mat@hou5d.UUCP (09/06/83)
Wasn't there some author (Phillip J. Farmer?) who writes works mentioned in other fiction? Does anyone know if he is ghost-writing for Thomas Covenant? For that matter, has he translated ``The Mad Tryst of Sir Edthelred Caunning''? For that matter, how many of you literary types can name the story where THAT appears? (Hint: it is a WELL-KNOWN story.) Having just battered my way through the two Covenant trilogies for the first and (sadly) probably last time I would like to toss a little more oil on the TC/LOTR fire. First and foremost: I don't think that a valid comparison is really possible, except for the nitpicking ``how much did who steal from whom''. The works are ENTIRELY different. Different genre. Different genesis. Different purposes in the writing. Etc. With that in mind, I'll try. First, a few comments on LOTR, which I have read THROUGH a half-a-dozen times, and skimmed and sampled hundreds of times. The Lord of The Rings is a massive work of epic fantasy. Tolkien spent most of his life working on it in one way or another. Even when it was finished it wasn't finished. He continued to work on the Silmarillion. LOTR lies somewhere between Morte d'Arthur and The Wind in the Willows. In his essay ``Tree and Leaf'' (available today in The Tolkien Reader) Professor Tolkien places TWitW in the world of ``Beast Fantasy'', saying that it does not quite make it into the realm of Fairy-Story (which is where he placed his own works). The animals in it are at once ordinary animals and ordinary people. Incidentaly, if you haven't read it, or haven't read it since you were a little child, you may want to take a look at it. It is a book for litlle children and for adults. It is probably of little interest to pre-adolescents and adolescents. The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Graham. Morte d'Arthur paints a picture of a real world into which the denizons of Faerie sometimes reach, to serve such purposes as they may. LOTR pictures the real world already inhabited by the people of Faerie alongside the people native to the earth. Indeed, there are some who belong to both worlds, and who ``cannot be altogether whole'' in either. It is a ``tale that grew in the telling'', to use Prof. Tolkien's own words. It has, he insisted, no allagorical or historical purpose whatsoever. Indeed, morals can be drawn from it; a fair amount of analysis about who and whom and why the story had to be this way to work is possible; but the story was meant first as a story. That it is an object suited to literary analysis is due, perhaps, to the depths of the vision from which Professor Tolkien drew the story. What does ``a tale that grew in the telling'' mean? Well, in the introduction to ``Tree and Leaf'' Tolkien writes ``At that time we had just about reached Bree, and I had then no more notion than they of what had become of Gandalf or who Strider was; and I had begun to despair of surviving to find out.'' In the Foreword to the Ballentine edition of LOTR, he writes `` ... in 1939, by the end of which year the tale had not yet reached the end of Book I [ note: not volume 1 of 3, book 1 of 5 ]. In spite of the darkness of the next five years, I found that the story could not wholly be abandoned, and I plodded on, mostly by night, till I stood by Balin's tomb in Moria. There I halted for a while. It was almost a year later when I picked up again and so came to Lothlorien and the Great River late in 1941.'' It seems obvious then, that the characters became who they were by participating in the story. It is true that after the story was written, it had to be rewritten backwards to get consistancy, and it seems likely that a good deal of the flesh on the bones of the characters got propagated backwards in that fashion. Donaldson's work seems to be fundementally different. Where Tolkien adopts the posture of a storyteller, Donaldson's writing seems, somehow, to be more in the line of sci-fi. Very Good sci-fi, yes indeed, very good, but sci-fi, NOT epic fairy-story. It is just something in the way it is told. Perhaps it is the number of strange, italicized words. Oh, sure, Tolkien does this too, but I think that Donaldson does it to drastic excess ... as if he wanted to show just how well he could do it. There is something else. At least one of the six volumes that I have contains a blurb saying that Donaldson's father had been a doctor who worked with victims of Hansen's disease (leprousy) and that the idea for a leper-hero had had it's origins in a speech that his father gave about despair and the life of a leper. We have, then, a single character in search of a story. It is the single-minded attention to the thought, actions, and perceptions of ONE protagonist to the exclusion of all others that made the first volume of the first trilogy so difficult for me to beat through. The second volume was better, simply because Hile Troy was the focus of much of the book. And there were a few surprises. When the Forestal Caerroil Wildwod of the Garroting Deep tells Troy that there will be another thing demanded of the bargain, you realize that the Forestal wants Troy. Troy is too worried about his charge and his fear of failure to worry about his life. What you don't realize is that the Forestal doesn't want Troy's LIFE; he wants Troy's SERVICE. Forever -- or a good approximation thereof. A nice touch. And a nice touch also in the second trilogy where we see that Troy's doom has turned into a boon for the Land. There are a lot of nice touches in the two trilogies. Where the *haruchai* mentions his Vow of service on the Sarangrave Flats and the strength of the mention of the Vow is enough to alert Lord Foul the Despiser to the whereabouts of the company. The Giants, who are more REAL than any other people in the story. Etc. A few of them would seem to come right out of Tolkien. Example: In ``The Illearth War'' (book 2 of the first trilogy), in the section called ``Runnik's Tale'', on P218 of the DelRey paperback edition, there is a description of the Sarangrave Flat: ``cunning, old, half-rotten willows and cypresses that sang quiet songs which could bind the unwary ...''. In LOTR, in the first volume, ``The Fellowship of the Ring'', in the chapter entitled ``The Old Forest'', Sam says ``I don't like this big tree. I don't trust it. Hark at it singing about sleep now! This won't do at all!''. And indeed, just a little while later, two of the hobbits need to be rescued. From the next chapter, ``In The House of Tom Bombadi'': ``We guessed you'd come ere long to the water; all paths lead that way, down to the Withywindle. Old Grey Willowman, he's a mighty singer; and it's hard for the little folk to escape his cunning mazes.'' And, for what it's worth, the name ``Sarangrave'' sounds almost as if it had come from the parody ``Bored of the Rings'' that the Harvard Lampoon people wrote a while ago. THAT little piece of literary dross features such names as the Plains of Roi-Tan, Goodgulf the Wizard, Orlon the Elf, and the Lord of the Vee-Ates, also called the Jolly Green Giant. Kind of like the picture on the front of Book Three of the First Chronicles of TC,U, The Power That Preserves. None of the establishes that Donaldson took anything from Tolkien. This is probably a good thing, considering the damage that has been done to hot young musicians when their works were found to resemble someone elses too closely. And anyway, I suppose that we shouldn't be to hard on anyone who has borrowed from JRRT. After all, what would Rogue be like without orcs? I am not totally positive that Tolkien made the first modern use of the word, but then again I don't know that he didn't. There are a few things that I will actually fault Donaldson on. One is the need to have his world be correct and consistent. SF authors seems to be especially prey to the illness that requires their world to be an extension of the world as we know it. For example, in ``The Wounded Land'', book one of the Second Chronicle, in the section with the title ``Sarangrave Flat'', P408, the ill aura around the sun has diminished. Linden says: ``This is the line. ... When the sun passes over thi cliff, the Sunbane will be as strong as ever. ... Because the atmosphere is different. It doesn't have anything to do with the sun. That corona is an illusion. We see it because we're looking at the sun through the atmosphere. ...'' He [ Thomas Covenant ] did not interrupt. ... The power required to literally change the sun was incinceivable'' Donaldson should know that in the world he created HE is tha master. If Lord Foul the Despiser can change the sun, then there is no need for him to explain it away. Unfortunately, SF writers cling to timidly to the established science. Also, Donaldson feels the need to create for each being a whole encyclopedia of facts -- its appearence, how it fights, etc. Tolkien holds this to a minimum. What his beings say and do is more important than what they eat for breakfast. And he hasn't burdens us with dozens of different kinds of fighting. Tolkien usually troubles us only with those things that are either part of the immediate scene, or those that his characters need to tell each other. When he has to make an exception for example in talking about Shelob, he does so by weaving a small but seperate tale of the incident. Thus he almost apologizes for not knowing what became of Shelob, whether she died or healed. Well, it should be clear where my preferences lie. The fault lies not, perhaps, with Donaldson's writing but with the type of works he has chosen to set it among. Many of the expectations of the genre look like flaws to me. Within those flaws, however, he has done spectacularaly well. Still, I will take LOTR over TCoTC,U any day. But let no one say that I speak from ignorance! hou5d!mat Mark Terribile Duke of deNet PS No complaints, please, about where this was posted. It went to net.sf-lovers because that is where it belongs. Ant to net.books because of the note on The Wind in the Willows.