tolkien's successors

Matthew Malthouse · 02 Dec 2004, 13:24 · from 2004-December.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: matthew.malthouse at ntlworld.com (Matthew Malthouse)
Date: Thu Dec  2 13:24:40 2004
Subject: (urth) tolkien's successors
In-Reply-To: <02e301c4d817$05a8c310$4c1e4b0a at vcorp.ad.vrsn.com>
References: <20041130204636.5373A37CED at sitemail.everyone.net>
Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20041202211734.02c8ae30 at pop.ntlworld.com>

At 02:31 02/12/2004, Crush wrote:
>Surely all fantasy writers today must say -with apologies to Nixon- "We're
>all Tolkienites now".

To my mind the "Like Tolkien" tag is a bad reviewers tag.

There aren't any writers like Tolkien.  Oh, there are some who on their own 
merits are just as good or perhaps better if one is prepared to compare 
apples and oranges. But no one is doing precisely what Tolkein did and it's 
possible that because he did it already no one will.

I don't think it's to be disputed that Tolkien is an irradicable influence 
on contemporary writers and to that degree they might all be Tolkienites.

Matthew

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net