Fantasy

[Andsigil]

Originally Posted by davem

Its to do with how people die, not how graphically that death is described - or whether it should be/needs to be described realistically - go back to the Poul Anderson essay I linked to a while back http://www.sfwa.org/writing/thud.htm - is Anderson right? Even though Tolkien does not depict love scenes one assumes that the act takes place because there are children in the stories. One assumes that characters use the bathroom even though Tolkien doesn't mention it - & that is the whole point: if Tolkien was to depict love-making or toilet practices we would expect them (even if only obliquely) to be 'true' to the basic facts of the primary world (ie babies are not brought by the stork or get found under gooseberry bushes & bodily waste products do not turn into rainbow coloured bubbles which pop out of the character's ears). This is because Tolkien repeatedly stressed that 'Middle-earth' is meant to be this world in the ancient past.

The original question was about how much freedom a writer of fantasy should have, & what boundaries, if any, are required. If a writer like Pullman can be criticised for his 'misrepresentation' of Christianity, can (should?) Tolkien be criticised for his 'misrepresentation' of death in battle (as just one example)?

Anyone can be criticized for anything. Our responsibility is to look at the criticism, its origins, and its reasons, and then decide if it has merits.

For example, I find Phillip Pullman to be petty and repulsive. He mocks Lewis and Tolkien- men who wrote for the good of people, and admits that he only wrote his series to tear down their works.

(Ironically, I find Pullman to the personification of Tolkien's Melkor: bitter at not being able to create, he instead takes the creations of others, twists them, and then congratulates himself on his own genius.)

The sad part is that, because he is crafty with words (and, oooooh, so avant garde, dahhhling...), people ignore that he's brassy, uncouth, and unimaginative. At the risk of being repetitive, it's quite sad that so many people like someone whose only objective is to tear good things down. Sad. Very sad.

So, criticism of a bitter, petty iconoclast like Pullman is different from criticism of someone like Tolkien, who had no malice behind his work.

As for Tolkien, graphic portrayal of death would take away from his writing style, which was based on lore (for lack of a better term) and, especially in the Silmarillion, reflective of that style.

All I see are apples and oranges here.