I'm a huge Tolkien fan, by which I don't mean that I can write elvish or remember the family trees implicit in the Silmarillion, though I can recite some of the songs from Lord of the Rings...
I'm a huge fan in that the story of JRR told owns a significant chunk of my heart and that the landscape of my imagination will always be mapped, at least in part, with Tolkien's iconic mountains, trees, and hills.
So, I'm in complete sympathy with those readers who want MORE. The ones who want more of that sense of awe and gravitas and scale, sprinkled with individual lives that matter.
My mother read me Lord of The Rings when I was 7 and I've read quite a few attempts to rebottle that lightning over the course of my lifetime. I read Terry Brook's homage (The Sword of Shannara) when I was 13 and it scratched at the itch without relieving it. I did enjoy the book at the time.
Many of the books that I've read which appear to want to build on / exploit / honour The Lord of the Rings do so simply by throwing in elves, dwarves, and renamed orcs into a similarly open and conflicted world that shares the bucolic farmlands of Southern England along with the wild forests of Germany and the white-toothed Alps of France.
It's here where the attempts to recapture LotRishness fail for me. What brought elves and dwarves (and to some degree orcs) to life for me wasn't the pointy-eared handsome of the elf or the gruff practicality of the dwarf, it was that they were products of cultures that were in turn products of a history, and that it was a history that wasn't merely complex (a broken plate is complex). Tolkien's history for the world he created was a work of love, a work for its own sake, built over the course of many years and not to support a story. The story fell out of it as a by-product.
It feels (from the books I've read - which are only a small fraction of the elf/dwarf/orc fiction out there) that in pulling these races from the shelf for your novel you are then either forced to build your own history which will immediately be in competition with JRRT's in the reader's head, or to make vague swipes at a similar history/culture, these brush strokes being broad enough to avoid copyright/plagiarism whilst fine enough to benefit from riding the LotR wave.
To truly revisit the territory LotR opened up, I feel you would need to abandon elves, dwarves, and faux-orcs entirely and to construct something equally grand and deep using wholly new devices. Though this would of course limit your ability to stand on the bedrock of western myth.
I know that this has been done to some extent by various authors. But the ones I've visited have never really worked for me. Perhaps I need to be seven again in order to incorporate any book as deeply into my own personal mythology as I did The Lord of the Rings.
But, (and this is entirely personal), I don't think elves and dwarves and awks in anyone else's hands will ever light up the page for me.
Ten Years!
