Why I Like it When SFF Writers Write about Tolkien!

Some of the best thinking about Tolkien’s Legendarium that I’ve seen over the years is by the people who write sff (not surprising since, as Terry Pratchett (who once wrote a Fan Letter to Tolkien which I saw at the Bodleian!!!) describes Tolkien’s position in the genre as similar to the way Mt. Fuji “appears so often in Japanese prints.”

I am thinking about assembling a bibliography (perhaps with some annotations) of what sff writers have said about Tolkien.1 Off the top of my head, I remember ones by Ursula K. LeGuin and Diana Wynne Jones (in academic collections!) and at least one, probably more, by N. K. Jemisin, and of course the 2001 collection, Meditations on Middle-earth, edited by Karen Haber which is all about writers influenced by Tolkien.

Feel free to share any sff writers’ thoughts on Tolkien you know about in the comments below!

Max Gladstone’s “Just Silmaril Things” is to blame — this fantastic post on his experience listening to The Silmarillion (in the context of an earlier attempt to read) and what Gladstone says about how the ending works is well worth reading.

Just Silmaril Things

I listened to the Silmarillion a couple months back. Strong recommend! That’s it, that’s the post, cut here. This was my first time through the JRR Tolkien Basement Tapes. (The History of Middle Earth are the Bootleg Series I guess?) He’s the genre’s Mount Fuji, I know, but when I was a kid I bounced off the Valaquenta. I wanted to know about Beren and L…

The Third Place

I have two pieces on the adaptation issues in process — I hope to get one up later today (teaser alert: it will involve Shakespeare! in order to talk about the Jackson adaptations—sorry, I’m not sure I’m ever going to be able to write coherently about Rings of Power and all my problems with it and even more my problems with the far-right extremists who exploded all over the internet. . .).