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user-inactivated  ·  3706 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Hubski Newsletter: #030

    GRRM is double the writer Tolkien ever was.

This is as hilarious at is possible for anything to be given that in the original thread you mentioned you only read the Hobbit in 4th grade and never got to LotR (to say nothing of Sil, Lost Tales, etc), where all the best prose is. (I suppose that could have changed in the intervening years.)

Meanwhile Martin ... he does have his poetic, beautiful moments but god are they few and far between -- as they should be, in a setting like that. If the sentences are textured and elegant while the subject matter is repulsive, harsh, etc, reading them just produces too much cognitive dissonance.

    Look up some John Bauer and recognize that Tolkien was riffing on the gestalt, not busting into new ground.

Tolkien was quite clearly taking forgotten, wonderful ground and rebreaking it in the context of two world wars, protestantism/Catholicism, industrialization, etc.