This is a repost of a series I’ve been doing on the website Reddit for a while. Essentially, it is my attempt to categorize and address articles and books that take a negative view of author J.RR Tolkien. In this case, historian Felipe Fernandez Armesto wrote a treatise on the negative aspects of the fantasy genre, and how it supposedly ruins history and mythology. This is my attempt at a response to him. It’s been edited a little because this website is not an internet message board, so most people probably don’t want hyperlinks and bizarre memes in what should be a serious text. The italics are excerpts pulled directly from the article, while everything else is composed of my genius responses.
Article URL:https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.arts.sf.written/6FKfk8gUTkw%5B1-25%5D (It’s originally from the New York Times, read it there if you can afford to pay the subscription)
Title: Fantasy is the Opium of the Ignorant and Indolent
Author: Felipe Fernandez Armesto
Basic Idea: My boy Felipe summarizes it pretty succinctly in the title
Welcome back to Bad Tolkien, and boy are we in for a ride. Today acclaimed historian Felipe Fernandez Armesto, who I originally thought was just an angry guy ranting on a forum, decides to try his hand at literary criticism. Hopefully he emerged from this short a hand, because he should never try his hand at anything related to literary criticism ever again. Some of the most egregious misunderstanding of Professor Tolkien and the genre he hoped to create are contained within this treatise, so please enter at your own risk.
So, without further ado, let’s hop right into this article.
Fantasy is our fix. In the past 20 or 30 years fantasy has become the
world’s most bankable form of fiction, the genre of our times —
star-warring its way through cinemas, boldly going across video
screens, building Diskworlds, colonising imaginations with all the
tenacity of the Evil Empire. Superheroes win ratings wars against real
heroes: they have “special powers”. Their magic is more potent than
mere myth.
If this guy read fantasy, he would know its “Discworld,” I know this is Bad Tolkien, but I can’t let Terry Pratchett’s honor suffer like that. I would hardly call fantasy the “genre of our times,” most genres of fantasy are still relatively niche. Seeing as superheroes are oftentimes regarded as modern myths, I have a hard time seeing how Armesto views modern fantasy and mythology separately.
Yet the rise of fantasy is puzzling, even to those of us who relish
its thrills. It defies common wisdom. Truth is supposed to be
stranger, stronger than fiction, for ours is the strangest of all
possible worlds: Middle Earth seems morally simple by comparison,
while the world beyond Harry Potter’s railway platform is childishly
predictable. Realism is unbeatably interesting: that is why social
observation is the foundation of all the world’s best books. When
there is so much reality to go round, it is hard to understand how
audiences can fall for fantasy.
I would hardly call Middle-Earth “morally simple,” because that wouldn’t do justice to such characters as Feanor or Gollum/Smeagol. Tolkien’s works are very morally complex, as can be seen in “Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth,” or any of Tolkien’s essays on the origin of orcs. While Tolkien’s Catholic morality is heavily present in all of his works, I would hardly consider his morality black and white. Middle-Earth deals with the complex interplay between good and evil, and the many shades of grey in between. The way men react to moral dilemmas characterizes Tolkien’s subcreation, and to deny that is to fundamentally misunderstand all of Tolkien’s works. Take Sam pondering the slaughter of the Haradrim youth. Looking upon the enemy as a person the way Sam did and pondering his desire to even fight is something that simply wouldn’t be part of any morally simplistic tale. I would not even begin to call Tolkien “morally simple” until you have read his greater body of works. What of the Noldor? The Numenoreans? The Kin-Strife? I suppose these are all just black and white morality tales, obviously Tolkien’s world is a very morally complex one.
It is fantasy, especially Tolkien, being able to take what is real and present it in a new way that has led to fantasy’s popularity, the ability to examine very real values, morals, and actions through the lens of a secondary creation, making them both approachable and complex. Fantasy is inherently grounded in reality. Fantasy authors, especially Tolkien, are able to take reality and present it in an apparently new way.
For fantasy is self-doomed to be implausible. It is hard to feel
involved when the author can whistle up a wizard to get the hero out
of a fix. Magic, like madness, is no way to contrive a denouement: in
worlds where anything can happen, the tension of the plot — which
depends on characters trapped in the constrictions of reality —
dissolves. Art demands discipline, and there are no disciplines
tighter than those of the real world. History and myth have the best
stories and the best images: fantasy-authors ransack them to get their
ideas. Why warp myths when they are wonderful unwarped?
Armesto’s belief that the author can simply “whistle up a wizard,” demonstrates his fundamental lack of knowledge around fantasy as a whole. Shockingly, most fantasy novels that rely on deus ex machina don’t do very well. Good fantasy novels have rules consistent within their worlds. Any author, can write their characters out of any situation. but they don’t because it takes away from the finished work and the themes they wish to convey. Fantasy characters are trapped in reality, a different reality but a reality nonetheless. History and myth aren’t “ransacked,” but rather taken from and repurposed and changed, keeping the symbols and motifs that are so familiar to us but presenting them in a new way. History and myth are important, but it is the shaping of the new myth that keeps humanity moving forward, while drawing on the past. Being able to rely on tradition while preparing for an ever-progressing world is what fantasy does so well. Subcreations like Tolkien’s feel grounded because they are both old and new.
Fantasy-writers do not generate myths; they make cut-and-paste
confections from the myths of the world. Star Wars imagery drew on the
Ancient Maya and feudal Japan. Tolkien’s world evokes the Anglo-Saxons
and the Norse, as if in a distorting mirror. J. K.Rowling flits
between classical, medieval and Hindu myths. Of course, clever
literary pirates have always plundered legends to appropriate their
power. Ovid pillaged ancient repositories for his Metamorphoses. Homer
and the Arthurian bards wrenched Bronze Age tales into works of art.
Mr. Armesto is essentially countering his own argument here. There is no such thing as a “pure” myth, they all spring from the collective human experience, and myth builds on myth until we have such great stories as the Eddas, Beowulf, and the Mahabharata. Tolkien draws heavily upon the Norse and Anglo-Saxon, and it is through these that he presents myths that are so integral to the human experience, it is by building upon the myths of old that new myths arise. Tolkien is able to present Norse, Saxon, and Catholic values and worldviews in his works by drawing upon the large body of myths before him, making his own subcreation feel even more alive. Myths always build on myths, we shouldn’t cease to write myths to preserve them, but continue melding them into newer ones. If Armesto had his way, Notre Dame would remain burned so as not to distort its supposed “purity.”
Peter Brook shunned the fakery of fantasy-pastiche to film the 100,000
verses of the Mahabharata — the world’s greatest epic, composed over
800 years, culminating more than 1,500 years ago. With a Hollywood
budget, it could barge Lord of the Rings out of the box office. One of
the best cartoon versions of a mythic story is a cheaply made
Guatemalan film of the Popol Vuh — the magical tale of the underworld
trials and triumphs of Mayan hero-twins. The Icelandic Edda or the
tales of the Sumerian gods could be dazzlingly cinematic and more
exciting than any fantasy game.
I don’t understand why the author is saying the Mahabharata is okay despite it being composed from a tapestry of myths and being built on through 800 years, whereas Tolkien’s works, being composed from a different tapestry of myths, is not. I don’t mean to discredit the Hindu holy scriptures, I only want to bring home the point that modern myths are just as much myths as ancient ones.
Once more, modern myths are just as exciting as ancient ones. I love the Eddas and it’s interesting to see how Tolkien drew on them in his own works. Enjoying fantasy doesn’t mean finding old myth and history boring and useless, on the other hand most fantasy authors and fans love both of those subjects. If I hadn’t read Tolkien I probably never would’ve discovered my love of early medieval history, nor would I have read the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, The Battle of Maldon, or the Icelandic Sagas. New myth serves as a gate-way to the old.
The current supremacy of fantasy in the cinema relies, like most
conquests, on superior technology, building the empire of special
effects. Fantasy commands the timeless appeal of nonsense: plots which
make no sense, characters bereft of conviction and events untouched by
reason spare the reader or viewer the effort to think. Indeed, if you
subject the film version of The Lord of the Rings to critical
scrutiny, you cease to enjoy it. For the intellectuals in the
audience, the only pleasure lies in observing a world created by
cannibalising exotic cultures and eluding rational limitations. A
pterodactyl joins the battlers in The Lord of the Rings: the Two
Towers. In other movies, on a single field, warriors wield flaming
swords and inter-ballistic missiles without incongruity. It increases
the spectacle. It does not, however, enhance the art.
Yes, filming fantasy requires special effects and CGI, it would be unfilmable otherwise. But it isn’t the spectacle that draws most people in, the flop of the most recent Game of Thrones Season should show that now amount of “Wow” moments or grandiose technological spectacle can make up for the lack of a story at the heart of said spectacle.
Where is the pterodactyl he speaks of? Fell beasts maybe? I doubt this man even watched the movie or, for that matter, read the book. Critics seem to love LotR, if that is what he is getting at, and once more, Tolkien is not cannibalizing cultures but rather using them to make Middle-Earth come alive and make the true messages of his writing shine through. That is where the real art lies, not in the spectacle but in the messages within, something Tolkien excels at.
Our fantasy fixation is worrying. Fantasy doesn’t just feed on the
imagination: it drains it. Virtuality erodes reality. Students who
sweat over Elvish and Klingon will never dream in Chinese or Greek.
Kids know more about the battles of Aragorn than of Alexander, the
life of Harry Potter than the life of Harry VIII. Fantasy endangers
history, some say: realism is on the way to extinction, shrinking from
the syllabus, extruded from bookshops, de-accessioned from libraries.
What is Elvish? Does he mean Quenya? Sindarin? I may be a little pedantic, but the truth of the matter is that for many fantasy is a jumping-off point to history, folklore, and myth. Modern day historians have fantasy to thank for the renewed interest in the Medieval and ancient eras, if anything, fantasy does not take away from those who wish to be historians or folklorists, but adds to the growing pool. Most people who aren’t interested in history won’t be whether fantasy exists or not. If anything, fantasy adds to the growing interest. We still teach history and myth, I don’t know where this “shrinking from the syllabus” comes from. Sound like fear-mongering to me.
Fears like these, however, misrepresent the rise of fantasy. The
demise of history and the retreat of realism are not the results of
fantasy’s popularity, but its causes. Unmindful of our real roots, we
reconstruct an imperfectly imagined antiquity. The fault lies with
historians, who have done their best to make the true past boring.
Similarly, writers of realistic fiction increasingly address each
other, or the prize-awarding committees, instead of the public.
As a lover of history, I actually agree that historians should work to make history more appealing, if they wish more to know about it. Fantasy authors have done more for the popularity of history than any pop-historian has. Fantasy has grown to add to the ever-growing pool of myths and legends to draw on. It is a facet of realism, not something foreign to it.
In conclusion, Armesto’s arguments are grounded in a false reality that myth is a societal monolith. Fantasy is decidedly not the opium of the ignorant and indolent.
