This is Why We Never Got Another Lord of the Rings

The key to "being the next Tolkien" isnt to replicate his book. Replicate his passion and his dedication to create a beautiful work of art not just a random fantasy book

Tolkien fought in one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history. He understood heroism in a way that most never will, and it allowed him to write heroic characters like many just can't. Be it a lost king uniting humanity to fight evil or just a humble farmer doing everything in his power to save his best friend, Tolkien wrote them masterfully. And he also understood the need for heroes, the need for aspirational characters, the need for characters that could give us hope in our darkest times, even if they were fictional.

“J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji.” Terry Pratchett

Tolkien once wrote an essay called "On Fairy-stories". He talks quite a bit about how stories contain elements of earlier stories, and that every story-teller is basically like a cook making soup. What really matters isn't so much what ingredients are being used, but how they are combined and what spices are added. Story-telling is an Art, not a Science. Anyway, if you haven't read Tolkien's essay, I strongly recommend it.

I remember reading that Tolkien said something along the lines of, "I wrote a book that I wanted to read."

That's why Lord of the Rings was great, in my opinion. It was something that came from the heart and a place of passion.

Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea was not written according to any formula, Lester del Rey's or anyone else's. It was begun in the summer of 1966 and published in 1968, long before The Sword of Shannara which was published in 1977. Throughout her career she fought for and supported genuine art, and resisted and criticized the kind of corporate control over literary art which del Rey promulgated.

Given how viable self-publishing is in this day and age, I don't think anyone should be dissuaded from writing their story, based on how messed up publishers are. You won't be the next Beatles, but you still have a good chance to find your audience.

But yeah, first you have to write a good book.

Robert E. Howard's Conan was first published in Weird Tales in 1932 while The Hobbit was published in 1937. I'm just pointing this out because Conan appeared a couple of times lumped in with other mass market fantasy paper backs. I have no doubt Conan was published in paper back as another fantasy product. I just think it's important to point out that Robert E Howard and Conan not only pre dates the Del Ray formula but also pre dates Tolkien.

I find it exausting the way people think Martain thinks of Tolkien. Martin has said multiple times that he loves Tolkien, and that he thinks Tolkien is the significantly better author. His story, sure, is based on moving away from Tolkien but I think it's staunchly from a source of love. Everything I've seen him say about it reads to me as "I was so obsessed with lotr that I started thinking about Aragon's tax policy, and thought that would be a fun book to write, and would be an interesting alternate direction to take a fantasy story" rather than "what a trash writer tolkien was for not thinking about Aragon's tax policy". That damn show, the shitty sensationalised articles, the immature Tolkien haters who all ignore context to pretend Martin is one of them, it drives me mad.

And this is why the only maxim any creative person must follow is to create what they’d like to consume themselves. Trends, methodologies, etc. are not bad and are otherwise terrific foundations upon which to build BUT what goes on top of said foundation is best when it is unique to the individual building it.

You have some valid points about the commercialization the Del Reys formulated, but there are so many chronological errors (Moorcock is not some late-period Grimdark figure, he was a pulpy contemporary of Tolkien whose dislike of the man's work is based as much on drawing from different influences and aspects of myth, history, and the American school of pulp fantasy Moorcock admires like Edgar Rice Burroughs, Leigh Brackett, Jack Vance, Robert E Howard and Fritz Leiber who were all writing their takes on fantasy well before Lord of the Rings) .

Moorcock's most significant work as an editor was for science fiction in New Worlds magazine, not fantasy, giving people like J G Ballard, M. John Harrison, Roger Zelazny and more a deserved spotlight for their own takes on sci-fi.)

Maybe it's a mistake to have authors like Ursula K LeGuin and CJ Cherryh filed under "slop" but the bias here, whether intentional or not, is so overpowering that what valid points you do have is lost in what is either bad research, or just plain outrage farming.

I am not going to say your opinions are invalid, but your arguments for them are. That's a shame, because as a first time watcher, it makes me skeptical of the rest of your channel.

This feels like you started with the conclusion that "fantasy is just pseudo-Tolkiens and anti-Tolkiens" and interpreted the history of the genre to fit that conclusion.

There was an entire non-Tolkienian tradition of fantasy going back to Howard, Lovecraft, and Ashton Smith, up through Poul Anderson and Jack Vance, and from them too Moorcoock and Tanith Lee. To simply dismiss any fantasy work published after Lord of the Ringsbut unlike it as "anti-Tolkien" gives entirely the wrong impression about where these stories came from, who was writing them, and who their influences were.

The idea that fantasy was strangled in it's crib because Del Rey published Shannara is ignoring the sheer volume of excellent non-Tolkienian fantasy that came out before and after Shannara.

A lot of cherries were picked in the making of this video.

Tolkien didnt write a book to make money. He wrote a language he was passionate about that needed a world to fit in. He showed so much love for the fine details. He took his time. If you want to be the next Tolkien, be youself and design your world with love

I could be wrong, but I think one of the things that makes Tolkien unique, or at least a bit superior to other writers of these types of fantasy books, was his level of education in languages allowed him to bring a sort solidity and provenance to his imaginings which is why his character ideas and creatures have been so widely copied, which is what I think people actually mean when they credit him with inventing the genre.

Tolkein spent 17 years writing LOTR. That's why we haven't had another. Society now values speed over quality.

You included a lot of examples of books as del Rey formula books that don't fit. Le Guin being perhaps the most egregious example - but also Lord Foul's Bane and Conan don't support your theory very well. Certainly there are examples you could have used that fit better (Feist, Eddings, Goodkind). And there are huge exceptions; what about McCaffrey, Zelazney, Moorcock himself (whose Eternal Champion books long pre-date the 90s), McKinley, Susan Cooper, McKillip, Terry Pratchett for goodness sake? The story of modern fantasy is much more complex than you are presenting here.

"I'm a contrarian. This means that, like a conformist, I allow other people to control my thoughts, but in the opposite direction."

I think you should also consider the role that Dungeons and Dragons and it's take on fantasy (influenced by Tolkien and others) played in defining fantasy tropes starting in the 1970s.

Tolkien never wanted to write 'Fantasy'.
He wanted to create 'The poetic Edda' for an Anglo saxon audience.

The reason why there hasn't been another Tolkien is because there aren't all that many authors willing to devote their entire lives to their created world and its people and history. It can be argued that Tolkien didn't "create" fantasy as a genre - he was riffing on Northern European myths and folklore - but what he did was _define_ it all in a way that would be difficult to outdo. Basically, he set the fantasy template.

Prior to Tolkien, elves were twee little fairy-folk - Santa's helpers, The Elves and the Shoemaker, and all that. And dwarves were Disneyfied "Snow White" characters. Orcs were obscure "corrupted" goblin-like things in Old English folklore. Tolkien "reinvented" the whole fantasy pantheon, and got rid of the childishness.

It wasn't all just Tolkien's doing, though. His concept of what an elf, dwarf, orc, wraith, troll, goblin, balrog, wizard, dragon, etc., ought to be became the way everyone imagined them, largely due to the thousands of works that were derivative of Tolkien: novels, films, RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons, computer games.

Tolkien is like Lovecraft in the way that the works that were actually written by the man himself were only the beginning, and the massive impact on modern culture is due to the many derivative works that other authors built on it.

Moorcock’s own writing is a lot weirder and more wide-ranging than just inverting the Del Rey formula.

I've watched the video twice now, and read all of Hilary's responses to comments.. and I still can't figure out what her angle is. What her specific axe is that she's grinding. She disparages an entire genre of books, but won't indicate what books (in any genre) she feels are not terrible. As near as i can tell, she definitely hates some specific examples of fantasy, and feels they are too dominant. She conflates that with ALL examples of books that have come along in the Del Rey/ "fantasy genre" era as complicit in following a formula and therefore, by default, worthy of derision (except for the outliers, which she won't name). I'm trying to figure out what her goal is. Is she selling something? Does she have a writing course or editing service? I checked out her Goodreads list (very short list of books for someone so knowing about so many books) and among her very very few genre books in the list is a one-star review of Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow! One star! The Sparrow is all the things she rails against in this video. It's an incredibly original idea, exceptionally well-written, featuring ADULTS who do adult things and contemplate grown-up, spiritual issues along with exploring trauma and loss. Brilliant book. But just one of the many, many, infinite number of fascinating and brilliant genre books that have come out in the post-Del Rey era. She follows in the grand tradition of people who lack the courage of their convictions to declare what they consider to be "GOOD" books. It's always easy to disparage entire swaths of something while only naming the easy targets that are already polarizing. Over and over, she won't name those books she considers good, instead merely saying that there are 'outliers'. Of course there are outliers. That's what makes books and movies and music and art so special. Countless people make it. Countless people make TERRIBLE art and books and movies and music. Countless people follow trends and make stuff they THINK people will like, and sometimes they do! Many artists create things in direct contradiction to all those trends and popular artists and what the corporate entities choose to put their money behind. Many of THOSE works are TERRIBLE. But in all cases-- trends, subverting trends, blatant cash-grabs, unsellable passion projects, book-tok, and on and on, there are truly amazing and original works AND/OR amazingly fun and popular and just pure joy, but books that are easily dismissed and considered terribly-written.

To have the opinion she has, with such gravitas, but with so little substance to back any of it up, is shocking.

What a nonsense video!

I think these people don't realise that Tolkien and GOT sold well because they were GOOD. They have longevity.

There are lots of contestable points in this essay, many of which other commenters have already pointed out; I'll mention one more: it's a bit rich to dismiss "entertaining" as a subjective quality (not wrong in itself) when you absolutely refuse to define what you mean by "good" or attempt to explain why Tolkien is "good" and everything that came after him is "bad". Are you talking about quality of prose? Singularity of voice? Character depth? Story craft? Discussion of philosophical ideas? Ideology? Innovations brought to the art? Experimental qualities?

Asides from vaguely gesturing at "formulas" (as if classic literature authors and authors of other genres were all writing in a vacuum and not constantly in dialogue with each other), you don't offer the beginning of an argument for why modern fantasy is bad. You present The Goblin Emperor as a terrible book without even attempting to hint at what its supposed failings are beyond "reacting to Martin" and "being contrarian" — should we dismiss your essay on the same ground since after all it is ~reacting~ to modern fantasy and being ~contrarian~ by calling all of it bad and implying its readers are mindless passive consumers? The use of the word "slop", an already extremely vague and lazy term used to inflammatorily denigrate creations one doesn't like without having to go thru the effort of actually putting forth grounded arguments about craft, intent or skill of execution, as a blanket and nuanceless dismissal of seemingly ALL modern media, is the cherry on top of an essay that is steeped in unexamined subjectivity confused with hard facts.

I'm having an extremely bad reaction to seeing Katherine Kurtz, CJ Cherryh, and Ursula K LeGuin in a slop line up. If Lathe of Heaven or Left Hand of Darkness or Foreigner or Russalka are your idea of formulaic anything, you're losing cred fast with me.

Banging quote, totally agree. He became a landmark. "he just made a world" trivialises the extraordinary. Michelangelo just painted a ceiling, which doesn't convey the scale of what you're talking about. It's a great video, but that "he just made a world" really made me start to twitch lol.

Lester Del Rey surely did a disservice to modern fantasy by prioritizing money-driven formulas over art. But during the same period that the industry was cranking out derivative Tolkien clones, Ursula LeGuin and Patricia McKillip were crafting lyrical, character-driven, and thought-provoking fantasies that ignored the Del Rey formula; Stephen Donaldson was creating a leper anti-hero who infects a Land as exquisite as Middle Earth with his own brand of original sin and has to claw his way toward redemption, mostly in spite of himself; and Gene Wolfe was writing the extraordinary Book of the New Sun that felt like part Homer, part Scripture, and part fever dream. These were real works of literature that were neither cheap Tolkien copies nor mere anti-Tolkien trope inversions.

​@HilaryLayne​ Howard wasn't horror. Neither are Anderson, Vance, and Moorcock, and Tanith Lee did as much straight fantasy as she did horror. Even Clark Ashton Smith had Zothique and Averoigne. And all of them were an influence on both Dungeons and Dragons and modern fantasy. They are absolutely considered part of the fantasy canon.

I don't think that's a fair point.

I completely agree! And it can be hard to write that book if one's head is crowded with all these publishing formulas and industry standards. So that's something else writers need to keep an eye on.

You intentionally circumvented the full quote from GRRM by leaivng out "modern". In essnece, Tolkien *did* create the modern fantasy genre even if that wasnt his intention. LOTR is the work to which every following fantasy author is inevitbly beholden to. He is the reason why the fantasy genre looks the way it does today. What you claim is that Tolkien didnt create the genre as a whole, which is true. But that also wasnt what Martin claimed in the clip that you showed. You can´t ignore that which contradicts your argument because it doesnt suit you. It´s a dishonest way to start your video.

You might also ask "Why did we never get another Shakespeare?", and there are some parallels with Tolkien. Shakespeare had his imitators, such as Ford and Webster, who took the blood-and-thunder elements out of Shakespeare to create their dramas. Also, in the 17th century Shakespeare was eclipsed for a time as his work was classed as 'old-fashioned', which is what Tolkien's reputation is enduring at the moment.

I found this video to be disrespectful (or dismissive?) to a lot of great authors, and also excludes fantasy works that would have ran contrary to the point you were trying to make (Tad Williams). The assumption that George RR Martin is simply anti-Tolkien really misses the mark in my opinion. He's been very open about his other influences, and even when something is different than Tolkien doesn't mean he was deliberately setting out to subvert.. Fantasy is in a good place now as creativity and risks are being taken to expand the genre to new and unique places.

Tolkien, RE Howard, Tad Williams, GRRM, Brooks, Sanderson, Abercrombie - I can look back at and read things from various fantasy writing eras and be able to enjoy and appreciate them. I guess I disagree with the premise posed in the video as a whole.

Same here. Also it scratches me so wrong to hear ASoIaF referenced by the name of the show. It immediately screams that the person is not seeing it from a position of respect or even attention to the book.

Wow. This sure was a take. Opinions were definitely shared. Of that we can be certain.

I think you're wrong in saying that what Tolkien did wasn't unique: He was a man that had been learning ancient languages as a kid, a philologist and a scholar of mythology, he took decades upon decades to make his books, and drew from ancient symbolism, language, the medieval worldview, perennial struggles found stories up to ancient times, his own experiences during world upending wars, and catholic theology and metaphysics, which then got published by luck and contacts (and maybe other things). Hardly will you find something like this to happen any time soon.
The man tried to write an ancient myth in novel form, while most fantasy writers take inspiration from modern books and movies.

Martin has literally said he'd rather to go Middle Earth than Heaven after he dies!

It's clear that many in the comments think that what made Tolkien special was his scholarly worldbuilding and not, I dunno, his profound firsthand understanding of faith, hope, and love in the midst of darkest misery.

I think a lot of the points made in this video are the sort of things that lead aspiring writers to obsess over writing something “unique” or try too hard to do “something never done before” to the point that they just never end up writing anything
Also, a lot of this video comes off as “old = good, new = bad”

Exactly! Ursula Le Guin doesn’t get enough credit in this genre. The Disposed and The Left Hand of Darkness could have been fantasy (world building) stories, but some writers want to get to the point sooner, I guess.

I'm always happy to see someone poke a sharp stick into fantasy's soft underbelly, but the argument in this video is ludicrously misconceived. It takes the various trends in the fantasy genre, oversimplifies them, then claims they apply to absolutely EVERYTHING that's published as fantasy, or for that matter all publishing period. Of course it's true that writers should ignore trends and formulas. But it's manifestly false to claim that everything being published today subordinates itself uncritically to whatever trend or formula a publisher demands. I have to wonder whether Hilary has ever even read a fantasy novel. Here are important examples of writers who all get published, or were published in the past and are still in print, but who do not fit into this simplistic argument: N. K. Jemisin, Guy Gavriel Kay, Robin Hobb, Steven Eriksen, China Mieville, John Crowley, Patricia McKillip, Ursula K. Le Guin, Tim Powers, Haruki Murakami, Jorge Luis Borges, R. F. Kuang, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Robert Holdstock, Angela Carter, Terry Pratchett, M. John Harrison, Fritz Leiber .... I could go on and on. I will also mention that Moorcock included Lord of the Rings in his 1988 book of recommendations, Fantasy: The 101 Best Books. So the claim that Moorcock hated Tolkien is nonsense.

Yes, the trends are real, and they are damaging. But they have never dominated all of publishing, and they still don't, not even in the bleak landscape of modern dystopian neoliberalism.

"he had written prolifically in sci-fi pulp magazines with a teenage target audience in the 40s "

This seems unfair, and pretty darned dismissive and disparaging of the writers who wrote for those pulp magazines as well as their readers. Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Leigh Brackett, Robert E. Howard, John D. MacDonald, Elmore Leonard, Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, Raymond Chandler, Phillip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, Michael Moorcock, Louis L'Amour, H. P. Lovecraft, Seabury Quinn, Manly Wade Wellman, Rafael Sabatini, Jim Thompson, Jack Vance, Valerie Taylor, Agnes Boulton, C.L. Moore, Avram Davidson, Clark Ashton Smith, Dashiell Hammett... I could go on and on. And among the works of many of those writers you find the foundations of modern fantasy and horror literature which extend far beyond LotR.

No. The cultural purpose of heroes, aspirational characters, and sources of hope aren't some special area of experience. Everyone _understands_ those things. A common understanding of them is why Tolkien's books were successful in resonating with an audience. If the experience and understanding he was drawing from was special and coming from a niche most people couldn't understand, they'd have been highly specialized niche books that would have never taken off to a large general audience instead of a small specialized one.
What make Tolkien successful was the fact that he was 1. a highly trained author and literary expert who knew how to write the stories, 2. well-versed through that authorial and literary background in the storytelling and mythological motifs that worked for the story he was telling, and 3. just plain lucky that he was an obsessive world and language builder who _also_ happened to find the time to write a story at some point.

This seems VERY ignorant of the actual history of publishing. Mass-market, formula-driven genre fiction did not start in the 1970s. Before that was the science fiction and cowboy westerns of the 1950s and 1960s. Before that was the pulp adventure and detective noir of the 1930s and 1940s. Before that was the newspaper and magazine serials going all the way back to Victorian England.

EDIT: Inserted "and cowboy westerns".

Slop is the last word I would use to describe "A Wizard of Earthsea," or really any of Ursula K. Le Guin's works. Also, the history of fantasy as a genre is a lot more complex than this artificial binary you created. Were there people like Lester Del Ray peddling formulaic books that aped Tolkien's style? Yes. But there were also writers like Katherine Kurtz, C. J. Cherryh, and the aforementioned Le Guin who were bringing the genre into exciting new directions. I would suggest maybe taking a closer look at some of those cherries before you pick them.

"Evil cannot create, it only corrupts" - quite ironic how Del Rey completely missed the point of Tolkien's work

I'm so confused by the notion that authors reacting to other works via their own (and becoming popular once published as a result) is something to bemoan. All art is conversation. Yes, trends are a thing and always have been (Shakespeare, anyone?). Popularity doesn't mean something is good (or bad, for that matter). And patronage, whether from a corporation or a king, is by no means new.

This idea that (specifically) Western literature is somehow in a worse place today than it was in the 1960s because publishers chase the almighty dollar is equally strange. Authors have more avenues to write, and publish, and find an audience now than ever before. Those in Western countries are subject to less censorship than in many, many other parts of the world - or other time periods. As both authors and readers (and publishers), we have greater awareness of a wide variety of issues and the ability to research and converse with people from far further afield than ever.

Personally, all of this makes me hugely optimistic about the state of fiction in general - and speculative literature in particular. The 'I guess someone somewhere can maybe do something countercultural to escape the corporate machine' conclusion of this video is truly baffling. Or engagement farming, I guess. In which case, I suppose I'm contributing to your ad revenue.

Conan was a franchise that was eventually taken up by a number of other authors, many of whom followed formulas in their installments.

The effort here taken to ignore most of the more popular modern fantasy series dating back to at least Harry Potter is genuinely impressive.

I would argue that there are plenty of fantasy books that do this - they just aren't often all that popular because people generally think they want what is familiar. Also she included shots from Andor in her "corporate slop" rant - Andor is literally the best thing Disney/Lucasfilm has done in 40 years. It is the opposite of corporate slop, it's the exception that proves the rule.