Is there a serious rival?
Is there a serious rival?
LOTR is pretty good too.....
Shall these bones live?
Oh, I think people could argue that there is but I certainly agree it's a remarkable piece of work. I think it gets a bad reputation of being a hard, tedious read and it has it's moments but if you stick it out, you'll be amazed at it's scope and tragedy and beauty.Originally Posted by EAP
the luminous grass of the prairie hides
feet lovely and still as sleeping doves,
porcelain bones strong enough to carry a life,
but weighty and unmovable
As black Dakota hills. ~ Riesa
For a collection of notes about an imagined world it is pretty good, but it doesn't have a plot, characters, or any of the features that make good fiction good. If you like things like that, then you should read the Eddas by Snorri Sturlason, and there various ancient epics that have most of what is good about The Silmarillon and have characters and a plot. The Rig Veda is one of the better ones, and the Enuma Elish is truly great, and it happens to be the oldest work of literature.
Last edited by PeterL; 07-15-2007 at 08:09 PM. Reason: typo
I can think of many. That book is even worse than The Lord of The Rings (in my opinion, they both are pretty bad to me).
I find it funny how you could say this is the best book ever written.
I can think of one that comes to mind, which happens to be the basis of the book, The Poetic Edda. Note, I am not saying that one is the best, just saying it is better, since a) it is written in a nice poetic style. b) it is more interesting.
Clearly very few people on these boards, on all the "what is the best novel(s) ever written" threads rarely place the Silmarillion as their favorite, or even their top 5, I would say that clearly there are plenty of books that top this.
Of course, my personal favorites vary from yours, as well as everyone else's, thereby I cannot accurately say what the "greatest novel ever written" is, though we can say that my favorites, Pride and Prejudice, Only Yesterday by Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Homer's Epics, Lolita, etc. by myself are in themselves the "greatest books ever written". If you wish to discuss the aesthetic merit, or perhaps the content of the Silmarillion then say so, rather than asking people to "name one greater".
Is there a serious rival?
Dante's Comedia, Milton's Paradise Lost, Montaigne's Essays, Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and a few thousand others to begin with, although to call them "rivals" might be something of a misnomer, to say the least.
Beware of the man with just one book. -Ovid
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.- Mark Twain
My Blog: Of Delicious Recoil
http://stlukesguild.tumblr.com/
Tells us why The Silmarillion is the greatest book ever published.
Okay, this thread is obviously at least partly provocation.
But we are weak. We can be provoked...
Well, speaking of Silmarillion We tend to remember the story of Children of Hurin. We quite like how Tolkien managed to combine the stories of Kullervo and Sigurd, from two different epics.
But still, although JRRT was once The One and Only Author for us, it isn't so any more.
For example there are:
Bulgakov
Strugatskis
Simmons
Le Guin
and so on.
If you believe even a half of this post, you are severely mistaken.
Yeah, it's not worthy of making it to the best books ever competition, IMO.
That being said, however, The Silmarillion is my favourite book of the LotR saga.
Ningún hombre llega a ser lo que es por lo que escribe, sino por lo que lee.
- Jorge Luis Borges
Exactly! I love the The Silmarillion. Like Crisaor, in many ways I prefer it to LOTR proper but it's really not a book that compares well to other books, it's not even a technical book, it's just a bunch of unfinished stories his son gathered together and edited into something that could be published. Maybe you could say it's the best book never written.
....sorry, that was a really bad attempt at a joke.
the luminous grass of the prairie hides
feet lovely and still as sleeping doves,
porcelain bones strong enough to carry a life,
but weighty and unmovable
As black Dakota hills. ~ Riesa
Bulgakov - good but tends to ramble boringly
dante - yawn
sturgatskis - very good but not v. interesting characters
the norse sagas - amazing but lack the polish of silm - besides the stories ultimately are never as interesting as silm
simmons - very good but lacking
le guin - amazing and if she ahd written left hand of darkness and the dispossessed inside one book then maybe we could have considered her...
rig veda - talk about boring classical lit
proust and milton - sound boring from the names
i havent read the bible so mebbe it doesnt contain the best creation myth ever but it sure is the best book ever published
Silm as you call it clearly isn't polished. Tolkien himself didn't even finish it, and his son barely managed to string it together. You want to talk about interesting characters? I doubt the name Tolkien has ever been associated with character; clearly he is a setting driven writer. That being said, his story is reliant on a fictional world, where unbelievable (meaning it in the sense that one cannot believe them) things occur, and trees get three page poems to ramble on about growing. That being said, what you call boring to some may be very interesting, yet I find it very difficult to see how you can criticize another author for having weak characterization, yet fail to realize Tolkien's is clearly crummy.
Personally I think most of the "I love the Lord of the Rings" talk is more of an Emperor's New Clothes desicion. What I mean by this is that people are really afraid to go out and say they hate the book, and in fact many people will claim to like the stuff even if they have not read it, and have just seen the movies. The books perhaps have some aesthetic merit, but to go as far as to say Silm. as being the greatest book of all time is a bit much.
To dismiss Dante as boring, yet accept a Tolkien book with no real structure as interesting I find a bit annoying. Like I pointed out before, many readers have displayed such distaste for the long boring story Tolkien has crafted in his tale, and have dismissed LOTR as boring. How can you so easilly dismiss Dante as boring? Have you even read it? Whereas Tolkien goes into boring detail about family trees and things (more than even the Russian writers) Dante leaves a lot to the imagination. Not to mention the fact that the Comedia is a self reflection piece, written in a more difficult style, reflecting real characters (I include Beatrice, Virgil, and Dante as the characters) (who by the way aren't as cut-out looking as Tolkien's) in a very unique way.
Your subjective argument is clearly lacking any real foundation, considering that I have yet to see a major study showing this to be the greatest book of all time, or even top 20.
So please, rephrase your post since clearly this post is idiotic, subjective, and has no purpose other than to make you appear like an idiot. You will just sit here turning down every single name every user posts on this thread and saying another "this author is boring" "this author has weak characters" "this author has weak plots" when really everyone can easilly say that about Silm, and in fact many do.
And of course there is your argument against Proust and against Milton. having not read Proust, I will just comment saying that to dismiss Milton as boring just from the name is perhaps the weakest argument you could make, and instead of making you seem funny, or intelligent, just adds to the stupidity of the post.
~JBI
P.S. Tolkien's fiction in my opinion is some of the driest, most boring, poorly stupidly plotted, work, that to me is void of any aesthetic merit. Until perhaps you are the only one left in this world who can and has read a book, I doubt this will be the greatest book of all time (well maybe that is slightly hyperbolic, there are perhaps a few people like you who favor this book over all others, though by its influence I doubt you could even go as far as to calling it a "great" book.)
aww, you get riled up so easily - besides, more people than i can count consider silmarillion the best book they have ever read so i am pretty satisfied on that account!
would you have a heart attack if i proclaimed rowlings the best thing since sliced bread? or, heavens forbid, stephen king?
or maybe another long rant will be forthcoming?
They are certainly entertaining.
No book can claim to be the greatest book ever published. Any work of literature can fall under heavy criticism and completely dissected by remarkable opinion.
Tolkien is a very popular standard er banner in literature maybe because he is... very popular and noted great topseller.
I certainly don't consider him a great writer as much as a great mythmaker world constructor.
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