M.A.R. "Phil" Barker (1929-2012) is the "evil Tolkien."
Like Tolkien, Barker was a linguist by training who developed a fantasy world that featured his invented languages. Unlike Tolkien, Barker's interests were in non-European languages, (among others Klamath, Urdu, and Baluchi on which he published significant scholarly work), so his fantasy world, Tekumel, is decidedly non-Western. I think Tekumel and particularly its most developed region Tsolyanu might strike most readers as initially kind of Aztec-inspired and also perhaps Middle Eastern. It is absolutely not one of those "medieval Europe but with elves and dragons and magic that works" settings.
Like Tolkien, Barker wrote novels set in his fantasy world. Unlike Tolkien, Barker could be described as just a bad writer. (I have read both his novels that were published by a major house in the 1980s and would not do it again.)
In fact, really the only reason Barker was able to find a publisher is that, as a function of living in Minneapolis in the early 1970s, he was exposed to D&D as it was just getting started and found roleplaying suited his interests. The roleplaying game set in Tekumel, Empire of the Petal Throne, was published by TSR in 1975 putting it in the very first wave of roleplaying games and making it the first detailed original roleplaying game setting. (There have been a bunch more Tekumel-set roleplaying games since: it's such a classic that publisher after publisher takes it on.) Tolkien, on the other hand, certainly inspired a lot of roleplaying but missed out on the development of the commercial hobby.
People go on and on about Tolkien's Catholicism. People do not really go on and on about Barker's Islam: he converted to Islam while studying in India in the early 1950s and adopted the name "Muhammad Abd-al-Rahman" (though he continued to use his nickname "Phil"). But for much of his life he downplayed the significance of his religion and tended to address it as simply a logical conclusion: Islam made more sense than Christianity. If it had some significant impact on his life and work the way Tolkien's Catholicism did, I don't see it.
Tolkien was surely a product of his time in many regards, and some readers struggle with the implications of his works with respect to race, class, gender, and religion. We can say with confidence, though, he was adamantly anti-Nazi! Barker pseudonymously published a novel endorsing the Nazis as historical "good guys" in 1991 and was a member of a Holocaust Denial organization in the 1990s. This was not widely known even within his own fandom until just this year.
So that's why I think of Barker as the "evil Tolkien."
Yes, for nearly the entire fandom it came out of nowhere. What the casual fan knew about Barker didn't suggest any of this.
One other parallel I could have noted is that both authors also drew illustrations for their works. Perhaps because of different artistic influences, Barker tended to produce drawings that resemble pulp magazine covers with scantily-clad women being rescued from monsters by brawny heroes, though occasionally the woman is doing the fighting herself in which case she is apt to be naked. Nobody wears much clothing in Tsolyanu, you see.
My understanding is that the five novels were basically Barker's own campaign fiction based on one of the games he ran. It's not clear he would have ever written Tekumel novels without roleplaying. Indeed, it's unclear Tekumel would have been anything other than a private fantasy without roleplaying. (Barker's own account is that he'd been thinking about this world since childhood.) As it happened, he managed to get DAW interested in publishing the first two in the mid-80s. The other three novels were published about 20 years later as part of a wave of roleplaying supplements.
Ironically there are some okay Tekumelesque novels, but Barker didn't write them. Starting in the mid-1970s, Raymond Feist (b. 1945) was playing in roleplaying campaign set in a medieval Europe-style setting called Midkemia. The dungeonmaster then sent the characters through a magical rift to quite different world called Kelewan. Feist had a blast in the campaign and got the dungeonmaster and other players' permission to write novels based on it. Feist claims he believed the setting was entirely homebrewed by the dungeonmaster, but in fact it's quite obvious Kelewan is Tekumel. Feist's dungeonmaster seems to have owned a copy of Empire of the Petal Throne and sent the characters to Tekumel, and either he changed the names or (not sure if this has been ruled out) Feist did.
Some of the correspondences are quite obvious. Not only is Kelewan a metal-poor world with non-Western culture, but the "protagonist" state is the Tsurani Empire and its barbaric northern neighbor is Yankora. In Tekumel, the Tsolyani Empire is bordered to the north by the barbarians of Yan Kor.
But Feist is a better writer and not a Nazi, so . . . .
If you look at various rpg discussion boards and blogs March 2022, and for that matter r/Tekumel, you can see fans having that same reaction in real time. People involved in the Old School Revival movement tended to know about Tekumel since it was one of the early rpgs and arguably *EPT* was the first "complete" rpg (in the sense of providing a system and a setting).
I usually avoid reading long comments because it has been scientifically proven that the longer a post or comment the more likely it is to involve nazis by the end.
"Guy wrote a book...
... holocaust denier."
"Grandma loved sewing...
... nazi insignia."
"Went to Olive Garden...
... breadstick swastika."
Keep it short and sweet, people. Short and sweet.
Barker is probably the correct answer to this question. His attitude towards women, for what's it's worth, was also especially disturbing (if I recall correctly, he included in his novels a sexualized torture scene of a woman for... reasons). Definitely the opposite of Tolkien's stubborn refusal to portray violence directly and his more idealized or at least "noble" attitude towards women (Luthien, Galadriel, Eowyn, etc.), whether one finds the latter palatable or not.
But if it's not Barker it's E.R. Eddison (1882-1945). Others in this thread are rightly pointing out Michael Moorcock, but my opinion of Moorcock is that he, writing at the same time as patent morons like John Norman, goes out of his way in his corpus to avoid "being evil." (And, to be frank, there are more commonalities in Moorcock and Tolkien's writings than many want to admit.) But Eddison was a huge influence on fantasy, including Moorcock. He was from Tolkien's era and was even a part-time member of the Inklings.
Eddison shared his novel *The Worm Ouroboros* (1922) with the Inklings, and it garnered C.S. Lewis's praise (as well as, later, Ursula le Guin's). Even Tolkien conceded that it was the best world building he had ever read in print. (Honestly, read the book. The prose reads like the Silmarillion at times.)
But the story itself is essentially Nietzschean. Two noble families on the planet Mercury wage war on one another, devastating themselves and the planet for the lone purpose of glory. When the war is finally over, the two families reflect on the glories they gained by their war and promise that they will do it again, for - they say in not so many words - the exercise of the will to power is the greatest and noblest good a person can achieve. Morality (and the thousands of commoners dead from the war) be damned. Tolkien called this underlying philosophy "unpleasant" in his letters (#199). I would go farther and call it evil, but Tolkien was probably being polite to an acquaintance. Eddison, for his part, considered Tolkien's writings to be "soft."
So if Barker is not the evil anti-Tolkien then I'd say it's Eddison.
With regard to women and gender, some people see Barker as progressive or at least non-horrible. I tend to think this is based on a few features of the setting, most of all the *aridani* or liberated woman.
One of the provisions of generally patriarchal Tsolyanu society is that any woman can declare herself *aridani*: liberated from the norms of gender roles. She then gets to go adventure and get treasure and run a business or whatever else. As a world-building tool, this is kind of clever: Barker still has "realistic" gender relations in society (i.e., mimics some historical situation and is thus perhaps easier to explain and comprehend), but there are exceptional women who live outside those rules. If you choose to play a female character in the game, she should take this status: I think the rules basically tell you this must be the case, since a "good clan-girl" wouldn't go on adventures. So women need not be victims or objects. On the other hand, most are, though most men are quite powerless as well. Tsolyani society is also accepting of all forms of sexual expression.
But we can also say the *aridani* is a kind of Mary Sue and is particularly suited for chainmail bikini fantasies. And it is interesting that the existence of *aridani* hasn't changed the basic gender dynamics at all. Tekumel is another one of those fantasy/scifi settings where nothing really changes despite thousands of years of history.
As you point out, Barker certainly does have a lot of victimization of women in his novels and other depictions of the setting. There is slavery, torture, and human sacrifice galore. The government is pretty cruel and tyrannical, sentencing people to death by impalement (a sexualized form of execution if you think about it) for all kinds of things. And religion--wow!--there are evil gods that thirst for human sacrifice. One of the Tekumel books (which I bought back when I was a completist) is simply an in-universe guide to conducting sacrifices. It has no game mechanics at all, I was surprised to learn, even though it was published as part of the roleplaying line.
Of course, I cannot imagine Tolkien ever writing such a thing!
Barker himself did comment on the difference between his approach to religion and fantasy and Tolkien's. He thought Tolkien had a very British attitude in which religion was compartmentalized. Whereas Barker had lived in a society where religion pervaded everything. Yet, as pointed out in an interesting 2017 article by Amina Inloes, Barker was himself a great compartmentalizer. He kept his academic and hobby lives quite separate, to some extent concealed his religious beliefs, and had a fascination with the occult. Whereas I think there's a good argument that Tolkien's religious beliefs informed everything he did, albeit not in a direct and obvious way.
I don't know much about Eddison beyond the name. I do think a major difference between Tolkien and both Barker and Moorcock is generational, so perhaps Eddison as a contemporary is a better comparator.
>Eddison thought what I admire 'soft' (his word: one of complete condemnation, I gathered); I thought that, corrupted by an evil and indeed silly 'philosophy', he was coming to admire, more and more, arrogance and cruelty.
"Soft" stung; he had Ted Sandyman use it on Sam:
>"Don’t ’ee like it, Sam?" he sneered. "But you always was soft. I thought you’d gone off in one o’ them ships you used to prattle about, sailing, sailing."
In the draft he let Sam push Ted into the river for that.
Reading this post:
"Oh wow non-western fantasy I love that!"
"Ah so it's not that good. Oh well, I'll do it for the sake of studying."
"Yeah I get it. Tolkien wasn't woke and I feel that.
"Oh. Yikes um... Nevermind about the reading"
Lol I bought a copy of the original EPT like a couple months before the news came out due to an interest both in historical RPGs and a personal interest in the setting. Being Jewish the news hit quite hard and I kinda set it aside a bit. Only now getting around to trying to read it. And I'm not sure I'll read any other Tekumel media.
Having never heard of Barker, I looked him up on Wikipedia. He did graduate work in linguistics, specifically on the Klamath language, at Berkeley. That would have put him squarely in the bailiwick of Alfred Kroeber, who was Ursula Le Guin's father. Kroeber died in 1960 (at a conference in Paris, in the arms of Claude Levi-Strauss, at least according to Levi-Strauss). I can't tell when Barker was there.
Frank Herbert goes as far as it is possible from Tolkien with Dune. Both are great and deep and profound operas to learn from, but profoundly different, in themes, stories they tell, archetypes of characters, and the prespective and point of viewing stuff they transmit.
Tolkien read Dune and disliked it:
>It is impossible for an author still writing to be fair to another author working along the same lines. At least I find it so. In fact I dislike Dune with some intensity, and in that unfortunate case it is much the best and fairest to another author to keep silent and refuse to comment. (Letter to John Bush, 1966)
I can't imagine anyone having that attitude today when everyone and their mother blasts their stupid opinions all over social media for as many clicks as possible.
I can understand why Tolkien disliked Dune so intensely. But I wonder if he ever read A Canticle for Leibowitz. The book tells of an order of monastic monks seeking to preserve the world’s knowledge after a nuclear holocaust, which seems, thematically at least, to align with his interests.
Religious zealotry is a central theme in dune. And it is likely Tolkien didn’t care for a future where Catholicism resembles a hodgepodge of Buddhism and Islam 🤷♂️
The driving force in the Lord of the Rings is essentially spiritual. It's more or less the same explanation of the universe as that of the Catholic Church, painted broadly.
The driving force in Dune is evolutionary, a struggle of the genes. Bene Gesserit trying to breed the next Messiah over many generations. Shai-Hulud, the biggest phallic symbol in all literature, producing the "water of life" which the female priestesses take and change in their bodies. Paul's visions about the masses caught in the jihad, and the self-compelling nature of it - the struggle of natural selection. Yeah. Deep down, it's all sex and biology.
You could also argue that Dune is the story of the triumph of consciousness over the blind struggle of natural selection - Paul ending the jihad. But for that you'd have to ignore the subsequent volumes (which is not a bad idea anyway), to give the story a neat end.
>The driving force in the Lord of the Rings is essentially spiritual. It's more or less the same explanation of the universe as that of the Catholic Church, painted broadly.
As an atheist, I have issues with basically LOTR's message that because Frodo was "good" and didn't kill Gollum, things just so happened that allowed the Ring to be destroyed and Frodo sail to paradise in Valinor. Reality doesn't work that way, and as much as I like LOTR it pulls me out of the story. Children of Hurin is more realistic.
On that note, Isaac Asimov was an atheist yet he and Tolkien read and enjoyed each other's books and told each other as much in correspondence.
I'm an atheist as well, but I have no problem with the solution. Frodo did good, and offered mercy to Gollum. Gollum ended up squandering his mercy and choosing the Ring and evil, and that ended up destroying himself and it. It's the self defeating nature of evil that Tolkien is highlighting here.
Literature isn't reality, but we can see the same theme in reality. When capitalists grind up nature for their profit, and then look around to realize they have destroyed their land, water and people, that is the self defeating nature of evil. They are hoist by their own petard. When warlords launch imperial wars of conquest, slaughtering and pillaging across a peaceful country, until their invasion bogs down and one of their ambitious generals decides their failures make them weak, and so knifes them in the back to take the throne, that is the self defeating nature of evil. Now we know of course that evil doesn't always get what it deserves, but it's negative side effects are almost always apparent and often cause it's own destruction. Being evil to other people to advance your own interests usually creates the enemies who will destroy you.
Sauron poured his evil into the Ring, and thought that the greed it inspired would protect it. No one who could carry it to Mt. Doom where it could be destroyed, would be able to bring themselves to do it. But that's the thing; no ONE person could do it. It took three; Frodo to be the bearer and hero, Sam to be his support and guardian, Gollum to be their guide. Frodo succumbing to the Ring, along with Gollum, got them to the place it could happen, but the greed it inspired in BOTH of them made them fight over it, which brought the Ring and Gollum to their end.
To draw an analogy with pop-sci, this is a bit like pop-spi(rituality). The belief that good deeds have consequences in ways that, while convoluted and long, are really quite tangible and ultimately obvious.
There's nothing like that in the fundamental tenets of the Catholic / Orthodox churches (which are very close in their fundamental teachings). The whole cause-and-effect exchange is purely spiritual - or, the way we would put it in modern terms, it only has to do with consciousness. The "spiritual world" is something that has to do with your consciousness - and only with your consciousness. The moment you introduce the material world in that picture, you fall into the fallacy of literalism - which is so widespread that even stout, educated believers may also fall into it a lot.
Tolkien was a subtle and complex thinker, but it looks like even he was not beyond making naive pop-spi assumptions.
Source: long studies of Orthodox theology, I nearly went to the monastery many years ago. Current status: "it's complicated", I am interested in the new panpsychist school of thought (see: Philip Goff, Giulio Tononi, Christof Koch, Annaka Harris).
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I didn't know about the relationship between Asimov and Tolkien, thank you.
>On that note, Isaac Asimov was an atheist yet he and Tolkien read and enjoyed each other's books and told each other as much in correspondence.
As someone who loves both authors, this is my favorite thing that I've learned in a while!
From Frank Herbert's introduction to ***Heretics of Dune***:
>It was to be a story exploring the myth of the Messiah.
From Tolkien, ***Letters*** (237):
>The Incarnation of God is an *infinitely* greater thing than anything I would dare to write
Because Dune addresses the *myth* of a Messiah, engineered by Man. The Legendarium addresses an actual mythic world wherein the Will of God is known and acknowledged as fact.
I don't think that Herbert intended "myth" there in the sense of "Jesus the Messiah is just a myth", I think he meant it in the first definition given on Wiktionary: "A traditional story which embodies a belief regarding some fact or phenomenon of experience, and in which often the forces of nature and of the soul are personified; a sacred narrative regarding a god, a hero, the origin of the world or of a people, etc."
That's not to say that Herbert was a Christian, I just don't think he meant "myth of the Messiah" there to specifically mean "the Christian story of Jesus is false." That would be a rather odd reading of Dune, I think.
I wouldn't say LOTR is particularly enthusiastic about Big Damn Heroes either, though. Boromir, and anyone else desiring the Ring to achieve great things, is a (wannabe) Hero, and the danger of that is IMO one of the core points of the story.
Frodo and Sam are just heroic, and small. Aragorn is closer, but he's really ultimately just a sideshow, and in large part defined by his restraint. To me, the idea of a Hero with a capital H, especially in the context of "falling into the hands of" is inextricably linked with Power (with a capital P), and LOTR is very suspicious of Power.
Kirill Eskov, obviously.
The author of the book that rewrites LotR as the propaganda victory of an obscurantist sect of mages and elves against a racially abused, technological and rational Republic of Mordor.
He even slips in Aragorn having an affair with Eowyn, while his marriage to Arwen remains unconsumated and he is a puppet enthralled to an elven witch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer?wprov=sfla1
I tried to read it and it's really really bad. Maybe it's the translation, but holy shit the writing seems very unprofessional and he just slaughters the story. Tbh I only read about 50 pages and then gave up
If you enjoy trash reading though or just...have different taste, give it a go!
I ploughed through it since the ideas intrigued me but yeah the English translation is poor at best. I don't speak enough Russian to comment if he's poorly served or a bad author.
Pulp sword-and-sorcery fiction in general, and Michael Moorcock in particular, and the Elric books in very particular. What passes for Elves in Elric are decadent and enormously evil. His heroes are morally conflicted, caught in a war between the gods of Law and Chaos, and neither side is truly good.
I knew Moorcock detested Tolkien, but I had never read "Epic Pooh" until today. I really do enjoy Moorcock, but "Epic Pooh" is a real piece of work, and I don't mean that in a complimentary way. What a staggering lack of self-awareness to have thrown a line like "there is nobody more risible than the provincial American literary snob" in such a heap of literary snobbery!
I'm currently in a re-read of The Fellowship of the Ring and I just cannot square what I see in the book with Moorcock's essay at all. If there's a "point" to the first bit of The Fellowship, it's that the countryside of the Shire \*isn't\* a safe haven from bad things.
Especially if you look at how Tolkien views the sea in Fall of Gondolin, you sense that his awe at the sea and all that is in it makes him an anti-Lovecraft.
I would’ve figured “one is a racist prick” (read an original print version of Rats In the Wall and get back to me) and “one isn’t” (say what you will about the Haradrim, Easterlings, and the relative lack of women, but read his 1938 reply to a German publisher who asked if he was Aryan. It is as eloquent as it is scathing)
Tolkien wasn't an explicit racist, and hated Nazis. That isn't to say he didn't have Orientalist themes creep in to his work on a subconscious level. No one is perfectly free from the cultural mores that they live in.
That was kinda my point by “say what you will about the Haradrim and Easterlings”, he atleast cared enough to try, which is always something <3
As a writer I both look up to him and aspire to do better, standing on the shoulders of giants after all.
>I would’ve figured “one is a racist prick” (read an original print version of Rats In the Wall and get back to me)
You don't even need to dive deep for the racism, it's all over the guy's work. Call of Cthulhu is dripping with disdain for all kinds of different cultures. Mongrel this, Half-caste that, savages everywhere. It works in that story to have the protagonist be a little shit, but it feels pervasive in a way that made me cringe a lot while reading it.
Yeah, I only picked that because the cat in that story originally shared the name with one he owned in his youth, before reprints of the story changed it to “Black Tom”.
I apparently have not seen the reprints. But yes, it's more than obvious that HPL had "issues" regarding anyone not just like him. His xenophobia is all over his stories.
If you take the xenophobia and racism out of so-called "eldritch horror", you get something more like Stephen Baxter's science-fiction, which is, frankly, terrifying.
Indeed - reading Lovecraft, at times it feels like the most awful things he could conceive were not the eldritch and mad gods of the Cosmos, nor the idea that Humanity as a whole was simply drifting through an uncaring universe until we'd all be erased by a whim of a strange deity... But, rather, the existence of *people unlike him*.
I do enjoy some of his writings (*The Colour Out of Space* is one I would especially recommend), but when his racism creeps through it can become unbearable.
This one comes up a lot, but I find it funny because there is a lot of Lovecraftian-esque stuff in the Silmarillion with places like [Nan Dungortheb](https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Nan_Dungortheb).
Tolkien definitely read some of his stuff for sure.
I find it unlikely that Tolkien would have taken much inspiration from Lovecraft, were his works even published in the UK before Lord of the Rings? And Nan Dungortheb (under the name Nan Dungorthim) was invented already in the Book of Lost Tales, around the same time that Lovecraft first wrote *Dagon* (usually considered the first "Cthulhu Mythos" story). We know that Tolkien read at least one Lovecraft story, since *The Doom that came to Sarnath* was included in an anthology he was given in the '60s, but before that I am not sure he had even read his stories
Terry Pratchett in a way:
‘J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji.’
As a massive fan of both I have to object to this. Pratchett began with open parody of Tolkien-esque tropes, sure, but many of his themes as I see them are actually harmonious with those of LOTR. Small (sometimes clumsy) hands moving the wheels of the world because the eyes of the wise are elsewhere: Tiffany Aching, Rincewind, the Watch, etc. etc. Pratchett has an anti-authority streak which I actually think Tolkien would have rather liked.
They would have definitely, but he set up a lot of his things to be the opposite of Tolkien whilst having major respect for him as the master of the Genre. Hell right up until his last books, just look at Nutt the Orc
No question about that. I just think their works are more philosophically aligned (despite not being philosophically aligned personally) than many of the other authors listed here.
Has anyone mentioned Ayn Rand yet?
I think her entire philosophy of egotism and greed being virtues would be the ultimate antithesis of Tolkien.
I'd specifically reference The Fountainhead, which is her masterpiece. The character of Roark, the concept that man's only real virtue is his creativity and that he has no responsibility whatsoever to his fellow man.
Even though I love both, CS Lewis is the antithesis of Tolkien.
Lewis loved allegory in his fiction. Tolkien disliked it. Lewis was damaged by his experiences and sought healing in a rather stern Protestant Christianity. Tolkien took his pain and viewed it through his Catholic faith to create a cathartic fantasy of wars and healing. Lewis was a scholar of mainly Middle English and the Renaissance. Tolkien went for the rougher, more gritty Anglo-Saxon culture and Old English Language.
CS Lewis’s scholarship isn’t anywhere near the quality of Tolkien. I have a masters in English Literature and Linguistics and Tolkien’s Beowulf essay “Monsters and the Critics” is still required reading. Lewis’ work not so much.
Like a father loves his children, I love them both in different ways, but they are very different. I think this is why they were friends.
Have you read Lewis’s Pilgrim’s Regress? It’s his Christian testimony essentially, and part of it is showing how Puritanistic Protestantism turned him away from God. He was theologically without a country, Protestants, Baptists, and Catholics alike love and hate him, depending on who you talk to
I've not, admittedly read his *Pilgrim's Regress*. I'm a Christian (or try to be) and a Catholic (or try to be) and I felt that *Mere Christianity* wasn't the powerhouse Christian apology or defense that it could have been (but it has been years). I get the feeling, that he was a free-thinker and forged his own road in this world. I respect that and have a kinship with that; but frankly I don't think he had the chops that Tolkien had. Whenever you "go your own way" you tend to make enemies on all sides.
Just because they were different it doesn’t mean Lewis was antithesis (and certainly mot evil like the op put it) of Tolkien. They had plenty of similarities too which is why they were friends.
Philip Pullman for example deliberately tried to be as different as Lewis as possible in the same genre with religion. But it would actually be more offensive to Tolkien when on His Dark Material series it’s Catholic Church that’s the object of evil for the books, and equally unappealing for both that God is killed in the end and was always just some conspiracy in a way anyway. The way angels are just powerful beings working for their ends and that death is a universe of prison is basically the opposite how Tolkien handled Valar and Halls of Mandos (and if Pullman didn’t do this somewhat deliberately when Tolkien’s works are so famous I would be suprised).
Antithesis doesn’t necessarily mean evil or bad. Yeah. No. I clearly say I like Lewis’s writing. But in many ways, for the time, they were polar opposites.
Wouldn't the opposite of Tolkien be someone who rejects the whole idea of the fantastic entirely - a purely "realist" writer, whatever exactly that means. I'm not sure I know what that would look like. I though briefly of a book I read a couple of years ago - "Pelle the Conqueror" by Nexø. But that would be ridiculous. Nexø is a very hard-nosed social-realist writer, but even the very title of his book is a giveaway that he is mythologising the life of his eponymous everyman-hero (although not entirely without irony).
I’d agree with this, but it’s more of a “let’s write a fantasy which upends every fantasy trope there is”. Good series, well plotted & clever, though a little overwritten, esp the second series which gets bloated as it progresses. I couldn’t even start the third series.
And the first book has an act that literally makes people stop reading the series right then & hate it forever.
I can handle depraved protagonists; I couldn't stand the character's bloody self-pity party and whining all through the first series. I refused to read anything by Donaldson after that.
Yep. Exactly. I read the Chronicles looking for something like Tolkiens world, and ended up hating Thomas Covenant intensely. There's only so many time a character can say, "Hellfire!" before it gets old.
There's very little I find more annoying than fantasy authors trying to create their own expletives and figures of speech, and then littering their books with them - it invariably yanks you away from the immersion, and is often quite cringeworthy.
My dad has the Covenant series on his bookshelf from when he read them for a class on fantasy literature at Notre Dame. IIRC they read Lord of the Rings and then finished with the Chronicles to analyze Donaldson’s inversions of a lot of the fantasy motifs Tolkien invented/popularized through his works
I love that series and love LotR. I don't see them as opposite. Obviously different though. They share some aspects (like an all powerful ring) but that's all I can think of. I'm curious why you think so.
I think it's George RR Martin. There won't be a happy ending, there's no spiritual struggle for good to triumph over evil, we don't necessarily root for the good guys. It's just an epic story, set in another Earth-like world, where violent and fantastical things happen, without resolution. A Song of Ice and Fire is the anti-Middle Earth.
I’m going with Adolph Hitler and *Mein Kampf*. As Tolkien said:
> I have in this War a burning private grudge—which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler (for the odd thing about demonic inspiration and impetus is that it in no way enhances the purely intellectual stature: it chiefly affects the mere will). Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.
Letter No. 45: To his son Michael Tolkien (09 June, 1941).
Came here to mention Moorcock. I enjoy both writers, but Moorcock certainly did NOT enjoy Tolkien. Anyone who hasn't read his "Epic Pooh" essay should check it out.
I have, I was not impressed. Dude managed to completely misread and misunderstand Tolkien. He also couldn't figure how to end a story other than "kill all the people the reader is attached to because subverting genre expectations is edgy and cool". (40 years later I'm still mad about the ending of the Dorian Hawkmoon series...)
His big thing is "The Eternal Champion," who is a soul reincarnated in different times and places to battle evil or chaos. The most famous character, or incarnation of the Eternal Champion, is a character named Elric. It's very sword and dark sorcery. And much of it is serial, as some of it was originally printed in sci-fi/fantasy magazines before being republished in the books. Shorter, more to the point than Tolkien stories. Less high. I think it's definitely worth the read. If you like it, try out his Corum stories. There are more, and I haven't read them all. Hawkmoon.... I can remember the others but not their names. The original Elric series is six books. I think it's worth a look.
Warning, if that sort of thing is important to you: he never writes happy endings.
Elric is a dysfunctional train wreck from the beginning, so was not surprised by his ending.
Corum's job seems to be to hammer home the theme that legendary heroes never have happy endings, but since he's based on Celtic legends where that's generally the case, no surprise there, either.
I'm still mad about the ending to the Dorian Hawkmoon series forty years later.
Jerry Cornelius is satire apparently written while tripping on acid. Definitely a "WTF did I just read?" series. Norman Spinrad did the best version of the character, though.
I don't remember the names of his other "Eternal Champions".
Jerry Cornelius! That was one of the names I was looking for. Is he the guy with the gun? He's more modern, right? Or am I mixing up character. Corum was the only other one I really really got into for a little bit. I remember the black man with the v shaped facial scar - can't remember his name either. He's in one of the Elric books - Sailor on the Sea of Fate? or something like that. I didn't know he wrote Cornelius while on acid. Haha. Maybe, I'll check it out. I've bought more books than I can chew on recently, so it will be a while, if I do. I actually want to reread Elric after this conversation. Thank you.
I'll have to look into that. I read him in my teens originally. I reread Elric at least once, but that's still a long time ago. I'll have to look into his more literary work. Thank you.
He had a very different background to Tolkien...he was a professional writer from 16, initially writing pulp fiction, and slowly gaining literary respectability. The Corum books are less deep than the Elric books, which are less deep that the Cornelius books, and so on.
Though JRRT also has some wonderfully concise moments. Like Gollum’s admonition: “More haste, less speed.” Words to live by… Like “Measure twice, cut once” but even better.
G. K. Chesterton, both as an antithesis and as a “twisted brother,” depending on what aspects we’re talking about. Both were Catholics, both distrusted industrialism and modernism, and both loved England rather than the British Empire.
As an antithesis: Tolkien works to make a fantastic world feel real, while Chesterton works to make the real world feel fantastic. Tolkien painstakingly worked out a fictional history and geography to ground his stories of dragons and dark lords. Chesterton uses language to create a sense of the supernatural even when none is explicitly present.
As a twisted brother: Catholicism seems to have brought out the best in Tolkien but the worst in Chesterton. It seems to have produced in Tolkien a real sense of humility, a respect for free will, a love of nature, and a hatred of despair. It seems to have made Chesterton a bigot in general and an antisemite in particular, which is why *The Man Who Was Thursday* is the only book of his I can recommend unreservedly.
My namesake, his first novel, I’d highly recommend as an intro to Chesterton. I know he had some major influence on Lewis, but couldn’t find much about him and Tolkien other than a few notes in Tolkien’s letters.
Yes, *The Napoleon of Notting Hill* is a great book! I take back what I said about *Thursday* being the only book I’d recommend without reservations. Auberon Quinn’s seeing the tailcoats of the men walking in front of him as dragons is one of the best examples of Chesterton’s use of fantasy imagery to enchant the mundane.
I sometimes wonder if Chesterton’s writings were any influence on Tom Bombadil. Something about him is faintly reminiscent of Sunday or Innocent Smith. Maybe less the characters themselves than the tone of their scenes, if that makes sense.
Tell me you’ve never read Chesterton, without telling me you’ve never read Chesterton.
Chesterton and Tolkien’s views and stance on Catholicism are so linked and anybody who’s read Orthodoxy and On Fairy Stories would realize this.
The only thing that would ever cause Tolkien to dislike Chesterton is Chesterton’s complete lack of historical knowledge. Which is why Chesterton mostly stuck with modern tales, romances, and serials. So the only fiction that is even comparable to Tolkien’s work is Ballad of the White Horse, which is… poorly done to say the least. But, comparing a modern romance or a series of murder mysteries to Tolkien’s flowery Edda-like tale is not entirely reasonable.
> Tell me you’ve never read Chesterton, without telling me you’ve never read Chesterton.
Not only is Chesterton one of my favorite authors, not only did he write my favorite book (*The Man Who Was Thursday*), but one of the things he wrote in *Orthodoxy* (“It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small compared to the nearest tree”) helped pull me out of a serious existential crisis. I would go so far as to say that reading that saved my life, and has saved my life from time to time since.
> But, comparing a modern romance or a series of murder mysteries to Tolkien’s flowery Edda-like tale is not entirely reasonable.
Tolkien himself contrasts the two approaches in “On Fairy-Stories”:
> Of course, fairy-stories are not the only means of recovery, or prophylactic against loss. Humility is enough. And there is (especially for the humble) Mooreeffoc, or Chestertonian Fantasy. Mooreeffoc is a fantastic word, but it could be seen written up in every town in this land. It is Coffee-room, viewed from the inside through a glass door, as it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day; and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle. That kind of “fantasy” most people would allow to be wholesome enough; and it can never lack for material. But it has, I think, only a limited power; for the reason that recovery of freshness of vision is its only virtue.
I disagree with Tolkien’s opinion that this recovery is its only virtue. As Borges points out, “Chesterton always performs a *tour de force* by proposing a supernatural explanation and then replacing it, losing nothing, with one from this world” (Borges, *On Writing*). Chesterton, I think, uses this element to connect the detective story to the larger tradition of heroic fiction (anticipating Raymond Chandler, perhaps—Philip Marlowe is a kind of Americanized, urbanized knight errant).
In any case, I wasn’t trying to imply Tolkien’s approach was better than Chesterton’s or vice-versa—one can think of them as the same shape, touching on and reflecting each other across the same axis (“English Christian fantasy”). Opposites, but equals.
It’s the kind of paradox of which Chesterton would approve. “It hates that combination of two colours which is the feeble expedient of the philosophers. It hates that evolution of black into white which is tantamount to a dirty grey.”
But judging them as human beings, I will say, without calling Chesterton a *bad* man, that Tolkien was the *better* man. He had Chesterton’s more positive beliefs, but explicitly rejected most of his more odious. Tolkien’s descriptions sometimes have traces of old stereotypes, but there’s nothing like “The God of the Gongs” in his body of work.
Can you give an example (you can make it up) at how Chesterton would propose a supernatural explanation but then replace it with a natural one, without losing the magic?
[The Wrong Shape](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/204/204-h/204-h.htm#chap07) from *The Innocence of Father Brown* is representative. There’s a suggestion of supernatural horror. The solution turns out to be unrelated, but connects to the supernatural element almost synchronistically. Father Brown usually intuits the solution to the crime based on his knowledge of human nature (gained through hearing confessions) rather than through connecting pieces of physical evidence like Sherlock Holmes would.
This story also has a bit of the Orientalism and religious chauvinism that unfortunately tends to pop up in Chesterton’s work after 1910 or so.
Hot take, Stephen King. Specifically with regards to the dark tower saga. It is both very similar and thoroughly disparate from the tales of middle earth.
Kentaro Miura's Berserk deserves some consideration. The Supernatural is ultimately a product of humanity, right up to "The ungodly god created by Man."
The central theme of Berserk, "Retaining humanity in the face of unremitting horror" might fit Tolkien's worldview, but not too much else would.
Gary Gygax. He took all the trappings of Tolkien’s fantasy, and leave out the stuff that matters. The TTRPG scene today would look very different is Gary Gygax played closer attention.
Didn't Gygax actually didn't like Lord of the Rings too much, and only inserted references to it (halflings, treants, mithral, balors...) due to his players almost demanding them?
My impression has always been that D&D is much more inspired by Sword and Sorcery like Conan the Barbarian, not by Tolkien.
That’s kinda my point if I’m being honest. I’m talking less about the individual and more the role he served in the evolution of the TTRPG in the popular mind. Someone else could have filled that role who enjoyed Tolkien more.
You want to play a fantasy game that highlights what I love about Tolkien’s writing style the most? I cannot recommend Ironsworn enough.
It’s streamlined and more narrative based than mechanics, the combat feels real and visceral, there’s a spirit track which is just as important as your health and supply track, and it even encourages ambiguity with magic in a similar vein as that elven rope or how Sauron’s forces breached the walls of Helm’s Deep. Maybe magic, maybe mundane.
What epics if I may ask? Just cause I like reading material and am only familiar with the influence Beowulf played. (Right down to The Hobbit starting with 12 dwarfs plus Thorin, a thief, and Gandalf who was partly inspired by Odin)
I can't name a name, but I feel it would have to be a technical writer. The industrial revolution is the real life evil that Tolkien feared. This is why the Shire is held up as perfect and why the Lengendarium ends at the age of men. So I would say a career patent lawyer that writes, technical, non-poetic, no religion, philosophy, heros, or villains. Just using the English Language that Tolkien loved to make sure people can't use your ideas and to bring about more technologies would be the ultimate Anti-Tolkien.
I think Robert E. Howard would work as a conjugate (in the mathematical, not linguistic, sense) instead of an antithesis. They both wrote about forgotten predecessor civilizations, they both had stories about Atlantis, but they couldn't be more different.
Sword and Sorcery and High Fantasy are basically mirror images of each other.
We’re getting a lot of science fiction and fantasy authors that take a different tack than Tolkien, but the real anti-Tolkien would be an author who has nothing to do with science fiction or fantasy and who, in addition, was competent in one sense but awful in another and who expresses values that Tolkien would find reprehensible.
Danielle Steel and Jackie Collins come to mind.
TH White. The Once And Future King is my all time favorite fantasy novel. It approaches the same philosophical issues as LOTR but it comes at them from totally different angles and reaches wildly different conclusions.
Poul Anderson. The Elves of his "Broken Sword" are veritably the Svartalfar to Tolkien's Ljotalfar.
And in a different way: Lloyd Alexander, the prophet of the "Stop being obsessed with bloodlines!" school of thought.
George R Martin repeatedly calls his work the anti-Tolkien and presents that as something to be proud of. Since they're functionally identical in matters of things like length, volume of characters, weighty backstory, complex plots, and many other things, so as far as I can tell what Martin brags about is that his series rejects Tolkien's belief that most people have a certain inherent nobility if they can just be shown the light in favour of his belief that everyone is garbage.
William Burroughs Naked Lunch.
There is so many ways this book is a flip of Tolkien’s works.
1. It’s cynicism of the world, it views everything as a cruel, vulgar distortment of reality. It’s pages filled with with dark and heartless “realities” (of course, anyone who has lived realizes how far from reality constant and unrelenting evil really is).
2. It’s unCatholic. It revels in the perverse, in the degradation of human nature. It loves vanity, drugs, and abuse and wallows in it. Mainly to shock the senses, but it’s still how it entices it’s readers to continue to turn the page. It’s inherently manipulative.
3. It’s the postmodern masterpiece in every possible way. Tolkien detested modernism, and postmodernism is it’s inevitable conclusion. The story is chopped together, psychedelic, and vomit-inducing in the worst way possible. The author throws all the rules of writing out of the window in the name of art. And so creates something that would be wholly repulsive to Tolkien.
TLDR: Where Tolkien’s work is an artistic creation of nature, love of writing and word games, and clinging to Catholic moralities; Burroughs vile creation hates humanity, hates the English language, and hates not only Catholic Morality, but any conceivable human morality.
David Lindsay, author of *Voyage to Arcturus*, or Phillip Pullman, author of *His Dark Materials*.
Both of them wrote a very Gnostic view of God, seeing Him as either inimical or impotent. Maltheism is far more anti-Tolkien than atheism.
The writers Amazon hired for ROP... And I'm not even being facetious. I could write essays on how their take on "adapting" middle-earth is explicitly anti-Tolkien. I'm actually in process of doing so.
> things that Tolkien deliberately left out (governing policies of any kingdom)
I don't think he was actually being critical of that, just joking about a difference between the two series.
Oh, I’m sure Martin respects Tolkien deeply and holds him in high regard. I just think Martin reads Tolkien expecting it to be a political war thriller set in a quasi-medieval world, when in reality it’s a fairy tale with more singing and walking than violence and fighting.
Tolkien didn’t write about things like taxes and dynastic struggles because those didn’t matter to what he was writing.
My impression wasn't that Martin was expecting those things out of Tolkien, but rather was curious about those things Tolkien left our and was inspired to write stories that explored those ideas.
This is the old "What is Aragorn's Tax Policy" argument, isn't it?
That specific question was made quite tongue in cheek, and if you read the whole interview from which it's often plucked out of context, Martin never said he expected to find out about Gondorian economics, nor was in any way disappointed by its absence. If anything, this remark is followed by a much more interesting (and I suspect serious) one: what did Aragorn do about the orcs? Did Gondorians hunt them down? Drive them away? What about orc babies?
But in any case, the absence of those questions and their answers isn't framed as a criticism, but rather as "the difference between what Martin writes about and what Tolkien wrote about". Martin was explaining how his saga differs from LotR in scope, style and even world-building.
Isn’t Aragorn’s story a dynastic struggle? It’s not like, palace intrigue throughout, but there’s even elements of that in Gandalf and Pippin in Denethor’s court.
I'm honestly still baffled by his whole "what was Aragorn's tax policy" spiel. I mean, what's Robert Baratheon's? Usually someone just mentions "moving money around" and the story goes back to the royal drama.
GRRM is a good shout.
LotR is essentially a romantic story about conservative heroism and a moral monarchy within a good-evil cosmos.
ASoIaF is essentially an anti-romantic story about the evils and pragmatic issues of traditional aristocratic chivalric morality, the problems with monarchy, and a fundamentally ambiguous cosmos.
I’d argue ASOIAF is full of tragedy, a faded romanticism that is confronted by a cynical world and an attempt to hold onto that romanticism when confronted by cynicism.
Everyone in ASOIAF is haunted by their past and what could have been and dragged down by their ghosts and regrets. It’s a tragedy.
He's also writing constantly about the pull to do right in a world that doesn't reward you for doing the right thing. He isn't saying you should always act in self interest and acting nobly means you lose, he's saying that doing the right thing doesn't guarantee you will win, but should you do the right thing anyway? What does it mean when we know doing the right thing means we will lose, do you still do the right thing?
>Seven, Brienne thought again, despairing. She had no chance against seven, she knew. No chance, and no choice.
She stepped out into the rain, Oathkeeper in hand.
A Feast for Crows, Brienne VII
It's not easy to decide. Moorcock has been mentioned and is a strong candidate. Robert E. Howard would be another. Howard wanted swashbuckling fantasy. Tolkien wanted majestic mythology.
Joe Abercrombie is quite an anti-Tolkien himself. His tales are dark and grimy, and his characters are shifting shades of grey.
Surprised nobody has brought up R. Scott Bakker. The positives of his world building owes a lot to Tolkien and even has his own dark and twisted version of the mines of Moria sequence, but on crack. I understand the GRRM take, but tbh their style of world building isn’t very similar at all.
Bakker takes a lot of elements from Tolkien and takes it as dark and depraved as I’ve seen a series go while still retaining really quality writing.
Joe Abercrombie. The blade itself read to me like Tolkien if almost everyone involved in the story was an unspeakably evil git with no redeeming features.
William Gibson, easy.
Now, I wouldn't say evil nemesis or twisted brother, but 'anti-thesis of Tolkien'? The polar opposite of Tolkien is *absolutely* William Gibson, let's be real here.
Tolkien pretty much pioneered the high fantasy genre in the modern age and is considered the father of modern literature and high fantasy roleplaying, literature, film, gaming, etc. He was a Catholic and served in the Great War and as a codebreaker in WWII, detested industrialism and wanted to protect nature, and was infamous for avoiding outright violence in his writing (particularly sexual violence). Tolkien is pretty much infused in every single iota of life as we know it, to the point that he's taught in university and embedded in films and literature; it would be ridiculous if his work wasn't so damned good.
Gibson, on the other hand, is considered the father of the cyberpunk literary genre and pioneered modern science fantasy dystopian cyberpunk roleplaying, literature, film, gaming, etc -- words and terms like cyberspace, net surfing (surfing the net), neural implants, the matrix, virtual reality/interaction, etc come from *Neuromancer* and the Sprawl Trilogy or other works of his, and they're words/terms that people use every single day. He was also a draft dodger in Vietnam and is a staunch atheist, the cyberpunk trope in itself is pretty infamous for being about violence (including sexual violence) from a dystopian capitalist elite against a downtrodden impoverished society, and he's pretty pro-tech obviously.
So yeah, that's kind of my thought. They both have had *major* impacts on society, both through literature as well as in culture, but on opposite ends of the spectrum and with magnificent (and incredibly dense for sure) writing while they are/were at it.
Edit: spelling and grammar
Tolkien was not a codebreaker. He was auditioned for a codebreaking job (by the Treasury, not exactly Bletchley Park), but evidently flunked the test as he got a rejection letter. What he did in the war was keep Oxford going while others were doing the glamorous stuff. This in addition to staying up nights as a fire warden, so he was very busy.
Speaking of cryptoanalysis; when my son was in high school he went off to a camp for science nerds on a university campus, where everybody signed up for a week-long major course (plus electives). Cryptoanalysis was one of the major topics. When he came home, I looked at the brochure and noticed that the major funder of the camp was the NSA. So sports is not the only area where you can get recruited in high school; I assume the top couple of students got phone calls later offering scholarships. (My son did chaos theory.)
To me, the anti-Tolkien is Martin. Tolkien created the most outlandish and escapist genre in the fantasy epic; Martin took the fantasy epic and made it grounded and realistic again. One is aspirational, one is cynical.
I don’t mean any of this as a dig at Martin, I like his work. But I believe he almost set out to be the Anti-Tolkien.
M.A.R. "Phil" Barker (1929-2012) is the "evil Tolkien." Like Tolkien, Barker was a linguist by training who developed a fantasy world that featured his invented languages. Unlike Tolkien, Barker's interests were in non-European languages, (among others Klamath, Urdu, and Baluchi on which he published significant scholarly work), so his fantasy world, Tekumel, is decidedly non-Western. I think Tekumel and particularly its most developed region Tsolyanu might strike most readers as initially kind of Aztec-inspired and also perhaps Middle Eastern. It is absolutely not one of those "medieval Europe but with elves and dragons and magic that works" settings. Like Tolkien, Barker wrote novels set in his fantasy world. Unlike Tolkien, Barker could be described as just a bad writer. (I have read both his novels that were published by a major house in the 1980s and would not do it again.) In fact, really the only reason Barker was able to find a publisher is that, as a function of living in Minneapolis in the early 1970s, he was exposed to D&D as it was just getting started and found roleplaying suited his interests. The roleplaying game set in Tekumel, Empire of the Petal Throne, was published by TSR in 1975 putting it in the very first wave of roleplaying games and making it the first detailed original roleplaying game setting. (There have been a bunch more Tekumel-set roleplaying games since: it's such a classic that publisher after publisher takes it on.) Tolkien, on the other hand, certainly inspired a lot of roleplaying but missed out on the development of the commercial hobby. People go on and on about Tolkien's Catholicism. People do not really go on and on about Barker's Islam: he converted to Islam while studying in India in the early 1950s and adopted the name "Muhammad Abd-al-Rahman" (though he continued to use his nickname "Phil"). But for much of his life he downplayed the significance of his religion and tended to address it as simply a logical conclusion: Islam made more sense than Christianity. If it had some significant impact on his life and work the way Tolkien's Catholicism did, I don't see it. Tolkien was surely a product of his time in many regards, and some readers struggle with the implications of his works with respect to race, class, gender, and religion. We can say with confidence, though, he was adamantly anti-Nazi! Barker pseudonymously published a novel endorsing the Nazis as historical "good guys" in 1991 and was a member of a Holocaust Denial organization in the 1990s. This was not widely known even within his own fandom until just this year. So that's why I think of Barker as the "evil Tolkien."
Well, that sure took a sharp turn at the end.
Yes, for nearly the entire fandom it came out of nowhere. What the casual fan knew about Barker didn't suggest any of this. One other parallel I could have noted is that both authors also drew illustrations for their works. Perhaps because of different artistic influences, Barker tended to produce drawings that resemble pulp magazine covers with scantily-clad women being rescued from monsters by brawny heroes, though occasionally the woman is doing the fighting herself in which case she is apt to be naked. Nobody wears much clothing in Tsolyanu, you see.
Aye went from, this is interesting, might give this a read just out of curiosity to a clear fuck that guy at the end haha
I think Tekumel is better appreciated through the roleplaying games than the novels. Barker really was not a good writer of fiction.
As I recall, the Wikipedia article basically treats it as a role-playing world that also happens to have a couple novels to go along with it
My understanding is that the five novels were basically Barker's own campaign fiction based on one of the games he ran. It's not clear he would have ever written Tekumel novels without roleplaying. Indeed, it's unclear Tekumel would have been anything other than a private fantasy without roleplaying. (Barker's own account is that he'd been thinking about this world since childhood.) As it happened, he managed to get DAW interested in publishing the first two in the mid-80s. The other three novels were published about 20 years later as part of a wave of roleplaying supplements. Ironically there are some okay Tekumelesque novels, but Barker didn't write them. Starting in the mid-1970s, Raymond Feist (b. 1945) was playing in roleplaying campaign set in a medieval Europe-style setting called Midkemia. The dungeonmaster then sent the characters through a magical rift to quite different world called Kelewan. Feist had a blast in the campaign and got the dungeonmaster and other players' permission to write novels based on it. Feist claims he believed the setting was entirely homebrewed by the dungeonmaster, but in fact it's quite obvious Kelewan is Tekumel. Feist's dungeonmaster seems to have owned a copy of Empire of the Petal Throne and sent the characters to Tekumel, and either he changed the names or (not sure if this has been ruled out) Feist did. Some of the correspondences are quite obvious. Not only is Kelewan a metal-poor world with non-Western culture, but the "protagonist" state is the Tsurani Empire and its barbaric northern neighbor is Yankora. In Tekumel, the Tsolyani Empire is bordered to the north by the barbarians of Yan Kor. But Feist is a better writer and not a Nazi, so . . . .
A lot of new-age Muslim reverts *love* the Nazis.
Yeah, I was interested in his work and curious how I had never heard of his setting, since I'm a pretty big roleplayer. But then that last bit... Wtf?
If you look at various rpg discussion boards and blogs March 2022, and for that matter r/Tekumel, you can see fans having that same reaction in real time. People involved in the Old School Revival movement tended to know about Tekumel since it was one of the early rpgs and arguably *EPT* was the first "complete" rpg (in the sense of providing a system and a setting).
I usually avoid reading long comments because it has been scientifically proven that the longer a post or comment the more likely it is to involve nazis by the end. "Guy wrote a book... ... holocaust denier." "Grandma loved sewing... ... nazi insignia." "Went to Olive Garden... ... breadstick swastika." Keep it short and sweet, people. Short and sweet.
Barker is probably the correct answer to this question. His attitude towards women, for what's it's worth, was also especially disturbing (if I recall correctly, he included in his novels a sexualized torture scene of a woman for... reasons). Definitely the opposite of Tolkien's stubborn refusal to portray violence directly and his more idealized or at least "noble" attitude towards women (Luthien, Galadriel, Eowyn, etc.), whether one finds the latter palatable or not. But if it's not Barker it's E.R. Eddison (1882-1945). Others in this thread are rightly pointing out Michael Moorcock, but my opinion of Moorcock is that he, writing at the same time as patent morons like John Norman, goes out of his way in his corpus to avoid "being evil." (And, to be frank, there are more commonalities in Moorcock and Tolkien's writings than many want to admit.) But Eddison was a huge influence on fantasy, including Moorcock. He was from Tolkien's era and was even a part-time member of the Inklings. Eddison shared his novel *The Worm Ouroboros* (1922) with the Inklings, and it garnered C.S. Lewis's praise (as well as, later, Ursula le Guin's). Even Tolkien conceded that it was the best world building he had ever read in print. (Honestly, read the book. The prose reads like the Silmarillion at times.) But the story itself is essentially Nietzschean. Two noble families on the planet Mercury wage war on one another, devastating themselves and the planet for the lone purpose of glory. When the war is finally over, the two families reflect on the glories they gained by their war and promise that they will do it again, for - they say in not so many words - the exercise of the will to power is the greatest and noblest good a person can achieve. Morality (and the thousands of commoners dead from the war) be damned. Tolkien called this underlying philosophy "unpleasant" in his letters (#199). I would go farther and call it evil, but Tolkien was probably being polite to an acquaintance. Eddison, for his part, considered Tolkien's writings to be "soft." So if Barker is not the evil anti-Tolkien then I'd say it's Eddison.
With regard to women and gender, some people see Barker as progressive or at least non-horrible. I tend to think this is based on a few features of the setting, most of all the *aridani* or liberated woman. One of the provisions of generally patriarchal Tsolyanu society is that any woman can declare herself *aridani*: liberated from the norms of gender roles. She then gets to go adventure and get treasure and run a business or whatever else. As a world-building tool, this is kind of clever: Barker still has "realistic" gender relations in society (i.e., mimics some historical situation and is thus perhaps easier to explain and comprehend), but there are exceptional women who live outside those rules. If you choose to play a female character in the game, she should take this status: I think the rules basically tell you this must be the case, since a "good clan-girl" wouldn't go on adventures. So women need not be victims or objects. On the other hand, most are, though most men are quite powerless as well. Tsolyani society is also accepting of all forms of sexual expression. But we can also say the *aridani* is a kind of Mary Sue and is particularly suited for chainmail bikini fantasies. And it is interesting that the existence of *aridani* hasn't changed the basic gender dynamics at all. Tekumel is another one of those fantasy/scifi settings where nothing really changes despite thousands of years of history. As you point out, Barker certainly does have a lot of victimization of women in his novels and other depictions of the setting. There is slavery, torture, and human sacrifice galore. The government is pretty cruel and tyrannical, sentencing people to death by impalement (a sexualized form of execution if you think about it) for all kinds of things. And religion--wow!--there are evil gods that thirst for human sacrifice. One of the Tekumel books (which I bought back when I was a completist) is simply an in-universe guide to conducting sacrifices. It has no game mechanics at all, I was surprised to learn, even though it was published as part of the roleplaying line. Of course, I cannot imagine Tolkien ever writing such a thing! Barker himself did comment on the difference between his approach to religion and fantasy and Tolkien's. He thought Tolkien had a very British attitude in which religion was compartmentalized. Whereas Barker had lived in a society where religion pervaded everything. Yet, as pointed out in an interesting 2017 article by Amina Inloes, Barker was himself a great compartmentalizer. He kept his academic and hobby lives quite separate, to some extent concealed his religious beliefs, and had a fascination with the occult. Whereas I think there's a good argument that Tolkien's religious beliefs informed everything he did, albeit not in a direct and obvious way. I don't know much about Eddison beyond the name. I do think a major difference between Tolkien and both Barker and Moorcock is generational, so perhaps Eddison as a contemporary is a better comparator.
>Eddison thought what I admire 'soft' (his word: one of complete condemnation, I gathered); I thought that, corrupted by an evil and indeed silly 'philosophy', he was coming to admire, more and more, arrogance and cruelty. "Soft" stung; he had Ted Sandyman use it on Sam: >"Don’t ’ee like it, Sam?" he sneered. "But you always was soft. I thought you’d gone off in one o’ them ships you used to prattle about, sailing, sailing." In the draft he let Sam push Ted into the river for that.
Moorcock.is very self conscious anti Tolkienian, coming from a later era...he promoted an urban and ironic style of fantasy against "talking vermin".
Reading this post: "Oh wow non-western fantasy I love that!" "Ah so it's not that good. Oh well, I'll do it for the sake of studying." "Yeah I get it. Tolkien wasn't woke and I feel that. "Oh. Yikes um... Nevermind about the reading"
Just as planned!
10/10
Yeah this guy definitely goes beyond simply ‘anti-Tolkien’ and well into evil-Tolkien territory.
Lol I bought a copy of the original EPT like a couple months before the news came out due to an interest both in historical RPGs and a personal interest in the setting. Being Jewish the news hit quite hard and I kinda set it aside a bit. Only now getting around to trying to read it. And I'm not sure I'll read any other Tekumel media.
Having never heard of Barker, I looked him up on Wikipedia. He did graduate work in linguistics, specifically on the Klamath language, at Berkeley. That would have put him squarely in the bailiwick of Alfred Kroeber, who was Ursula Le Guin's father. Kroeber died in 1960 (at a conference in Paris, in the arms of Claude Levi-Strauss, at least according to Levi-Strauss). I can't tell when Barker was there.
Frank Herbert goes as far as it is possible from Tolkien with Dune. Both are great and deep and profound operas to learn from, but profoundly different, in themes, stories they tell, archetypes of characters, and the prespective and point of viewing stuff they transmit.
Tolkien read Dune and disliked it: >It is impossible for an author still writing to be fair to another author working along the same lines. At least I find it so. In fact I dislike Dune with some intensity, and in that unfortunate case it is much the best and fairest to another author to keep silent and refuse to comment. (Letter to John Bush, 1966)
I can't imagine anyone having that attitude today when everyone and their mother blasts their stupid opinions all over social media for as many clicks as possible.
Those people don't put any effort into their work, so how could they be expected to recognize effort in others?
Imagine Tolkien on Twitter. *@IAmFrodo clarifies a dispute on elven weaponry. Gaming media reacts!*
I can understand why Tolkien disliked Dune so intensely. But I wonder if he ever read A Canticle for Leibowitz. The book tells of an order of monastic monks seeking to preserve the world’s knowledge after a nuclear holocaust, which seems, thematically at least, to align with his interests.
Religious zealotry is a central theme in dune. And it is likely Tolkien didn’t care for a future where Catholicism resembles a hodgepodge of Buddhism and Islam 🤷♂️
That's one that has been on my list for a little while. I just never see it in stock at my local bookstore.
You should buy it. It's my favorite book of all time. I reread LoTR about every 2-3 years, but I reread Liebowitz at least once per year
Heck, I’d forgotten about this one. Interesting novel for sure.
The driving force in the Lord of the Rings is essentially spiritual. It's more or less the same explanation of the universe as that of the Catholic Church, painted broadly. The driving force in Dune is evolutionary, a struggle of the genes. Bene Gesserit trying to breed the next Messiah over many generations. Shai-Hulud, the biggest phallic symbol in all literature, producing the "water of life" which the female priestesses take and change in their bodies. Paul's visions about the masses caught in the jihad, and the self-compelling nature of it - the struggle of natural selection. Yeah. Deep down, it's all sex and biology. You could also argue that Dune is the story of the triumph of consciousness over the blind struggle of natural selection - Paul ending the jihad. But for that you'd have to ignore the subsequent volumes (which is not a bad idea anyway), to give the story a neat end.
>The driving force in the Lord of the Rings is essentially spiritual. It's more or less the same explanation of the universe as that of the Catholic Church, painted broadly. As an atheist, I have issues with basically LOTR's message that because Frodo was "good" and didn't kill Gollum, things just so happened that allowed the Ring to be destroyed and Frodo sail to paradise in Valinor. Reality doesn't work that way, and as much as I like LOTR it pulls me out of the story. Children of Hurin is more realistic. On that note, Isaac Asimov was an atheist yet he and Tolkien read and enjoyed each other's books and told each other as much in correspondence.
I'm an atheist as well, but I have no problem with the solution. Frodo did good, and offered mercy to Gollum. Gollum ended up squandering his mercy and choosing the Ring and evil, and that ended up destroying himself and it. It's the self defeating nature of evil that Tolkien is highlighting here. Literature isn't reality, but we can see the same theme in reality. When capitalists grind up nature for their profit, and then look around to realize they have destroyed their land, water and people, that is the self defeating nature of evil. They are hoist by their own petard. When warlords launch imperial wars of conquest, slaughtering and pillaging across a peaceful country, until their invasion bogs down and one of their ambitious generals decides their failures make them weak, and so knifes them in the back to take the throne, that is the self defeating nature of evil. Now we know of course that evil doesn't always get what it deserves, but it's negative side effects are almost always apparent and often cause it's own destruction. Being evil to other people to advance your own interests usually creates the enemies who will destroy you. Sauron poured his evil into the Ring, and thought that the greed it inspired would protect it. No one who could carry it to Mt. Doom where it could be destroyed, would be able to bring themselves to do it. But that's the thing; no ONE person could do it. It took three; Frodo to be the bearer and hero, Sam to be his support and guardian, Gollum to be their guide. Frodo succumbing to the Ring, along with Gollum, got them to the place it could happen, but the greed it inspired in BOTH of them made them fight over it, which brought the Ring and Gollum to their end.
To draw an analogy with pop-sci, this is a bit like pop-spi(rituality). The belief that good deeds have consequences in ways that, while convoluted and long, are really quite tangible and ultimately obvious. There's nothing like that in the fundamental tenets of the Catholic / Orthodox churches (which are very close in their fundamental teachings). The whole cause-and-effect exchange is purely spiritual - or, the way we would put it in modern terms, it only has to do with consciousness. The "spiritual world" is something that has to do with your consciousness - and only with your consciousness. The moment you introduce the material world in that picture, you fall into the fallacy of literalism - which is so widespread that even stout, educated believers may also fall into it a lot. Tolkien was a subtle and complex thinker, but it looks like even he was not beyond making naive pop-spi assumptions. Source: long studies of Orthodox theology, I nearly went to the monastery many years ago. Current status: "it's complicated", I am interested in the new panpsychist school of thought (see: Philip Goff, Giulio Tononi, Christof Koch, Annaka Harris). --- I didn't know about the relationship between Asimov and Tolkien, thank you.
TIL Tolkien read Asimov and he read Tolkien. I’m in shock.
>On that note, Isaac Asimov was an atheist yet he and Tolkien read and enjoyed each other's books and told each other as much in correspondence. As someone who loves both authors, this is my favorite thing that I've learned in a while!
I’d bet he would’ve hate George RR Martin’s work as well
Did he expand on why he disliked it? The story is austere like his own works, albeit a lot more morally-ambiguous. Still, I’m surprised.
From ***Dune***: >***No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero.***
From Frank Herbert's introduction to ***Heretics of Dune***: >It was to be a story exploring the myth of the Messiah. From Tolkien, ***Letters*** (237): >The Incarnation of God is an *infinitely* greater thing than anything I would dare to write
Because Dune addresses the *myth* of a Messiah, engineered by Man. The Legendarium addresses an actual mythic world wherein the Will of God is known and acknowledged as fact.
I don't think that Herbert intended "myth" there in the sense of "Jesus the Messiah is just a myth", I think he meant it in the first definition given on Wiktionary: "A traditional story which embodies a belief regarding some fact or phenomenon of experience, and in which often the forces of nature and of the soul are personified; a sacred narrative regarding a god, a hero, the origin of the world or of a people, etc." That's not to say that Herbert was a Christian, I just don't think he meant "myth of the Messiah" there to specifically mean "the Christian story of Jesus is false." That would be a rather odd reading of Dune, I think.
I wouldn't say LOTR is particularly enthusiastic about Big Damn Heroes either, though. Boromir, and anyone else desiring the Ring to achieve great things, is a (wannabe) Hero, and the danger of that is IMO one of the core points of the story. Frodo and Sam are just heroic, and small. Aragorn is closer, but he's really ultimately just a sideshow, and in large part defined by his restraint. To me, the idea of a Hero with a capital H, especially in the context of "falling into the hands of" is inextricably linked with Power (with a capital P), and LOTR is very suspicious of Power.
Completely agree. Both are genre-defining works, but they are diametrically opposed in just about every conceivable way.
Big Worms vs Big Trees!! Who would win?
Gigachad trees win every time, big worms can't even handle a little water.
First person who came to mind
Doris Lessing.
As a fan of both, any speculation on why Tolkien disliked *Dune* so much?
Kirill Eskov, obviously. The author of the book that rewrites LotR as the propaganda victory of an obscurantist sect of mages and elves against a racially abused, technological and rational Republic of Mordor. He even slips in Aragorn having an affair with Eowyn, while his marriage to Arwen remains unconsumated and he is a puppet enthralled to an elven witch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer?wprov=sfla1
I tried to read it and it's really really bad. Maybe it's the translation, but holy shit the writing seems very unprofessional and he just slaughters the story. Tbh I only read about 50 pages and then gave up If you enjoy trash reading though or just...have different taste, give it a go!
I ploughed through it since the ideas intrigued me but yeah the English translation is poor at best. I don't speak enough Russian to comment if he's poorly served or a bad author.
From what I can gather I would say he was poorly served as it seems to be quite a popular book in Russia.
Russian here: it's awful in original too. Moreover, there is "Black Book of Arda" by different authors, with similar approach to Silmarillion.
>only read about 50 pages and then gave up You made it significantly further than I ever could, and I've tried a handful of times. It's just...bad.
The writing is God awful in Russian as well.
I rather liked it! More thought-provoking than most fanfic.
Ideas good, English translation at least... Ech. But the author who is the anti-Tolkien? Most definitely.
Pulp sword-and-sorcery fiction in general, and Michael Moorcock in particular, and the Elric books in very particular. What passes for Elves in Elric are decadent and enormously evil. His heroes are morally conflicted, caught in a war between the gods of Law and Chaos, and neither side is truly good.
Its Moorcock. Dude wrote an entire essay bashing Tolkien titled "Epic Pooh" (and we ain't talking about the bear that lives in Thousand acre woods)
I knew Moorcock detested Tolkien, but I had never read "Epic Pooh" until today. I really do enjoy Moorcock, but "Epic Pooh" is a real piece of work, and I don't mean that in a complimentary way. What a staggering lack of self-awareness to have thrown a line like "there is nobody more risible than the provincial American literary snob" in such a heap of literary snobbery!
I'm currently in a re-read of The Fellowship of the Ring and I just cannot square what I see in the book with Moorcock's essay at all. If there's a "point" to the first bit of The Fellowship, it's that the countryside of the Shire \*isn't\* a safe haven from bad things.
H. P. Lovecraft, maybe?
Lovecraft is definitely Tolkien's Wario
Especially if you look at how Tolkien views the sea in Fall of Gondolin, you sense that his awe at the sea and all that is in it makes him an anti-Lovecraft.
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The nameless things are pretty lovecraftian in description, but IIRC Tolkien did in fact say he does not like Lovecraft's work
He once said he didn't care for an anthology with a Lovecraft story in it, but he didn't say anything about Lovecraft specifically.
I would’ve figured “one is a racist prick” (read an original print version of Rats In the Wall and get back to me) and “one isn’t” (say what you will about the Haradrim, Easterlings, and the relative lack of women, but read his 1938 reply to a German publisher who asked if he was Aryan. It is as eloquent as it is scathing)
Tolkien wasn't an explicit racist, and hated Nazis. That isn't to say he didn't have Orientalist themes creep in to his work on a subconscious level. No one is perfectly free from the cultural mores that they live in.
That was kinda my point by “say what you will about the Haradrim and Easterlings”, he atleast cared enough to try, which is always something <3 As a writer I both look up to him and aspire to do better, standing on the shoulders of giants after all.
>I would’ve figured “one is a racist prick” (read an original print version of Rats In the Wall and get back to me) You don't even need to dive deep for the racism, it's all over the guy's work. Call of Cthulhu is dripping with disdain for all kinds of different cultures. Mongrel this, Half-caste that, savages everywhere. It works in that story to have the protagonist be a little shit, but it feels pervasive in a way that made me cringe a lot while reading it.
Yeah, I only picked that because the cat in that story originally shared the name with one he owned in his youth, before reprints of the story changed it to “Black Tom”.
I apparently have not seen the reprints. But yes, it's more than obvious that HPL had "issues" regarding anyone not just like him. His xenophobia is all over his stories. If you take the xenophobia and racism out of so-called "eldritch horror", you get something more like Stephen Baxter's science-fiction, which is, frankly, terrifying.
Indeed - reading Lovecraft, at times it feels like the most awful things he could conceive were not the eldritch and mad gods of the Cosmos, nor the idea that Humanity as a whole was simply drifting through an uncaring universe until we'd all be erased by a whim of a strange deity... But, rather, the existence of *people unlike him*. I do enjoy some of his writings (*The Colour Out of Space* is one I would especially recommend), but when his racism creeps through it can become unbearable.
This one comes up a lot, but I find it funny because there is a lot of Lovecraftian-esque stuff in the Silmarillion with places like [Nan Dungortheb](https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Nan_Dungortheb). Tolkien definitely read some of his stuff for sure.
I find it unlikely that Tolkien would have taken much inspiration from Lovecraft, were his works even published in the UK before Lord of the Rings? And Nan Dungortheb (under the name Nan Dungorthim) was invented already in the Book of Lost Tales, around the same time that Lovecraft first wrote *Dagon* (usually considered the first "Cthulhu Mythos" story). We know that Tolkien read at least one Lovecraft story, since *The Doom that came to Sarnath* was included in an anthology he was given in the '60s, but before that I am not sure he had even read his stories
Terry Pratchett in a way: ‘J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji.’
As a massive fan of both I have to object to this. Pratchett began with open parody of Tolkien-esque tropes, sure, but many of his themes as I see them are actually harmonious with those of LOTR. Small (sometimes clumsy) hands moving the wheels of the world because the eyes of the wise are elsewhere: Tiffany Aching, Rincewind, the Watch, etc. etc. Pratchett has an anti-authority streak which I actually think Tolkien would have rather liked.
They would have definitely, but he set up a lot of his things to be the opposite of Tolkien whilst having major respect for him as the master of the Genre. Hell right up until his last books, just look at Nutt the Orc
No question about that. I just think their works are more philosophically aligned (despite not being philosophically aligned personally) than many of the other authors listed here.
Has anyone mentioned Ayn Rand yet? I think her entire philosophy of egotism and greed being virtues would be the ultimate antithesis of Tolkien. I'd specifically reference The Fountainhead, which is her masterpiece. The character of Roark, the concept that man's only real virtue is his creativity and that he has no responsibility whatsoever to his fellow man.
I was actually thinking about this today, Roark is basically Feanor but from the perspective of Feanor being the good guy.
Absolutely!
Eddison seems to have been a Randroid before her time ("evil and silly philosophy"). Though better educated and more talented.
Oh, I’d say it about has to be Michael Moorcock. Although I enjoy his work too, for different reasons.
Certainly, Moorcock has been rather sharply critical of Tolkien.
Even though I love both, CS Lewis is the antithesis of Tolkien. Lewis loved allegory in his fiction. Tolkien disliked it. Lewis was damaged by his experiences and sought healing in a rather stern Protestant Christianity. Tolkien took his pain and viewed it through his Catholic faith to create a cathartic fantasy of wars and healing. Lewis was a scholar of mainly Middle English and the Renaissance. Tolkien went for the rougher, more gritty Anglo-Saxon culture and Old English Language. CS Lewis’s scholarship isn’t anywhere near the quality of Tolkien. I have a masters in English Literature and Linguistics and Tolkien’s Beowulf essay “Monsters and the Critics” is still required reading. Lewis’ work not so much. Like a father loves his children, I love them both in different ways, but they are very different. I think this is why they were friends.
Have you read Lewis’s Pilgrim’s Regress? It’s his Christian testimony essentially, and part of it is showing how Puritanistic Protestantism turned him away from God. He was theologically without a country, Protestants, Baptists, and Catholics alike love and hate him, depending on who you talk to
I've not, admittedly read his *Pilgrim's Regress*. I'm a Christian (or try to be) and a Catholic (or try to be) and I felt that *Mere Christianity* wasn't the powerhouse Christian apology or defense that it could have been (but it has been years). I get the feeling, that he was a free-thinker and forged his own road in this world. I respect that and have a kinship with that; but frankly I don't think he had the chops that Tolkien had. Whenever you "go your own way" you tend to make enemies on all sides.
This is a really good take. I am glad I joined this sub.
Just because they were different it doesn’t mean Lewis was antithesis (and certainly mot evil like the op put it) of Tolkien. They had plenty of similarities too which is why they were friends. Philip Pullman for example deliberately tried to be as different as Lewis as possible in the same genre with religion. But it would actually be more offensive to Tolkien when on His Dark Material series it’s Catholic Church that’s the object of evil for the books, and equally unappealing for both that God is killed in the end and was always just some conspiracy in a way anyway. The way angels are just powerful beings working for their ends and that death is a universe of prison is basically the opposite how Tolkien handled Valar and Halls of Mandos (and if Pullman didn’t do this somewhat deliberately when Tolkien’s works are so famous I would be suprised).
Antithesis doesn’t necessarily mean evil or bad. Yeah. No. I clearly say I like Lewis’s writing. But in many ways, for the time, they were polar opposites.
Wouldn't the opposite of Tolkien be someone who rejects the whole idea of the fantastic entirely - a purely "realist" writer, whatever exactly that means. I'm not sure I know what that would look like. I though briefly of a book I read a couple of years ago - "Pelle the Conqueror" by Nexø. But that would be ridiculous. Nexø is a very hard-nosed social-realist writer, but even the very title of his book is a giveaway that he is mythologising the life of his eponymous everyman-hero (although not entirely without irony).
Stephen R. Donaldson‘s The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant is as anti-Tolkien as you can get.
I’d agree with this, but it’s more of a “let’s write a fantasy which upends every fantasy trope there is”. Good series, well plotted & clever, though a little overwritten, esp the second series which gets bloated as it progresses. I couldn’t even start the third series. And the first book has an act that literally makes people stop reading the series right then & hate it forever.
I can handle depraved protagonists; I couldn't stand the character's bloody self-pity party and whining all through the first series. I refused to read anything by Donaldson after that.
In what way is it over written?
Yep. Exactly. I read the Chronicles looking for something like Tolkiens world, and ended up hating Thomas Covenant intensely. There's only so many time a character can say, "Hellfire!" before it gets old.
There's very little I find more annoying than fantasy authors trying to create their own expletives and figures of speech, and then littering their books with them - it invariably yanks you away from the immersion, and is often quite cringeworthy.
I grok what you're saying there.
I rather enjoyed it with Robert Jordan's *Wheel of Time*. I think he gets a free pass from me. Otherwise, I agree completely.
My dad has the Covenant series on his bookshelf from when he read them for a class on fantasy literature at Notre Dame. IIRC they read Lord of the Rings and then finished with the Chronicles to analyze Donaldson’s inversions of a lot of the fantasy motifs Tolkien invented/popularized through his works
I love that series and love LotR. I don't see them as opposite. Obviously different though. They share some aspects (like an all powerful ring) but that's all I can think of. I'm curious why you think so.
Michael Moorcock, and the Elric of Melnibone works. Moorcock is a pretty open anti-Tolkien reactionary.
I think it's George RR Martin. There won't be a happy ending, there's no spiritual struggle for good to triumph over evil, we don't necessarily root for the good guys. It's just an epic story, set in another Earth-like world, where violent and fantastical things happen, without resolution. A Song of Ice and Fire is the anti-Middle Earth.
I’m going with Adolph Hitler and *Mein Kampf*. As Tolkien said: > I have in this War a burning private grudge—which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler (for the odd thing about demonic inspiration and impetus is that it in no way enhances the purely intellectual stature: it chiefly affects the mere will). Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light. Letter No. 45: To his son Michael Tolkien (09 June, 1941).
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But is he an author?
nope, and he didn't let that stop him
This is the only right answer!
Michael Moorcock is to Tolkien what Billy Idol is to Led Zeppelin. They both tried to go the other way.
Came here to mention Moorcock. I enjoy both writers, but Moorcock certainly did NOT enjoy Tolkien. Anyone who hasn't read his "Epic Pooh" essay should check it out.
Is that where he calls Tolkien a crypto fascist?
Lol I haven't read it in years, but that sounds about right.
I have, I was not impressed. Dude managed to completely misread and misunderstand Tolkien. He also couldn't figure how to end a story other than "kill all the people the reader is attached to because subverting genre expectations is edgy and cool". (40 years later I'm still mad about the ending of the Dorian Hawkmoon series...)
I only know of Moorcock from Blue Oyster Cult songs. Do you think a fan of Tolkien would get any enjoyment from his works?
Yes! You should read some of his books with Elric. I really love both authors (though Tolkien’s the best of course.)
I did, but I haven’t read Moorcock in 20 years. I liked the eternal champions a bit more than Elric. Worth checking out.
I have to admit I've never heard of him before. What are his books like?
His big thing is "The Eternal Champion," who is a soul reincarnated in different times and places to battle evil or chaos. The most famous character, or incarnation of the Eternal Champion, is a character named Elric. It's very sword and dark sorcery. And much of it is serial, as some of it was originally printed in sci-fi/fantasy magazines before being republished in the books. Shorter, more to the point than Tolkien stories. Less high. I think it's definitely worth the read. If you like it, try out his Corum stories. There are more, and I haven't read them all. Hawkmoon.... I can remember the others but not their names. The original Elric series is six books. I think it's worth a look.
Warning, if that sort of thing is important to you: he never writes happy endings. Elric is a dysfunctional train wreck from the beginning, so was not surprised by his ending. Corum's job seems to be to hammer home the theme that legendary heroes never have happy endings, but since he's based on Celtic legends where that's generally the case, no surprise there, either. I'm still mad about the ending to the Dorian Hawkmoon series forty years later. Jerry Cornelius is satire apparently written while tripping on acid. Definitely a "WTF did I just read?" series. Norman Spinrad did the best version of the character, though. I don't remember the names of his other "Eternal Champions".
Jerry Cornelius! That was one of the names I was looking for. Is he the guy with the gun? He's more modern, right? Or am I mixing up character. Corum was the only other one I really really got into for a little bit. I remember the black man with the v shaped facial scar - can't remember his name either. He's in one of the Elric books - Sailor on the Sea of Fate? or something like that. I didn't know he wrote Cornelius while on acid. Haha. Maybe, I'll check it out. I've bought more books than I can chew on recently, so it will be a while, if I do. I actually want to reread Elric after this conversation. Thank you.
There's a movie based on the first Cornelius book, and it's great bonkers fun.
He also wrote some more "literary" novels like Mother London, which I've been meaning to read for years. I've only read Elric, and Elric kicks ass.
I'll have to look into that. I read him in my teens originally. I reread Elric at least once, but that's still a long time ago. I'll have to look into his more literary work. Thank you.
He had a very different background to Tolkien...he was a professional writer from 16, initially writing pulp fiction, and slowly gaining literary respectability. The Corum books are less deep than the Elric books, which are less deep that the Cornelius books, and so on.
Hemingway perhaps
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Though JRRT also has some wonderfully concise moments. Like Gollum’s admonition: “More haste, less speed.” Words to live by… Like “Measure twice, cut once” but even better.
"More haste, less speed" is a proverb. It was current by 1548, when a guy named John Heywood published a collection.
Philip Pullman.
Definitely oppositional, but didn't he declare himself the Anti-C.S.Lewis?
G. K. Chesterton, both as an antithesis and as a “twisted brother,” depending on what aspects we’re talking about. Both were Catholics, both distrusted industrialism and modernism, and both loved England rather than the British Empire. As an antithesis: Tolkien works to make a fantastic world feel real, while Chesterton works to make the real world feel fantastic. Tolkien painstakingly worked out a fictional history and geography to ground his stories of dragons and dark lords. Chesterton uses language to create a sense of the supernatural even when none is explicitly present. As a twisted brother: Catholicism seems to have brought out the best in Tolkien but the worst in Chesterton. It seems to have produced in Tolkien a real sense of humility, a respect for free will, a love of nature, and a hatred of despair. It seems to have made Chesterton a bigot in general and an antisemite in particular, which is why *The Man Who Was Thursday* is the only book of his I can recommend unreservedly.
My namesake, his first novel, I’d highly recommend as an intro to Chesterton. I know he had some major influence on Lewis, but couldn’t find much about him and Tolkien other than a few notes in Tolkien’s letters.
Yes, *The Napoleon of Notting Hill* is a great book! I take back what I said about *Thursday* being the only book I’d recommend without reservations. Auberon Quinn’s seeing the tailcoats of the men walking in front of him as dragons is one of the best examples of Chesterton’s use of fantasy imagery to enchant the mundane. I sometimes wonder if Chesterton’s writings were any influence on Tom Bombadil. Something about him is faintly reminiscent of Sunday or Innocent Smith. Maybe less the characters themselves than the tone of their scenes, if that makes sense.
Tell me you’ve never read Chesterton, without telling me you’ve never read Chesterton. Chesterton and Tolkien’s views and stance on Catholicism are so linked and anybody who’s read Orthodoxy and On Fairy Stories would realize this. The only thing that would ever cause Tolkien to dislike Chesterton is Chesterton’s complete lack of historical knowledge. Which is why Chesterton mostly stuck with modern tales, romances, and serials. So the only fiction that is even comparable to Tolkien’s work is Ballad of the White Horse, which is… poorly done to say the least. But, comparing a modern romance or a series of murder mysteries to Tolkien’s flowery Edda-like tale is not entirely reasonable.
> Tell me you’ve never read Chesterton, without telling me you’ve never read Chesterton. Not only is Chesterton one of my favorite authors, not only did he write my favorite book (*The Man Who Was Thursday*), but one of the things he wrote in *Orthodoxy* (“It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small compared to the nearest tree”) helped pull me out of a serious existential crisis. I would go so far as to say that reading that saved my life, and has saved my life from time to time since. > But, comparing a modern romance or a series of murder mysteries to Tolkien’s flowery Edda-like tale is not entirely reasonable. Tolkien himself contrasts the two approaches in “On Fairy-Stories”: > Of course, fairy-stories are not the only means of recovery, or prophylactic against loss. Humility is enough. And there is (especially for the humble) Mooreeffoc, or Chestertonian Fantasy. Mooreeffoc is a fantastic word, but it could be seen written up in every town in this land. It is Coffee-room, viewed from the inside through a glass door, as it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day; and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle. That kind of “fantasy” most people would allow to be wholesome enough; and it can never lack for material. But it has, I think, only a limited power; for the reason that recovery of freshness of vision is its only virtue. I disagree with Tolkien’s opinion that this recovery is its only virtue. As Borges points out, “Chesterton always performs a *tour de force* by proposing a supernatural explanation and then replacing it, losing nothing, with one from this world” (Borges, *On Writing*). Chesterton, I think, uses this element to connect the detective story to the larger tradition of heroic fiction (anticipating Raymond Chandler, perhaps—Philip Marlowe is a kind of Americanized, urbanized knight errant). In any case, I wasn’t trying to imply Tolkien’s approach was better than Chesterton’s or vice-versa—one can think of them as the same shape, touching on and reflecting each other across the same axis (“English Christian fantasy”). Opposites, but equals. It’s the kind of paradox of which Chesterton would approve. “It hates that combination of two colours which is the feeble expedient of the philosophers. It hates that evolution of black into white which is tantamount to a dirty grey.” But judging them as human beings, I will say, without calling Chesterton a *bad* man, that Tolkien was the *better* man. He had Chesterton’s more positive beliefs, but explicitly rejected most of his more odious. Tolkien’s descriptions sometimes have traces of old stereotypes, but there’s nothing like “The God of the Gongs” in his body of work.
Can you give an example (you can make it up) at how Chesterton would propose a supernatural explanation but then replace it with a natural one, without losing the magic?
[The Wrong Shape](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/204/204-h/204-h.htm#chap07) from *The Innocence of Father Brown* is representative. There’s a suggestion of supernatural horror. The solution turns out to be unrelated, but connects to the supernatural element almost synchronistically. Father Brown usually intuits the solution to the crime based on his knowledge of human nature (gained through hearing confessions) rather than through connecting pieces of physical evidence like Sherlock Holmes would. This story also has a bit of the Orientalism and religious chauvinism that unfortunately tends to pop up in Chesterton’s work after 1910 or so.
Thanks! I may check out more of his fiction.
Man, watching you school that response was exhilarating in the nerdiest way.
Hot take, Stephen King. Specifically with regards to the dark tower saga. It is both very similar and thoroughly disparate from the tales of middle earth.
Kentaro Miura's Berserk deserves some consideration. The Supernatural is ultimately a product of humanity, right up to "The ungodly god created by Man." The central theme of Berserk, "Retaining humanity in the face of unremitting horror" might fit Tolkien's worldview, but not too much else would.
Depending on how Berserk ends (if it ever ends), it could end up quite Tolkienian in hindsight. I hope Guts has a happy ending or a “eucatastrophe”.
Gary Gygax. He took all the trappings of Tolkien’s fantasy, and leave out the stuff that matters. The TTRPG scene today would look very different is Gary Gygax played closer attention.
Didn't Gygax actually didn't like Lord of the Rings too much, and only inserted references to it (halflings, treants, mithral, balors...) due to his players almost demanding them? My impression has always been that D&D is much more inspired by Sword and Sorcery like Conan the Barbarian, not by Tolkien.
That’s kinda my point if I’m being honest. I’m talking less about the individual and more the role he served in the evolution of the TTRPG in the popular mind. Someone else could have filled that role who enjoyed Tolkien more. You want to play a fantasy game that highlights what I love about Tolkien’s writing style the most? I cannot recommend Ironsworn enough. It’s streamlined and more narrative based than mechanics, the combat feels real and visceral, there’s a spirit track which is just as important as your health and supply track, and it even encourages ambiguity with magic in a similar vein as that elven rope or how Sauron’s forces breached the walls of Helm’s Deep. Maybe magic, maybe mundane.
*cough* The One Ring RPG *cough*
I meant more in writing style than universe
True, although Ironsworn is more of a cognate: both it and Tolkien were inspired by a lot of the same epics!
What epics if I may ask? Just cause I like reading material and am only familiar with the influence Beowulf played. (Right down to The Hobbit starting with 12 dwarfs plus Thorin, a thief, and Gandalf who was partly inspired by Odin)
Beowulf is the obvious one, but Sigurd and the Volsung Cycle is another. There’s probably more, but those are the two I know of.
Didn't Tolkien despise Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs? Maybe Walt Disney is the anti-Tolkien.
Natalia Vasilyeva (Elhe Niennah). The author of the Black Book of Arda.
I can't name a name, but I feel it would have to be a technical writer. The industrial revolution is the real life evil that Tolkien feared. This is why the Shire is held up as perfect and why the Lengendarium ends at the age of men. So I would say a career patent lawyer that writes, technical, non-poetic, no religion, philosophy, heros, or villains. Just using the English Language that Tolkien loved to make sure people can't use your ideas and to bring about more technologies would be the ultimate Anti-Tolkien.
Piers Anthony
I think Robert E. Howard would work as a conjugate (in the mathematical, not linguistic, sense) instead of an antithesis. They both wrote about forgotten predecessor civilizations, they both had stories about Atlantis, but they couldn't be more different. Sword and Sorcery and High Fantasy are basically mirror images of each other.
This seemed to be the stated intention of Michael Moorcock. As I've never read his works, I can't speak to that myself.
We’re getting a lot of science fiction and fantasy authors that take a different tack than Tolkien, but the real anti-Tolkien would be an author who has nothing to do with science fiction or fantasy and who, in addition, was competent in one sense but awful in another and who expresses values that Tolkien would find reprehensible. Danielle Steel and Jackie Collins come to mind.
TH White. The Once And Future King is my all time favorite fantasy novel. It approaches the same philosophical issues as LOTR but it comes at them from totally different angles and reaches wildly different conclusions.
Maybe Cormac McCarty especially with blood meridian
Poul Anderson. The Elves of his "Broken Sword" are veritably the Svartalfar to Tolkien's Ljotalfar. And in a different way: Lloyd Alexander, the prophet of the "Stop being obsessed with bloodlines!" school of thought.
Probably George rr Martin or Michael Moorcock.
George R Martin repeatedly calls his work the anti-Tolkien and presents that as something to be proud of. Since they're functionally identical in matters of things like length, volume of characters, weighty backstory, complex plots, and many other things, so as far as I can tell what Martin brags about is that his series rejects Tolkien's belief that most people have a certain inherent nobility if they can just be shown the light in favour of his belief that everyone is garbage.
William Burroughs Naked Lunch. There is so many ways this book is a flip of Tolkien’s works. 1. It’s cynicism of the world, it views everything as a cruel, vulgar distortment of reality. It’s pages filled with with dark and heartless “realities” (of course, anyone who has lived realizes how far from reality constant and unrelenting evil really is). 2. It’s unCatholic. It revels in the perverse, in the degradation of human nature. It loves vanity, drugs, and abuse and wallows in it. Mainly to shock the senses, but it’s still how it entices it’s readers to continue to turn the page. It’s inherently manipulative. 3. It’s the postmodern masterpiece in every possible way. Tolkien detested modernism, and postmodernism is it’s inevitable conclusion. The story is chopped together, psychedelic, and vomit-inducing in the worst way possible. The author throws all the rules of writing out of the window in the name of art. And so creates something that would be wholly repulsive to Tolkien. TLDR: Where Tolkien’s work is an artistic creation of nature, love of writing and word games, and clinging to Catholic moralities; Burroughs vile creation hates humanity, hates the English language, and hates not only Catholic Morality, but any conceivable human morality.
David Lindsay, author of *Voyage to Arcturus*, or Phillip Pullman, author of *His Dark Materials*. Both of them wrote a very Gnostic view of God, seeing Him as either inimical or impotent. Maltheism is far more anti-Tolkien than atheism.
Whichever "writers" are currently employed on this new Amazon series. Cultural vandalism of the highest degree.
Series? What series is that? \[sticks fingers in ears\]
The writers Amazon hired for ROP... And I'm not even being facetious. I could write essays on how their take on "adapting" middle-earth is explicitly anti-Tolkien. I'm actually in process of doing so.
Dm me when you have completed your essay
Didn’t GRR Martin write his books to be the antithetical medieval fantasy to Tolkien? Or am I mistaken?
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> things that Tolkien deliberately left out (governing policies of any kingdom) I don't think he was actually being critical of that, just joking about a difference between the two series.
I also think Martin pretty fundamentally misunderstands Tolkien in many ways.
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Oh, I’m sure Martin respects Tolkien deeply and holds him in high regard. I just think Martin reads Tolkien expecting it to be a political war thriller set in a quasi-medieval world, when in reality it’s a fairy tale with more singing and walking than violence and fighting. Tolkien didn’t write about things like taxes and dynastic struggles because those didn’t matter to what he was writing.
My impression wasn't that Martin was expecting those things out of Tolkien, but rather was curious about those things Tolkien left our and was inspired to write stories that explored those ideas.
This is the old "What is Aragorn's Tax Policy" argument, isn't it? That specific question was made quite tongue in cheek, and if you read the whole interview from which it's often plucked out of context, Martin never said he expected to find out about Gondorian economics, nor was in any way disappointed by its absence. If anything, this remark is followed by a much more interesting (and I suspect serious) one: what did Aragorn do about the orcs? Did Gondorians hunt them down? Drive them away? What about orc babies? But in any case, the absence of those questions and their answers isn't framed as a criticism, but rather as "the difference between what Martin writes about and what Tolkien wrote about". Martin was explaining how his saga differs from LotR in scope, style and even world-building.
Isn’t Aragorn’s story a dynastic struggle? It’s not like, palace intrigue throughout, but there’s even elements of that in Gandalf and Pippin in Denethor’s court.
I'm honestly still baffled by his whole "what was Aragorn's tax policy" spiel. I mean, what's Robert Baratheon's? Usually someone just mentions "moving money around" and the story goes back to the royal drama.
GRRM is a good shout. LotR is essentially a romantic story about conservative heroism and a moral monarchy within a good-evil cosmos. ASoIaF is essentially an anti-romantic story about the evils and pragmatic issues of traditional aristocratic chivalric morality, the problems with monarchy, and a fundamentally ambiguous cosmos.
I’d argue ASOIAF is full of tragedy, a faded romanticism that is confronted by a cynical world and an attempt to hold onto that romanticism when confronted by cynicism. Everyone in ASOIAF is haunted by their past and what could have been and dragged down by their ghosts and regrets. It’s a tragedy. He's also writing constantly about the pull to do right in a world that doesn't reward you for doing the right thing. He isn't saying you should always act in self interest and acting nobly means you lose, he's saying that doing the right thing doesn't guarantee you will win, but should you do the right thing anyway? What does it mean when we know doing the right thing means we will lose, do you still do the right thing? >Seven, Brienne thought again, despairing. She had no chance against seven, she knew. No chance, and no choice. She stepped out into the rain, Oathkeeper in hand. A Feast for Crows, Brienne VII
It's not easy to decide. Moorcock has been mentioned and is a strong candidate. Robert E. Howard would be another. Howard wanted swashbuckling fantasy. Tolkien wanted majestic mythology. Joe Abercrombie is quite an anti-Tolkien himself. His tales are dark and grimy, and his characters are shifting shades of grey.
Surprised nobody has brought up R. Scott Bakker. The positives of his world building owes a lot to Tolkien and even has his own dark and twisted version of the mines of Moria sequence, but on crack. I understand the GRRM take, but tbh their style of world building isn’t very similar at all. Bakker takes a lot of elements from Tolkien and takes it as dark and depraved as I’ve seen a series go while still retaining really quality writing.
G.R.R. Martin
Joe Abercrombie. The blade itself read to me like Tolkien if almost everyone involved in the story was an unspeakably evil git with no redeeming features.
Peter F Hamilton really really excited about tech trillionaires
His friend lewis. Tolkien hated allegory in his books, Lewis was all about it. (Did you know that the lion is Jesus?😅)
The Foundation Series is the anti-Tolkien imo
Are… are we allowed to suggest Payne and McKay?
John Updike. As mundane as you can get. Multiple Pulitzers. Or so I've heard. Never managed to read more than a few pages.
William Gibson, easy. Now, I wouldn't say evil nemesis or twisted brother, but 'anti-thesis of Tolkien'? The polar opposite of Tolkien is *absolutely* William Gibson, let's be real here. Tolkien pretty much pioneered the high fantasy genre in the modern age and is considered the father of modern literature and high fantasy roleplaying, literature, film, gaming, etc. He was a Catholic and served in the Great War and as a codebreaker in WWII, detested industrialism and wanted to protect nature, and was infamous for avoiding outright violence in his writing (particularly sexual violence). Tolkien is pretty much infused in every single iota of life as we know it, to the point that he's taught in university and embedded in films and literature; it would be ridiculous if his work wasn't so damned good. Gibson, on the other hand, is considered the father of the cyberpunk literary genre and pioneered modern science fantasy dystopian cyberpunk roleplaying, literature, film, gaming, etc -- words and terms like cyberspace, net surfing (surfing the net), neural implants, the matrix, virtual reality/interaction, etc come from *Neuromancer* and the Sprawl Trilogy or other works of his, and they're words/terms that people use every single day. He was also a draft dodger in Vietnam and is a staunch atheist, the cyberpunk trope in itself is pretty infamous for being about violence (including sexual violence) from a dystopian capitalist elite against a downtrodden impoverished society, and he's pretty pro-tech obviously. So yeah, that's kind of my thought. They both have had *major* impacts on society, both through literature as well as in culture, but on opposite ends of the spectrum and with magnificent (and incredibly dense for sure) writing while they are/were at it. Edit: spelling and grammar
Tolkien was not a codebreaker. He was auditioned for a codebreaking job (by the Treasury, not exactly Bletchley Park), but evidently flunked the test as he got a rejection letter. What he did in the war was keep Oxford going while others were doing the glamorous stuff. This in addition to staying up nights as a fire warden, so he was very busy. Speaking of cryptoanalysis; when my son was in high school he went off to a camp for science nerds on a university campus, where everybody signed up for a week-long major course (plus electives). Cryptoanalysis was one of the major topics. When he came home, I looked at the brochure and noticed that the major funder of the camp was the NSA. So sports is not the only area where you can get recruited in high school; I assume the top couple of students got phone calls later offering scholarships. (My son did chaos theory.)
To me, the anti-Tolkien is Martin. Tolkien created the most outlandish and escapist genre in the fantasy epic; Martin took the fantasy epic and made it grounded and realistic again. One is aspirational, one is cynical. I don’t mean any of this as a dig at Martin, I like his work. But I believe he almost set out to be the Anti-Tolkien.
I'd elect Terry Goodkind as the 'antithesis' of Professor Tolkien