![]() ![]() So although fantasy creators in all media have devoted most of their energies in the past eight decades to digesting Tolkien, so in turn Tolkien has become part of the fabric of their works. While the watchword of the day is subversion-twisting tropes, destroying moral absolutes with relativism, and making mockeries of gallantry and heroism-subversion still requires a substrate. Modern fantasy and its subgenres, as represented in Martin’s work, might be positioned as anti-art in relation to Tolkien. Heavenly beings are denuded of potency and purity while the gods may not be dead, divinity certainly is. Characters like Martin’s mercenary Bronn of the Blackwater are expected to say “fuck.” Modern stories, even when set in lands like A Song of Ice and Fire’s Essos that are filled with competing faiths, tend toward the nihilist, and mostly atheist. ![]() High and epic fantasy are often expected to dip heavily into the medieval muck of realism, to contain heavy doses of sex and curses, gore and grime, sickness and believable motives and set pieces. Martin’s got the market cornered on heavily initialed fantasy writers, and his hand guides the field. ![]() It started, 80 years ago in a hobbit-hole, with Bilbo Baggins.Īlthough Tolkien created the complicated cosmological sprawl of The Silmarillion and stories like the incestuous saga of Túrin Turambar told in The Children of Húrin, Middle-earth itself is mostly remembered today as something akin to little Bilbo in his Hobbit-hole: quaint, virtuous, and tidy. Tolkien’s work is probably best remembered today by the sword-and-sandal epic scale of The Lord of The Rings films, but it started in the quiet, fictionalized English countryside of the Shire. “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” So began the legendarium that dominated a genre, changed Western literature and the field of linguistics, created a tapestry of characters and mythology that endured four generations, built an anti-war ethos that endured a World War and a Cold War, and spawned a multibillion-dollar media franchise. ![]()
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