[littlemanpoet]

Thank you all for excellent responses.

Anna: 'Tis good to see you here, Milady of the Gifted Quill. ::bows, removing bard's cap:: You have excellently illustrated my point of the Hobbits' mediation of Middle Earth. Your description brings out why I distinguish between charm and wonder:

Hobbits were so fascinating *because* of their simplicty in view of all the other majestic creatures. Noble Aragorn, powerful Gandalf, the Elves in thier 'holiness'...

Not sure if you're making sense!? Excellent examples!

Kuruharan: We in the "Are You Writing Serious Fantasy" thread have done our share of talking about backstory writing, so that's where that comes from.

I think one of the keys to good description is to keep it according to the pov of the most accessible character. Sam in Mordor. Gimli in the caves of the undead. Pippin at Minas Tirith. Frodo in Lorien and elsewhere. As to a lack of description, I think what's necessary is not bogging the reader down with needless description. It should evoke wonder, charm, a sense of place, or action such that it does not bog down the story.

Did McKiernan do this? Well, yes. Who cares if she has to wash dishes to make a living? It was the wrong direction to go with the plot. Then she sings for a living in a beerpub, and then in a concert hall. It's all too much like the real world. There should have been some more magical place, a more wonderous way to evoke her gift of song as magical, if that's what it was. I don't think McKiernan understands Faerie, or else maybe he was just playing around. A successful author can fall prey to such temptation, I suppose. Sorry for rambling there.

Part of wonder is that it is something that is beyond our experience, or at least beyond the ordinary.

Just so.

Muse: You argue convincingly for the Shire as a place of wonder. Your descriptions remind me what a wonderful place it was, but I still want to keep my distinction because of how the Hobbits and the Shire mediate between the reader and the grandeur of the rest of Middle Earth. Hobbits most certainly did have their foibles, which were not wonderous but still part of their charm.

Mister Underhill: Your point about simplicity is well taken. Yet we all would agree, I think, that Tolkien's Middle Earth is wonderful in its complexity, too. Maybe we're talking apples and oranges, though: visceral and moral simplicity combined with backstory complexity?

...any details that tend to make the fantastic world and its characters seem ordinary, dreary, and dull and life in that world seem like drudgery will destroy that work’s charm and wonder.

Precisely.

Estelyn: What you describe in your interaction with Lewis' space trilogy is Tolkien's sense of recovery, described in On Faerie Stories as (paraphrasing here) having seen clouds in fairyland, we see clouds in our own world with new eyes. We recover the wonder. I had the same experience in reading Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. I for one did enjoy That Hideous Strength, partly because of Merlin and the scene of babel in the meeting room, but there was for me a sense of spiritual intensity that lent to me a kind of wonder. To each her own, I guess.

I agree that there seems to be a lot more evil than good described in THS. I think part of my enjoyment was the very darkness that was a turn-off for you.

McKiernan did present some things that achieved for me the 'new eyes of wonder'. His wide ocean is described well enough to have given me the sea-hunger.

Are there any other works that achieve the wonder, or don't? Why and why not? What else about LotR stand out as having done so? Is there anybody here at the Downs who takes exception to LotR's success in evoking wonder?

[ August 06, 2002: Message edited by: littlemanpoet ]