Tolkien also created complete Languages for each race of his stories.
this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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Sometimes I think he just liked world-building, and writing stories about his world came second.
From reading his biography, it seemed he mostly liked creating languages and then crafted stories and worlds based off them.
Tolkien's the GOAT.
He was a philology teacher, so that's indeed the case. You see it with how much details the language have, like real languages dialects and evolution. It was really his craft.
Philology Professor at Oxford, no less.
He only wanted to create languages, for fun... but he wanted to do it properly, so he needed full cultural backgrounds for his languages, including epic poetic sagas written in said languages... and to do that properly he needed a whole history of the world said languages and cultures had developed in... so the maniac built that. And then he wrote a children's book set in that world, for his kids, as one does.
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They are called Paracosms. He was writting languages during his teens long before he got to stories.
Middle earth is the first item on the list of examples on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracosm
It’s not impossible! It’s fairly niche and finding others who appreciate it before the age of the internet would’ve been tough.
Modern Tolkien would’ve probably been part of the various conlang communities, doing challenges and whatnot.
Not only the languages but also an etymology for them to explain, how they developed.
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Frank Herbert: Giant sandworms lol. /j
Frank Herbert: ... and dogs that are also chairs... rips bong... chairdogs
Duncan, Duncan, Duncan, Duncan
lol Herbert had some weird fantasy about a guy named Duncan from Idaho. Only explanation for some of that stuff.
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Frank Herbert is what happens when a genius writer takes too much shrooms while studying dunes. Like that is literally what happened.
Fuckin Herbert just decided to write philosophy disguised as a sci-fi story lol
Tolkien is clearly the best, but I don’t have a problem with Martin borrowing from real-life history. History is incredibly cool, and full of amazing stories. Stealing from other authors is bullshit, though.
Then you have the author of Twilight that started world building after the first book, created a number of characters with interesting background lore, then proceeded to do nothing with any of it.
It's even worse than that - Twilight was originally fanfic for Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles series, so it's all just Lestat with a fake mustache and sparkles.
And 50 shades was a Twilight fanfic...
And Interview with the Vampire was fanfic based on a cross between Blacula and the David Frost interview of Richard Nixon...
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George Lucas: Let someone else handle it.
as long as the broads are wearin' short skirts
“There's no underwear in space.”
George Lucas: I like money
To be fair the children's story came first. In that regard Tolkien and Rowling had something in common, their first books were written for a much younger and simpler audience. It wasn't until they took off commercially that the more adult and deep lore was developed.
EDIT: I'm wrong
What? No. First was the story of Arda in a prototype version of the Silmarillon and Unfinished Tales.
Huh, interesting, I didn't realize Tolkien had started writing portions of the Silmarillion in 1914. I had to do some looking based on your response and learned something.
From what I know, he never really wrote "for" the silmsrillion either. He wrote stories for him to flesh out the history of the world but not with the intention of publishing such stories. Some of them were even just notes about what happened in the world and some weren't finished.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong
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Also, fun fact: Tolkien converted C.S. Lewis to Christianity, who almost immediately disappointed him by adopting Anglicanism instead of Catholicism and then decided Tolkien's stories weren't Christian enough, so he basically wrote the Narnia books out of spite.
Tolkien is the best ever, but a lot of his stuff is inspired or ported directly from Catholicism.
This but also various mythological bits and pieces from England, because Tolkien wanted to create an English mythology akin to the Odyssey, Edda or Niebelungen.
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Yeah, Martin learned the "cribbed from history" trick from Tolkien
A lot of that Catholicism stuff is just Christianity with local gods and figures retconed in using saints expansions.
And that whole Christian thing is just a Mediterraneanised/Latinized Zoroastrianism.
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It's all fanfiction all the way down from the original cave drawings anyway
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Steven Erikson: here's a world that contains millennia of anthropologically grounded cultures that got spiced up by some interdimensional elves, orcs, gods & dragons that me and my buddy use to play D&D in, have fun reading through the eyes of over 1000 characters lol
Erikson ruined fantasy novels for me. Book of the Fallen was the most challenging and rewarding read of my life. It made almost everything else feel like YA fiction.
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GRRM wrote "Sandkings" which is one of my favorite novellas ever. He gets a pass from me.
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Writing world building is fun!
Writing actual fiction is boring and dull because if it's not a monomyth your editor is gonna removed about it
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