Lord of the Rings

Yeah, basically that. Tolkien's obsession with making every corner of Middle Earth feel brimming with life is both his greatest asset and perhaps his greatest flaw (since he got to finish relatively few of his many planned works), but it's amazing how even his unfinished drafts and bits and pieces of the universe still feel incredibly well-thought out and show a immeasurable amount of love.

I do think in the story themselves his world-building is more than fine, though that's partially due the pace of the stories, which have this vibe of every corner of the world mattering and the world itself being a sort of protagonist. I'm actually way more bothered by George R.R. Martin's excessive worldbuilding (even though it's not particularly more excessive than Tolkien), and I think that's because Martin's world, while highly detailed, doesn't carry the same feel of a living, breathing world. And part of it is obviously by design evidently due Martin's more realpolitik approach to the world deprived of the more open mysticism in Tolkien, but still.

Westeros feels like a world where a lot of profoundly fascinating characters live in for me, while Middle Earth feels like a profoundly fascinating place where a lot of profoundly fascinating characters live. That may be why I get a lot more on Martin's case every few hundred times the narrative strays off to discuss some minor house from some corner of the world.

Also, in Martin's case, he's left his main narrative story unfinished whereas Tolkien got the Hobbit (revised) out, got the complete Lord of the Rings out, and at least made sure that the Silmarillion would get out in one volume (and left enough notes for Christopher and Guy Gavriel Kay to finish the job, and for Christopher to eventually publish the "Three 'Great Tales' of the Elder Days") whereas people are still waiting for the conclusion to ASoIaf, with 9 years since the last entry and one more to go after that.

Incidentally, I don't think worldbuilder's disease specifically is what's holding Grum back, rather his specific pantser writing style where his creative output is somewhat dependent on how he feels on a given day - waiting for inspiration to hit kinda thing.

I think this is a bit off. Had you asked Tolkien I suspect he would consider The Silmarillion to be his chief work. The Lord of the Rings, while something he put much care into and loved dearly, was an addition. It essentially inserted itself into the already created Legendarium. However the difference is that The Hobbit and LOTR can stand on their own. The Silmarillion and unfinished drafts Christopher published enrich the work but they are not essential to get a complete story out of the completed novels. GRRM still hasn't produced a completed narrative which is why I get pissed off when he comments about how Tolkien was a great fantasy writer and he never finished the Silmarillion. While true he did finish LOTR and the Silmarillion is not essential like The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring will be.

Edit: I will say that I don't think Tolkien's worldbuilding is flawless. He put tremendous detail into the lands and cultures of the West but we know virtually nothing about the South and East. Granted from what he's said in letters this is partially a case of Write What You Know. He intentionally left gaps in some areas to provide his full focus on the regions that mattered to his story.

Edited by Kostya on Feb 20th 2020 at 8:50:37 AM

Yeah, but no-one else knew that at the time - the Lord of the Rings might have been the culmination of the story he started with the Silmarillion's narratives, but in effect, LotR is the work he is most well known for, the work that made him so famous, and the work that was so influential for the rest of the fantasy genre. My point was that Tolkien at least finished the narratives of the Hobbit and LotR in self-contained chunks, and when the Silmarillion eventually came out, it also came out in a single volume - I don't think people were harping on at Tolkien near the end of his days to PUBLISH THE SILMARILLION ALREADY like people are going at Grum, because Grum still has a conclusion he needs to reach, whereas the Silmarillion might have been important to Tolkien that he publish it, but his fans as a whole might not have been so expectant.

If Grum is actually using Tolkien and the Silmarillion to deflect from his own not having finished Winds of Winter yet, I'm starting to doubt the good faith of his word. And I'm still of the ones who are still quietly confident he will finish those books one day. They aren't the same - Tolkien was basically trying to compile the entire legendarium into one lore book in the Silmarillion rather than write a more narrative story - like the three 'Great Tales' of the First Age books published between 2007 and today by Christopher.

Edited by GoldenKaos on Feb 20th 2020 at 3:33:51 PM

I was reading the Letters of Tolkien and a lot of them involve him telling fans that "This info will be expanded on in the Silmarillion which I am working on". I don't know what the state of the fandom was in the era when he was alive but it seems like The Silmarillion was a known entity that people were awaiting. At least among the hardcore Tolkien nerds. This is probably what motivated Christopher to publish it so quickly after his father's death. In the later History of Middle-earth books he even talks about how he wishes he could go back and redo things.

I'm sure people knew it was on the way, but it wasn't a narrative he was in the middle of that people were actively bugging him for

Yeah, in a sense Silmarillion is hard to compare to anything in Martin's purview because the Silmarillion is less-so a book and more-so a collection of books. Possibly four books minimum (The Fall of Gondolin, Beren and Luthien, Children of Hurin, The Simlarillion) or even as many as eight books (the three great tales, Ainulindale, Valaquenta, Quenta Silmarillion, Akallabeth, and Of The Rings of Power and the Third Age) depending how you far you interpret Tolkien's ambition. It's a pretty wild and crazy idea.

Despite their relevance, though, they are the backstory. LOTR is, despite Tolkien's initial plans, the endgame of the Legendarium and where the entire thing comes full circle. This is the same with the mainline ASOIAF books, which provide the endgame of the 'verse like LOTR (and Martin has explicitly said he'll have his manuscripts destroyed if he dies before completion, so...), so the delay presents more of a problem compared to the Silmarrilion.

Martin's equivalent of to the Silmarrilion so far would actually probably be the two volumes of Fire & Blood.

Which, if we're being honest, probably has a much higher chance of coming out than the actual ending to ASOIAF. But we're kind of veering off topic here.

@Silmarillion is a collection of books: It could technically be even more. Tolkien went back and forth on things at various points but if we're being inclusive the "Silmarillion" could be said to consist of the Narn I Chin Hurin, The Lay of Leithian, Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin, The Lay of Eärendil, The Annals of Aman, The Grey Annals, The Valaquenta, The Ainulindale, The Lhammas, the Ambarkanta, and the Quenta Silmarillion which is a distillation of many of those works. It might even include the Noldolantë and Narsilion but Tolkien didn't really give us much info about those.

I imagine things like the LOTR, The Hobbit, Akallabeth, and Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age were not really part of the Silmarillion proper. Rather they were additional texts included in the Red Book of Westmarch.

World Builder's disease, eh? Well, Tolkien certainly had it. It was kind of the point to him. A man whose life-long hobby is creating languages is a world-builder.

But the world by itself wouldn't have been enough to give Tolkien the stature he has as a writer if the story of The Lord of the Rings hadn't been compelling in and of itself. You could cut most of the back story and world-building that is present in the book and still have a compelling story. Witness the movies.

And yet, would The Lord of the Rings be what it is without the world building? I think not. It would be a popular story, but not the classic and giant of the genre that it is. A lot of the readers say the world feels "alive" precisely because of the little world-building details.

It's kind of a chicken-and-egg thing. No LotR without the world-building, but no noteworthy world-building without LotR.

Edited by Bense on Feb 20th 2020 at 2:01:54 AM

ASOIAF being super slow isn't because of worldbuilding creep though. GRRM just has a shitty work ethic, as he's admitted himself.

Usually the fastest-working, most prolific authors are the hungry authors. The ones who don't eat if they don't produce. That doesn't mean they are the best authors, but they are probably the authors with the best work ethic.

Yeah, one book in 15 years is not very productive, no matter how you see it.

Are there any information how Tolkiens job at the university might have affected his work at Lot R? From my understanding, he wrote them as a hobby in his spare time.

And he wrote The Hobbit as a bedtime story thing. I think his son was the one who convinced him to publish it.

Edited by theLibrarian on Feb 20th 2020 at 4:28:46 AM

@Kostya: And still no book about Dwarves. Damn it, Tolkien.

I think world-builder's disease is part of it. If you read A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords back to back you can see very clearly how the first two books follow a much more manageable, functional pace compared to the third onwards and this seems to be because Martin started to get side-tracked with fleshing out the world. A Dance of Dragons and A Feast For Crows in particular have a lot of superfluous plotlines that achieve basically nothing other than fill page-space and world-build to bog down the pace. I read all of the ASOIAF Books basically back-to-back and their greatest issue for me has always been that they slow down to tectonic plates after the third book in rhythim.

The broad consensus seems to be that Tolkien became increasingly less engaged in teaching as his life went on because he found it profoundly depressing and exhausting (presumably his students seemed to lack his apetite for obscure Anglo-Saxon myths), and thus shifted most of his energies to the Legendarium.

Edited by Gaon on Feb 20th 2020 at 2:30:01 AM

Much like the lack of focus on the East and South the lack of information on Dwarves is an intentional world building gap. Tolkien wanted the Legendarium to be focused on Elves and Men and Dwarves are supposed to be the mysterious outsider culture. It's unfortunate but not without reason.

Edited by Kostya on Feb 20th 2020 at 7:38:27 AM

I found this video on War of the Ring, the Lot R board game:

It seems like a fun game, though really hard to play in part because you often can't see what you're doing, and you need to know what everything is from memory.

Also, calling the Nazgul "noisy gothic seagulls" is pretty hilarious.

I do think there's a difference between world builder disease and being a discovery writer (pantser/gardener) however - many fantasy series where the later volumes get bloated with unnecessary side-plots and focus on secondary or tertiary characters aren't necessarily the result of world-builder disease, but are a side-effect of discovery writing - i.e. writing and discovering the story as you go along rather than outlining it first. Grum himself compared it to being a gardener versus being an architect - he is a gardener, he may plant the seeds and prune and feed the plants, but the plants grow where they will and he's basically growing an organic story and making adjustments as he go along. In such stories, it's really fucking easy to discover interesting side characters with plots that might really go somewhere and just follow those threads so many times that before you know it you have three billion POV characters and your main characters were last seen four books ago. This happened with Wheel of Time, this is currently happening with A Song of Ice and Fire. It happened with the Lord of the Rings too - "the tale grew in the telling" and there's a very evocative letter Tolkien sent to Christopher about Faramir having just walked out of the woods of Ithilien onto the pages, and that Tolkien didn't have a clue where this guy came from, but he's here now...

I guess the difference is that Tolkien had a far smaller scope setting out, the plan being a sequel to the Hobbit (which is notably shorter than most fantasy books today at only 90k words) ended up being 481k words whereas the entire ASoIaF word count thus far is at about 1.77 million words, and the Wheel of Time is at 4.4M.

Another difference is that Tolkien still had an end goal for his story (bring the Ring to Mount Doom), and he always brought the story back to the Fellowship. Also, he has Frodo laser focus on that end goal near the end of the story, Fellowship be damned, which in turn freed up the Fellowship to work towards the other big goal (putting Aragorn on the throne).

Yeah, LotR always had a smaller cast and scope than the other two behemoths I've mentioned, and the entirety of the main plot of the books happen within a few months, with Frodo leaving the Shire shortly after his birthday in late September, leaving Rivendell in late December, the Fellowship breaking in late February of the following year, and dunking the Ring in some hot, hot lava in late March. The events of both WOT (completed) and ASoIaF (incomplete) have both taken up 3 in-universe years so far.

I never thought I would say The Lord of the Rings is an example of "less is more", but when compared to Wheel of Time...

I've got a few problems with that New Yorker story on Tolkien. Yes it is said that he often spoke too fast for his students to follow along, and no doubt some of his students did not enjoy the experience, but there are other students who said they greatly enjoyed his readings of Beowulf in the original Anglo-Saxon, and he was a tutor for most of his academic career alongside his lectures. Tolkien also did more lectures than were strictly required of him, at least earlier in his career, so it may be supposed that he either enjoyed giving them or he felt personally obligated to work harder than other professors.

I also have a problem with the idea that Tolkien invented a formula that people like Terry Brooks just copied. Tolkien didn't invent it. He was consciously re-creating a Christianized Nordic epic - like Beowulf - and he only put the very English Hobbits in it because it was nominally a sequel to The Hobbit. He only broke it into a trilogy because of paper shortages and the publisher's insistence that it couldn't be sold economically otherwise.

Edited by Bense on Feb 21st 2020 at 9:16:40 AM

I mean, the trilogy really isn't that word-count heavy for what the adult fantasy genre has gotten used to. Brandon Sanderson has written some TOMES but if we just look at the Mistborn trilogy, which is pretty normal-sized in comparison, we're still looking at over 200k per book, ranging up to as high as 245k for the biggest (2). None of the LotR books reach 190k and the shortest (RotK) doesn't even reach 140k. LotR is short enough to be compiled into a single doorstopper tome - I don't think you could do that with Mistborn, and a lot of fantasy series these days are comprised of individual doorstopper tomes almost as large as the entirety of LotR.

Edited by GoldenKaos on Feb 21st 2020 at 4:18:12 PM

Tolkien's work on Beowulf is great, and well worth a read with his notes.

Sanderson certainly has World Builder's disease, especially in The Stormlight Archives, but he also knows how to make a plot move.

I really don't think he does. I'd argue the line between world builder's disease and just engaging in a lot of world-building is based on whether the world-building gets in the way of writing the book or not. If you're so invested in world-building that you never get started on your story, or that the world-building often takes place instead of writing the story, that's world-builder's disease. Sanderson is very methodical and rather regimental in the way he world-builds, outlines and drafts his stories, so that it doesn't really get in the way of getting his books out on time.

Just to clarify - World Builder's Disease, as I understand it and as I've seen it explained elsewhere is when world-building takes over your time and you don't write the book. Not an overload of lore and background in the book, because that sounds like what you're describing.

Edited by GoldenKaos on Feb 21st 2020 at 4:39:39 PM