while I don't doubt Tolkien influenced her writing to some extent, I always thought of her as being her own category.

In fact, purely for fun and my personal needs, I divide fantasy into three vague and overlapping categories. Tolkien (where the journeys are more external), Ursula le Guin (where the journeys are more internal, think of the Jungian aspects of the Earthsea books) and anti-Tolkien (Sapkowski, Martin etc).

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I wonder where various examples of sword & sorcery fit into your system (Robert E Howard, Fritz Lieber's Fafhrd and Gray Mouser, etc.)? Michael Moorcock's innovation was a fascinating blending of low-fantasy and high-fantasy elements. His Elric might fit into both your "anti-Tolkien" and "le Guin" catagories.

It was decades ago, but I thought they were Tolkien dumbed down, mixed with a few other things, none of them original, except maybe how fascinating leprosy is <sarcasm emoji>. I only made it through the first one.

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I was fascinated by Covenant as a different sort of protagonist--one who, at the story's beginning, has reached rock-bottom and is only one bad day from pulling the plug on himself. It's unusual to have a fantasy hero who is so self-pitying and hard to like.

I came to the conclusion that Lord of the Rings was, most probably, the best book that ever could be written, which put me in something of a quandary. I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. (That’s not true: I wanted to be a writer then.) And I wanted to write The Lord of the Rings. The problem was that it had already been written.

I gave the matter a great deal of thought, and eventually came to the conclusion that the best thing would be if, while holding a copy of The Lord of the Rings, I slipped into a parallel universe in which Professor Tolkien had not existed. And then I would get someone to retype the book — I knew that if I sent a publisher a book that had already been published, even in a parallel universe, they’d get suspicious, just as I knew my own thirteen-year old typing skills were not going to be up to the job of typing it. And once the book was published I would, in this parallel universe, be the author of Lord of the Rings, than which there can be no better thing. And I read Lord of the Rings until I no longer needed to read it any longer, because it was inside me.


"A speech I once gave: On Lewis, Tolkien and Chesterton " http://journal.neilgaiman.com/...wis-tolkien-and.html

...but Neil Gaiman is such a trivial writer; even worse are the films (Beowulf!) and television series (Good Omens, American Gods) he has been involved with as a writer - the very definition of postmodern claptrap.

To stay more on topic: one of the few good genre writers influenced by Tolkien passed last year: Gene Wolfe. That man actually wrote literature (PS: Here I completely side with Otaku-sempai ;) )

I am not of the opinion that art is purely subjective; nor do I think opinions have to be framed in the safest way possible. Of course, this is just my opinion. Everything written here are just opinions. It is pointless to reiterate this in every post.

Gaiman is a "successful and widely admired author", but so are J.K. Rowling, John Grisham, or Ken Follett. I do not deny that these people have their talents - they certainly know how to please their readers - but they are bestseller writers and not serious writers of literature. Their primary concern is to entertain, rather than to bring forth truth (even if it is a false truth).

"When I was a child, I loved books with magic in them. Then at the beginning of the '90s, I'd abandoned a detective novel I was writing, partly because I couldn't get the plot right and partly because a weird, fantastic, slightly surreal atmosphere kept creeping in—quite wrong for a detective novel. I was teaching English in Bilbao, and I became ill with some sort of postviral thing. This necessitated resting a lot. So I bought The Lord of the Rings and reread it. Then I reread it again. It completely took me over, and by the time I'd finished, it was obvious I ought to try writing a novel of magic and fantasy."
Susanna Clarke interviewed by the trade magazine Publishers Weekly

Clarke’s influences are appropriately eclectic. She has claimed Jane Austen is her favourite writer, because she ‘got as close to perfection as anyone can’, but also cites as influential Charles Dickens, fantastical postmodernist Neil Gaiman, Tolkien, the comics of Alan Moore, and the script-writing team behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer. An enduring fascination with magicians was prompted by reading C.S. Lewis as a child, but she claims that her closest model for creating convincing magical masters was Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy.


Susanna Clarke in British Council: Literature

In any case, the staggering amount of medieval allusions, the ecclesiastical nomenclature and the dogmatic debates swirling about a 14th century Benedictine monastery would have bewildered most movie goers

Terry Brooks— Shannara series—. The first was so obviously a Tolkien ripoff that I stopped. The tv series gave me a hint that maybe he eventually made his own story but I never went back to see. Anyone have an opinion on Shannara?

Sometimes when I look at Narnia and Middle Earth tales.... I think they seem the result of two guys handed a list and told go write a story that includes x, y and z and don't forget q and t.

Similar elements -- vastly different treatments --- but a lot of the underlying themes are similar --- though that could be the q and t above.

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The first book was obviously heavily influenced. i would say the series deviated significantly and became its own thing starting with Brooks' second novel. I wonder a little if perhaps the similarity was influenced by Judy Del Rey -- she certainly requested artwork for the first publication that was heavily influenced by work the Hildebrandts did for LOTR. I found the annotated version (okay, the audiobook of it) very enlightening.

I have got a little past midway through the Shannara series. The world really has nothing to do with Tolkien or Middle-earth -- to the point that I question why he calls the races Elves, Dwarves, and Trolls.

It seems very much like different trilogies in the Shannara series have nothing to do with each other but later it becomes clearer that Brooks is trying to generate a millenia-spanning conflict between 2 fundamental forces.

The rules of magic don't seem to have any continuity but it doesn't seem like the magic fart conjuring that you see in Harry Potter, more akin to the enhancing of natural properties or subtle influencing that Tolkien and Scandanavian myths used (leaving aside the magical singing from skalds).

BTW, Brooks' Magic Kingdom series is quite different and has no evidence of borrowing from Tolkien.

Obviously, Tolkien had a huge influence. Before his works, there really hadn't been any serious adult-oriented fantasy. Having said that, a lot of classic SF/F authors don't exhibit any Tolkien influence. Even among contemporary writers, Larry Correia's Monster Hunter and Grimnoir Chronicles series (which are both kind of a blend of science fiction and fantasy) and David Drake's Books of the Elements and The Isles series are distinct.