What Next To Read . . .? - The Barrow-Downs Discussion Forum

Alfirin · 10-23-2007, 05:59 PM

I'm afraid that personally I must disagree on both The Worm Oroborus and A Voyage to Arcturus as being good choices for the Tolkein buff. Neither is all that Tolkinesque except on the most fundamnetal level. In addtion I feel that both have signifcant proalbmes as works of thier own.

While I have heard people auomatically go for the worm trilogy as being an automatic for tolkein lovers (the paperback copy I had even went so far as saying that it was the only conteporary work that could be judges as equal to LOTR. However while it does indeed have a fairly good mideval romance type plot to it, it is completely obfuscated by the language used. Tolkein while himself a linguist wrote LOTR in a fairy modern in educated form of English so that an ordinary person is able to follow the plot with realive ease. In contrast Eddison writes in a very archaic pseudo-shakesperian form (lots of "spakes" and so on) as well as often reverting to medival spelling of words even when those spellings are not all that close to ones a modern person would recognize ("crocodile" become "cocadrill" for example) Add on his frequen use of ancient sounding metaphors and aphorisms and you wind up with a prose style which if you are not already fluent in achaic English becomes simply mind numbing and almost ipossible to get through. Oroborous might be tolerable if it was a movie or radio dramatization, but as a book it is just impossible. Likewise, Lindsay's Voyage is a bit incomprehensible if you are not well educated in modern philsophy and in particular have a deep understading of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein (at least I've been told that if you have and understanding of them Lindsay makes sense) otherwise Lindsay is very confusing and more than a little depressing (the supreme power in the universe is pain?)

As for what I would reccoment in the Tolkien Vein, you could do worse than Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time its not nearly as literate as Tolkein but it has a good fantasy epic storline and at 13 600+ page book and going will at least keep you busy

10-23-2007, 05:59 PM	#7
Alfirin Shade of Carn Dûm Join Date: Jun 2007 Posts: 435	I'm afraid that personally I must disagree on both The Worm Oroborus and A Voyage to Arcturus as being good choices for the Tolkein buff. Neither is all that Tolkinesque except on the most fundamnetal level. In addtion I feel that both have signifcant proalbmes as works of thier own. While I have heard people auomatically go for the worm trilogy as being an automatic for tolkein lovers (the paperback copy I had even went so far as saying that it was the only conteporary work that could be judges as equal to LOTR. However while it does indeed have a fairly good mideval romance type plot to it, it is completely obfuscated by the language used. Tolkein while himself a linguist wrote LOTR in a fairy modern in educated form of English so that an ordinary person is able to follow the plot with realive ease. In contrast Eddison writes in a very archaic pseudo-shakesperian form (lots of "spakes" and so on) as well as often reverting to medival spelling of words even when those spellings are not all that close to ones a modern person would recognize ("crocodile" become "cocadrill" for example) Add on his frequen use of ancient sounding metaphors and aphorisms and you wind up with a prose style which if you are not already fluent in achaic English becomes simply mind numbing and almost ipossible to get through. Oroborous might be tolerable if it was a movie or radio dramatization, but as a book it is just impossible. Likewise, Lindsay's Voyage is a bit incomprehensible if you are not well educated in modern philsophy and in particular have a deep understading of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein (at least I've been told that if you have and understanding of them Lindsay makes sense) otherwise Lindsay is very confusing and more than a little depressing (the supreme power in the universe is pain?) As for what I would reccoment in the Tolkien Vein, you could do worse than Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time its not nearly as literate as Tolkein but it has a good fantasy epic storline and at 13 600+ page book and going will at least keep you busy Last edited by Alfirin; 10-23-2007 at 06:00 PM. Reason: grammar mistakes