stephen donaldson vs tolkien

[I'm Murrin]

You know, one thing I found really great about the Appendices to the films was the part with them all talking about the books - here we have, in tTT Appendix, a bunch of JRRT fans talking about how, these days, no publisher in their right minds would even consider accepting LotR.

[birdandbear]

Look, no one is going to win any battles here. Tolkien was great. He wrote an entire history. Lord of the Rings represents a very small moment in that history where everything sped up and got resolved in a relatively short period of time. The guy was a literary genius.

Donaldson would never have been published if not for Tolkien. You ask him. I guarantee you he has nothing but good things to say about Tolkien.

That said, SRD did not "rewrite" LOTR. Its apples and oranges. The TC books stand on their own. And quite well, thank you very much. Anyone who has bothered to read the opening passages of Lord Foul's Bane knows that SRD was laying the groundwork for a completely different type of story. So the story had some familiar "tokens", big deal. SRD's books talk about the agony and conflict within the human sole.

I guess I am just saying that comparing the two is a futile endeavor. They both are great stories written by great writers.

I couldn't have put it better, Otter.

[Penner Theologius Pott]

T.A. Shippey observes that, while the Lord of the Rings is very much the product of a British man writing during WWII, the Chronicles can be read as an American's response to the Vietnam War.

I really, really like this interpretation.

Also, Tolkien has been criticized for the superficiality of his characters and conflicts; I think that this is missing the point. Boromir is a fascinating character, a noble patriot who is simply completely out of his depth; the thing is, Tolkien never travels *inside* his characters' heads. Had the LOTR been written by Donaldson, he would have detailed his mental anguish. As it is, it is dealt with much more subtly.

Donaldson falls much more in line with the tradition of the modern novel, with its love of psychological analysis. I don't know that one technique is superior to the other; I just think that it's important to recognize that they were both drawing on very different traditions, and that they knew exactly what they were doing when they chose to do so.

[Loredoctor]

What a fantastic post! Thanks for that great read, Penner.

[UrLord]

I didn't realize I was fighting a battle. I already have made up my mind, and since I'm always right everyone else automatically loses. Thus, no battle needs to be fought at all.

[Guest]

Wow... I obviously came into this late. I believe character depth is simply more important in a novel (IMHO), so I like TCTC far more than Tolkien. It's also why I enjoy Melanie Rawn's Dragon Prince/Dragon Star trilogies more than anything by R. A. Salvatore or Anne Rice or Mercedes Lackey. Rawn simply brings her characters to life in a way those other authors could'nt (again IMHO), as well as creating a general comraderie between friends that makes you feel like you KNOW these people. Tolkien seemed to care more for his world than those who inhabited it. SRD's characters (well mainly Covenant) were beings of conflict and self-reprisal, who grew and changed as they made mistakes. (the Gap Cycle seemed to epitomize this concept) Overall, I was impressed with the completeness of Tolkien's world, but I never got into his writing style. And thats that.

[Baradakas]

Oh, sorry, I thought I was logged in. I'm new by the way! Hi everyone!

[Furls Fire]

Well, I for one, think Tolkien was a genius. Like Otter said, LOTR is just a small fraction in the history of Middle Earth. He really had no intention of novelizing LOTR. The depth and structure of this world is beyond comprehension. This man created whole languages, whole histories, whole races, and whole lands. There is an account how he was writing in the trenches during WWI, these writings eventually became The Book of Lost Tales. Amazing. There is so much more out by Tolkien then just The Hobbit and LOTR. There is The Silmarillion, both volumes of The Lost Tales, The Unfinished Tales, numerous essays and short stories...his genius in boundless. Tolkien made me fall in love with fantasy, and Donaldson, well, he just brought me up to a whole other level of fantasy. His genius stems from the legacy of Tolkien, from inspiration, from the door that Tolkien opened. There is no denying this. Whether or not people think that LOTR is nothing but fluff, there is no denying that that masterpiece is what set the stage for other authors' works to be taken seriously. If it were not for LOTR, fantasy fiction would still be put on a back shelf in the children's section of the library, (where Le Guin's Earthsea books can still be found, and Narnia, both ingenious works).

To me, Tolkien will always be the Master.

[Loredoctor]

You make some interesting points there, Furls. However, creating an indepth history, languages, and so on does not make a great book. It takes characters and story to do that. I honestly don't think LOTR's characters are that interesting. So no matter how much work Tolkein put into the Elven language, it's just not going to make me like the Hobbits and company. I remember reading LOTRs and I never even accessed the appendix at the end to see who was related to whom, and what happened when in history. All that sort of information should be part of the story and relayed by the characters, otherwise it's just chaff and not really important to the story.

[Furls Fire]

hmmm..I have to disagree that Tolkien's characters have no depth. Look at Gollum, that character alone is brilliance. The inner struggle between good and evil. The grand scope of that battle embodied in one wretched, pitiful, loathesome character. Whom we end up feel sorry for. That's depth to me. Then there is Aragorn. His battle with himself, does he continue to run from his destiny or does he accept who he is and rise to the challenge of it? And Boromir, drivin mad by the Ring. And then the Ring itself.

I can see the difference between Tolkien's characterization and Donaldson's. SRD threw us completely into Covenant's head. We were emersed in his misery, self hate, bitterness, awe, unbelief..we felt all that profoundly. We weren't thrown into Aragorn's head, or Smeagol's, but that doesn't mean they didn't have depth, it was just a different way of experiencing them. All authors have their own style and I for one love Tolkien's style. He's writing is so lyrical, it's like reading a dream. I love LOTR and all his other works. As I do Donaldson.

[DukkhaWaynhim]

I am frustrated with the way the subject of this thread is worded. It's like one author is being pitted against the other, in a Celebrity Death-Match kind of way. I like both works, but for entirely different reasons.

Tolkien is good because it reads like any other history book, except that it holds my attention far better than a real history book because it deals in the fantasy genre that I hold dear to my heart. He provides all the necessary elements of the story and everything that takes place does so in lyrical epic scale, which can be cumbersome [especially when expositioning lineages and detailed-but-not-quite-relevant ancillary information], but paints a very vivid picture of the grand spectacle. But in the end, it is still a picture that you are looking at, like watching someone else's dream, simply because Tolkien gives you less insight into what the characters are thinking; only what you can infer from their actions. This is not bad or good, it is simply part of Tolkien's writing style, and it works extremely well for LOTR.

IN addition to SRD's MN and TCTC, I also like Gap Cycle, and though I've only read TMWFA from the mystery bin, I liked it as well. Heck, I just like the way SRD writes, so much that I'm willing to buy his non-fantasy books. though fantasy is my main genre.
SRD makes you crawl into the head of his PoV characters, so you experience everything from that vantage point. The scope of the story is still epic, but it's written from such an intimate point of view that some readers can get 'sucked in,' like being in the dream rather than simply watch it unfold. This works awesomely well for TCTC, and is the reason why it is and will always be my favorite set of books.

OK, I'm rambling now. Must sleep

DW
[Weird, warped, and waking up early tomorrow morning]

[matrixman]

(Please ignore)

[Penner Theologius Pott]

I'd like to clarify my earlier point --

I don't think that the characters in the Chronicles are *deeper* than those in the LOTR; I think that they're revealed to us in a different way. Read the chronicles, and half the book is Covenant's inner monologue. (The other half consists of philosophical arguments with every character that he meets.) This is very modern storytelling.

Tolkien's prose is inspired by much older sources. Gawain and Beowulf are both intriguing and at times conflicted characters, but we *never hear about it from them.*

Boromir's fascinating. I get annoyed with people who generalize him as clearly "evil" from the outset. He's not evil. He's a good man trying as hard as he can to be *good.* He's genuinely compassionate and courageous. His downfall is his *patriotism* -- the irony is that the ring doesn't turn your worst aspects against you; it takes advantage of your best.

But this story isn't spelled out for us in the text. And I think that we're used to a certain kind of storytelling; if the character's motives aren't spelled out for us to a degree, than we believe that they're not there.

Tolkien's characters are deep. Donaldson reveals his characters to us more explicitly. So the conflict, I think, is not in who draws more believable characters, but the methods that they've chosen for revealing them.

[Loredoctor]

hmmm..I have to disagree that Tolkien's characters have no depth. Look at Gollum, that character alone is brilliance. The inner struggle between good and evil. The grand scope of that battle embodied in one wretched, pitiful, loathesome character. Whom we end up feel sorry for. That's depth to me.

Yeah, that's a good point.
I hope I didn't seem as if I was attacking your opinion, Furls. I just prefer TCTC.

[Forestal]

i cant be assed 2 read this topic, but donaldson ownz tolkien, period.

[amanibhavam]

he rather owes Tolkien a lot...

[Furls Fire]

hmmm..I have to disagree that Tolkien's characters have no depth. Look at Gollum, that character alone is brilliance. The inner struggle between good and evil. The grand scope of that battle embodied in one wretched, pitiful, loathesome character. Whom we end up feel sorry for. That's depth to me.

Yeah, that's a good point.
I hope I didn't seem as if I was attacking your opinion, Furls. I just prefer TCTC.

Oh no, never Ur-Vile I love a good debate. I never once felt attacked. I love both Tolkien and Donaldson, and countless others. It's all a matter of taste and preference.

[Dragonlily]

It is a question of differences in writing approach. Personally, I think Donaldson improved immensely on what he found in Tolkein. That's because I like being put inside the characters, from their heads to their autonomic responses (minus any alimentary activity, as noted elsewhere ).

Here's my litany on the subject:

Who created more living worlds, Tolkein or Donaldson?
Who writes with mastery in more styles, Tolkein or Donaldson?
Who writes with more passion and immediacy, Tolkein or Donaldson?

I rest my case.

[amanibhavam]

I gave a lecture on Tolkienian languages on an annual Tolkien convention over here, so you can tell I love Tolkien's world, really

But, seriously: how could we compare the writing style of a man with a late-Victorian soul immersed deeply in long-forgotten Nordic and Germanic sagas to someone so modern as SRD? Do they both love what they create? They do. Does it show in their works? It clearly does. From this point, it is only a matter of personal taste. And de gustibus non est disputantur.

[Dragonlily]

Amani puts us straight. You're right, of course.