Be Excellent To Each Other

Since this was brought up in the Game of Thrones thread i have been thinking on it. Personaly i always thought The Hobbit and LOTR books were good from a young age, but i have to admit that the writing style was fucking horrible when i went back to re-read em recently (well 8 or so years ago now)

Everyone seems to have a opinion on it, lets find out what the Hive mind comes up with (as requested by WTB).

Sorry for the slightly bias poll statements but you all get the gist

Give him his due, idiots! I've honestly never witnessed a greater example of "hating on something because it's cool to/makes me look dead clever and sophisticated" than people who claim the LOTR novels are crap.

I JUST DON'T LIKE LONG WORDS!!!!

I struggled through the first one and gave up part way into the second, when all they were doing was walking through forests. It was horrible.

Er... Well, that's insulting.

There's a difference between "I didn't get on with it, it's too verbose", which is fair enough, and "it's fucking crap!" which is what a certain chum of ours was saying in the Game of Thrones thread!

(Chris)

I hate the books because they are extremely poorly written. I thought that when I tried to read them as a child, I think that now.
The idea was great, it started a whole genre, hats off to him, but he couldn't write for shit.

It's not "too verbose". It's shit because it's badly written, and the story is gash.

Haha! I'm off! Have fun guys!

…and Gloin and Thorin and Dwalin and Balin, Bifur and Bofur and Bombur, Dori and Nori and Oria, Fili and Kili…

Don't worry, we'll hate on you while you are gone, because it's "cool"

Er, whatnow?

This is also true of The Dark Tower, of course.

Stop trying to be cool - obviously you like it really.

He only likes it because it depicts a land where Dwarves are cool.

I was about to mention the difference in height between the Gunslinger and Frodo having some deeper meaning...

Ok, arguably created the high fantasy genre, but certainly revamped, pushed to the forefront, reinvigorated, changed direction, etc... of the fantasy genre in the main.

wow, maybe this thread should not have been started. I don't HATE Tolkien, he started the genre of books that i read the most, its just unfortunate that when you now compare his work to any number of modern Fantasy authors his work just falls flat on its face, that's not to say that there aren't lots of shit fantasy authors out there at the moment also.

As has been stated above by the 'haters' though his books are fucking boring with stupid names and are generally very slow and tedious, doesn't change the fact he was the 1st to make the genre big. Overall i would have to put myself in the Hat off to him but glad that his work was very quickly surpassed in quality camp.

Haha please don't get me started on that great big pile of steaming shit

You're me you are, but slightly greener.

There's a whole thread for it if you want to

ohh we already have a 'i hate The Dark Tower' thread?? yay will go have a look later

and especially Thorin!

Okay , so i've been avoiding the GOT thread because i've not read the books or watched the program (yet) , however from the initial post here I can assume there is some Tokien bashing going on.

My vote was for 'give him his dues' , however if you asked the young me then it would have been the god option whilst in the padded cell , as I loved the books - however I read the hobbit first and loved it , then went to the library and asked if they had any others by the same author and was pointed out of the childrens section to the young adult section where *two* of the LOTR books were (no third) and picked them up - and yes , at the start they were a bit of a struggle but I went through them all , and have re-read them many times.

I have not read the books in many years but I know there is a lot of stuff in there which is slow paced and there are so many similar books now but at the time there was nothing like them.

Without Tolkien what you look at today as Fantasy novels would exist.

"In a hole in the ground lived a Hobbit , not a dark dirty wet hole filled with the ends of worms ......... nor a dry bare sandy hole ..... It was a Hobbit hole and that ment comfort"

(From memory - I read it that much as a kid! - checking online I'm not that far off)

It's about 50/50, maybe a bit more "hatey". I love it.

The Dwarves are cool (but it's a nightmare trying to find a SFW picture)

Were you not massively pissed off by the crap blem ending to the whole lot? for me it ruined the whole thing, hmm will trundle off to that thread and have a read

*hang on am i derailing my own thread?*

Did you do a Mr Chris?



See you in the other thread!

LOTR was written to justify Toklien's obsessive creation of faux-anglo saxon and romance languages. He was a linguistics professor, not a novelist.

I struggled with the books and have never bothered reading the third one, but as a genre defining (if not creating) piece of work, it's influence can't be denied.

BIG UP THE TOLKIEN!

Based on LOTR, Tolkien was pretty imaginative, and his re-animation of old (mostly) Norse legends and that was neat. But he was a very poor storyteller with no sense of pacing. I had to force myself to read all of the first book after giving up once, and even then I found myself skipping about 100 pages of text. I literally can't think of any book I've ever done this with since I was a kid.

The second one I couldn't even get halfway through, even with my then-girlfriend reading them aloud to me with her ridiculously sexy accent.

I don't hate Tolkien, though. I do hate the legions of dull people who he's "inspired", though. As most of them have been inspired to do absolutely nothing original or even very good.

I'd say I respect Tolkien's linguistics thing, and that he's written such a detailed and complex history of varous peoples and languages and all that, but to be honest, I don't that much. I would have enjoyed reading reams of pages of history, but as it's all about a completely imaginary bunch of people, and not even satirical or allegorical, I just found myself thinking it was pointless, and either irrelevant to the story or, if relevant, than a sign of dreadful writing that someone would need all that backstory to make sense of anything.

Now, Dune, on the other hand... Dune is both ridiculously imaginative and extremely well-written. No backstory needed there - straight into the story, and everything you need to know is explained by its use in the context. There's not even an exposition dump section, which is pretty damn impressive.

That LOTR gets all the attention is quite a shame.

Very true, Dune is very very good, however have you had the misfortune to stumble upon the new one (erm...winds of dune iirc) written by Franks son...painful doesn't begin to describe it

I've not read the cash-ins his son wrote, no. I read that he had taken it upon himself to write a load of stories about events that were alluded to in the original books, and that was enough to convince me never to touch them. Good writers know which stones to leave unturned.

Dune was good. Dune Messiah was ... OK. Children of Dune was .... not as OK as the last one. After that .. /thud. Talk about flogging a dead sand worm!!

I love LOTR and have read it several times. The only bits I didn't like was the poems and songs, but then I generally fuckin' hate poetry anyway, unless it was written by Spike Milligan.

If you think LOTR is hard going FFS don't try the Silmarillion.

Yeah, I invariably skip straight past any songs or poems included in books. Snore. The Dune series does get pretty unwieldy. I've not read the follow ups since I was in school, and I'm not too upset about that. Nice ideas, and it explores some of the themes and all that, but they're not a patch on the first. Excellently, though, they're also unnecessary - the first is so self-contained that you don't need to read them if you don't want to.

I don't disagree, and I like them both!

Your mother is an epic fantasy.

I loved The Dark Tower. Even after it started eating itself.

I first read The Hobbit as a kid and totally loved it, and I would certainly be prepared to argue that this is a classic children's book.

I didn't read the LOTR books until the first film came out - basically I adored the films and that inspired me to read the books.

I enjoyed them (though as a standalone story, prefer The Hobbit), but I can see why people don't like them.

This is pretty much me, but it must be about 10 years since I've read any of them, and I got into the habit of pretty much skipping the entire last half of Return of the King as hardly anything happens.

Me also.

Also, I attempted to read silmarrilon, I gave up, it was very difficult.

Also

I gave up on it!!

I have only read 1 of the Dark tower..