Board Thread:Fun and Games/@comment-29153741-20160719091747/@comment-26453572-20160802002459

Solelfar wrote: Well once again an unfair debate on a LotR wikia... ^.^ Can we really compare these two masterpieces? We see Tolkien as someone who utterly recreated fantasy, and that might be true, but let's not forget he was not so very known until the movies were released - yeah, sad to admit but when the books came out, not much people read it, compared to the huge number of the LotR fans nowadays. But I agree that he contributed a lot to give a new face to modern fantasy, but he was not alone: Lewis, Robert Howard, Burroughs, and a lot others before helped a lot. However, Tolkien popularized a lot of today's fantasy clichés. Many new writers inspired greatly from his work. Some Tolkien experts say that it is now impossible to escape from the professor's legacy. Nevertheless, some fantasy authors tried to, such as Pratchett, or Martin, who both succeeded. Along with Tolkien or any other fantasy writers, they have marked the history of modern fantasy. So do we really need to hold a sterile debate to know which of the two is the best? Because in the end, what similarities do they share for real? Of course, since Martin was a Tolkien's fan, he took inspiration from him, but he also inspired from many other things and from his personal life and knowledge, as Tolkien did. Martin achieved a great work as well as Tolkien by creating all this and so he deserves respect for that. Do we really need to compare incomparable things? Tolkien's hard fans always want Tolkien to be the very best. As you said, you consider the story to be better. But once again, they are totally different. Tolkien's whole legendarium is a mythological thing contrary to GoT. Martin pointed out the fact that Tolkien never talked about Aragorn's politic on how to deal with the last remaining orcs. But that is not the point of the LotR. Mythology is much more a form of allegory than the reality described in GoT. Consequently, Tolkien's LotR will focus more on the legendary and ideological aspect of the war than Martin's GoT does. As Tolkien said: "A single dream is more powerful than a thousand realities." He described his story, not focusing on the very specific feelings and choices of the characters, but on their aims and their ideology resulting in the triumph of good. The war of the ring is an ideological war and so is the Lord of the Rings, "directly" giving us the message of the author such as the old mythological tales did, whereas GoT's message has to be interpreted by the reader who comes to his own conclusions. So to conclude, I believe you cannot compare these two series. ^.^ (gg if you read all this). There's one problem with this-Tolkien didn't become a popular author until the sixties, and not only did he become immensely popular, but it got to the point where he had to take his number out of phone books, and he expressed regrets for not retiring early. To show just how popular they got, Tolkien was mad that people would make the Lord of the Rings their entire life.