[espacement][emphase]3. Honorer le père sans l’imiter[/emphase]
Si Martin fait partie des fidèles relecteurs du Seigneur des Anneaux, c’est certes avant tout pour revivre cette découverte extraordinaire, alors enfant, de la Terre du Milieu :
[citation=30/05/2007]J.R.R. Tolkien, I think is the giant who looms above the entire realm of fantasy. I read Lord of the Rings when I was back in Junior High School still writing those stories for fanzines and it had a profound effect on me. I re-read it every few years.[/citation]
[citation=01/04/2012, Smarter Travel]I am a huge fan of Tolkien. I read Lord of the Rings when I was in high school. It had a tremendous impact on me and really solidified my love of fantasy. I still reread it every few years. I think all modern fantasy derives from Tolkien.[/citation]
[citation=07/10/2012, entretien, Adria’s News]I read Tolkien when I was twelve or so and he impressed me a lot so I don’t get tired of rereading it. In fact, I planned to send a letter to Mr. Tolkien when I was a child, but I finally didn’t, thing for which I am a little bit annoyed, more after getting noticed that Tolkien use to read almost every letter he received.[/citation]
[citation=11/08/2014, The Guardian]I revere Lord of the Rings, I reread it every few years, it had an enormous effect on me as a kid.[/citation]
Mais il y a plus. Lorsque Martin estime que [emphase]« toute fantasy moderne dérive de Tolkien »[/emphase] (2012), il veut dire que le lecteur adulte comme l’écrivain professionnel a tout à gagner à revenir au Seigneur des Anneaux pour y découvrir aussi bien la joie et l’amertume premières que de [emphase]« nouvelles choses »[/emphase], comme autant de [emphase]« niveaux et signification »[/emphase] que [emphase]« le père de toute fantasy moderne »[/emphase] aurait placées dans les [emphase]« profondeurs »[/emphase] de [emphase]« son chef-d’œuvre »[/emphase] :
[citation=13/08/2014, Tages Anzeiger]Tolkien […] is the father of all modern fantasy, the greatest fantasist of modern time certainly. His Lord of the Rings is his masterpiece, one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, it’s gonna be read for hundreds of years to come […]. The best books should have levels, should have depths, should have possible layers and meaning you discover on repeated rereadings […]. And for me Lord of the Rings of Tolkien is one of them, it’s the book I reread every three or four years, and every time I reread it I discover a new thing.[/citation]
Ces découvertes qui se succèdent d’années en années sont celles de l’explorateur. Car Tolkien a conçu un monde et a été capable de donner au monde qu’il avait imaginé la consistance de la réalité :
[citation=21/11/1996]As a kid, I read mostly SF and comics... there was no fantasy being published back then. I discovered JRR Tolkien in high school, when Ace published the unauthorized Lord of the Rings. Blew me away. […] Middle earth was magical and wondrous.
The “place” was as important as the plot or characters, I believe. It's that way in all great fantasy. I'm trying to make my world, my Seven Kingdoms, as vividly real as JRR did his.[/citation]
Tokien a conçu la Terre du Milieu certes par son travail d’architecte, mais il lui a donné vie par son talent de conteur, en choisissant à plusieurs reprises de surprendre le lecteur plutôt que de le satisfaire systématiquement. Martin est d’autant plus sensible à ce choix lorsque le conteur travaille le sentiment de la perte et introduit la réalité de la mort :
[citation=31/05/2015]I’ve talked about Gandalf [in The Lord of the Rings], and how the impact of his death was enormous. When I was a 12-year-old kid reading The Fellowship of the Ring and “Fly, you fools!” and he goes into the chasm… it was “Holy shit! [J.R.R. Tolkien] killed the wizard! That’s the guy who knew everything. How are they going to destroy the ring without him?” And now the “kids” have to grow up because their “daddy” is dead. If Gandalf could die, anybody could die. And then just a few chapters later Boromir goes down. Those two deaths created in me the “anyone could die” thing. At that point I was expecting [Tolkien] to pick off the whole Fellowship one by one. And then we also think in The Two Towers that Frodo is dead, since Shelob stung him and wrapped him up. I really bought it because he set me up with those other deaths. But then, of course, he brings Gandalf back. He’s a little strange at first, but then he’s basically the same old Gandalf. I liked the impact we got from him being gone.[/citation]
La stupeur qui était celle de Georges R.R. Martin lors de sa première lecture dans les années soixante alimente encore son écriture, avec toujours Tolkien pour référence :
[citation=08/11/2013, entretien avec Richard Fidler]I always remain impress with stories where you don’t know what was going to happen. […] And Tolkien, in some ways, laid the way for that. I mean the Fellowship of the Ring set out. The death of Boromir had an enormous impact on me. And the seeming death of Gandalf. That incredible moment in the Fellowhip of the Ring where the Balrog drags Gandalf down into the abyss and you think he’s dead, you think he’s dead for the good part of the rest of that book and the first part of the next book. If it had been me I probably would have him stayed dead. Because the impact of losing Gandalf. Gandalf was the leader, he was the one who knew what was gonna happen, he was the father figure, the wise guy. He always knew what to do and what was the meaning of this. So now it was “The children are in charge” […] “Father’s dead, what are you gonna do now? Now you have to save the world!” Oh God, what a feeling that was! That set me up perfectly for the end of the second book, the Two Towers, when it seems also Frodo is dead. Frodo has been stabbed by Shelob and Sam takes the Ring and he leaves Frodo and I was reading ad saying: “My God, they’ve killed – I thought Frodo was the hero – they’ve killed Fodo! How could they do this?” And I really didn’t know what was going to happen at the end of this book. And that’s the feelings that I’ve had reading those things that I try to replicate for my readers.[/citation]
Mais l’admiration de Martin à l’égard de Tolkien ne se reporte pas sur ses successeurs, appelés « imitateurs » et accusés d’avoir simplifié la pensée du Maître en réduisant la fantasy, ternissant ce qui en faisait l’attrait :
[citation=01/04/2012, Smarter Travel][…] like any really successful book, Tolkien has been imitated and imitated and imitated, and I think many of those imitators get it wrong. They take elements from Tolkien and they remove some of the things that make those elements interesting and produce works that to my mind are much inferior. I did not want to do that.[/citation]
Pour Martin, les imitateurs se sont égarés dès le départ en sélectionnant certains éléments seulement du chaudron des contes tolkieniens sans comprendre l’usage que Tolkien en faisait :
[citation=18/04/2011, Time]I’m a huge fan of Tolkien. […] The success that the Tolkien books had redefined modern fantasy.
But most of publishing regarded Tolkien as a freak: okay, this is one of those weird little books that comes along once in a while and it’s a bestseller for reasons nobody can comprehend, but no one will ever do another book like this. And it was [Lester and Judy-Lynn] del Rey at Ballantine Books, which later became Del Rey Books, who really finally challenged that assumption in the late-‘70’s, when they published the Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant and Terry Brooks’ Sword of Shannara, which were the first real attempts to follow in Tolkien’s footsteps… both with success. And that led to a lot more Tolkien imitators.
And as a Tolkien fan, I sampled a lot of it. And hated a lot of it. It just seemed to me that they were imitating Tolkien without understanding Tolkien and they were imitating the worst things of Tolkien.[/citation]
L’image du chaudron n’est pas si gratuite qu’elle en a l’air puisque suggérée par une autre image culinaire dans un ancien commentaire de Martin lui-même :
[citation=18/03/1999]Many fantasies after Tolkien have been terrible, of course. There are terrific writers, don't get me wrong. Tad Williams, Robin Hobb, Ursula K. Le Guin, Jack Vance, Guy Gavriel Kay, and others have done wonderful work in the fantasy field. But a lot of it does read like they boiled all the good stuff out of The Lord of the Rings and kept what was left.[/citation]
Parmi les éléments qui ont été conservés de l’héritage tolkienien : la magie et la magie à haute dose, sans qu’aient pu être saisis la nature et le rôle qu’elle avait dans le Seigneur des Anneaux :
[citation=18/04/2011, Time]Magic is a particular — I mean, my fantasy is quite low magic compared to the majority of it out there. And in that sense, I was following Tolkien’s footsteps because if you actually look at Lord of the Rings as I did when I was writing this, [Middle Earth is] a very magical world in a sense, it’s a world of wonders and marvels and so forth, but there’s very little onstage magic. […] You never see Gandalf doing a spell or, or creating throwing fireballs. You know, if there’s a fight, he draws a sword. You know? He does fireworks… his staff will glow. Minor stuff. Even the magic rings, I mean, the big powerful one ring, all we ever see it do is make people invisible.
[…] it’s supposed to have these great powers for domination, but it’s not like Frodo can put it on and tell the Nazgul what to do. […]. It’s unknowable, it’s mysterious. And that kind of magic I think is good. One mistake I see over time in bad fantasy is they go for the high magic world. They have really powerful wizards and witches and warlocks who can destroy entire armies – and they still have entire armies! […]. If you’ve got one guy who can go, booga-booga, and your 10,000 men army is all dead, you’re not going to get together 10,000 men!
But people don’t think through the consequences. They have these very powerful wizards but yet they still have kings and lords […] – why wouldn’t the wizards rule the world? I mean, power gravitates to it, you know.[/citation]
Pour Martin, le [emphase]« moule »[/emphase] du Seigneur des Anneaux aurait dû imposer d’user de l’artifice de la magie avec circonspection, trop de magie tuant la magie :
[citation=08/12/2003, brokenfrontier.com]I was irritated myself by as lot of fantasy that I’ve read that seems to take place in a sort of Disney version of the middle ages, rather than anything really approaching a real life medieval period.
I wanted something that was grittier and more realistic in that sense.
But in another respect I was also going back to the mold in a sense, because the mold of most modern fantasy is Tolkien’s mold. If you look at The Lord of the Rings although it’s a very magical tale, Tolkien makes magic very rare and mystical and something that only a few people practice and understand how it works.
That seemed to me like a much better way to do it. If you’re going to have rules to magic and have magic schools that people go to and everything is cut and dried, you kind of take the magic out of magic.[/citation]
Mais en réponse au traitement de la magie par les imitateurs, Martin a ressenti le besoin de [emphase]« revenir »[/emphase] à Tolkien lui-même :
[citation=07/2000 pour amazon.co.uk]As it is, I have carefully rationed magic. I went back to The Lord of the Rings and looked at how Tolkien does it. The Lord of the Rings is set in a magical world but there is not that much magic actually on stage. For Tolkien, wizardry is knowledge, not constant spells and incantations. I wanted to keep the magic in my book subtle and keep our sense of it growing, and it stops being magical if you see too much of it. In Tolkien, Aragorn's sword is magical because it just is; not because we regularly see it helping him win fights. In these books, magic is always dangerous and difficult, and has a price and risks[/citation]
Martin accepte sur ce point l'usage parcimonieux et discret du merveilleux chez Tolkien. Ainsi, il conserve à la magie sa puissance d'effroi ou d'émerveillement (wonder) qui dépend de son caractère extraordinaire (wondrous) :
[citation=02/1999, amazon.com]It's a fantasy novel, so I did think I should put some magic into it. But I wanted to handle the magic very carefully. This is one of the aspects where Tolkien had a good influence. We have this sense of Lord of the Rings being a very magical kind of novel, and it is. It's imbued with a sense of magic and mystery and wonder. But there's very little onstage magic. Gandalf is a wizard, but what does he actually do that's magical? He makes fireworks that may or may not be magical, his staff glows, but you don't see him, as in some of the bad fantasies, with magic treated almost as a superpower from a comic book, where the characters are going around throwing fireballs and they have a lot of spells.
Tolkien was much more mysterious. Sauron never comes on stage, you never know what his actual powers are except that they're vast and malignant. The whole handling of magic is very subtle. When I realized what Tolkien had done there, it seemed to me that he had made a great choice. The whole point about magic is that it has to be magical. If it's commonplace, if you go to the magic shop like you go to the butcher shop and the wizard lives on the corner of the street and anybody can go see them when they have a toothache, it loses a lot of its wonder.
I deliberately designed the series where magic would be very subtle at first and then would come up book through book. But I'm always going to keep it unusual and wondrous.[/citation]
[citation=01/2000]I think the handling of magic in fantasy is one of the genre’s trickiest aspects, one where we have to make a very important decision going in. I wrestled with this for a long time when I was first starting the books. I looked at Tolkien, of course, who’s regarded as the very master of modern fantasy. Virtually everything that all of us are doing today is pretty much patterned to Lord of the Rings, which created the genre as it now exists.
Middle Earth is a very magical place. You read the books and you certainly get the view that magic suffuses the world and the culture, but there’s actually very little onstage magic. Gandalf is a wizard, but he fights with a sword; he doesn’t perform incantations or pull down lightning from the sky. Most of the magic, when it does occur, is of great import, but he never really gives wiring diagrams as to how it works.
To my mind, that worked, and it worked better than most of the other alternatives I’ve seen. If you make magic too explicit, it ceases to become magical. Magic should be wondrous and terrifying. It should be outside our realm of knowledge—supernatural, not natural. That’s the way I tried to handle it.[/citation]
[citation=10/2000]I am trying to handle magic in some of the ways Tolkien did. LOTR has a great deal of magic, but seldom on stage, and seldom explained.[/citation]
[citation=24/05/2007, Weird Tales]I find myself […] in sympathy with the way Tolkien handled magic. I think if you’re going to do magic, it loses its magical qualities if it becomes nothing more than an alternate kind of science. It is more effective if it is something profoundly unknowable and wondrous, and something that can take your breath away.[/citation]
[espacement]S.
Si Martin fait partie des fidèles relecteurs du Seigneur des Anneaux, c’est certes avant tout pour revivre cette découverte extraordinaire, alors enfant, de la Terre du Milieu :
[citation=30/05/2007]J.R.R. Tolkien, I think is the giant who looms above the entire realm of fantasy. I read Lord of the Rings when I was back in Junior High School still writing those stories for fanzines and it had a profound effect on me. I re-read it every few years.[/citation]
[citation=01/04/2012, Smarter Travel]I am a huge fan of Tolkien. I read Lord of the Rings when I was in high school. It had a tremendous impact on me and really solidified my love of fantasy. I still reread it every few years. I think all modern fantasy derives from Tolkien.[/citation]
[citation=07/10/2012, entretien, Adria’s News]I read Tolkien when I was twelve or so and he impressed me a lot so I don’t get tired of rereading it. In fact, I planned to send a letter to Mr. Tolkien when I was a child, but I finally didn’t, thing for which I am a little bit annoyed, more after getting noticed that Tolkien use to read almost every letter he received.[/citation]
[citation=11/08/2014, The Guardian]I revere Lord of the Rings, I reread it every few years, it had an enormous effect on me as a kid.[/citation]
Mais il y a plus. Lorsque Martin estime que [emphase]« toute fantasy moderne dérive de Tolkien »[/emphase] (2012), il veut dire que le lecteur adulte comme l’écrivain professionnel a tout à gagner à revenir au Seigneur des Anneaux pour y découvrir aussi bien la joie et l’amertume premières que de [emphase]« nouvelles choses »[/emphase], comme autant de [emphase]« niveaux et signification »[/emphase] que [emphase]« le père de toute fantasy moderne »[/emphase] aurait placées dans les [emphase]« profondeurs »[/emphase] de [emphase]« son chef-d’œuvre »[/emphase] :
[citation=13/08/2014, Tages Anzeiger]Tolkien […] is the father of all modern fantasy, the greatest fantasist of modern time certainly. His Lord of the Rings is his masterpiece, one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, it’s gonna be read for hundreds of years to come […]. The best books should have levels, should have depths, should have possible layers and meaning you discover on repeated rereadings […]. And for me Lord of the Rings of Tolkien is one of them, it’s the book I reread every three or four years, and every time I reread it I discover a new thing.[/citation]
Ces découvertes qui se succèdent d’années en années sont celles de l’explorateur. Car Tolkien a conçu un monde et a été capable de donner au monde qu’il avait imaginé la consistance de la réalité :
[citation=21/11/1996]As a kid, I read mostly SF and comics... there was no fantasy being published back then. I discovered JRR Tolkien in high school, when Ace published the unauthorized Lord of the Rings. Blew me away. […] Middle earth was magical and wondrous.
The “place” was as important as the plot or characters, I believe. It's that way in all great fantasy. I'm trying to make my world, my Seven Kingdoms, as vividly real as JRR did his.[/citation]
Tokien a conçu la Terre du Milieu certes par son travail d’architecte, mais il lui a donné vie par son talent de conteur, en choisissant à plusieurs reprises de surprendre le lecteur plutôt que de le satisfaire systématiquement. Martin est d’autant plus sensible à ce choix lorsque le conteur travaille le sentiment de la perte et introduit la réalité de la mort :
[citation=31/05/2015]I’ve talked about Gandalf [in The Lord of the Rings], and how the impact of his death was enormous. When I was a 12-year-old kid reading The Fellowship of the Ring and “Fly, you fools!” and he goes into the chasm… it was “Holy shit! [J.R.R. Tolkien] killed the wizard! That’s the guy who knew everything. How are they going to destroy the ring without him?” And now the “kids” have to grow up because their “daddy” is dead. If Gandalf could die, anybody could die. And then just a few chapters later Boromir goes down. Those two deaths created in me the “anyone could die” thing. At that point I was expecting [Tolkien] to pick off the whole Fellowship one by one. And then we also think in The Two Towers that Frodo is dead, since Shelob stung him and wrapped him up. I really bought it because he set me up with those other deaths. But then, of course, he brings Gandalf back. He’s a little strange at first, but then he’s basically the same old Gandalf. I liked the impact we got from him being gone.[/citation]
La stupeur qui était celle de Georges R.R. Martin lors de sa première lecture dans les années soixante alimente encore son écriture, avec toujours Tolkien pour référence :
[citation=08/11/2013, entretien avec Richard Fidler]I always remain impress with stories where you don’t know what was going to happen. […] And Tolkien, in some ways, laid the way for that. I mean the Fellowship of the Ring set out. The death of Boromir had an enormous impact on me. And the seeming death of Gandalf. That incredible moment in the Fellowhip of the Ring where the Balrog drags Gandalf down into the abyss and you think he’s dead, you think he’s dead for the good part of the rest of that book and the first part of the next book. If it had been me I probably would have him stayed dead. Because the impact of losing Gandalf. Gandalf was the leader, he was the one who knew what was gonna happen, he was the father figure, the wise guy. He always knew what to do and what was the meaning of this. So now it was “The children are in charge” […] “Father’s dead, what are you gonna do now? Now you have to save the world!” Oh God, what a feeling that was! That set me up perfectly for the end of the second book, the Two Towers, when it seems also Frodo is dead. Frodo has been stabbed by Shelob and Sam takes the Ring and he leaves Frodo and I was reading ad saying: “My God, they’ve killed – I thought Frodo was the hero – they’ve killed Fodo! How could they do this?” And I really didn’t know what was going to happen at the end of this book. And that’s the feelings that I’ve had reading those things that I try to replicate for my readers.[/citation]
Mais l’admiration de Martin à l’égard de Tolkien ne se reporte pas sur ses successeurs, appelés « imitateurs » et accusés d’avoir simplifié la pensée du Maître en réduisant la fantasy, ternissant ce qui en faisait l’attrait :
[citation=01/04/2012, Smarter Travel][…] like any really successful book, Tolkien has been imitated and imitated and imitated, and I think many of those imitators get it wrong. They take elements from Tolkien and they remove some of the things that make those elements interesting and produce works that to my mind are much inferior. I did not want to do that.[/citation]
Pour Martin, les imitateurs se sont égarés dès le départ en sélectionnant certains éléments seulement du chaudron des contes tolkieniens sans comprendre l’usage que Tolkien en faisait :
[citation=18/04/2011, Time]I’m a huge fan of Tolkien. […] The success that the Tolkien books had redefined modern fantasy.
But most of publishing regarded Tolkien as a freak: okay, this is one of those weird little books that comes along once in a while and it’s a bestseller for reasons nobody can comprehend, but no one will ever do another book like this. And it was [Lester and Judy-Lynn] del Rey at Ballantine Books, which later became Del Rey Books, who really finally challenged that assumption in the late-‘70’s, when they published the Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant and Terry Brooks’ Sword of Shannara, which were the first real attempts to follow in Tolkien’s footsteps… both with success. And that led to a lot more Tolkien imitators.
And as a Tolkien fan, I sampled a lot of it. And hated a lot of it. It just seemed to me that they were imitating Tolkien without understanding Tolkien and they were imitating the worst things of Tolkien.[/citation]
L’image du chaudron n’est pas si gratuite qu’elle en a l’air puisque suggérée par une autre image culinaire dans un ancien commentaire de Martin lui-même :
[citation=18/03/1999]Many fantasies after Tolkien have been terrible, of course. There are terrific writers, don't get me wrong. Tad Williams, Robin Hobb, Ursula K. Le Guin, Jack Vance, Guy Gavriel Kay, and others have done wonderful work in the fantasy field. But a lot of it does read like they boiled all the good stuff out of The Lord of the Rings and kept what was left.[/citation]
Parmi les éléments qui ont été conservés de l’héritage tolkienien : la magie et la magie à haute dose, sans qu’aient pu être saisis la nature et le rôle qu’elle avait dans le Seigneur des Anneaux :
[citation=18/04/2011, Time]Magic is a particular — I mean, my fantasy is quite low magic compared to the majority of it out there. And in that sense, I was following Tolkien’s footsteps because if you actually look at Lord of the Rings as I did when I was writing this, [Middle Earth is] a very magical world in a sense, it’s a world of wonders and marvels and so forth, but there’s very little onstage magic. […] You never see Gandalf doing a spell or, or creating throwing fireballs. You know, if there’s a fight, he draws a sword. You know? He does fireworks… his staff will glow. Minor stuff. Even the magic rings, I mean, the big powerful one ring, all we ever see it do is make people invisible.
[…] it’s supposed to have these great powers for domination, but it’s not like Frodo can put it on and tell the Nazgul what to do. […]. It’s unknowable, it’s mysterious. And that kind of magic I think is good. One mistake I see over time in bad fantasy is they go for the high magic world. They have really powerful wizards and witches and warlocks who can destroy entire armies – and they still have entire armies! […]. If you’ve got one guy who can go, booga-booga, and your 10,000 men army is all dead, you’re not going to get together 10,000 men!
But people don’t think through the consequences. They have these very powerful wizards but yet they still have kings and lords […] – why wouldn’t the wizards rule the world? I mean, power gravitates to it, you know.[/citation]
Pour Martin, le [emphase]« moule »[/emphase] du Seigneur des Anneaux aurait dû imposer d’user de l’artifice de la magie avec circonspection, trop de magie tuant la magie :
[citation=08/12/2003, brokenfrontier.com]I was irritated myself by as lot of fantasy that I’ve read that seems to take place in a sort of Disney version of the middle ages, rather than anything really approaching a real life medieval period.
I wanted something that was grittier and more realistic in that sense.
But in another respect I was also going back to the mold in a sense, because the mold of most modern fantasy is Tolkien’s mold. If you look at The Lord of the Rings although it’s a very magical tale, Tolkien makes magic very rare and mystical and something that only a few people practice and understand how it works.
That seemed to me like a much better way to do it. If you’re going to have rules to magic and have magic schools that people go to and everything is cut and dried, you kind of take the magic out of magic.[/citation]
Mais en réponse au traitement de la magie par les imitateurs, Martin a ressenti le besoin de [emphase]« revenir »[/emphase] à Tolkien lui-même :
[citation=07/2000 pour amazon.co.uk]As it is, I have carefully rationed magic. I went back to The Lord of the Rings and looked at how Tolkien does it. The Lord of the Rings is set in a magical world but there is not that much magic actually on stage. For Tolkien, wizardry is knowledge, not constant spells and incantations. I wanted to keep the magic in my book subtle and keep our sense of it growing, and it stops being magical if you see too much of it. In Tolkien, Aragorn's sword is magical because it just is; not because we regularly see it helping him win fights. In these books, magic is always dangerous and difficult, and has a price and risks[/citation]
Martin accepte sur ce point l'usage parcimonieux et discret du merveilleux chez Tolkien. Ainsi, il conserve à la magie sa puissance d'effroi ou d'émerveillement (wonder) qui dépend de son caractère extraordinaire (wondrous) :
[citation=02/1999, amazon.com]It's a fantasy novel, so I did think I should put some magic into it. But I wanted to handle the magic very carefully. This is one of the aspects where Tolkien had a good influence. We have this sense of Lord of the Rings being a very magical kind of novel, and it is. It's imbued with a sense of magic and mystery and wonder. But there's very little onstage magic. Gandalf is a wizard, but what does he actually do that's magical? He makes fireworks that may or may not be magical, his staff glows, but you don't see him, as in some of the bad fantasies, with magic treated almost as a superpower from a comic book, where the characters are going around throwing fireballs and they have a lot of spells.
Tolkien was much more mysterious. Sauron never comes on stage, you never know what his actual powers are except that they're vast and malignant. The whole handling of magic is very subtle. When I realized what Tolkien had done there, it seemed to me that he had made a great choice. The whole point about magic is that it has to be magical. If it's commonplace, if you go to the magic shop like you go to the butcher shop and the wizard lives on the corner of the street and anybody can go see them when they have a toothache, it loses a lot of its wonder.
I deliberately designed the series where magic would be very subtle at first and then would come up book through book. But I'm always going to keep it unusual and wondrous.[/citation]
[citation=01/2000]I think the handling of magic in fantasy is one of the genre’s trickiest aspects, one where we have to make a very important decision going in. I wrestled with this for a long time when I was first starting the books. I looked at Tolkien, of course, who’s regarded as the very master of modern fantasy. Virtually everything that all of us are doing today is pretty much patterned to Lord of the Rings, which created the genre as it now exists.
Middle Earth is a very magical place. You read the books and you certainly get the view that magic suffuses the world and the culture, but there’s actually very little onstage magic. Gandalf is a wizard, but he fights with a sword; he doesn’t perform incantations or pull down lightning from the sky. Most of the magic, when it does occur, is of great import, but he never really gives wiring diagrams as to how it works.
To my mind, that worked, and it worked better than most of the other alternatives I’ve seen. If you make magic too explicit, it ceases to become magical. Magic should be wondrous and terrifying. It should be outside our realm of knowledge—supernatural, not natural. That’s the way I tried to handle it.[/citation]
[citation=10/2000]I am trying to handle magic in some of the ways Tolkien did. LOTR has a great deal of magic, but seldom on stage, and seldom explained.[/citation]
[citation=24/05/2007, Weird Tales]I find myself […] in sympathy with the way Tolkien handled magic. I think if you’re going to do magic, it loses its magical qualities if it becomes nothing more than an alternate kind of science. It is more effective if it is something profoundly unknowable and wondrous, and something that can take your breath away.[/citation]
[espacement]S.