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If writing what i think is childish then im 4 years old.
Well, anyone who writes "[anything] is soooo emo." should not really object to having their age or maturity questioned. Not so much 4 years old as mid teens though. Nothing wrong with being young, BUT I don't think many people in their mid teens can properly understand and appreciate Tolkien. When you read it when you're young, you read it as a childrens book. When you read it as an adult, you can (potentially) get so much more out of it. You still may not like it, but you can judge it as it is, not as it seemed to you as a child.
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But here you make the mistake humans like to do. You say that you cannot compare Tolkien(apples) to someone else(pears) like erikson.
You claim that tolkien is a "apple" and that nobody else can become a "apple", thus creating the illusion that tolkien is untouchable and unparalled.
I didn't say that nobody
can, I said that nobody has ever tried to. There's a very big difference. The first would be absurd, but the second is an assertion based on reasons I've given above, that are there for you to contradict if you can.
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This is ofcource rediculous and compleetly idiotic, there are many more better writers AND world creators out there, including erikson.
Of course there are better writers than Tolkien, what of it? I disagree about the world building (more on that in a moment), but even if
that were true it still wouldn't do anything to make the notion that Tolkien and Erikson were writing very different sorts of books 'ridiculous' or 'idiotic'.
Now, as to world building, all you're doing here is making assertions, same as potsherds was, and as with him there is nothing in your posts to explain your saying so except the fact that you like Erikson and you don't like Tolkien. You said earlier that I was making a common human mistake, and here I'll say that I think you're making one, for the same reason I gave in an earlier post. Fans of every fantasy author who I've had much experience with all like to say that their favourite author's world is greater in scope than Tolkien's. When even Goodkind fans can say that with a straight face, it's perhaps natural that fans of Erikson, who is perhaps the master of this among the modern fantasy authors, would say the same. But they'd still be wrong. Anyone who's read the Silmarillion could tell you this (as several on this thread have), but beyond even that are the many volumes of the History of Middle Earth. By all means like Erikson better, by all means like his world better. But to say that he is a better world builder than Tolkien is simply absurd. Reading Lord of the Rings only reveals a fraction of the world that Tolkien created.
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They both write fantasy, both in the medieval state of our civilasation, both have magic, both have shapeshifters, both have hero's, both have humans as the largest race, both have incompetant leaders and both have a plot about world domenation.
And yet they're so very, very different. All those elements you name are but shallow similarities, some very much so. Someone could write a detective novel, or a trashy romance, or a political thriller or whatever other sort of book you could think of that had all of those elements, but would be nothing like either Erikson or Tolkien. Someone who came along and said that Erikson sucks because his characters aren't cool detectives like Herlock Sholmes in Swords and Sleuthery or because he doesn't have as much bodice-ripping as Fantasy X, would not be making a valid criticism of Erikson. And nor is someone who criticises Tolkien's mythic fantasy for not having Erikson's humour, or his shades of grey, or whatever.
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The only thing that STRONGLY sets them apart is views on good and evil and killing characters. Other then that i think its save to say they both are apples.
And here I can only say again how wrong I think you are, and that perhaps understanding the fundamental difference between them is something that comes more easily when you're older. Because I think that the mistake that you're making is looking only at the surface similarities and missing a lot of the depth.
In fact, these two things you list are not even fundamental differences at all. Both of them kill some characters, both of them bring some characters back from supposed deaths. Their views on good/evil are certainly different, but then there's Robert Jordan who takes a similar view to Tolkien, but who still writes a style of fantasy that is much closer to Erikson's, and can be more directly compared to him and probably be found inferior in most respects.
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Good for you. Take what you can, give nothing back and never apologise.
Unless you're wrong, of course
.
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I read the hobbit when i was 9 i think, it was the translated version, and i liked it, i really liked it. Tolkien left out mayor battles and plots and stayed with what he did best, tell a story for kids.
If you say that tolkien is better read when your older then i quite disagree,
That's the thing though, when you read it as a child you only read it as a children's story, and you'll only remember it as a children's story, and when you get older it will be that half remembered story from your childhood that you'll be comparing to the books of your later years. But it
isn't a children's story - the fact that children can enjoy it as that is incidental. A child reading Erikson might years later remember the assassins and the battles and the magic, but would they comprehend Itkovian's sacrifice? Would they have... and I'll use one of Erikson's favourite words here, the sense of
pathos to be moved by the Chain of Dogs the same way that a more mature reader could? A child reading Erikson would miss out on a lot, I think, and so too, though in a rather different way, does a child reading Tolkien.
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Tolkien started his world so that he could tell them to his kids and the kids of his kids.
I don't know what led you to believe this, but it is completely wrong. It first began when he was studying philology at Oxford, where as something of a... hobby? project? experiment? he worked on inventing languages. Over the next years he began developing stories for a world in which his languages would be set, some straightforwardly mythological, others also going back to the philology of his languages, explaining in terms of his world's culture and history how certain words came to be. This was during WW1, before he was married. His first and intended audience was not children, but fellow scholars of mythology and language. Some of these stories were eventually made into the Silmarillion. It was many years later, after he'd had children, that he started writing stories for them. At first these were stories separate from his world of middle earth, but then he created the Hobbits and through them could share something of that world with them. The stories he made for his children led to the book 'The Hobbit' being published, which is indeed a children's book. The publishers then wanted a sequel to this... but that wasn't at all what they got. Tolkien returned to his older stories, to the greater part of the world that he had created, to its mythic roots, and over the course of many years the Lord of the Rings was created. It was meant to go hand in hand with the Silmarillion, and was not, is not, a children's book.
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You can see that in the way that the weaker can defeat the strong. Blibo against the dragon. Frodo against everybody. small against big. divided against united. few against many.
Kalam against the Claw, Quick Ben against the crippled god....
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So after the hobbit he went off the kiddy stories and tried a adult story, the slap of the rings. I read it when i was 13, and was baffeled by its boringness, not because i didnt understand, but because i could understand it. It was so predictable and its views on the world were extreamly simplistic.
I know you think you understood. I get that. I first read it when I was 13, and thought the same. It left no great impression. But when you miss something, it's not always obvious that you're missing it. Your brain just isn't wired to pick up on some things at that age. When I read it again at 20-something it was a revelation, and I now consider it one of the very best books I've had the pleasure of reading. That won't be the same for everyone of course, matters of personal taste and such will still come into it. But I've spoken to enough people whose experience was similar to mine to be convinced that those who read it at a young age cannot have read it as it was meant to be read.
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Everybody knew boringmir would die. everybody knew that gandalf would be back. everybody knew that the dark lord would be beaten. everybody knew that the elves would eventualy help out. everybody... well ill stop here but i think you understand my point. its just not mythmaking, its saying, 'hey everything will be fine'
Two different points here... predictability and themes. To the first, it's hard for me to remember back when I first read it. Apart from the 'dark lord would be beaten' part though (and really, when does a Dark Lord ever win?), I don't know that it really was all that predictable. You're speaking of your impressions on your second read of it here, but since you'd already read it and knew how everything went, calling it predictable at that point seems a little unfair. Even if it
is predictable, I don't really buy that as a criticism - keeping the reader guessing is one of the lesser merits of a book, though one on which a great deal of pulp fiction is primarily based. Anybody who's ever enjoyed a re-read of a book can tell you that there's a lot more pleasure to be had from a good book than merely finding out what happens next.
Now, as to themes, it is not saying 'hey everything will be fine'. If anything, it's saying that if you want everything to be fine you'll have to fight tooth and nail to make it that way, and even then there will be consequences, a price to pay. It was not a happy ending for Frodo, remember. There is so much more to it than that though... and even then, the themes were not the primary purpose. There was still so much more to the world, it wasn't created just to tell this story, or to convey a theme or message.
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All opinions are age/maturity related... So ridicule what you want.
No, not really. There's plenty that's just poor judgement from people who should know better, and plenty more that's a matter of personal taste. But your opinions on LOTR are based on a child's reading of it because you read it as a child, just the same as mine were before my later re-read. You may not like it as an adult, but until you've read it as an adult you have not truly read the same book that I have, you have not read the book that Tolkien wrote. And for that reason, and that reason alone, your opinion of it doesn't mean much. Read it again and still hate it, fine, then your opinions on it would be worth responding to if someone thought anything you said about it was wrong, or simply acknowledging, if it were a matter of taste. But as it is, I do not think you can at present hold any sort of valid opinion about the author.
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Ive read it twice. Once in dutch and once in english for english class, which is, if i may say so, quite impressive for a dislectic.
Very impressive, dyslexic or not. Your english is good for a second language, and I respect that. However, it does shed additional light on your dislike for Tolkien. Firstly, some authors do not translate well. With Tolkien there's so much in the language that you'd lose in translation... and no, I'm not just guessing at that, I've spoken about it with another Dutchie before as it happens, who'd read both the Dutch and English versions multiple times, and said as much. Secondly, reading it while still learning the language is about the worst possible way it could be read. Even if you had a fairly good grasp of English then, you just wouldn't be able to appreciate as well the beauty of Tolkien's language. Thirdly, nothing, and I mean
nothing, kills a good book so well as having to read it in school
.
I don't really think I can convince you to re-read it... and if you were to now, it would probably be with such a determination to dislike it still that it would prove self fulfilling. But I did want to explain, and I hope that I have done so at least to the extent that you can understand, if not agree with, my saying that having read LOTR as a child does not give you a true or just opinion about Tolkien.
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