[ SECRET POST #3234 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3234 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.
[Golden Girls]


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02.
[Boku no Hero Academia]


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03.
[C.S. Lewis vs. J.R.R. Tolkien]


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04.
[Pokémon, Leah Remini]


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05.
[Tales of Zestiria]


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06.
[The Man In The High Castle]


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07.
[Marjorie Liu, Sana Takeda, Monstress]


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08.
[Sleepy Hollow]








Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 020 secrets from Secret Submission Post #462.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 2 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[philippos42]

I can't believe you're going to make me defend Tolkien's writing style.

But somehow, this sounds really odd to me. Jack and Tolkien were very, very different in their approaches to setting, and I almost think Jack couldn't do what you're saying.

Note that Jack was a huge influence on me as a child, and I later went back and read some of his work and started really picking it apart. This idea appeals less to me now. Maybe I do find him juvenile. (Well, he and Tolkien both were, a bit.)

I'm not a great Tolkienian. I think I got through a few chapters of Quenta Silmarillion. He can be dry. And my favorite stories by him are not really the great world-building ones. But handing the scripting off to Jack Lewis? Eh, no.

Tolkien could do a pretty good short story. He was capable of writing clear little stories, we just get misled because LotR was such a drag. I don't think he needed Jack, and I don't think Jack was up to the worldbuilding and use of language.

[(Anonymous)]

Who is Jack?

[philippos42]

Sorry, "Jack" is C. S. Lewis. He went by Jack. I should have just said "Lewis."

I did stop myself from calling Tolkien "John Ronald."

[(Anonymous)]

You knew Mr Lewis personally?

[philippos42]

No, I just think "C.S." sounds awkward. And as a onetime fan of his, it's easy to pick up on the fact that his friends all called him "Jack." So I started calling him Jack. Maybe it's too familiar, but as I said, he was a very big influence on me when I was a kid.

It's a stupid habit of mine, especially inasmuch as there are literally a dozen other modern English writers name who write under the name "Jack Lewis." It's like "Mike Smith" or something.

On the other hand, I know a guy who calls Lewis and Tolkien "The Lesser Professor" and "The Greater Professor," and people who understand who he means. That's kind of surreal.

[cbrachyrhynchos]

Most of the Silmarillion is barely beyond second-draft stuff. But Tolkien wasn't a "world-builder" and treating him as such is almost certainly a terrible reading.

[(Anonymous)]

+1

[philippos42]

Builder of language and myth, then.

I don't know if you're using a narrower and more science-fiction definition of world-building than I am; or making a fair point that Tolkien was no more of a world-builder than Lewis, who had the strange vistas of Malacandra and the weirder lands around and under Narnia. In that, you're probably right, of course.

But I still think Tolkien's work was more rooted in imagined language and created pseudo-myth than Lewis's was.

It's possible that everything I have said is wrong, however.

[cbrachyrhynchos]

Tolkien's work is rooted in a myth of Fall, Mortality, and Machine (and of course Faith). All of the major episodes of Lord of the Rings involve the Hobbits witnessing characters who deal with the realization of Fall and Mortality by either turning to the Machine (the Ring, the Palantir, Dwarven ingenuity, Sauruman's own wisdom), or by turning away from the Machine and trusting divine provenance (the prophesied king, alliances, the phail, the ringbearer, elven powers.)

Middle Earth is a vehicle for telling those stories, and doesn't make a great deal of sense objectively. Putting the economics, class structure, or even language of Minas Tirith ahead of Denethor's harrowing "dark night of the soul" is missing the point. The Stewardship exists to set up his dramatic flaming fall from the ramparts. The oath of Rohan exists as a case study in duty. Historically speaking, regents tend to crown themselves king, and oaths of allegiance are forgotten in the face of domestic threats.

Of course Tolkien muddies the waters a bit because he can't resist showing off his clever conlangs. But they're just set dressing.

[(Anonymous)]

PRECISELY!

[(Anonymous)]

This is well-put.

I never thought of Tolkien as a master world-builder, so to speak. He's building literary tropes full of symbolism, but the world itself isn't very "real". It's beautiful and descriptive, but not "real".

[(Anonymous)]

I kinda disagree. I get the idea it is intended to be our own world, in a time of myths, and everything is just ... stronger, and bolder, and darker and deeper and closer to the awe and mystery of its creation, and we are meant to see our RL world as in continuity but a faded remnant of all that.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, there's just not very much of the gritty practicalities of how the world actually functions. I don't mean dividing a fictional world into kingdoms with languages, but the not so fantastical and aesthetically beautiful. Like it's one thing to have a king of prophecy, or leading great armies, etc. But taxation policies, law making, economy, development and distribution of resources, differing political/religious opinions, disease, crime and punishment, etc make the world feel like it's actually running independently without direction from its god (Tolkien), even ours a thousand or more years ago. Tolkien is writing like Beowulf (which he studied and wrote papers on and such), so it feels more mythological and more like a mythic-heroic saga than like a historian's creation of a viable, working world. Middle Earth lacks plumbing, so to speak.

But that's not necessarily a bad thing. A mythic-heroic saga doesn't necessarily benefit from talking about the shit (I mean that somewhat literally). The genre is supposed to be literary beauty and symbolism. Flawless elves that never get diarrhea and kings of prophecy that are good kings simply because they are good men fit in just fine.

[philippos42]

Alternatively, if you mean that he was actually a translator and adaptor, and the Red Book is mostly actual forgotten history, that's a whole other question. ;)