Speak Friend and Enter: A Lord of the Rings Podcast | Deep Dive - Tolkien's Influence on Fantasy

Hosts Stephanie and Lydia discuss how Tolkien essentially created the Fantasy genre as we know it.

What is Speak Friend and Enter: A Lord of the Rings Podcast ?

Speak Friend and Enter is a weekly discussion on all things Lord of the Rings hosted by friends Lydia & Stephanie. Come along with us as we explore the world of Tolkien through deep dives, read-alongs, and laugh-alongs.

Hi there, I'm Stephanie.

And I'm Lydia. Come along with us as we explore and learn about the world of Tolkien through deep dives on lore, characters, beat-a-lons, and laugh-a-lons. We are excited to have you as a new friend on this journey with us. Welcome to Speak Friend and Enter a Lord of the Rings podcast. Alright, welcome welcome. Hello. So, this is my chance to actually chip in here instead of being a total slacker like usual. I'm so excited for this.

Yeah. So, Stephanie asked me, she's like, she said it all nice and sweet. She goes, it's like maybe anything that you would like to talk about. And I thought, oh, Steph, I'm getting called out. No, it's just when we started, when we were originally talking about this podcast, we talked about a ton of great ideas. I was saying how like I wanted to, you know, just know more about Tolkien and Lydia agreed, but she also was like, yeah, and there's so many other pieces that you can pull out of it or talk about like the influence of Tolkien on fantasy.

So this is one of the OG topics. I just haven't given you a really hard time because what really happens is Stephanie does all the work and I come in at the tail end and I go, hey, let me mess up your neatly detailed syllabus with my bad questions. No, she asked the best questions. So, this is a, tables have turned and I'm prepared to get ret. But yeah, that's what we're talking about.

So I don't know what other people have to say about this, but this is something I think about a lot. So this is what has Tolkien done to the genre of fantasy? And actually, the better question is really what hasn't he done to it?

Because he founded it, essentially. So let me just give you a run through kind of like what I think we'll talk about and then we'll start from the top. So I want to talk about like what's the definition of a genre first off? What inspires like the authors who I don't know whether it's a confluence of impeccable events or whether they go out thinking that they're going to create a genre. But like what inspires those authors who found genres?

Because this happened a lot, which I think is fun. And then trying to just talk about how is a new genre created? Like what makes it what it is timeline of fantasy in general. And then just like the tell end here is things that Tolkien did that became really popular in fantasy. We'll talk about those and then things that Tolkien did that never became popular in fantasy.

Actually, that's funny, which is gonna be really fun because there's a lot there as I was drilling into. I was like, whoa, there's so much in Lord of the Rings that remains fresh and unique because it never got adopted in fantasy as like the wider genre. And then like the end is just like, you know, talking about how genres cross pollinate and like influence each other. And I think that's all really fun. I'm really excited. This is going to be a fun conversation. Yeah.

So that's the general that's my railroad and you must keep to it. I'll try not to get too off topic. So first things first, yeah, I wanted to talk about what is the definition of a genre. So this is just my definition.

I'm sure there are better ones. But to me, a genre is or a genre is books that share a set of characteristics, right? So it's gonna be theme, it's gonna be tropes, and it's gonna be setting.

I think those are the primary ones. There are probably others like there are certain character archetypes that belong in some genres versus others. Like you're not gonna set, you're not like, for example, the noir detective, a very flat character archetype, but that's what's expected in the genre. You're not expecting a ton of growth from that person.

You want him to stay hard boiled and hard headed, right? But when you go to like fantasy genre or something more YA, you're expecting your characters to move and change and have a coming of age growth process, etc. So yeah, all these scenes, themes, tropes, setting, character archetypes, these all contribute to a genre.

And what really contributes to the genre, I think is the audience expectation for all these different themes, right? So I've been told by many people that romance requires a happy ending. I happen to disagree, but I'm not a romance reader. Like I don't have correct audience expectations for that genre. I think bittersweet tragedy is better. And still romantic in a way, yes?

Exactly, exactly. But like a strong romance reader would say, no, it is not romance unless there's a happily ever after or a happily for now. So the audience expects certain themes. And I think what's really interesting is that there are people who are so like that they'd have the exact same expectations of themes, tropes, setting, character archetypes. And they want that same thing. They want that yummy story and they want it over and over and over with different flavors. And I would make fun of them, but every time I go to a restaurant, I order mac and cheese. Like I am them.

I understand deeply what's going on there. So the psyche of the reader is interesting to me, but that's what the genre is, right? And so with those elements, you can say to yourself, well, that's fun. Like what makes what what is like, how does the genre start? So I thought about a couple different like founding stories.

So we have Lord of the Rings, which takes off the fantasy genre as we know it, like high fantasy, epic fantasy. I was going to ask about that. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. So we can talk about subgenres in a minute because I have lots of thoughts about that. But it hits off a specific flavor of fantasy that has since expanded into different genres. We have Dune, which is a great example of a founding story that kicks off space opera, a particular flavor of space opera, like highly political, quite intricate, a little bit psychedelic.

But all the really good sci-fi is a little bit weird. So it's all good. We have Hundred Games, which kicks off YA dystopia. And you can definitely say that like YA dystopian was around before Hundred Games, but Hundred Games, I believe it was one of the first ones. And it popularized it to such a degree that it changed the genre forever. So if it's not like a complete start to that genre, it's at least foundational. And then you do things like Starship Troopers, which is like military sci-fi. So these are all like really foundational books that hit off strong genres.

Or were heavily influential. So I thought about it. I mean, stop me at any point. But I think it's really interesting to think about these people who write these amazing books and you never hear from them again. Like I am forever bitter. Like I love Suzanne Collins. She wrote Hundred Games. She is an impeccable writer.

And she's written one other series that makes me try every time I read it. It's called Director of the Overlander. It's really good. It's like a kid's series.

It's really good. And then she wrote Hundred Games and she's never been heard from a Dean. And all I can think is, is she just out there like a killer or shark just hunting the next genre? She's done a savage.

Like what is she doing? I need to know. But we don't know. And I'm not like, I don't know. I guess I'm not Internet stalker savvy enough to find out. But since she has never told us, I thought it was fun to like try to find out if we knew what Tolten was thinking when he wrote his books.

So I went and figured it out. There's a quote from him that I think is relevant at least. So what we know about Tolten is that he was a lover of mythology, right? He goes to Oxford or whatever fancy school he went to. I think it was Oxford. He studies mythology. He studies languages.

He studies all of these scenes and you just see it in the way he writes and the things he chooses to write about. But one thing I think that comes to mind with him is that he's been described as being deeply disappointed in the way that England had lost its oral traditions. So England way back when it was the Celts.

It was like Budakai. It was like all these like Celtic traditions and probably some stuff pre-Celtic, but I don't really know anything about that. All of that Celtic stuff was lost by the Anglo-Saxon invasions. Well, first the Romans, then the Anglo-Saxons, then the Norman invasions.

We did these successive invasions and they lose their oral traditions. And this is what he says about it. He says, I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country. It had no stories of its own bound up with its ton and soil, not of the quality that I sought and found as an ingredient in legends of other lands. So he's talking about themes from Norway. He's talking about, I want to say the German folk tales, other things like this. And so basically, there's more to that quote, but he basically his aim was to give England the mythological tradition that it was missing.

One that would resonate with its people, even if it was fictional. Yeah. I would say he succeeded. Like you look at the way that Lord of the Rings resonates with people and he made what he set out to make. But that was his intention. Like he set out to found something to create this large grand work.

I'm not sure everybody who found the genre sets out like that. Like I think the guy who wrote Dune was like on mini drugs. Like how else could he come up with half his ideas?

So you may not have had that vision, but it worked for him anyway. So like I think it can be incidental or it can be purposeful. And I would say like Tolkien is quite purposeful in the way he set out to do this. And the reason it resonates because he looked at all these other mythologies and he said, this is what this is what lasts the test of time. This is what sticks in the oral tradition. This is what people talk about.

This is what they feel like there's this pathos attached to these themes, these topics, these character arcs, etc. And he decided that's good enough for them. It's going to be good enough for England's mythology.

Let's go. And then he added else because it wasn't good enough. We need it more.

I love that. Okay, I have a question. I'll answer it here.

I think this is perfect. So we were talking about genres and what you feel like helps create genres. And we're talking about how Tolkien was really trying to dig back into like the mythology and folklore genre, if we can call it that. So what do you think, even though he was trying to follow that tradition of those types of stories and those types of arcs and characters, what do you think made his writing or Lord of the Rings different? So we look back in time and we say that's the founding of like high fantasy because... You mean as opposed to saying this is just pure mythology?

Pure like this sounds like a folk tale or like a myth. Yeah, that's a really good question. And frankly, I honestly don't know if there's a difference. Yeah. Because especially like what we've been reading in the Somerillian, you read that and you compare it to like a brother's grim. Oh, that feels very, yeah. Yeah, there is that fairy tale aspect to it.

I don't know that there's a difference. I do have a list of themes and tropes that came out of Tolkien that I think define the fantasy genre. So I'll list those out for you right now. But those things, I don't think they're different from mythology in general, which means that mythology as anciently kind of like either written or the oral tradition. I really feel like it is at its core fantasy. So he would have modulated the genre. He would like brought it to a modern audience.

Obviously by writing it in the vernacular, like nobody's going to be out there reading. In old English, right? So he took like things like Beowulf and he trans and whatever concepts he took from Beowulf, which I'm not overly familiar with. We might have to read this sometime. But he took those concepts and he took it out of the old English and put it into good old study English.

But in a way that was accessible to the people similar to like when you took the Latin Bible and you made it into English, it just made it more accessible. It makes me wonder. No, I agree. And I think because I was as you were talking about genres and the things that you feel like found a genre or specify a genre. I was thinking if I think about high fantasy, what do I expect when I open a book? I expect magic and I usually expect it to be somewhere else like in a setting like a world that's different. And so technically I'm thinking like old folklore mythology, definitely magic. I would say not a lot of the old myths and folklore were completely somewhere else. A lot of them were built into somehow here. But then there's like a god location of the gods or there's like these islands that are, you know, mystical or elements of that.

That was definitely one of the things I wrote down as like part of it. Like it has to be set in another world. And I think with mythology, they almost slip it in the way that urban fantasy slips it in. It's the hidden world that's in our world. And Tolkien did do that, right? Where he said Middle Earth could eventually become. Exactly.

So she slipped it in. It's part of our Earth, but it's foreign to us because of the time, the age that it's set in. And then there's the alternative of there's lots of different ways to create a separate world, essentially. Yeah. Is I think how I wrote it down. And it's either, you know, it's a different age.

So it's not our time. It's either pre or post or whatever. So that's how Lord of the Rings and Wheel of Time treat it. Or you can say it's our world, but there's some hidden aspect to it.

So this is how like urban fantasy doesn't work. There's the world of the fay. You have to have the, you know, a little bit of fairy blood in you to see it, you know, or like, you know, Harry Potter is how that one is set, right? The, the modern world versus the wizarding world. And with the way that old fairy tales do it, I almost feel like they just say, this is how the world is and your modern world. That's like, that's, that's the separate world. Yeah.

Because in a fairy tale, you start reading things that are looking normal and then the horse speaks and they'll be back in eye. And yeah, that's just clearly normal in that world, but it's clearly so clearly not out current world. Yeah.

The only way to read that is either as a separate world or with many, many layers of symbolism, symbolism, which is also a theme. Yeah. Yeah. And so I feel like just because of all of this, like you're explaining and the similarities and difference, I don't know, I feel like the main thing that created high fantasy for me from Tolkien is the way he wrote it, right? Because like you were saying, the similar really in, you get very much like rambling myth folklore vibes. But I think maybe it was the structure of how he wrote it. The prose.

Yeah, the prose, more modern English. Yeah, we can talk to that. So let's start with this list. Yes, let's go on with the list. Let's start some of the list here of like fantasy, trips and themes. So like you mentioned, you open up an epic fantasy book or high fantasy, you know, these are almost, I would say they're basically the same.

They're fungible. What are you expecting? You're expecting good versus evil, right? Ooh, that's a big thing. Big concept. Again, huge thing in mythology, right?

The good this, the evil that, the dualism. That's a massive element of mythology. You're expecting some kind of heroes journey. You're expecting great deeds.

And these can be good and bad. So like you got the great deed of feign or in creating the similar aliens, you have the great, creating the trees. Then you have melt or various great deeds, which were many. So just great deeds like outsized. You have, you are expecting magic.

You're expecting chosen ones, power, corruption. I called this one, I don't know how to describe this, but epic quests, like you're going somewhere to do a theme and it has to be on a grand scale. Like a big journey. Exactly journeys, magical creatures, prophecy is huge. Even in the Lord of the Rings, which I would not have said had prophecy. Now having done some of the similar alien, we see Mandos is all the time looking left and right and saying, and thus it shall be. And real time obviously has a mastermind of promises. So it plays a lot in the genre as it follows, I think you get miss and legend within your fantasy.

So there's always like people talking about the previous age and the miss that came before them. You did dark Lords. That's very straight from Lord of the Rings. The setting often a medieval esque setting, a third world setting like a separated world. You did a lot of symbolism. So these are the themes that to me are like this is fantasy in general. This is a slightly, maybe we'll come back to that.

This is just slightly I didn't organize as well as I should have. But there's one question that I want to talk about a little bit because it's like how does a new genre like you've got the founding story. How does it like, how does a new genre did establish right?

So in my mind, there's a couple different ways. So a new genre can happen because it's building on some kind of established notion. So like Tolkien builds off of mythology and legends. Suzanne Collins builds off of whatever was the previous YA dystopia and just made it back. So they or they established the notion. So like she took like Battle Royale, which was like a popular Japanese theme in Mondas.

And I think she added it into Westernized YA dystopia, which is super fun. That's how you do 100 games. And everyone goes crazy and loves it because they're well written. So you build off of an established notion that somebody like a Tolkens or Collins creates. I thought there were some other interesting versions of how a genre can be made because it's not just all about somebody goes in, they make the foundational story and then you're set. A lot of genres are created as a combination of previous genres. And so you will still have like the foundational story that sparks this new subgenre.

But it takes a minute. So like thrillers, thrillers are awesome because they're a combination of three or four different genres. So you get horror, you get crime, you get action. You have to have all the different story beats and audience expectations met for each of those genres to make the new genre. So it's actually really hard to like work in one of these newer genres because you have to meet the expectations of each of those audiences in altogether. But then it hits all the harder because like you did a romance beat or you did a crime beat and then you did like a horror beat and then you did an action beat and you just go, go, go, go, go. So it gives you so much to do as an author.

I do it works really well. One that's really popular right now that's coming into its own right now is Romantic. Which is fantasy genre and romance. Lots of thoughts about this invasion of my fantasy genre. But like you can't deny the draw because you do all the elements. You get that whole list of good things that people want in fantasy.

Get the whole list of good things that people want in romance. You just go, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. You check them all off and now you've created this awesome theme that people are going to love even more than they would have loved either of those separated because you did to hit more beats. Science fantasy, which is like my favorite kind of science fiction fantasy is it's taking science fiction and fantasy. So you get fun things like they don't know that they are a post apocalyptic society descended from spaceship, you know, star dwellers, right?

Because they're stuck in their fantasy age, but then they discover technology, you know, so you do all kinds of fun things. Cyberpunk is an interesting one. You do science fiction plus noir plus dystopia. These are all different genres that go into that one. So I really enjoy combination genres.

They're awesome. All right, let's think that a genre could be how can a new genre be created? It could be a rejection or pushback of a previous genre. So for example, like epic fantasy, it goes out there, it's put out there.

For the longest time, it's like totally dominant. And then we start getting grimdark. Grimdark is screw all these like nice good heroes. Let's get some villain heroes.

Let's get some antagonist protagonist villain. Yeah. So you did a lot of that. So like Game of Thrones is a great example of that huge to find the genre essentially. There are some precursors to him. Like Glenn Cook wrote this really excellent series called the Black Company, which is all about group of mercenaries that's working essentially for Sauron. But like that idea, like that idea of writing the story about the mercenaries that worked for Sauron, that would have never worked in the first 10 years post Tolkien.

Nobody would have read it. It's too crazy. It takes a long enough time. You have to like establish a genre before you can push back. So epic fantasy is around for a long time. Then we did our grimdark phase and coming out of grimdark. Eventually people are like, this is crazy.

How can we have we can't have good heroes anymore? What's going on here? Where is my chosen one?

And so now you did. I think they called it Hope Punk. You get the push back to Grimdark where you get like good heroes again and people want good scenes.

There's not quite so much gore and violence everywhere. So I think that part is really interesting. The cycles.

Yeah, those are the cycles. And then every once in a while, somebody will just come in with something like brand new and establishes a new genre. So it's either you establish a new brilliant genre, you combine previous genres or you push back against something. So that's how I feel like the genre creation fits in. I just want to stem through like a really quick timeline of fantasy in general just so that people know what the time scale is here. So 1950s is when Tolkien writes The Lord of the Rings and essentially spawns the epic fantasy genre.

Yeah. And then 1960s and tell me if you've read any of these because there are a lot of these I haven't read. I was making this list. I was thinking I was like, wow, I am way better read in sci-fi like sci-fi. I started at like Asimov and I read down from there. So like the newer stuff I'm not caught up on but I'm way caught up on the old stuff and fantasy is not quite as good for me.

I'm much more caught up on the new stuff and I haven't I haven't gone all the way back up the chain. Yeah. So 1950s we did Lord of the Rings. 1960s we did two major works I think that are worth calling out.

We did Elric of Melnabone. This is by Michael Morkock. I've heard of it.

Never read it. It's like Sword and Sorcery. And then we did Wizard of Earthsea, which I feel like I have read but I'm not positive.

This is by Ursula Thaladin. So that's more like a YA fantasy. So we did like Sword and Sorcery and YA fantasy start to branch out from Epic Fantasy. 1970s we did Dragon Riders of Pern. Dan, haven't read it.

Should have. This is where we start getting science fantasy because I guess they have like technological, I guess they're a post-apocalyptic society that's fantasy but they descended from something technological. I don't know the history there. And then we start getting one called The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Have you read this? No, I've read any of these. Yeah, I read this. I read this one a long time ago but I don't remember how many of them I read. So this is Epic Fantasy but it's the beginning of Grimdark because the protagonist is extremely, at least in the first book that I read, he is like very unsympathetic.

He does lots of bad things. And then I feel like weirdly enough it's almost like 30 years after Tolkien, like a generation, is when we hit the straight Tolkien copies. So like 1980s we started getting Terry Brooks, Raymond Feist, Margaret Weiss, Tracy Hickman, DiDavril Kay. DiDavril Kay actually helped with the Silmarillion apparently. So like Terry Brooks I think is a strong argument for, he was going for the Tolkien vibe and he hit it for beat, for beat, for beat. I've read a few of his books.

Not a ton, but yeah, not a ton. So 1990s were now 40 years post we did Robert Jordan who writes Will Time. We did George R. R. Martin who does the Grimdark like the Dane of Thrones. We did J.J. Rowling.

And she tapes out Urban Fantasy, Magic School Spin. And then in the 2000s we started getting everyone else. We did like Sanderson and Rothfuss and Joe Abercrombie and like all these, we are now fully split. More familiar with, yeah. Yeah, stuff we're more familiar with and we're fully split out.

There are tons of sub-genres within fantasy. It takes, you know, roughly 50 years. I think that's so interesting. I had a couple, okay, I had a couple of thoughts as you were talking about this because the timeline, I was genuinely curious. Because I feel like I read fantasy now and I love Tolkien, but in between that I have a huge gap. And I don't really know how it progressed.

I have a huge gap too. Yeah, I'm gonna have to look into all that. I would love to read some of those books. But okay, first one that I had because we were talking about cycles and you're saying like he published Lord of the Rings in the 1950s. Do you think coming out of the world wars, there was a certain feeling of like wanting that good versus bad. Like this is evil, strong, hero, paths, arcs where there could be hope in the world. Kind of not making it to like the world that you're living in. So it's fantasy, right?

It's myth. But you're still seeing those strong themes. Yeah, I could definitely see that.

And I could definitely see like a strong, let's get some of the stapism in here. We're not gonna set it in our world. There's too much going on.

Strong good and evil, evil loses in the end. Yeah, I could definitely see that hitting really hard. And this is why you can never know which genre is gonna hit next. You can't predict which direction society is going to go. They've done studies on this.

I'm trying to remember what I would have read this. I want to say was Netflix has done studies like in periods of boom, these are the types of shows people watch. In periods of bust, these are the types of people that shows people watch. And if I recall, that could be totally misquoting this, of course.

But if I recall, it was in periods of boom, like things are going well in the world. People are willing to go into more like grim dark. They want the darker stories. Yeah, they're like maybe there's gray in the world, right? Yeah, they want the darker stories.

And in times where things are tough, they want almost the opposite. You're going to go for the light of romance. You're going to go for something very astapist, something not set in this world. Good must triumph otherwise. Tragedy is not a strong seller in that dynamic. So yeah, I definitely, I think there's some element to that.

But I think the statism in general has got to be relatively, it's got to be robust, boom or bust, right? Who doesn't want to escape? You got to be escaping something every day, right? I was just going to say, I was like, it's funny you're talking about those trends because I feel like I see that in myself. Just like when I have nothing going on, I'm like, ooh, maybe I get a little drama, like read something a little intense.

Or when I have a lot going on, I'm like, I just need the most basic. It's only big treats. Yeah, exactly.

The most basic happy go lucky. So just even in myself, I see that which is hilarious. Yeah.

And so actually this is a good point. I don't know if I raise this. So like 1990s when we started dating like George RMR and we did Damo Thrones, Stanison would not call himself whatever Hope Punk is the genre.

I think that people are trying to call it. He wouldn't call himself that. I don't believe I've ever heard him say that, but he definitely is a reaction to that.

His heroes are sympathetic. They're good. They win. There is evil. It gets defeated.

Like it's not like it's cut and dried necessarily, but it is not. You don't have unsympathetic heroes necessarily with him. And he's wildly popular for a lot of other reasons. He's like extremely good at business. But I think that is one of the reasons, you know, he caught that wave when it was happening. Like people were getting a little sick of the, and not to say like there wasn't other fantasy, but the grim dark wave had come and there was now a new pushback.

And when you catch the right wave, I think you can crest, which is pretty cool. I love that. Yeah, that's a rough timeline. And we'll talk more about this, I think in a minute. But I think working your way up the chain. So like I said, like I'm way more familiar with fantasy, like newer fantasy than I am with older fantasy. Yeah, for sure. And I think working your way up the chain to the original source has a lot going for it. And we'll talk more about that. Because like when I do that with sci-fi, having done that with sci-fi, you can look at it and be like, ah, Asimov invented that 40 years ago.

Looks like they're not executing it very well today 40 years later. So it's really fun to see that. It's so funny because I don't know why this past year I feel like I've been, I've read a couple of vampire themed things and watched a couple of vampire themed things I haven't before. Like I read an interview with a vampire and I watched Buffy the vampire in the TV show.

And it's funny because I was the era of Twilight, right? I read that. And just even seeing like little bits and pieces or different aspects from previous media and where it builds from is super fascinating. Have you read Dracula? Yeah, I read Dracula too, which is, it feels so different from Twilight. It's so different.

But it's so interesting to see how it falls. Like you go from demonic, nasty, scary creature to, and he's really hot, which is where we're at with vampires now. But like maybe we'll rebound, maybe we'll get back to vampires as horror, which I'm sure if I read more horror, they are.

I'm sure the horror genre still has that monstrous element to them. So interesting though, just that connecting piece can clarify so much. Yeah, it's cool. Actually, while we're on the topic on, I guess we'll discuss it anyways, stripping down to the end of my list of notes. So yeah, why it's important to read up the chain and like know the connections between the old and the new. It's just really fun to like spot these influences. One, because genres like cross pollinate constantly.

Yeah. Because no authors, like authors are readers. They're always going to be out there reading something and as soon as they see something, they'll say to themselves, aha, I could do this, but I could do it better. And they steal it and they take it away.

They slap it into their genre and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. But I was just reminded of this recently because I rewatched Dune and. Yes, the movie or the movies are the old ones. The new movies. The new movies.

I like those. Which I enjoyed a lot. And so growing up, I was like, like I said, like my old sci-fi is much better than my old fantasy. So I read a lot of Dune growing up. I probably read that book probably eight times.

Wow. And like I was way into Dune and I was way into Dune before I was into Wheel of Time. And like. And you love Wheel of Time.

Oh, I love Wheel of Time. Let the listener know. Yeah.

For boating. Do I love it? But now like when I watched it, so I watched those movies again and I have not read Dune for probably 10 years. You know, I read it when I was a kid, but I read it a lot. So like, you know, it's got to be formative in some way, right? And then I watched the movies and I was reminded of all these scenes, but now I'm reminded of it post having read Wheel of Time. And now to compare Wheel of Time and Dune, which are technically different genres, but not really, you can just see all the massive influences that Dune had on Wheel of Time.

So like, it's just massive. So like in Wheel of Time, you have these, these, I guess tribes called the IEEL, which are identical to the Fremen in every way that matters. Like independent desert dwellers, excellent fighters, a force to be reckoned with. They're used to do XYZ, etc. Like massive parallels. In Wheel of Time, you get the Dragon Reborn in Dune. You get the Quitsats, Quitsats Haderach, the same thing.

The man of prophecy, you know, stuff like that. You get the Isidae, you get the Benedicera. Like completely the same. You get the power of prophecy, the inevitability of fate. You get like this grandstail of the world building and the politics and everything. And you just looked at that, you're like, whoa.

If I had known that this was a copy, I would have read this earlier. But it hits all the right buttons. That's what I'm saying. Like it's not bad. It's amazing.

Like when you get these like influences and you fight, you find a Dune that you really enjoy and then you find out, oh, all the things that I love in Dune, it's just over here and their tweets just slightly and it's perfect and amazing. People just keep iterating and iterating. Yeah, people keep iterating. So to me, that part is really fun because you get to see who influenced who, what they thought was cool, where they put it, when they put it into this new genre. Anyways, that's what I was going to kind of end on. But like since we're on the topic, let's talk about it.

Yeah. To me, Will, Time and Dune was super obvious. If I thought a little hard, I could probably come up with some other like cross pollinating books. There are others, but I didn't.

That was the most obvious to me and the most immediate. So if you think of any, let me know because I love like comparing them and see those. Okay. So I also wanted to talk about, we kind of talked in general terms, like what became the fantasy genre? Like what are these tropes like good versus evil, etc. But like more specifically, what are things that Tolkien did that became really popular in fantasy? So the obvious ones are the races that he invented.

Elves, dwarves, orcs, halflings, etc. Like he invented them, how they're portrayed. I mean, he took them from mythology. He tweaked them.

He did stuff. But everyone else, no one else was going out and reading the old mythology. They just said, hmm, Tolkien says this is what this is.

I guess we believe him. And you see this a lot in like Dungeons and Dragons, right? So Dungeons and Dragons, it's influence is a slightly different branch of fantasy, but it's heavily influenced by Tolkien, like everybody. And so they invent other races, but those main ones, that's very much Tolkien. At its core. At its core, yeah. Other themes. So another major thing that Tolkien does that is huge in fantasy is the Fellowship quest.

Get the band together, do the theme. Huge. Like honestly, it's hard to think of a single book that isn't like that. Okay. It's tricky. I think going off of that.

One of the main things that I was curious about, if you knew if it started with Tolkien or if it was something earlier, but like the old wizard mentor saying, come on this journey. Right? Yeah. That call.

That call it turned almost. Yep. That was my next one here is like the mentor figure. Yeah.

Technically, technically, if I recall from like there's a, there's a book called the Hero's Journey by Campbell, I think. Yeah. It's really good. And I haven't read it in a while, but technically that's old. That's mythology stuff.

Dang. But again, we already decided that mythology is essentially fantasy and it's essentially Tolkien. Well, that was like Merlin and Arthur. Sorry. I'm just thinking about like that's pretty much there. Yeah.

So it's older than Tolkien, but he took it because he looked at that and said, that's, that is correct. That's what I need. Yeah. And then the rest of fantasy said, yep, that was the right theme.

Let's do it. So there's something just like that fits in the way stories are created that you see that over and over at that archetype. You see that in Harry Potter.

You see that in so many places. It's all part of the Hero's Journey, which is a huge element of, I think all stories, but I think the way that it's described in fantasy is the way that most people think of it. Like you said, the wizard mentor and then the wizard mentor dies and then, you know, they go here and they do that's why Z. So yeah, that is definitely something that Tolkien took. But it was relevant in mythology prior. And then, okay, next one, Dark Lords, massive.

Oh, just like straight up Dark Lords and speaking of Dark Lords, there's an amazing book called Dark Lord of Dirkholm. Who is this by? I'm blanking on the author. Oh yeah, Diana Wynne Jones. She's great. Highly recommend that. It's just, it's hilarious. It's a great take on the Dark Lord.

I love it. He also invents the evil object, Mac Duffin, which is basically, you know, the Mac Duffin is like a plot device where it's, we have the theme and these are different from A to Z and then something needs to be done with it. And this is the ring, right?

This is what the plot of the entire book is. And it can be really like, it's simplistic to like reduce everything down to just, you know, really a well trod trope for fantasy is, oh no, we have the magic sword. We need to do X, Y, Z with it. Or, oh no, we have this object, this theme, this pendant, this annulate, whatever.

Yeah. And that's just, that's just classical. Um, medieval technology.

So he chose to set his world at essentially the medieval time. And I don't know why. I don't know.

See, I don't know which is the chit, like the Chitra and the Ape here. I don't know if the fact that he wrote the Shire to Be So Tozy has forever imbued the medieval technology with the sense of like, oh, this is cozy times. Or it was just the fact that the readers forget about toilets. You know what I mean? Okay.

I had a question here. But it has that vibe. It does. So when I think of men in this world, I definitely think medieval, right? Like you just, the clothing, I'm thinking of the movie to be fair. The clothing, everything the way it's set up. Rivendell, maybe Renaissance.

Like they have like the long, flowy, it seems somewhat like elevated, beautiful. Okay. But the Shire, it's more like 17, 1800s. They have cute little waistcoats. It's true.

They have little pocket watches. It's true. Yeah.

Like there's actually an interesting almost like time warp between locales. Yeah. Which I guess you could just say. Yeah. That is what you're saying is like, well, I think some of that is to help with visual distinction.

Yeah. You want to portray everyone to wear different types of clothing. So, you know, you did the Rohan looking different from Gondor, but everyone looks different from the Shire.

So yeah, I agree. It is interesting to feel like there's time steps. Something I thought was funny when I started reading Will Time was in my mind as like fantasy reader, I go in and for the first like three minutes, I'm thinking, yep, this is medieval. And then Robert Jordan was just like such a fan of describing clothing.

It's ridiculous. So he starts describing all of this lace and all of this frippery and all this brocade. And then I was like, whoa, we are in the Tudor Palace like Renaissance tier.

Like it is actually much more Renaissance than it is medieval. And you don't really click in. You don't clue in on that until, you know, at a certain point. And after that, I was like, oh, that's really interesting.

I actually really enjoy that. I love the fact that it's not we are medieval peasants. It is we are close to Renaissance.

We're getting there. Like just like the way he describes certain styles and things. So for actually another good example here is like flintlock fantasy. This is a subgenre that I love a lot.

And they kind of push back on this. They say what if fantasy, but what if not medieval? What if Napoleonic? What if we have the early stages of gunpowder? Actually, I love Napoleonic. Hair just a hair more advanced. Like they still only have mustots.

We're not getting light with the browning machine gun anytime soon in this genre. But it's really intriguing. Just that slight shift in setting is like it makes it feel fresh. It makes it feel super new. It's really fun. And I think about when they play Shakespeare, but they change the time period.

Yeah. It like totally warps with your mind. You're like, wait, this is the eighties. And it's like, all this is happening.

And it makes you think of the characters and everything differently. Yeah. It's exactly like that.

Just a slight twist. Okay. Other things that Tolkien did that between very popular magic, obviously.

Yes. Tolkien had a very particular kind of magic. So there are things that he did with his magic that are like not popular now today.

So for example, his magic is very soft. Dandalf can do things. What Dandalf can do exactly? We're not sure.

Probably Dandalf doesn't even know. It's like unstructured. Yeah. Unstructured. Whereas the pushback in sat would be like the very Sanderson style of like there's a system to this magic.

It's a hard magic. There are rules and there are laws, etc., etc. And they're all known to the reader.

The reader knows exactly what the limit is. Whereas with Tolkien, you did a much more, I want to call it not a magic. I don't know, it's just a softer vibe. You get more of a legend feel to it. So, Dandalf can do things. We have a rough sense of the stale at which Dandalf can do things, but we don't know that Dandalf needs 32 grams of gold and he needs to eat it before, you know.

To breathe fire. The third moon rises, exactly. Like, there's none of that. And so eventually there will be a pushback to Sanders, Sanders' style, and we'll start seeing soft magic in it. And we may already have done that. I'm not actually certain where we're at in that.

In that wave. Constructive languages. Obviously Tolkien was the master of this.

Nobody's actually going to be him. But everyone tries. Mind blowing. Yeah, everyone tries a little bit and... Oh man, I'm trying to remember.

I'm not going to remember the phrase, hang on a second. Did you ever read Watership Down? No, I feel like this episode is just going to be exposing all the books I haven't read, but... That's right.

No, I haven't. Get ready, Stephanie. All right, I won't spoil anything.

And not because I don't want to, but because I cannot, because I can't remember the phrase. So Watership Down is technically fantasy. Do not watch the movie.

It will traumatize you. Like, the cover shows two. So the story of Watership Down is about a rabbit warren. And the rabbits are taught. It's basically a red wall, right?

You know, fantasy creatures talking, right? Yeah. It is not like red wall, though.

So it's amazing. If you watch the movie, which you should not, it has two cute little bunnies on it. And the parent puts it into the TV, thinking, yes, this will entertain the children for, you know, the next two hours. And then the children come out two hours later, just completely starred. It is, it is, it's a very like, scary book in a sense. And it really, very in TV format.

So Watership Down, excellent. It's about rabbits. And the rabbits have like this myth, this mythological prints. And so they have a rabbit language and they like, they drop certain words throughout the book. Like the author doesn't like really explain them. He just drops it until you get it. And then at the very end of the book, he combines like the five or six words in rabbit that you know into one long sentence that also does not get translated. But because you've picked up all of these words throughout the book, you know what that sentence means. And it's like, fably vulgar.

And not very inappropriate. It's like one of these rabbits says it while like about to have a fight, you know. And it's just, it's just a perfect example of how a constructed language can be effective. You drop, it adds so much flavor to that book. It's, it's that line is one of the most pivotal lines in the entire book. And I'm just ashamed that I cannot remember it off the top of my head after not having read the book for 15 years. But like it's such a good line. And it adds so much that it is written in the rabbit language and not in English.

So that that is the number one thing that comes to mind for me with constructed languages. They're super effective. I think they set the setting and the light the tone.

Yeah. I think it helps give like an age and aging feeling to the world, too. And Lord of the Rings specifically. Lord of the Rings and any other kind of book that incorporates language, like it just makes it feel like this place is old, right? Like there's language and there's myth that existed before this story is taking place. It's fun to like have different societies and for them to have different slain. So I sign often does this as well, where it's like these people have a word for that concept or that item, but it's different from those people.

And you look at it like, like, yeah, that's real. We still have dialects. Like there are so many southern words.

I have no idea what they are. Or like New York word, New Jersey, you know. So constructed languages, massive theme. World building in general, I would say is the next element where he has been very influential in the genre and not always for good. So like his favorite thing was world building. And I just really feel like so many authors. They just spend their whole lives world building.

And I think we did not need that information for the plot. That is being brought. Thank you very much.

Probably don't need to know about the layers of your earth. Yeah, pretty much. So that was a long list. Those are the things that I feel like he did specifically in Lord of the Rings that became very popular.

I want to talk about like the things that he did that were not popular that are still like a state and. Yeah, they either died in Lord of the Rings or they just like roundly rejected. Maybe they'll come back. I don't know. Maybe you'll disagree with these and say, no, this is popular. I don't know. Maybe I just have like a thin slice of fantasy.

But yeah, this is kind of a long list. Let's create through it. So first and foremost, my first thought was protagonist like Frodo. We have he's a Lord. He's like middle aged. He's well. He's like 40 something.

Yeah. He is physically weak, never becomes a fighter. Where are these protagonists? This is like unheard of in fantasy. Fantasy protagonist is, you know, the chosen one.

He's a teenage peasant from the farm life. That eventually becomes incredibly strong. It becomes an incredible fighter, an incredible magician, whatever the incredible thing he needs to be, he levels up. We just don't have this very often in fantasy. And I think just because it's hard to pull off, I don't know exactly the reason why this dog is so roundly rejected. But I think it pretty much is completely rejected. OK, that's so funny, because I actually feel like in fantasy or romantic that I read, I would prefer to see some diversity in my main character. I feel like we've kind of narrowed it a lot.

Sure. And when we might be at that point where it's like now the pushback where you do start seeing a protagonist like Frodo, I guess it's the best way to put it. OK, here's a good one. A chosen one who fails. Because Frodo completely fails. You get to the end of the Lord of the Rings and he completely fails.

It is Golem who destroys the ring. And that was completely by accident. So I'm looking at this and I'm thinking, wow, this is still super fresh and super innovative. This has never been like fully adopted by the genre.

Otherwise, we'd see a ton of Golem clones and we just don't. Yeah, which is interesting because I think a lot of people critique Tolkien and Lord of the Rings by saying it's not very gray, right? He's so moralistic almost in his storytelling that it's like it just seems very clean. But that ending, I mean, that ending is bold. It is a bold ending.

And frankly, every time I like read or watch him, I'm like, oh, yeah, Frodo fails. I almost forget it every time because you're not expecting it. It's like, yeah, it's just not it's not expected. I think a little bit I could be wrong.

Maybe a little bit of grimdark got into the whole chosen one failing theme because you do start getting like characters who die. Right. I mean, I'm not trying to. This may be a spoiler, but watch out. It's been like 20 years. So like Ned Stark dies in Game of Thrones. Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily call it a chosen one. But like destroyed me.

Yeah, watching that season. Oh, my gosh. I didn't want to continue.

I was like, I'm fed up with these people. They're all terrible. Exactly. So. That is an element of grimdark where they kind of adopt the chosen one who fails. But they take it to a completely different context, right? Their their stories, themes, the direction of the story, the types of characters that are portrayed are completely different. We don't have in a lot of like more, I don't know what you call this, like cut and dried, more good and evil. We don't have in a lot of stories with the heroic characters.

We don't have them failing. At the very end, where it matters. He got it like 95 percent of the way. Exactly.

But that last moment. And he does the same thing with the seal door, right? This is not something that he's like, this is not a one off theme where it's like, ah, maybe this time I will just do it this way. He I really feel like he has a statement here. It's so interesting because his heroes, people talk about how his heroes are very like, I don't know, like Aragorn. Very like prophecy. Like I am the chosen king, all this other stuff. But I will say a lot of his heroes are fallable, available to you.

I'm not saying that right. But like Bormir, Bormir, yeah, I don't know. Sealdor, Frodo, like, yeah, they all they did close, but they missed the mark. And there is something super relatable about that. And for some reason, like fantasy genre genre in general, just never took that aspect and said, oh, yeah, we can work with that.

They like dropped it. Um, OK, here's another one. The will to not use power is such a huge theme. Oh, my gosh.

And it's nowhere in the fantasy genre. Like don't put the ring on. Right.

Yeah. Things like don't put the ring on. Delagel rejecting it. Dandall rejecting it.

Fermi rejecting it. Um, and it's even all like the smaller level, too. Like we don't get training montages in Lord of the Rings. We don't get the characters leveling up. But I mean, you get some tiny little bit when Borimer teaches the hobbits how to use their swords.

Tiny, tiny, tiny. Like stab. Yeah, it's just there.

There's a difference in the way they treat power. And I would characterize that as definitely like a told in. Yeah, he put that in deliberately. This is how he views things.

And I think that's legitimate. He saw a lot of misuse of power. He was in the wars, et cetera, et cetera. Like this is definitely well, that ties into my nuts one, which is war as tragedy, massive theme.

Yeah. Also, for the most part, not particularly well executed or not particularly adopted in the fantasy genre. Like you did a lot of war as necessity or war as exciting action sequences.

And I was going to say very detailed. Yes. War sequences. Yeah. And definitely not treated as tragedy.

Will Time actually does a very interesting job with this, the attitude. And this is, I think, because Jordan was a veteran. He was in the Vietnam War. And the way he writes war and he writes battles, it's not, oh, wow, this is so exciting. You almost never get his war sequences are so short. You did this massive battle and it's like two and a half pages, three pages.

And it's all the preparation before tiny little snippets in it. It's like very fought of war. This it's so confusing. You know, what's going on.

Yeah. And then yet aftermath and the aftermath is always tragic. Like it's never portrayed as like cool, awesome, great. There's a scene in Will Time that is often read as cool, awesome, great. And then when you read it, like I think the first time you read it, like, yeah, let's go. And then the second time you read it, like, oh, shoot, is more the reaction. So this is for anyone who wants to know, this is book six. Lord of Chaos, the ending of Lord of Chaos is what I'm talking about.

And at Dumas Wells. So yeah, that is a theme that I don't think was like well adopted by all the people who followed him. And I do think it might have to do with yeah, exposure to violence or exposure to war because yeah, my grandpa was also in the Vietnam War. And like till he passed away, he would have he would have dreams. He would have extremely violent dreams and he'd come out and he would say, I dreamt about, you know, this, this thing happening last night that he had experienced in the Vietnam jungle and I was like, oh, grandpa, you're like 70 years old.

Like it haunted him. Yeah. So like, I don't know. I think yeah, the way violence and war is depicted. Yeah, sometimes I don't think we really talk about all the side effects and all of the pain and all of the really good point is that war as tragedy is not just war as tragedy right now. It's also war haunts you. War has side effects. War never ends in that like it never leaves the people who are affected by it, but like have been involved, you know. So like Frodo has all these never healing wounds. Ran for years.

Yeah. And he leaves to try to get like to stay at all. And who knows if he's successful. Like he'll go to the Greyhavens like fingers crossed for him. I don't know if it'll work, but he has to leave the Shire. He can't he can't recover and heal Sam.

Can. And whether that's because a limited at Sposior or because of Sam's character and because we needed somebody who did heal just as a reader. But like real time also treats it that way. Like you did like this haunting. You did like this PDSD. You did the ramifications and the chronic like issues that come out of it. It's really great.

I like that sort of theme. So this is very disappointing to me. That it was not more adopted. And it's hard to write to, though. I think it's hard to write to put that in. I don't know. That's got to be tough to articulate.

And yeah, I don't know. And some of it must just be from experience. Like there are certain themes that your average Joe blow and the the year of our Lord 2024 is not like experiencing right now. Maybe once we get a World War Three, we'll get a new genre full of this theme. Hopefully, hopefully.

Yeah, but hopefully not. I mean, I'm serious. Yeah, it's crazy.

It's interesting. OK, another one that never got adopted in book poems and songs. Oh, my gosh. Everywhere and everywhere. Quite limited in fantasy. And I was thinking about this.

I was like, is it just because one element is that told in love poetry? Right. Obviously. Yeah.

Language. He loves his songs. He loved his poetry. He just had to stick it in.

He couldn't resist. The other issue, though, I think is the lack of it in like more modern fantasy. I think it really comes down to an author still issue. Poetry is pretty hard.

You want to sound good. I really think there's a still gap. Obviously told him to cross it. And there's got to be other people who have crossed it. But I really don't see this very often.

One place that I think I see it like remnants of this is sometimes you did. Book titles that are extremely poetical. And I really enjoy those. So like I've always been jealous of these but titles. What's one of them called a piece named Desolation?

No, no, no. A Desolation named peace. Fantastic book title. Very. That's amazing. There's another one called by schism.

Rent a Sunder. And I think it's just like a typical military sci-fi thing. I'm just like, ah, that title is so wasted on you.

I want that one. But just like they feel biblical. They feel poetic in a like a King James way. And the Tolkien, the Tolkien poeticism is very, I think it's older. It's Beowulf. It's like mythology.

It's it's like the the the horse and the rider poem from the middle of that Ro Hanse. The movies. Oh my goodness. There's a longer version in the books and it is straight up amazing. I was just reading it the other day.

So I think it's still issue and I'm slightly sad that we don't have more of it. Um, I don't I don't know for sure that I'd like it because I definitely think there are parts of the books where I'm like, oh, another poem. But you know, you got to respect Tolkien for the ability to put those in.

Yeah. You know, it's funny as you were saying that I was trying to think. I was like, what do I feel like he that added to his books? Like, what do I think these little songs and these little poems?

You're right. Sometimes I'm like, these are long. But generally, if I read them in context, what do I feel like they add?

And I think there's two things for me. I think sometimes there's like little songs or little ditties that seem soft and very humorous and they add like this very light air to like either being in the shire or just hanging out with your, you know, your posse, the fellowship on a journey, you know, which adds a lightness to it. Or they add like a sense of history and for almost.

Yeah. And some of those longer poems and and sentiments. So I think those are the two things I see those kind of add to his.

Yeah. Overall, I would say they're definitely a positive. And this could be just because I've not read them recently enough to remember if it was like every other page.

But overall, I think definitely a positive, right? It lends to that sense of there's history here. There's another world. People, the people in this world are real. They have they have songs, they have music, they have stories that they're telling each other.

So I really enjoy it. I don't think many people could pull it off, though. Yeah. Actually, it's funny because as you've been listening things, I was like, oh, I should write a book that has that I should write a book that this one. I'm a little like, definitely not exactly. Very funny. All right. Here's another one. Books that are disjointed in their timeline.

So thankfully, this is something that has not been super adopted because I hate this. So for example, this is what I mean by this is the first half, the two towers, we did Mary, Pip and Ludlas Aragon, right? Yeah.

Second half of the two towers, we go back in time and we see Froda and Sam. Oh, yeah. And so we did all of their time. We did all of the events, but they're disjointed by like, this group is these storylines are connected, so we're going to tell them and then we're going to go back in time and tell these storylines. And in this case, it's probably fine because they are truly disjointed.

Like Froda and Sam are really off on their own, not really interacting with anybody else's plot lines. But for the most part, for most fantasy, this is a terrible, no good, bad idea. Idea. Yeah. I forgot about that because the movie is trying to go back and forth. Yep. Exactly. I forgot that they sectioned it like that.

And I think it's to their benefit that they did that. So for example, Will Time has Book 10, Crossroads of Twilight, Fright and Awful. Because in Book 9, you get this really exciting event. It's so exciting.

We want to know what's happening. And then Book 10 goes back in time and you just spend forever getting to the really exciting event. And frankly, nothing happens. And then it's just bad. It's just really bad. And one of the reasons it's bad and this is not Sanderson's fault, technically, it's just the way they publish the books.

He also does this in his last three when he finished out that series. But the reason it's bad is because you lose like dramatic effect. So if your series is too interconnected and you try to like divest certain plot lines, like Sanderson does in the last couple of books, you did a storyline of these two characters and you get something either really good or really bad that's happening. And then you go in his case, something really good happens. And then you go back in time to follow the rest of the cast.

And it doesn't matter how bad their situation is. You already know that the really good thing happened. It just really feels all the tension. Um, so I prefer, vastly prefer what modern fantasy has done here, which is if you're going to have a stupid long, wide cast of characters, you've got it interspersed. You got to cut, you got to move, you got to get to different people. They're good and bad ways. They're good and bad ways to do that.

Some ways are better than others. But in general, this idea of like having an entire book where we go back in time and it's just like displaced in the timeline. I'm really glad. I think people are seeing that's a bad idea. Yeah. Or at least I haven't seen it recently. I haven't seen it great with that. Yeah.

So I think a load of Marines pulls it off, but I would almost be interested in doing a little project of like combining all the, you know, splitting out in a modern way to see if it means. Yeah. Um, okay. Another thing that is not, another thing that is not very common in modern fantasy. Um, the way Tolkien treats magic is he treats it as very rare and not very understood. Um, and there's a lot of fantasy where maybe magic starts out as rare and not very understood because of coming back into the world. But by the end of the series, magic is really well understood and your protagonist is a super magic user. Um, and some of that is like magic. I think there are good elements of this, like magic, having its own like character art. Like we get, we have like the mystery of magic and then we learn some more because our character is learning more and then our hero does this scene. So now we know even more about magic.

Like there's some like joy in that. Um, but you also lose the mysticism of magic when you get as far as like Sanderson tapes it, which is, uh, you know, I'll do X, Y, Z and I'll get A and B out. You know, it's just black box inputs, black box outputs. Um, so you lose some mysticism.

I don't know. I enjoy both. It's hard for me to say that this is like overall a bad theme, but it is very different. Yeah. I think man, this kind of reminds me of what you were saying about the genres kind of taking different pieces and splitting out. This, the more structured like Brian's, uh, Sanderson method, I feel like it's kind of thinking of magic as like a science saying, okay, if we picked, if we're incorporating the most scientific method, yeah, and we can explain magic in a scientific way.

Let's do that. Whereas I think Tolkien is kind of based off of those old myths and legends where people are like, I have no clue what this is. Right. It's a different attitude entirely. It's a different attitude. And it provokes a different magic. Like the feel of the magic is completely different. It feels different to the people too. Right. We're in this, it's almost like this, ah, factor, or if it's not an off factor, it's like, okay, this thing, this, you know, this thing functions like this.

I'm going to see if I can maybe conch. There seems to be a lot more question. There's a lot more question in it. Whereas when you have a very hardened system of magic, it's more like, how can I gather all the, the 50 things I need to do at XYZ? It's more about resource gathering or lovely, not successful issues as opposed to I must pray to my God and I hope my prayers answered.

Like hope the Eagles come. So yeah, that's an interesting one. This one is kind of a small side one, but I thought it was in Tree Dean. So in the books, as opposed to the movies, Aragorn is the long boss team who actively wants his throne back. We do not see this very often. Even in the movies, and they did this for character arc reasons, and I can see why they made him more of like the reluctant noble who has to be convinced to take power. Whereas in the book, she's like, no, I'm the air to daunderer.

And yeah, I'll be taking that throne any minute, which is just, it's an interesting arc. Well, because he was kind of hidden and living this other life or how old is he? Wouldn't Lord of the Rings like a hundred or something? Yeah, he's like 90 something, something. He's had a he's had a decent.

Yeah, so he has done stuff without it. But definitely the vibe in the books is definitely, oh, yeah, I'm ready to rotate the throne or the door now. Yeah, like he's like, I'm ready to step up to this mantle.

Yeah. And there's not that attitude is, I think, missing in a lot of fantasy books or or that character is quite rare. And maybe because it is more interesting to have like the reluctant power or the convince him into it, I don't know. Maybe that is just more interesting. I actually do lean a little bit closer to that personally.

That could just be fantasy, modern fantasy shaping my taste. OK, here's a good one. You like this one. Resurrection, a day, Dandalf. This is almost never used in fantasy. But really, there's not characters that is like, maybe characters you think they're dead and they're not dead, but not necessarily resurrection. Oh, Dandalf was dead, dead. Yeah, good. I was dead, dead. Yeah. So I think like the trick of always you really dead, that's obviously used a lot.

But like, yeah, I cannot think I could not personally think of a single like that guy was dead and now he's been resurrected. Harry Potter. Oh, wow, you caught me out pants down. You're right. That's like the main character at the end.

It's very climactic. Yep. Yep. Hope that didn't spoil it.

Still trying to make it through this series. So yeah, it's rarely used. And I don't know. I don't know personally if like the Harry Potter and he was like super controversial, I wonder if it was like maybe people would have preferred if Harry died. I think that's a bold statement.

But I don't know if people would have preferred. Well, actually, I've never looked that up. I don't know.

I'm kind of curious now. But I think the reason people don't use this is because it feels like it has to be some kind of like Deus Ex Machina, right? It feels like a cheat trick.

And I don't think it has to be because the reservoir. Well, I guess in certain contexts, it's not a cheat trick. So like when I look at the resurrection of Dandalf, it does not feel like a cheat trick, but that's because of the way the world is built, because there is that room for the mysticism. We don't know how the magic works. We don't really know what a real Louveteart's plan is. We don't know how it fits into it.

We don't really know his purpose, like his mission anyways. So yeah, like there's room for kind of flexibility and for for strange events to occur that are peculiar. Whereas I think a lot of modern fantasy does not leave that room for themselves.

So they're not able to fit something as big as a resurrection into like the scale of their plot or the style of their world. Yeah, that's so interesting. Man, I'm trying to think about anything else that might be relevant there. You're right. It never felt. I always just felt excitement when that happened. No question. I never felt like, oh, yeah.

I thought it was dead. And maybe there's some horrible person out there who feels that way, but you that person, you are wrong. A person doesn't love Gandalf the way I did.

Here's another one. Uh, the tone and the theme of Lord of the Rings. I feel like this is not particularly well adopted in modern fantasy. Lord of the Rings is very somber. The theme is death. Oh, but it's also about hope in the face of almost certain death. Right. So it's complex. Um, modern fantasy, when they have a theme that's about death, they just, they kind of just like take it too far.

Right. You did grimdark where it's all about death, but it's, it's not hope. Everyone dies. Yeah. It's not hope in death. It's hopelessness and nihilism and stuff like that.

Yeah. Um, whereas most fantasy, most fantasies, like it's all about the adventure. There's a little death here and here, just like keep the stage high, but like, which is here for a fun romp. Um, and I just really feel like Lord of the Rings hits this.

Interesting tone of somber death is everywhere, but there is still hope. And it doesn't dip into grimdark. It doesn't dip into like the nihilism.

It stays actually very far away from it. It is a, it's a strong rebuttal, I think, to that attitude, but it's still very somber. And something that I think is so interesting too, is he has this lightness with like the hobbit characters. There's almost innocence and like giddiness that he's able to kind of weave this theme, like Mary and Pippin through this very, like if you took out the hobbits, it would be like medieval epic, but try to get this ring to Mount Doom.

But with the hobbits, you have this feeling of there's like almost a child play from this. There's something to protect here, right? Yeah.

It's the innocence that you're protecting. And there are worlds, I think, I think a lot of fantasy has some element of that. So like, for instance, in Will Time, you did like the two, the two rivers is like their version of the Shire. It's like there's an innocence there. Yeah.

But Tolten keeps the Shire. Well, we'll talk a little bit about that, actually, when I say this. In Will Time, the two river changes. Like it develops, it becomes a bittersweet, a bitter town, etc. etc. So like you see it change and in the Shire, mostly is fixed as like it's perfection.

We want to keep it exactly how it is. Yeah. OK, I just have three more, four more. Excellent.

Gracie says. OK, the Stouring of the Shire. This was a really interesting thing that I don't feel like was well adopted. So the threat of Stouring the Shire was well adopted because you have a lot of fantasy books where it's like, oh, no, the bad guy is headed towards, you know, the hometown.

My home. Yeah. But then the hero goes and saves them, right? Whereas here we have the bad guy has successfully destroyed my home.

And it has happened at the end of the book when you thought you were done. And we have to rebuild. And we have to rebuild. So and I guess what I was trying to say with like the way that the Shire stays permanent and fixed is like when they rebuild, they don't like build a city. They rebuild the Shire, you know, as it was.

So there is that element. So but yeah, Stouring the Shire, I think this is pretty bold. I think that in fantasy, fantasy in general usually protects the hometown or or if they sacrifice it, they sacrifice it early on, right about when the death of the mentor or core occurs so that the hero can have like a nice little tragic impetus to like go on their quest, right? It's it's at the beginning of the story.

If you're going to destroy the hometown, you destroy it at the beginning. And then the hero goes on the quest. Whereas the way that I feel like Tolkien did it was he did the whole hero's journey of you can never go home.

And he did it by saying, literally, you can't go home. We have Scoured the Shire. It's not there, but he has a din with that somber theme. He has like a happy note to it. He adds this hope. He says, you can never go home, but you can rebuild home.

You can rebuild home. Yeah, which feels more real to me, to be honest. It's hard. It's not as satisfying. It's not that like happy ending kind of piece. But I think it's very fitting for the way Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings that the Shire was not untouched, that the Scouring happened.

But again, it's also fitting for Lord of the Rings that eventually they rebuild and it becomes this beautiful happy place again. I do. OK, I feel like maybe I pulled this too much. But I think of the World Wars again and how like England was bombed. And it was very much like, we're going to make it through this, right? Like we are strong as a nation.

And I wonder if there's some of that of like. You can you can be hurt or you can be right. You can see the devastation and you can see the devastation in your homeland. Yeah, you can you can overcome it. You can overcome it.

Sure. Also, I think he talked a lot about like themes of industrialism versus nature and his stories because he was saying a lot of industrialism at the time. And I wonder if there was ever a hope for him of like, just because we're ramping up to this doesn't mean we always have to stay this way. Yeah, I wonder if you're right. Yeah, he was also saying here was the Shire. Then it was Shire under the orcs industrial kind of beautiful.

Yeah. Well, yeah, here's the original Shire. Then we get the Shire as controlled by orcs and Saruman and it's horrible and industrial. But we don't have to stay like that. We can fix it.

We can restore it to this beautiful natural like natural state. Yeah, I would say that's probably definitely true. Some kind of element of that. Because I think we look at history. We think, oh, we ramped up.

We industrialized. And you can never go back. There's no going back. But he's saying you can go back. Why not? Just do it.

It'll make your book better. I don't know. That's funny.

OK, another one. Evil Dragons. I think it's so interesting. I think I love dragons. I think I love dragons, but in total, they are only evil. And I think it's so interesting that the rest of fantasy thought, yeah. I want to ride that thing.

I want to ride that thing. They're not wrong. They're not wrong.

They're not wrong. But Evil Dragons that you ride also dope. Think about that. So I think about dragons all the time. I have a dragon book in me somewhere.

I just haven't decided what it is. Oh, I'm so excited. Like for sure, we've got to have some of this like evil dragon nonsense because they're so cool. And I think it's it's a little bit of a letdown when to me, at least it's a letdown when you got the book, you got the dragon, but they're really just like a staley Labrador retriever. You know, yeah, a little bit too gentle, too soft, too cute.

I just want something that's got a little bit of that dinosaur in them. Yeah, you know, you know, it's so funny. It makes me laugh that everyone loves dragons because not a lot of people love snakes.

I know. Like lizards. I actually have been to life. So you slap some wings on it and you're like, whoa. Yeah, I think like an actual person, I actually kind of really like snakes.

But I think like your average person who actually like stepped in front of a dragon, you would look at that thing and it would be creepy, right? You got the long, unbleething days. I was going to say the eyes. You have like the twitchy movement patterns.

Like there's going to be all kinds of elements that are not pleasant to look at for the hot blood of mammal that you are. And it's huge, right? Yeah. Right.

Exactly. How did people come by? Oh, this is a cute and fluffy, well, cute and staley pet theme. Yeah, I don't know. It's funny to me that we love it in fantasy, but in real life, I don't know many people who are like, oh, my pet lizard. Exactly.

There are a lot of people. Pet lizard. The people who love lizards love them hard. How did they fool the rest of us into liking dragons?

That's what I think is funny. Everyone usually likes the furry thing, but yeah, interesting. Oh, could you ever do furry dragon?

I don't know. I've not seen a dragon that scales. It could be fluffy. Maybe maybe there's like a eastern dragon that I'm not aware of that is fluffy. Because they have quite a different version of dragon. But anyways, I love the the lack of evil dragons.

I wish we had more. OK, so my last one here is basically just like how he wrote. So he uses the omniscient narrator, which is not nearly as popular as it once was. And this is more of the fairy tale vibe.

Right. This is how fairy tales of legends are written often. So modern times has shifted this into third person or third person close or even first person. I hate first person, third person close forever. And I do prefer that personally. Like that POV is it's more enjoyable for me to read, because I feel like you get into the territory's head. You get to see their thoughts. You get to think of their thoughts with them. So I personally enjoy that.

But of course, that could just be preference, you know. And then the other thing that he does in terms of the way he wrote it is I think we had talked about this a long time ago. He's much more of like a he's not always about the plot, you know, when he's doing his pacing and his structure, he's not always about the plot.

He's not even always about character development. And all the other things that are like really heavily drilled. If you if you go and type in how to write a good book, these are all like super heavily drilled, whereas told it is like, I'm going to take my time. I'm going to take five pages here and I'm going to discuss these trees and those mountains and this. I feel like I want to walk with him. He's about describing the sensory world around him. There's so much Milo.

Milu, how have you say that word? It's it's different. And this style was not really adopted by modern fantasy. We did so much more action, so much more plot. There are authors who are a little bit more whimsical and a bit slower paced. Yeah. But they're not they're not the foremost popular ones.

I wonder too. And it's probably not perfectly comparable. I think he was probably slower in how he wrote in terms of what he was describing than other authors of his time. But I will say it's so interesting to me reading a book from like the 1800s, like like a LaMise, which talks about the aqueducts in Paris for a long time.

Was that like paid by the like paid by the word? I got to know because I know digits was and I know that's why some of his books are the way they are. Oh, wait, really? Is that why?

Yes. Oh, my gosh. So there were some. And there's so long.

Yeah. They don't have this drive. It's actually there's not a nobody was telling them if you haven't hooked your reader by the first page, you're screwed, which honestly, part of me wonders if it was because it was a time before television and strong photography and visuals. And so when people thought, how am I going to have someone picture this in their mind? I got to be descriptive. Yeah. Yeah. So the overall style has for sure shifted.

Yeah. And Tolkien, I feel like sits in the middle for me in terms of between that and then something that's probably a more modern, fast paced fantasy book. I will say I think we've gotten to the point and I read a lot of romanticies specifically in that genre where it's just it's almost too fast, right? Where they're like, OK, we know the tropes.

We know all the we know all the little plot, the plot points and is a very satisfying like short book where you're just like, boop, boop, boop. And like it goes up the little mountain comes down and it ends. And I'm like, oh, where's the relationship?

So where's the like it doesn't build a lot in between? Where's the room to breathe? Right.

Where's the room to breathe? Yeah. And so I don't know. I think it's interesting. He's he sits in the middle for me in regards to that descriptiveness. I would say for me, he feels slow paced. But that that is just, I think, an aspect of the way pacing has shifted for books. Yeah.

Yeah. And the level of description required, which is to say not very much. And some people, some authors are better than others.

Like this is, of course, like always to taste the level of description I need. Not very much. Other people like really enjoy X, Y and Z. So, yeah, that was just something I noticed. Like I think this is not necessarily fantasy, not picking up what he's putting down. It's more just like, like you said, introduction of film, introduction of frankly, all the mediums I think of are faster and faster. Like you watch an old film, which I don't do. But like you watch an old film and the cuts are so slow. You know, the transitions take so much longer and you can just it.

And the style nowadays is boom, boom, boom, boom so fast. So, yeah, that's just that was the tell end of my long list of things that Tolkien did that nobody who followed him liked. Well, this has been such a fascinating journey. And wow, what an amazing learning experience for me. I think I have a whole list of books. Yeah, I'm going to read some of this. I also thought to myself, oh snap, I better read some of these. I don't have any street cred if I haven't. Like, dude, I'm not even hitting 1980s. Like I read 1990s, but I don't even have 1980s.

So I know. And funny enough, out of all the ones you mentioned, the dragon riders one sounded interesting to me. What was that?

It's called Dragon Riders of Perne, P-E-R-N. I have good things. I've heard it's fun.

I love Dragon Riders. I've never read it. But yeah, exactly. And that's a theme like all those other books I wrote about Dragon Riders, they for sure were calling off of this one.

Yeah. So yeah, I am not positive, but I think it is one of the first Dragon Rider books. So if you like Dragon Riding, you might have a good time like going through it and like seeing it for the first time. Like, oh, this is when that trope was first fresh.

Yeah, fourth wing is popping these days. So if you want to look at the origins. Exactly. Exactly.

But yeah, that's all I got for you. Amazing. Thank you so much, Lydia, for preparing this.

This is such a fun combo. Yeah, of course. And for next time, I just will discuss all the oldie books we read.

If we do. I know. Over the bridge. We can get to it. Yeah, that sounds great.

Awesome. All right, we'll call it here. OK, see you next time, guys. Bye. Bye.