PicoBlog

Um, no. Obviously. This shouldn’t even need further explanation, but this temporary controversy keeps sloshing around the internet, and since I spent a year mired in Martin, I suppose I may as well say something about this quote people are losing their shit over.

For those wondering what I mean by mired in Martin, here are a list of my pieces from 2022:

And the weekly reviews of House of the Dragon:

If you read this and thought to yourself, “What’s controversial about this?”

Congratulations!

You’re normal.

Martin said this twenty or thirty years ago and everyone has understood it the same way for these last few decades. But the internet being what it is, this has now become controversial.

But Martin is not making a value statement here or even one of judgment. He’s not saying that Tolkien’s books are bad or failures or that they’re not worth reading. He’s definitely not saying that they should have included Aragorn’s tax or reconciliation policy.

He’s making a very normal statement that could be summed up as critical analysis. He read The Lord of the Rings and found himself asking very specific questions that he was interested in knowing more about, but that Tolkien was not interested in.

Some of you reading this now are writers or aspiring writers and you likely have a favorite author or a favorite book that you consider essentially perfect. But if, at the same time, you don’t see things you would have done differently, I would say that you likely have nothing more to say in this genre.

Which is also fine.

That doesn’t mean the genre is dead or there’s no more room in it, but that you, specifically, probably have nothing new to add to it.

For example, I’ve written tens of thousands of words about Martin’s world. I only did that because I sure do like it a lot. But when I first read it, I found myself asking very specific questions and found myself daydreaming about very specific things. Like what would this massive civil war mean to a farmer or one of the denizens of Flea Bottom.

This led directly to me writing an entire 100,000 word novel published in 2014, which will be re-released this May.

Martin’s A Song of Ice & Fire lit my brain on fire with possibility and I’ve spent the last fifteen years writing about these things that he left out. Martin is very interested in nobility and the games of power that are politics.

I’m more interested in the common person.

So when I ask you, What did Renly’s campaign mean for farmers on the Reach? or what Robb Stark emptying the north meant for a maid in Winterfell? or what Tywin’s policies meant for a cobbler in Flea Bottom?

I’m not making a value statement.

I’m showing a narrative preference.

I love A Song of Ice & Fire. But if I were to write it, it would be very, very different.

This is what Martin’s quote is saying about Tolkien.

He’s not saying that these books are bad or anything even remotely similar. He’s saying, Had I done this, I would have focused more here.

In fact, we know Martin admired Tolkien greatly. The RR in his name is a direct homage. He’s also open and honest about how The Lord of the Rings lit his own brain on fire with possibilities, how his own series would not and could not exist without Tolkien.

More recently, in 2019, Martin said something similar to the above again, but he prefaced it with this:

Tolkien, of all the authors I mentioned earlier, had an impact on me, but Tolkien is right up there at the top. I yield to no one in my admiration for The Lord of the Rings – I re-read it every few years. It’s one of the great books of the 20th century, but that doesn’t mean that I think it’s perfect. I keep wanting to argue with Professor Tolkien through the years about certain aspects of it.

Further, he’s said things like this repeatedly throughout his career:

I revere Lord of the Rings, I reread it every few years, it had an enormous effect on me as a kid. In some sense, when I started this saga I was replying to Tolkien, but even more to his modern imitators.

He went on to say how the imitators of Tolkien tarnished the genre Tolkien created:

But they cheapened it. The audience were being sold degraded goods. I thought: “This is not how it should be done.” Writers would take the structure of medieval times – castles, princesses, etc – but writing it from a 20th-century point of view. I wanted to combine the wonder and image of Tolkien fantasy with the gloom of historical fiction.

More at the 2014 interview from the Guardian.

You can watch him say more in the PBS series Great American Reads:

In a sense, what Martin is asking up above is: What happens when a figure like Aragorn wins his war but is not prepared for the throne?

Robert Baratheon is a great warrior. He’s unmatched on the field and may be the greatest warrior of his lifetime. And he had a strong claim on the throne—or at least strong enough.

But he made a terrible king because he was not actually interested in the difficult job of rule. This was compounded because of the webs of politics, of familial obligations and relationships that were required for him to take the throne.

Tolkien was not interested in these questions and so the Lord of the Rings doesn’t deal with them. There are gestures towards politics, but if you take the volume of words focused on politics from just A Game of Thrones and compare them to the volume of words Tolkien spent on politics across the entire Lord of the Rings, you’d begin drowning in Martin’s political jockeying.

At the same time, if you added up all the songs and poems from Lord of the Rings, you’d have a healthy poetry collection that stands on its own, whereas Martin’s poems and songs might fill a few pages.

This is all about perspective. About narrative preference.

But let’s go a step further into specificity:

Martin writes a lot about feasts. He uses these to tell us a lot about the world.

Tolkien wrote over 60 poems and songs for the Lord of the Rings to fill out his world.

Neither of these are essential narrative elements but both writers found them important enough to spend quite a lot of time on. This tells us a lot about them as writers.

And we could make a value judgment about these things, but I think that’s really missing the point of both works.

Martin admires and admits how much he owes to Tolkien, just as Tolkien admired and admitted how much he owed to Lord Dunsany and the Gawain Poet and the writer (compiler?) of Beowulf.

This is all normal and uncontroversial.

My novels:

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