard Merlin. Whether mirroring, amplifying or spinning off from these earlier works, the great fantasy sagas created by Tolkien and Martin have a family resemblance because they’ve inherited the same narrative DNA.

Interesting article. I don't agree that Martin is darker, just bloodier and more visceral. It's written in the modern age. Tolkien came from a generation that weren't going to make anything but a veiled allusion to torture, sexual violence and gore. That doesn't mean the root of what he was writing about wasn't every bit as dark and frightening, but the two wrote with methodologies of their time. Martin has the benefit of being read (or watched) by us in his own time, while Tolkien is being read by an audience who doesn't live in the world he lived in when he was writing. I think there's something to say about the influence of, and de-sesitisation of the audience by, the horror genre over the last 30 or 40 years which might explain Martin's perceived "darker" handling of his material.

I agree that just about every fantasy author will inevitably owe a debt to Tolkein, even if they've never read him. That's like saying all philosophers owe a debt to Aristotle. That isn't to say that they were overly influenced by Aristotle, or necessarily interacted with his writing directly. But just that when someone close to defined the modern sphere of their subject, it's impossible not to be influenced by that. Is that a subject worthy of writing an article about?

For my money I don't see all that many meaningful parallels between the two writers, and I don't think Martin could be accused of being derivative at all. Mostly I think this article raises some tropes of, and platitudes about, fantasy writing in general and then cites them as causal parallels between the two author's work. I think you could probably make most of these observations about Tolkien and any other fantasy writer, and in many cases hit closer to the mark.

It's an interesting subject to be raised, but of course G.R.R. Martin is very "now", so I think that, and not any particular weight in the argument itself, is why the article was written.

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Not...really.

For a start, he's a huge Tolkien fan. The most heroic character in the books is...well, put it that way, has a sidekick named Sam, a friend called Pip and someone who is so not Merry he's called Dolorous Edd.

Tolkien himself wrote three great works. The Hobbit, which is a children's book, is a sort of unheroic story about a gentle though rogueish character tagging along with a bunch of grim saga-esque heroes who are themselves mostly a bunch of amateurs. Misadventures occur. It's fun. The Lord of the Rings is a straightforward epic fantasy, set at a crucial moment in a world's history when the bad guys are pushing for a final victory. The good guys win. But Tolkien's biggest work was the first age cycle of stories. These aren't backstory: rather they are grander stories which share a world with the other works. In those books...the forces of darkness are massacring and enslaving people. Great heroes ride out only to be struck down by treachery. Supposedly good characters find themselves bound to oaths which force them to commit treachery. Turin Turambar is a murderer, and the less said about his sister, the better. The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings are more approachable, and familiar stories, but the First Age stories are just as key to Tolkien, and to Middle-earth.

GRR Martin is playing with the same themes, and a world which isn't at all dissimilar to Middle-earth. (Indeed, it sort of reads like an untold tale of the fall of Arnor)

Tolkien's work was inspired by what I call the "Saga age" - as in the myths, legends and half histories of Northern Europe from about 400AD to 1066. The books are full of little references and "shout outs" to Beowulf (Meduseld), to the Battle of Clontarf in Njall's Saga (Theoden's speech), the Heruvor saga (Eomer and Eowyn) and so on. Like good saga heroes, the characters are clad in mail, fight with spear and shield and sing songs about it.

Martin is drawing on a later period in British and world history. Specifically, he is drawing on the era of the 100 Years War (on one end) and the Tudors (at the other). It even references elements such as The Anarchy and perhaps even the Norman invasion. The core story is an alternate War of the Roses (the Lannisters are the Lancastrians, geddit?), though Robert is part Henry VII and a lot Henry VIII. Such eras, marked by civil war (the 100 Years war was as much a French civil war by proxy as a war between two nations) are always compromised, corrupt and downright immoral. The battles are less Stanford Bridge and more Touton. The War of the Roses took place against a backdrop of constantly shifting family alliances, brutal and arbitrary murders, sexual rivalries, iffy genealogies and new technologies changing the shape of a world not ready for them. In Game of Thrones, this means the core of the action is often about flawed characters making flawed decisions, held back by tradition, culture or plain old lack of understanding. So tonally, the stories are quite different. In intent, though, they are pretty similar, playing with the same ideas.

Furthermore, the Game of Thrones story does appear to be shifting, slowly, towards a showdown between good and evil, though the good guys are all going to be quite compromised when they get there. That being said, when the end comes for Middle-earth, when Morgoth breaks his chains, it will be Turin Turambar, betrayer, murderer and much else, who will be the one to slay Morgoth. Not all of Tolkien's heroes are moral paragons; not all of Martin's protagonists are corrupt.

Gavin

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Hmm. The article draws analogies and similarities between GRRM and JRRT. (oh look! another similarity in their initials!), and the excellent replies above highlight some of the differences, and clarifications on the details.

However, the question here is not in the fine detail, but in the basic premise...

The fundamental flaw in the original article is in making the comparison in the first place. It is like comparing Philip Marlowe to Miss Marple. Both are in the same genre. One is grittier and darker, exploring different themes with a hero who is not clean cut, human prone to do wrong himself. The other is clearly defined in a world of good and bad, and from a different pre-war era, sound familiar?

How much does Raymond Chandler owe Agatha Christie, or even further back, G.K. Chesterton, Conan Doyle or even Wilkie Collins - who probably initially established the genre.

This is what genres are! A genre is a collection of conventions. And clearly both JRRT and GRRM use those conventions and themes or else GoT wouldn't be a fantasy in the first place.

Tolkien established the genre almost singlehandedly, in a mature and well developed form. It was the life's work of a dedicated, imaginative and skilled man. Of course before LotR and even before The Hobbit, Edgar Rice Burroughs was doing fantastical stuff on Mars, and Robert E Howard had Conan and others romping through Hyperborea. But Tolkien took those conventions further, and opened the door to richer storytelling and grander themes.

So, any fantasy work (and before that 'Swords and Sorcery' as it used to be termed) adopting some or all of the conventions of the genre will therefore always risk comparison with the Tolkien's opus.

The answer to the question "Why can’t fantasy authors escape from Tolkien’s shadow?" is simply because article writers like the one creating that piece keep drawing the direct comparison. There is no shadow to escape. We, the public, the consumers, buy into that genre, and love to absorb and consume more of it, just like there are those who read and read detective novels/whodunnits, even if a lot of the time they are variations on the same theme.

Tolkien created the market... Mr Martin and the others have taken it to literally new worlds and places. The next time someone tries to compare this or that author to Tolkien, just compare an apple to an orange. They are both fruit and very tasty, but not the same or better than one another...

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Taking the War in Middle earth to a new level!

Piggy backing on the notion of, they are hard to compare. Tolkien was writing a myth story. He (more than once) bemoaned the fact that his native Britain did not have rich myths like scandinavia so he set out to write one.

By their nature, myths must have obvious good/evil characters as they are meant to teach something in addition to entertaining us.

Martin, did not set out to write a myth like tolkein did. He set out to write a fantasy novel. A novel is like a loose bag of marbles, you can stick whatever you want in there and shake it about.

Neither one is better than the other, much like apples and oranges. The only similarities are indeed the trappings: armor, swords, castles, rangers, etc. other than that, they fill two very different roles in the world of literature.

Well, its not specifically Britain he was complaining about, but England. Beowulf is considered "important to the English language" but the thing is almost certainly written by a Danish speaker, writing about Denmark (it may have been written in England, though). Wales has its own mythology. We don't know what the ancient inhabitants of what is now Scotland wrote stories about, being dead and all. The Irish speakers had their legends, and while Tolkien didn't like Irish/Gaelic, he managed to sneak in an Old Irish word into the legendarium (Forghoil actually does mean something very much like "strawhead" - only discovered that last year) and there's elements of the naming schemes which suggests he had a passing familiarity with Irish legends.

But England has no inherent mythology, largely because there was no inherent England. The Anglii and the Jutes and the Saxons only arrived following the fall of Rome (he said, simplifying wildly) Their religion was a German paganism, and so were their myths. The nation that evolved from those settlers was Christian and never really laid down myths about the land they inhabited. They certainly developed folklore, but not the sort of broad based myths the Germans and Scandinavians did. The thing is, though, that England was just an offshoot German nation. It didn't need English legends, it had German ones. And besides, Christianity converted the lot of them eventually.

The thing is, though, that Lord of the Rings isn't that mythology. The Silmarillion is closer to that mythology. It's a novel, with a plot, with characters and so forth. The characters face moral challenges and change over time. Frodo faces the ultimate darkness and it kills him; Sam steps out of Frodo's shadow and marries the girl of his dreams. By contrast, Turin's lifestory is Archetypal Mythic Element followed by Archetypical Mythic Element followed by Archetypal Mythic Element. Great story, but its not a novel. Lord of the Rings is more of a novel that riffs on mythic elements along with historical elements. The result, the "fantasy genre" is different from the Swords and Sorcery genre which itself has roots in odd places such as men's erotica, cowboy movies, horror novels and so forth. Generally, fantasy is often seen as "English" or "European" in some fashion, whereas Sword and Sorcery is often American. This is one reason why they call Martin "an American Tolkien" because he is writing something firmly in the established fantasy novel genre that isn't part of the Sword and Sorcery genre.

One of the big genre game changers in US fiction was the release of Dungeons and Dragons. D+D started as a "fantasy-ish" overlay on top of historical miniatures rules, then layered in various in-jokes and film references. The initial references were shaped by pulp magazine stories and thus, Sword and Sorcery. The game boosted a "fantasy genre" in the US which while looking Tolkien-ish (Elves, Dwarves, dark lords, et-cet-era) owes a lot to D+D and Sword and Sorcery. Martin's writing in the more "British" or "European" fantasy tradition. Which, again, is a reason people link his
books and LOTR in the same tradition.

tl;dr: though different, LOTR and GOT are part of the same literary tradition.

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After all the learned discourse above, all I am going to say is that I have read both authors work and can happily reread them again. A well-crafted universe is a nice escape from everyday life. And borrowing snippets from here and there in real history/mythology is a handy way of adding to the depth and atmosphere of the setting.
But strangely, I am finding Simon Scarrow's Cato and Macro books more rereadable that either of the above. Maybe it is because you have just two main characters and everything else is based on who and what they interact with, and without spoiliing anything for anyone out there, they do get around quite a bit. And their stories do tie in with a certain historical period.

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I enjoy the Saxon Stories series by Bernard Cornwell for the same reason. I've learned more about Dark Age England from reading a fictional book series and subsequent further reading, than I ever did through school.

The Dark Ages are by far my favourite historical period.

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