What would you criticize or change about LotR, The Hobbit, or Silmarillion?

TGStigmata

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New here and trying to get involved. I'm certainly more interested in the fantasy sword and sorcery side of SF and F, and Tolkein is of course one of my idols in the genre if not the greatest one. Every story could be improved or just seen with a different perspective though, so what bothers you about any of these stories? What would you change or improve?
 
Great world building but I, personally, found the characters and stories dull and lacking in oomph. The Hobbit was the first book I remember not finishing when I was about eight. If I was to change it I'd have better character arcs and have the stories be set in the world rather than the world being the story.

It's possibly not a popular view for a fantasy writer but I prefer other fantasy writers. In the era of Tolkien, I found Enid Blyton more engaging and her characters more memorable.
 
These are masterpieces. They delight and impress me again and again; I have read The Hobbit probably 12 times and LotR 13 times (though I don't always read all the appendices), and The Silmarillion about 5 times, etc.

There seems to me little that could be done to improve them. Three things might have been worthy of Tolkien's consideration. (1) He might have intensified the sense of the deadliness of the War of the Ring if one or two additional members of the Fellowship had died in battle. I can imagine an affecting sequence in which Legolas and Gimli are fighting side-by-side and one of them is killed. It might have been literarily effective if, when the surviving hobbits returned to the Shire, Merry or Pippin had not been among them. (2) He might have provided some explanation of what had been done with the presumably immense quantities of stone removed from Moria when the dwarves hollowed out its halls. I don't think we should think they excavated a sold mountain -- they worked with caves -- but still there must have been a lot of waste rock. (3) The rescue of Gandalf from Orthanc, and particularly of Frodo and Sam from Mt. Doom, by Eagles, feels a little too convenient. It might have been good for Tolkien to provide some suggestion of why the Eagles could not have carried Sam and Frodo to the vicinity of Mt. Doom or at least shortened their journey to the mountain.

None of these matters particularly troubles me though I have been aware of them for a long time.
 
What @Extollager said. Nothing is beyond criticism, however. I thought the pacing in TFOTR from the time Frodo leaves Bag End until he meets the Ring Wraiths was a bit slack in places ( just give me the Prancing Pony,Tom Bombadil, and the Barrow Wights).. Sarumans end is a bit laughable that after all the preceding palaver.
 
See, that's where we'd diverge, Anya. The brilliance of Tolkein's writing was environment influenced everything, including the characters. Aragon was the ranger elite he was because he had to brave the wilds of Middle Earth. The entirety of their societies hinged on the actions of Mordor and Minas Tirith, and the breathtaking descriptions about the topography and history sucked readers in. In his world, Tolkein made the world the star, and the characters were the backup band.

Admittedly, Blyton did have better characters, but her world building left a lot to be desired. That's why I never dug Blyton's works a much; fantasy's about an atmosphere, and she couldn't pull it off as well as Tolkein. You could have the best characters ever crafted in literary history; nobody cares if all they do is chill out all day in a refrigerator box. At least a well crafted world hides weak characters.

I don't agree that Tolkein is the greatest in fantasy; like athletes in pro sports, the next generation evolves and changes the game. That's why golfers use space age titanium drivers instead of those wooden spoon clubs these days. Robert Jordan, Brandon Sanderson, and when he was motivated, Michael Moorcock, proved to be better fantasy writers in the long run, but Tolkein provided the blueprint for the next generations to improve on.

Without him, the genre as we know it might not be what it is today. His style might seem a bit primitive compared to the stuff that came afterwards, but the first astronauts didn't exactly have the best equipment or knowledge to work with, either. He made a genre that was still experimental work. That alone merits him made man status.
 
I found them sadly lacking in 30ft killer robots armed with railguns
Operated by emo vampires, too, don't forget that. You can't have a great fantasy novel without super powered un-dead creatures who act like mopey teenagers when they can't get the lead singer of their favorite band to email them back or follow them on Instagram. :p
 
I found them sadly lacking in 30ft killer robots armed with railguns
I was going to suggest sharks with laser guns, but I digress...

As to the topic, I would have liked some explanation of just who the heck is Tom Bombadil.
I mean, he played with The Ring as if it were a mere trinket. That's some powerful dude.

I've read all sorts of theories, but the best essay on the subject is here (Warning! the page is a throwback to 90s web design :sick:)

Tom is possibly Aule and Goldberry is possibly Yavanna
 
I've always been concerned about Tolkein's refusal to do more direct metaphor. I understand why he doesn't like it, and his universe is much more mystical and leaves stuff up to our imagination, and that's part of the wonder of it. But sometimes I just wish he took things a bit farther in metaphor and told us what he was thinking.
 
I thought the pacing in TFOTR from the time Frodo leaves Bag End until he meets the Ring Wraiths was a bit slack in places ( just give me the Prancing Pony,Tom Bombadil, and the Barrow Wights)..

Whereas I find that sequence in which the four hobbits are being led deeper and deeper into the Withywindle valley, culminating in the Old Man Willow incident, eerie; it's one of my favorite passages in the book.

Since you mention the Ringwraiths: I could add:

(4) Tolkien might have developed the rationale for the Ringwraiths' seeming less dreadful when they are searching around in the Shire vs. their intimidating power in the War of the Ring; even within a relatively few pages, they can seem less (Bree) or more (Weathertop) terrifying. I do think Tolkien could have worked up explanations that would have been reasonably convincing. As it is, I sometimes find myself conscious, in reading or thinking about these passages, of Tolkien's writing process. The earlier sequences show more evidence of what Tolkien thought he was writing when he set out (a sequel to The Hobbit) vs the tale that LotR eventually became. I don't think this is entirely a liability, however, literarily. Whatever the cool, appraising intellect may consider, at first and perhaps later readings the change actually works: the reader at first is "lulled" by the hobbit-worldliness of the early chapters, while Tolkien gradually increases the sense of moral depth and peril -- more "adult" elements -- as the story continues and the hobbits, like Bilbo in his book, have to mature.

It would not do for the Ringwraiths to suddenly appear in the Shire as the ghastly terrors they are in the siege of Minas Tirith when their shrieks make doughty warriors sick with fear. Nor would it do for the Ringwraiths to appear during the War of the Ring as they snooping, sniffing highwaymen of the early pages. Tolkien is right, it seems, in what he does, but maybe it would have been good to provide a little more of a sop to the cool appraising intellect.
 
I've always been concerned about Tolkein's refusal to do more direct metaphor. I understand why he doesn't like it, and his universe is much more mystical and leaves stuff up to our imagination, and that's part of the wonder of it. But sometimes I just wish he took things a bit farther in metaphor and told us what he was thinking.

I'm not sure that I know what you're getting at with "metaphor" here, so maybe you could elaborate. I do think it is a strength of the book that Tolkien leaves some things ambiguous. (Tom Shippey is good on this.)

I'll quote something I posted here some years ago:

…..an essay by John Rateliff, from Tolkien Studies #6, seems to me to get closer than about anything else I have seen [to describing how Tolkien's prose works]. Rateliff writes:

....first I want to draw attention to Tolkien’s own description of how his prose works, of what he was trying to achieve. In one of the endnotes appended to “On Fairy-stories,” he includes the following revealing passage setting forth his narrative method, in which he makes clear his goal of writing in such a way as to draw in his readers, making them participate in the creation of the fictional world by encouraging them to draw on their own personal memories when reading one of his evocative passages:

[quoting Tolkien:]..... If a story says “he climbed a hill and saw a river in the valley below,” the illustrator may catch, or nearly catch, his own vision of such a scene; but every hearer of the words will have his own picture, and it will be made out of all the hills and rivers and dales he has ever seen, but specially out of The Hill, The River, The Valley which were for him the first embodiment of the word. ....

Rateliff continues:

Tolkien’s contrast here of a single image presented to the passive viewer with the internal personalized visualization of a reader, who thus participates in the (sub)creation of the work, is of a piece with his championing, in the Foreword of the second edition to The Lord of the Rings, of what he calls applicability: his refusal to impose a single authorial or “allegorical” meaning on a work.8 I would argue that the style in which he chose to write, which he painstakingly developed over several decades until it reached its peak in The Hobbit and Farmer Giles of Ham and The Lord of the Rings and some of the late Silmarillion material, is deliberately crafted to spark reader participation. That many readers do get drawn in is witnessed by the intense investment so many people have in these books, the strong personal connection they form with the story, the almost visceral rejection of illustrations or dramatizations that do not fit their own inner vision of the characters, the returning to reread the books again and again to renew our acquaintance with the imaginary world.

[Rateliff quotes a Tolkien passage and a John Bellairs passage. He comments:]

note that in the passage from Tolkien, he does not describe every detail—what color were the rocks? who was on either side of Frodo as he sat huddled against the bitter cold? But Tolkien does tell us everything we need to know, in general terms with just enough specific detail to bring the scene home, to guide the reader’s imagination, to draw on our own memories of being cold and frozen, exhausted and miserable. We do not need to know what Frodo looked like, because we are looking through his eyes; too much detail would actually limit the applicability......

.....he often describes a scene not as you would experience it but as you would remember it afterwards. That is, his prose assumes the tone of things which have already happened, as they are stored in our memory. Thus the “walking bits,” which have so annoyed impatient readers who are only reading for the plot, do not in fact detail every day of Frodo’s year-long journey but instead are rendered down to a relatively few vivid images, such as would linger in the memory long after the event. After you have read these passages and think back on them, they very strongly resemble your actual memories of similar events (in fact, the very ones that provided the mental images that flashed through your mind when reading them) : a general recollection of where you were and what you were doing anchored by a few sharp, vivid, specific details that stand out. Thus the memory of reading the story gains the associations of events in the reader’s own life, because the one has already drawn upon the other.

 
Footnote to my #10 above -- I found myself remembering the bit in The Year of Living Dangerously in which Billy Kwan tells Guy Hamilton that visiting the strange night-world of Djakarta makes children of us all again. A very different context, of course -- but I think LotR does that, unless we fight it with our adult expectations. Those early chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring tend to call upon us to settle into "listening" to a "children's story" if you like; and they do, of course, consciously recall The Hobbit (e.g. the trolls -- who, by the way, were the ones who spoke Cockney, not the Orcs). It's early in The Fellowship that we have the vignette of the fox who sees the hobbits and wonders what they are up to, and Tolkien says he never found out. Nothing like that would fit later in the book!
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@Extollager Your last 2 posts have made me remember that I started reading LOTR thinking it was a nice long sequel to The Hobbit, in the same style (I was 9, no one had told me any different, and the internet had not been invented. ) LOTR does start out in a reasonably Hobbitish style, but changes tone, as you say. That was a bit offputting back then. Anyway, thanks for making me think about something for the first time since the 1970s.
 
Were I tolken , I would taken the Silmarillion and rewritten it into a saga like LOTR.
 
In fairness, if Tolkein had lived a few years longer he might have reworked The Silmarillion into something more epic.

I would have liked to have the appendices in The Lord of the Rings woven into the main story of the book.*

*I have this same wish with the Dune appendices.
 
The Silmarillion was never really finished. I wish there were a final, fully realized, comprehensive version, (written solely by JRR Tolkien himself) in which all the material is fully integrated.

I have no suggestions for how either The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings could have been improved—because I believe they are exactly right for what he meant them to be at the time he finished writing each of them—with one exception, which is that I am dissatisfied with his treatment of the character of Arwen. I think she should have been written about in such a way as to make a stronger impression on readers and make it clear (without peeking at the appendices) how meaningful Aragorn's love for her was. NOT written with the changes and expansions that Peter Jackson and his collaborators inserted into the movies, I hasten to add—oh, no, no, no—but something that would better reflect the stature this romance had in Tolkien's own mind. As it is, she appears so briefly and unmemorably in the books that when she reappears at the end I remember saying to myself, "Who?" the first time I read the trilogy, and being mightily disappointed that he chose her instead of Eowyn. She felt like an afterthought. (Which to some extent, I understand from reading the early drafts, she actually was. Though once she came into the story, it is obvious—in hindsight, but certainly not the first time someone reads LOTR with no Silmarillion first— that for Tolkien, once it had been introduced, their union had great meaning and poignancy, reflecting the great romances of their ancestors. I wish that first time readers could experience a sense of that when Arwen enters Minas Tirith, as a culmination of their long betrothal, to marry him. I suppose he thought it needed nothing more since at that time he was still hoping that somehow the Silmarillion matter would be published first.)
 
The Silmarillion was never really finished. I wish there were a final, fully realized, comprehensive version, (written solely by JRR Tolkien himself) in which all the material is fully integrated.

I have no suggestions for how either The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings could have been improved—because I believe they are exactly right for what he meant them to be at the time he finished writing each of them—with one exception, which is that I am dissatisfied with his treatment of the character of Arwen. I think she should have been written about in such a way as to make a stronger impression on readers and make it clear (without peeking at the appendices) how meaningful Aragorn's love for her was. NOT written with the changes and expansions that Peter Jackson and his collaborators inserted into the movies, I hasten to add—oh, no, no, no—but something that would better reflect the stature this romance had in Tolkien's own mind. As it is, she appears so briefly and unmemorably in the books that when she reappears at the end I remember saying to myself, "Who?" the first time I read the trilogy, and being mightily disappointed that he chose her instead of Eowyn. She felt like an afterthought. (Which to some extent, I understand from reading the early drafts, she actually was. Though once she came into the story, it is obvious—in hindsight, but certainly not the first time someone reads LOTR with no Silmarillion first— that for Tolkien, once it had been introduced, their union had great meaning and poignancy, reflecting the great romances of their ancestors. I wish that first time readers could experience a sense of that when Arwen enters Minas Tirith, as a culmination of their long betrothal, to marry him. I suppose he thought it needed nothing more since at that time he was still hoping that somehow the Silmarillion matter would be published first.)

The Silmarillion had the potential to be something greater.
 
In a fairly recent re-reading of the Silmarillion and LOTR, I found the Silmarillion to be more satisfying. The more archane language and the way its styled as mythology works well with the subject matter. LOTR was very enjoyable, but there are ways I think it could have been improved. The way the fellowship (and then Frodo and Sam) progress reads a little as though they travel from location 1, with monster 1, to location 2, to greet monster 2, to location 3, so we can meet monster 3, etc. Rinse and repeat. Its not so bad that its spoils the book, but it definitely reads as though it was written over a long period, and evolved as a longer book, from scraps of ideas, rather than being conceived as a satisfying whole from the start. Tom Bombadil does not really fit especially, as an example. I quite like Tom Bombadil, but the writing here is distinct from the writing elsewhere, as though it was cut and pasted from another treatment. But LOTR also of course has many fine moments, passages and a great sense of scale - I don't wish to be seen as a negative critic of the book, only that I don't think it's perfect by any means.
 
I've always been concerned about Tolkein's refusal to do more direct metaphor. I understand why he doesn't like it, and his universe is much more mystical and leaves stuff up to our imagination, and that's part of the wonder of it. But sometimes I just wish he took things a bit farther in metaphor and told us what he was thinking.
I'm not sure that I know what you're getting at with "metaphor" here, so maybe you could elaborate. I do think it is a strength of the book that Tolkien leaves some things ambiguous.

@Extollager - this is my bad, as TGStigmata wanted to discuss Biblical allegories more specifically, but that would inevitably turn into a debate about Christianity, not LOTR.
 
Two of my thoughts on previous entries.

First Tom Bombadil.
I found Tom to be one of the most powerful characters (in a literary sense) in the whole book, and one who sparked my imagination the most. I saw him much as described in Roberts extract from Hargreaves' essay, (although I hadn't the words before I'd read the rest of the book, and the Silmarillion later), as a Maia who distanced himself from the rest of the pack, right at the beginning. A sort of hermit Maia, or to use an idea from Thomas Covenant an unfetterred one, who had his own vision, apart from the rest of the Powers. They (T.B and G.B.) could certainly be Maia of the "kin" of Aule and Yavanna but I'm afraid the idea that they actually are Aule and Yavanna, gone into a quiet retirement, I find just plain daft.

My other point is that Extollager references "On Fairy Tales" to say that each of us has our own vision of various places and people, (Bree, Rivendell, Aragorn, Eowyn etc.) and I fully agree with this and that it's a good thing.
Furthermore I found my vision of Rivendell when reading the Hobbit, and my vision of it when reading the LOTR were entirely different, and also didn't find that to be a problem. I have been to real places (Pisa for example) on more than 1 occasion and seen entirely different things.
But I would also like to suggest the same is true of sound/pronunciation.

You say Saruman, and I say Saruman,
You say Cirith, and I say Cirith
Sauron, Sauron
Thorin, Thorin
Let's not call the whole thing off.
 

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