If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.
Thorin Oakenshield, from The Hobbit
Tag Archives: JRR Tolkien
The War and The Journey
Ursula K. Le Guin connects The Iliad, The Odyssey, Milton, Christianity, the Mahabharata, The Lord of the Rings, and fantasy fiction in this essay on the Book View Cafe Blog, “Papa H”.
I was thinking about Homer, and it occurred to me that his two books are the two basic fantasy stories: the War and the Journey.
I’m sure this has occurred to others. That’s the thing about Homer. People keep going to him and discovering new things, or old things, or things for the first time, or things all over again, and saying them. This has been going on for two or three millennia. That is an amazingly long time for anything to mean anything to anybody.
Anyhow, so the Iliad is The War (actually only a piece of it, close to but not including the end), and the Odyssey is The Journey (There and Back Again, as Bilbo put it).
Top 25 Favorite Writers
Much like for my favorite movies, here is a list of my Top 25 favorite writers.
- Vladimir Nabokov
- Ray Bradbury
- JRR Tolkien
- Kurt Vonnegut
- Douglas Adams
- Ursula K Le Guin
- Mark Twain
The rest in alphabetical order by last name:
- Charlotte Brontë
- Emily Brontë
- Albert Camus
- Raymond Chandler
- Umberto Eco
- James Ellroy
- William Gibson
- Spalding Gray
- Franz Kafka
- Milan Kundera
- George Orwell
- Dorothy Parker
- Edgar Allan Poe
- Muriel Spark
- Bram Stoker
- Jules Verne
- Edith Wharton
- HG Wells
Honorable Mentions
- Jane Austen
- Robert Benchley
- George Carlin
- Philip K Dick
- Ernest Hemingway
- Jack Kerouac
- Flannery O’Connor
- William Shakespeare
- Mary Shelley
- Neal Stephenson
- John Steinbeck
- Bruce Sterling
- Hunter S Thompson
- Virginia Woolf
- Oscar Wilde
- PG Wodehouse
Sorting by magic
As seen in Google Reader, “Sort by magic.”
I half expect the various Tolkien Elvishes to be available under “Translate into my language”. :)