Don't get me wrong, I like A Song of Ice and Fire, but LOTR is still the standard by which fantasy is judged because of the expansive world-creation that takes place within the franchise. I'd like to seize on something Kavinay Kishor said regarding depth. First, let me say that I don't think that Martin's books have depth; his series is incredibly expansive, but ultimately very flat. I don't mean to say that Martin's characters or his story are one-dimensional, but rather that the world he created is very flat. Characters in Martin's story very rarely talk about the past beyond using it to explain/justify their actions and to move the story along.[1] And there's nothing wrong with that, Martin is telling a very expansive and relatively linear story which presumably requires him to put a lot of thought into the story itself. But while the characters behave in a realistic way, the world itself doesn't seem nearly as "real" as Middle-earth.
On the other hand, LOTR has probably nearly unparalleled depth. Even when looking at the core material (The Hobbit and the trilogy), Tolkien sacrifices width for depth. The core material is limited to about 20ish characters for each story and is very geographically limited, but is filled with anecdotes and conversations that flesh out the world that Tolkien has created. The story told in the trilogy includes things like the hobbits finding the goblins that were turned into stone in The Hobbit, Galadriel talking about her "test" (which hints at a much larger story in Tolkien's world), Tom Bombadil and Goldberry, the Ents talking about the Ent-wives, etc. All of these things are relatively inconsequential to the over-all plot, but go a great deal to making the world seem "real" and lived-in.[2] In fact, the conceit of many of Tolkien's books are that the reader isn't reading a storybook, but rather a book of history that was written and has evolved within the context of Tolkien's world-creation; the core books are the Red Book of Westmarch that were written by Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam and edited and expanded by others over time, while the Similarion is the book Bilbo is putting together in Rivendell during The Fellowship. All told, Tolkien's world has major stories that take a reader from creation through the first three ages of Middle-earth, giving the franchise and it's world a sense of richness that Martin's franchise just doesn't have.
As for impact, time will ultimately tell, but I doubt Martin's franchise will have anywhere near the impact that Tolkien's did simply because the Martin doesn't really go about world-creation and is, seemingly, only interested in telling the story he is telling.
[1] And when they do talk about the past, they don't really go that far back.
[2] Even though he didn't have really have a story for a lot of these things at the time (we still don't really really know exactly what happened to the Ent-wives or who/what Tom Bombadil is, for instance), by talking about the larger world outside of the context of moving the plot along, Tolkien creates an air of authenticity and more deeply entrenches the secondary-belief that he was looking to create.
Read other answers by William Petroff on Quora:
- Does the story of "The Lord of the Rings" resemble The Great War?
- Why did J.R.R. Tolkien call his world Middle Earth?
- How is The Hobbit connected to Lord of the Rings?
from Quora http://ift.tt/29ibigO
No comments:
Post a Comment