(urth) ot-my mini review of Children of Hurin

[Jesper Svedberg]

James Wynn skrev:

> On the issue of genre labels, I'm not sure I agree with this. Putting,
> say, "The Sword of Shanarah" in the bin with the works of William
> Morris is to me like labeling the music of the Ramones "Doo-Wop". Yes,
> the Ramones show self-evident influence from 50s music; in fact, the
> intention of the whole New Wave movement is a return to simple cords
> and the roots of Rock&Roll. Undoubtably, it is useful to your local
> record store to classify the Rolling Stones, Devo, and Lionel Richie
> in the same bin labeled "Rock", but it never helped me to organize my
> record collection (not that I own any Lionel Richie albums).
> 
> Tolkien's works occupy a middle ground between Morris and Brooks in
> that he was writing as a fan of Morris, and Brooks was rewriting
> Tolkien. Tolkien is the inventor of Adult Fantasy as we understand it
> today. "The Simarillion" of the Morris's Mythopoetic genre. "The Lord
> of the Rings" is the new animal that fills bookstores now.

I see fantasy literature as a world building genre (that is, where the 
construction of the world and its nature is of interest (much like sf)) 
with magical, mythical or supernatural elements. Morris, Tolkien and 
Brooks easily fit this description, even though there are other 
differences between them. Now, I wouldn't have any problems with further 
deviding Morris and Tolkien into mythopoetic fantasy and Brooks into 
adventure fantasy (or genre fantasy or commercial fantasy), but they are 
still all undoubtedly fantasy to me.

> The old Mythopoetic genre is as much the grandparent of modern horror
> (e.g. Lovecraft, Machen and Stephen King) as it is of modern Fantasy.

One generally tends to make a difference between "supernatural fiction" 
(where the supernatural intrudes in normal reality) and fantasy (where 
the supernatural is the centre of reality). Horror is often supernatural 
fiction, but there's no denying that there's a lot of horror that comes 
closer to fantasy in nature. But then again, there's also plenty of 
horror that's very close to science fiction, so I think one can say that 
there's plenty of interbreeding between these genres.

>>Tolkien did not invent this tradition. Before him there were writers
>>like William Morris, Lord Dunsany and E. R. Eddison who did similar
>>things and just because the tradition hadn't spawned widely marketable
>>genre until after Tolkien doesn't make his stuff much different from
>>what came later.
> 
> This is like saying Ellery Queen novels are not much different from
> Edgar Allen Poe's novels and that the divide that is Sir Arthur Conan
> Doyle is just an over-sized landmark in the Mystery genre.

No, it's like saying that stories about people solving crimes are 
stories about solving crimes, no matter what the development of genre 
looked like. I'm not saying that there are no differences at all between 
Brooks and Tolkien or Morris, but I find that the generally most 
sensible definition of fantasy easily includes all of these books. 
Whatever differences there might be are only a difference in flavour and 
quality, and not a difference in actual genre identity.


   // Jesper