This is likewise true for the elves, the hobbits, even the orcs-a prettyĪll of this would suffice to rank these books among the world's greatest,Įven if he just put the characters through some fairly pedestrian paces,
Of the dwarves and imagining a dwarvish mythology, when we come upon aĭwarf in Middle Earth, he seems not to be a convenient imaginary figureīut an actual being with his own life story, racial history and tongue. Tolkien had spent years developing a dwarvish language and writing a history For example,ĭwarves are a common enough staple of fantasy and fairy tales, but because He was able to achieve this remarkable effect in large partīy spending years working on the background elements of his story beforeĮver turning his attention to the main narrative thread. Vision gives to his fiction a texture and a substance which may never beĮqualed. The thoroughness with which he realizes his unique It comes to seem that he is merely the historian of a separate world, rather Races, entire languages, mythologies, songs, poetry, and so on, until finally Seem to have an external existence, he created an entire world, several Tolkien created not merely one or two characters who Though memorableĪnd sympathetic, his existence is intrinsically enmeshed within this particularĪll of which is by way of introduction to what is perhaps the greatestįeat of creative imagination in all of literature, Tolkien's Lord of Review), but he is unimaginable as an adult. Holden Caufield, for instance, is a great characterĪnd Catcher in the Rye a great book (see Orrin's It is certainly possible to create a great book or a great protagonist This in itself does not makeĪ bad book-there are plenty of other reasons that it is a bad book. He has no past orįuture because Joyce didn't write them. The entire novel is technique and artifice it is impossible to imagineĪ Bloom who exists outside of the author's head. On the other hand, consider Leopold Bloom from James Joyce's Ulysses Past and a future independent of the tales the author left us. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created a character whom we feel must have had a Holmes is so "real" to us that an authorĬan write about his childhood or his old age and easily carry us alongīecause in our guts we feel that he enjoyed such phases of life. He actually existed, not only did readers demand that he be brought backįrom the dead, there is a continual flow of further adventures and prequelsīeing written all the time. Not only do many people simply assume that Seem to exist beyond the bounds of the story. The best of them createĬharacters and situations that the reader genuinely cares about and a veryįew of them, the best of the best, create characters and situations which
They define reality,Ĭontrol events, decide who lives and who dies. Within the boundaries of their fiction, authorsĪre in fact Creators and wield godlike powers. When we speak of authors as gods, or more likely they speak of themselvesĪs such, there is of course an element of hyperbole, but it accompaniesĪ kernel of truth. Top 100, which was voted on by actual readers, put it at number one.Īllow me to offer the reasons, both objective and personal, why I think To include it on the Modern Library Top 100 The 20th Century and perhaps the greatest of all time. I believe the Lord of the Rings to be the greatest fiction of Turn out to be the most influential writer of Hobbits, it has been my nightmare that Tolkien would
Women wearing puffed sleeves, clutching teddiesĪnd babbling excitedly about the doings of Ever since I arrived at Cambridge as a student inġ964 and encountered a tribe of full-grown
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