Posted on 05/31/2013 12:43:32 PM PDT by nickcarraway
With the end of the third season of Game of Thrones in sight (June 9th), a global audience of over 5 million is debating whether or not George R.R. Martin is the rightful “American Tolkien.” I argue that while The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones have striking similarities, Martin is actually pioneering a distinct genre—a new kind of fantasy novel informed by historical fiction and politics. Martin admits that he was influenced a great deal by Tolkien, and mirrored the structure of his novels off of Tolkien’s work:
“Tolkien begins his story in the Shire with one group of inhabitants, hobbits, but eventually expands the tale in ever-widening orbits to cover many races and huge tracts of land. That’s what I wanted to do too. I wanted to start with a tight focus on a few characters and one place in the world, and as the story is told, the world will continue to get bigger and bigger and more people get drawn into the conflict,” Martin told the Detroit Free Press.
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
I was just on a Kardashian thread and thinking of the exact same scene.
In a word: no.
In two words: hell no.
Martin is a novelist, Tolkien was not. Tolkien was a linguist and creator. The stories that we have are derivative of his lifetime of work and serious scholarship that recreated the entire field of “fairy tales”, as Tolkien described his own work.
Martin’s work, while very good, is derivative of Tolkien’s establishment of the modern Sword and Sorcery genre.
Martin is not the “American Tolkien” any more than Terry Brooks or Robert Jordan were. He is the hottest thing in the genre right now, but he doesn’t compare to man who created an entire genre of literature.
All without being a novelist.
Many of Martin’s ideas come from Druon’s historical fiction novel The Iron King.
“I haven’t seen the show or read his books. How do they compare to Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series?”
Unlike the Wheel of Time, Martin’s book don’t completely suck ass.
Uhhh no. And I like Martin, written a lot of good stuff. But he’s never really had the vision of Tolkien, I don’t think anybody has actually. Asimov’s future history kind of comes close, but even his stuff you can sense that he’s gluing books together after the fact, Tolkien’s world was very well defined very early in his process.
No.
Seriously?
I'm more than a little curious to hear that.
I liked that song, “One Tolkien Over The Line”...
Not well IMO, I think the WoT is superior.
You ain’t the only one!
Us Fuddy-Duddies need to stick together! :-)
You know you’re invited to visit us here in Boring, anytime!
The boys were falling off the sofa laughing at the song about the troll and the bone, from the first part of “Fellowship of the Ring.”
Maybe it has to do with their listening to Homer from birth. They like poetry, especially narrative.
I am only familiar with Robert Jordan’s first Wheel of Time book, but I would say that Martin’s are vastly superior. The writing quality is not so different perhaps, but the scale and scope of the story, the richness in characters, character development, plot twist, outright surprises (such as killing off characters whom you believed he would NEVER kill off), puts Martin’s series on a level that Jordan can’t really touch.
If you like fantasy, you might want to look into Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind (The Kingkiller Chronicle). Excellent book.
The show is...like any book adapted by HBO really. Good production values, good acting, inspired costumes, and ridiculously over sexualized.
They get that way once they're teenagers ... but Anoreth got into saga-singing once she went to sea. Had some of her crewmates learning Old Norse with her.
Jordan has a thing called “The Game of Houses” (Noble houses) in his novels, which made me suspicious of this “Game of Thrones” when I first heard of it.
There isn’t that much sex in the books themselves, and very little is explicit, mainly just what is implied.
His stuff is not as squeaky clean as Tolkien, but its nowhere near what HBO did with it.
Martins characters are very, very flawed, by design.
As soon as he brought in incest, I stopped reading. All I perceived was empty violence and sex.
I just finished the final Wheel of Time book, by the way, and it bugs me that the NYT compared Jordan’s imaginary world to Tolkein’s, which was printed on every cover of those 14 books. Are they just stupid or something? The two were nothing like one another.
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