Game of Thrones vs. Lord of the Rings

Ever since Milton’s “Paradise Regained” it has been a commonplace in literature that the bad guys are interesting (Lucifer) and the good guys are boring (God). Darth Vader is a lot more fun than Luke Skywalker (as is Hans Solo). Stores sell Darth Vader helmets, not Luke Skywalker masks. Of course, the "bad guys" turn out to be good guys at the very end to satisfy the exigencies of the plot (Darth Vader again).  Or, as the servant Sganarelle says at the very end of Moliere’s Don Juan, when the Libertine Atheist Don Juan is plunged into hell, “His death satisfies everyone: heaven offended, laws broken, women seduced, families dishonored, parents outraged... everyone is happy. I'm the only one who is unhappy: My wages, my wages, my wages.”  Louis XIV's royal censorship ("L'État, c'est moi") forced Molière to drop the last sentence.

I have never liked Lord of the Rings for this reason: much too smarmy for my taste. I recently started reading Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin (the series on which the HBO series is based). As opposed to Good vs. Evil, this series is almost purely Machiavellian. It is about power, pure and simple. The Good Guys seem to wind up dead, and the more dishonest, devious and duplicitous you are the more power you seem to wind up having. The “game of thrones” is about winning by any means necessary and at all costs (and killing the other guy).

In addition, it is filled (5 volumes of about 1,000 pages each) with interesting detail. For example, Martin repeatedly refers to wounds being dressed and bound with moldy bread. Moldy bread??  Well, penicillin was originally discovered as mold spores on ... moldy bread. So the roughly medieval society knew about the use of penicillin.

This is a great read.

Comments

[Lauryn Purtee]

JR Tolkien bathed the pages of his novels with minute, albeit tedious, details. And in comparison, the thing that GRR Martin does right is detailing things that are close to the reader's heart and consciousness, like food and wounds. It is difficult to compare the movie to the TV show, since they both make good use of the medium.

[fastpoose]

Sorry die hard Tolkien fans, George RR Martin eats Lord of the Rings for breakfast, oh and so does Steven Eriksons Gardens of the Moon and others...

[MADAFAKERS]

what a disrespectfull bunch of idots you are.Who sold 150 mill copies or invented the genre.TOLKIEN.Who won 11 oscars and made 1 billion dollars.LOTR.So STFU.

[Witch Light]

I'm afraid GoT wouldn't even exist without Tolkien and his books. Maybe he didn't "invent the genre" since many things come from mythology, but still...

I think the movie and the show are both great, but if we're talking about the books I must say that Tolkien's job is much more impressive: I mean, he even invented a language...

[Arande of the North]

GRR Martin could not hold a candle to Tolkien. Everything Tolkien has written is research with detail and actual historic background. Martin can only name drop characters, places and events, they have no depth with fictitious fantasy at best. One such comparison "Encircling Mountains of Echoriath" vs. "The wall". Can you be any more vague?

[Aiodeus]

It's all a matter of taste. I, for one, enjoyed the moral ambiguities of GRRM's books. I'm horribly fed up of the whole Fantasy trope; of Elves being blonde sissies and of men being twats. Game of Thrones is appealing, since it breathes a new (albeit dark and sinister) life into the nearly-stagnant Fantasy genre.