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Tolkien also created complete Languages for each race of his stories.
Sometimes I think he just liked world-building, and writing stories about his world came second.
From reading his biography, it seemed he mostly liked creating languages and then crafted stories and worlds based off them.
Tolkien’s the GOAT.
He was a philology teacher, so that’s indeed the case. You see it with how much details the language have, like real languages dialects and evolution. It was really his craft.
Philology Professor at Oxford, no less.
He only wanted to create languages, for fun… but he wanted to do it properly, so he needed full cultural backgrounds for his languages, including epic poetic sagas written in said languages… and to do that properly he needed a whole history of the world said languages and cultures had developed in… so the maniac built that. And then he wrote a children’s book set in that world, for his kids, as one does.
He was truly a mad lad
They are called Paracosms. He was writting languages during his teens long before he got to stories.
Middle earth is the first item on the list of examples on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracosm
It’s not impossible! It’s fairly niche and finding others who appreciate it before the age of the internet would’ve been tough.
Modern Tolkien would’ve probably been part of the various conlang communities, doing challenges and whatnot.
Not only the languages but also an etymology for them to explain, how they developed.
Wish he was better at naming characters though. Not every son needs a name that starts with the same letter as his father’s.
What, you aren’t a fan of Aenor, son of Agenor, son of Agenar, son of Agenup, son of Ageflip, son of Agintur, Slayer of B’Thal’Muun?
B’Thal’Muun was peacemaker!
B’Thal’Muun was a tyrant and you know it!
Nuh-uh!
Tell that to my 2nd degree aunt
Frank Herbert: Giant sandworms lol. /j
Frank Herbert: … and dogs that are also chairs… rips bong… chairdogs
Duncan, Duncan, Duncan, Duncan
lol Herbert had some weird fantasy about a guy named Duncan from Idaho. Only explanation for some of that stuff.
He got a flat tire once in Duncan, Idaho. It was the early 60’s so things got freaky fast when he was picked up by a colorfully painted bus . . .
Let’s just say the memories will never die.
Fuckin Herbert just decided to write philosophy disguised as a sci-fi story lol
Frank Herbert is what happens when a genius writer takes too much shrooms while studying dunes. Like that is literally what happened.
I also like to kidnap my entire family in my used hearse then do a shitload of amphetamines in the Mexican desert immediately after completing a formal education in the newly developed science of ecology that ended with learning about the inevitability of man made climate change continuing to accelerate the greatest and final planetary mass extinction event, the holocene era
Yeah I feel that shit in my soul bro, for sure
Whomst amongst us hasn’t done a Herbert once or twice
Calling him a genius writer is probably being a bit too generous, what with all the beefswellings and all that
Cmon, you just gotta do more shrooms and re-read Dune bro.
Then you have the author of Twilight that started world building after the first book, created a number of characters with interesting background lore, then proceeded to do nothing with any of it.
It’s even worse than that - Twilight was originally fanfic for Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles series, so it’s all just Lestat with a fake mustache and sparkles.
And 50 shades was a Twilight fanfic…
And Interview with the Vampire was fanfic based on a cross between Blacula and the David Frost interview of Richard Nixon…
And the very existence of Richard Milhous Nixon was a protest against the statehood of Arizona and New Mexico gone horribly wrong.
Nah man. Nixon was a product of Dr. Killinger who specializes in creating supervillains.
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It’s really hard to criticize anything about Twilight after you learn it was literally self published fan fiction written by a Mormon house wife with ten kids that has never once in her life even seen a healthy or fulfilling relationship from a distance, or had a meal containing any form of seasoning, and will almost certainly die without having ever experienced even an aliquot of sexual pleasure
Also, normally when you write supernatural fiction that rips off indigenous mythology, you don’t name drop the tribe that you’re taking from and proceed to integrate their real-world reservation heavily into your setting.
Yet, somehow this would still probably be the most respectful treatment of any of the first nations by any Mormon, ever
The history of the Mormon church is like oops hahaha all war crimes I’m so silly
I read that series out of spite when it was popular, and actually started getting interested in the lore and world when she started introducing fucking X-Men powers. Huge build up, huge hype, and then… fucking nothing. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but alas.
Same.
Tolkien is clearly the best, but I don’t have a problem with Martin borrowing from real-life history. History is incredibly cool, and full of amazing stories. Stealing from other authors is bullshit, though.
George Lucas: Let someone else handle it.
as long as the broads are wearin’ short skirts
“There’s no underwear in space.”
George Lucas: I like money
To be fair the children’s story came first. In that regard Tolkien and Rowling had something in common, their first books were written for a much younger and simpler audience. It wasn’t until they took off commercially that the more adult and deep lore was developed.
EDIT: I’m wrong
What? No. First was the story of Arda in a prototype version of the Silmarillon and Unfinished Tales.
Huh, interesting, I didn’t realize Tolkien had started writing portions of the Silmarillion in 1914. I had to do some looking based on your response and learned something.
From what I know, he never really wrote “for” the silmsrillion either. He wrote stories for him to flesh out the history of the world but not with the intention of publishing such stories. Some of them were even just notes about what happened in the world and some weren’t finished.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong
I’d need to look up the dates, but he might’ve started creating the languages even earlier than that
Upvote because somebody online admitted they were wrong.
No they didn’t!
EDIT: I’m wrong
…?
Still a little ambiguous…
/s
Steven Erikson: here’s a world that contains millennia of anthropologically grounded cultures that got spiced up by some interdimensional elves, orcs, gods & dragons that me and my buddy use to play D&D in, have fun reading through the eyes of over 1000 characters lol
Erikson ruined fantasy novels for me. Book of the Fallen was the most challenging and rewarding read of my life. It made almost everything else feel like YA fiction.
Seriously. I only finished the main Book of the Fallen series this early this year and just can’t get interested in anything else fantasy now.
It’s one thing to make you feel something when a character you’ve been with for 10 books dies, but when an author can do the same with a character you’re with for a handful of pages, it’s something else.
!Abasard’s death in Reaper’s Gale still resonates with me. !<
I assume you were trying to add a spoiler, but it did not come through correctly and is visible
Felt the same when I finished that series. Didn’t feel that I could read fantasy again.
Not a native english speaker, but these books are so hard to read.
Currently in book 9. Moving ever so slowly so it doesn’t end too quickly, cause then what will I read? 😭
Tolkien is the best ever, but a lot of his stuff is inspired or ported directly from Catholicism.
This but also various mythological bits and pieces from England, because Tolkien wanted to create an English mythology akin to the Odyssey, Edda or Niebelungen.
Yeah. I absolutely love LotR. But read the niebelungen and certain poems from the Poetic Edda, not to mention Beowulf, and you see how heavy he was influenced by the stuff. Which is fine of course, everyone is influenced by things before them
Yeah, Martin learned the “cribbed from history” trick from Tolkien
Its good stuff. We dont know history anyway.
There’s an idea. A fantasy for American audiences using geography from South America. They’ll never know unless you show them a map that includes opposite coasts.
A lot of that Catholicism stuff is just Christianity with local gods and figures retconed in using saints expansions.
And that whole Christian thing is just a Mediterraneanised/Latinized Zoroastrianism.
… And Zoroastrianism is just hyped up druidism. The Persians were part of that Indo-European world.
I don’t know what drugs the Persians were into, but now I’m imagining a priestess ripping a massing bong and saying
“Okay, what if instead of alllll the trees, it’s just about one tree?.. And the tree is a dude”
It’s all fanfiction all the way down from the original cave drawings anyway
deleted by creator
Also, fun fact: Tolkien converted C.S. Lewis to Christianity, who almost immediately disappointed him by adopting Anglicanism instead of Catholicism and then decided Tolkien’s stories weren’t Christian enough, so he basically wrote the Narnia books out of spite.
GRRM wrote “Sandkings” which is one of my favorite novellas ever. He gets a pass from me.
I think he stole this from an episode of Outer Limits.
He might have written that ep of Outer Limits, he worked a ton in TV back in the day.
In 1995, “Sandkings” was adapted into a television film that served as the first episode of The Outer Limits relaunch. The script was adapted by Melinda M. Snodgrass, Martin’s co-editor for the Wild Cards series.
Honestly I prefer the Outer Limits version, the novel is a little too busy and the ending is a bit silly.
The novel is ~15 years older than that show…?
He used time travel to steal it.
Using a time machine stolen from HG Wells
My bottom panel is getting swapped out for the husband and wife duo of K.A Applegate and the Animorphs books.
She was one of the first AMAs I remember being there for on reddit. It was before people had PR handlers doing the AMAs for them (maybe 2011?), and it was so cool to hear her talk about the books.
Writing world building is fun!
Writing actual fiction is boring and dull because if it’s not a monomyth your editor is gonna removed about it
That’s mostly true, though sometimes a writer can make a killing writing contrarian edgy slop where anyone approaching a monomyth is brutally killed off as a recurring gimmick until not much really happens ultimately except a cycle of sensationalistic violent and/or sexually violent gotcha moments until it sputters out before its undelivered last book.
Yeah the Hobbit was the first book I ever read, at six years old, lucky me I became a lifetime nerd
“Damn the boy”
Didn’t he write the Hobbit first and then everything else around it?
No, not really. It was his first book that was supremely popular, but it was written for his children. His main body of work (which was later published in part in the Silmarallion) was started in WWI and was never really completed. The Hobbit and then to a far greater extant LotR were pulled into the preceding work.
He already hada lot of stories and ideas about Middle Earth before. When he wrote the Hobbit for his kids, he placed it in this world and it became the first book to be published. Lord of the Rings he wrote as a sequel to the Hobbit, but added a lot of hints and references to his other stories of his world.
He set The Hobbit (which he wrote for his kids) in the world he’d already built… not because he particularly enjoyed worldbuilding, but because a culturally complex fantasy world with a rich history and mythology was a prerequisite for the epic poetic sagas he felt needed to write in order to properly develop his fantasy languages, which is what he really liked to do, as a philologist.
