I was talking with someone about the lord of the rings books vs movies recently and my friend said he had always struggled getting through the books because of how much walking, singing, and descriptions of mountains there were. I hear similar criticisms with Moby dick: the only action happens in the beginning of the book and the last few chapters; the rest of it is just a dude musing about rope and the nature of the sperm whale’s tail while sitting doing nothing on a ship.
But I’ve recently gained some more perspective on this. Having started volunteering for peace corps in Africa several months ago, my American friends have this idea that this must be a never ending adventure and I’m so lucky to be out here seeing this exotic part of the world while they’re stuck in their corporate entry level jobs. And yes, it has been an adventure in a lot of ways. I live in a village of mostly mud huts; have eaten freshly slaughtered rabbit and more whole fish than I can count; have had a dramatic run in with some crooked cops; have met chiefs; and have navigated the country in a series of 12 seat vans illegally seating 20 people.
But what is the day to day like of adventure? Sitting in my house alone reading a book and waiting until work starts since things don’t typically operate on schedule. Sifting through and copying down all-paper health records for hours so that we can trace immunization defaulters and try to remind them to come to the health center, even though a lot have made up their mind it’s not important. Walking around the village and sitting in random people’s huts while drinking their tea and listening to them speaking a language I may understand 40% of. Staring at my wall in frustration as one of my project ideas is thwarted because we don’t have the resources or there’s been some corruption in the bureaucracy. Musing about why the world is the way it is and what the role is for an individual in attempting to fix it.
In other words, yes, adventure is climbing Mount Doom and chasing Moby Dick, but it’s also a lot of sitting, a lot of walking, and a lot of waiting around for the next big moment to happen. It’s forging a harpoon in blood for a few minutes just to stare at the ocean and debate the taxonomy of whale classification for the next few hours.
To me, that’s part of the subtle genius of Melville and Tolkien: their adventure epics capture what an adventure is actually like. Instead of writing never ending action, the authors opt for a slow burn with much more emphasis on world building and philosophy. I sometimes wonder if this is because both authors were genuinely adventurers. Melville had years of sailing experience that he based Moby dick on, and Tolkien was a WW1 veteran. Both men knew what a voyage or war really was, and wrote it.
Perhaps you’ll disagree. I also like more straightforward adventure books like the Jules Verne novels. I love epic poetry like Beowulf and The Odyssey, which tend to just jump from action to action. But overall, I don’t think anything can beat the subtlety of the lord of the rings and moby dick in capturing adventure’s true nature.
by bigben1234567890
50 Comments
[deleted]
>I was talking with someone about the lord of the rings books vs movies recently (…)
Keep in mind how old the books are and how much tastes in media have changed. Because older movies are also frequently criticized for being too slow. Tastes have changed and a modern audience just has different expectations.
If I wanted a realistic adventure I’d go on one, or read a non-fiction book about it. The benefit of fiction is that it can allow you to enjoy the more fun and interesting aspects of a thing while eliminating the more boring and unpleasant ones.
(Obviously reading tastes and preferences will vary. Plenty of people do like these books. But I don’t think that realistic automatically = good/entertaining when it comes to fiction.)
I don’t think the meandering in The Fellowship of the Ring was a deliberate artistic choice, but instead an accident of its creation.
Tolkien was trying to find the story as as he was writing it—hence why the beginning is slow and all over the place—and then later in the book when he had worked out the story in detail and the book became more focused he never went back to extensively pare down that early meandering.
Most writers find it very difficult to delete sections of their books.
People have forgotten how to stop and smell the fictional roses.
It’s very possible they understand what adventure is really like and don’t prefer to spend their time reading about the more tedious portions of adventure.
I don’t read fiction to learn what real things are really like.
You’re right in principle, but the job of a good book is not to describe experiences as realistically as possible, it’s to tell a story and immerse reader into the world. LotR focuses on immersion part, it’s not an action book.
I really recommend Daniel Defoe’s non abridged Robinson Crusoe if you haven’t read it.
Fantastic post, OP. Not only do I agree with you, but I really appreciate your perspective having moved to Africa.
Conversely, i’m actually from Africa and grew up with stories like *Narnia*, *Harry Potter*, *The Lord of the Rings*, etc. Yes, there’s a healthy amount of action in some of those stories, but what made them so engaging and fascinating to me was their worlds were so radically different from the one I knew (hitherto that point in my life).
We had castles in Namibia (okay, more like forts but they did have crenelations!), but nothing like those in Scotland (Hogwarts), or Ireland (the inspiration for *Narnia*) or England (Tolkien’s world).
I just couldn’t imagine all the greenery and the lakes and forests; even things that might seem mundane to most people, like subways, or train stations, or frozen lakes and forests were amazing to me. Even animals like deer or sheep seemed exotic – frankly, even more exotic than elephants and giraffes which I saw all the time at game parks, etc.
I think the point of the adventure tradition wasn’t to excite the reader, but amaze them with worlds they might never have an opportunity to visit or see.
To be fair, Moby Dick does have entire chapters dedicated to specific technical explanations of the logistics of wailing vessels that don’t really move the plot forward. Some people love this type of world building, and I’ve always been told that writers during this time were paid per word so there’s strong incentive to flesh things out like this.
Ok I am not sure about LOTR but Herman Mehlville has a whole chapter about how whales ~~aren’t~~ are fish despite what “scientists” say. I think some of the fun of that book is his random asides but I remember a lot of them being more opinion rather than action and exploration
Edit: thanks /u/miscellonymous
I read Moby Dick as it was meant to be read, on a mild beer and coffee bender in less that 2 weeks because a sadistic professor assigned it over Easter break, and let me tell you it holds up. That book is magic.
i was so pleasantly surprised when i didn’t find moby dick boring at all after hearing the criticisms, i love ishmael’s character
I personally find the Lord of the Rings to be too meandering for my taste but that doesn’t mean I think it sucks or anything. It’s just, like, my opinion, man.
Some commenters are saying that those authors’ pacing suffers because they are not plot-focused enough. To be honest? What matters most for the story is defined by the author. It’s their story to tell, they decide whether they prioritize the plot, the characters, the tone or the central theme.
Any good story has all four but not all stories focus on them equally. I get that you wanna know what happens next but what if the author’s intent was to create a very specific tone for which the philosophical discussions and the meandering are essential? In that case, the story is not about the plot, the plot is but a loose framework.
*Moby Dick* is like that. The whole point is not the plot: if that were the case, then Ahab would be the protagonist; what Melville wanted was to explore his themes of alienation, limits of knowledge, and exploitative endeavors through a veteran sailor’s life in the sea and, sometimes, the land.
Ahab relentlessly chasing down the whale regardless of his crew’s lives is the greatest analogy of most of those themes but you wouldn’t even get those were the base themes if it wasn’t for all the introspection and monologues and just the way the environment is described.
What about *LoftR*? There you can argue that the plot has more weight, which it does, but all things considered, the plot is not that convoluted. Yet, what primes is the central theme of evil destroying itself and Tolkien wanting to explore it through extensive worldbuilding.
Why else would he provide so many tales of evil being a plague to itself? Of evil bringing despair and decay and ultimately self-destroying? Everywhere the characters go, good self-perpetuates even if it has temporarily been overthrown by evil–each evil patch of the world is dominated by one or more sins (like Engolianth’s unsatiable hunger).
It’s through those sins that the heroes vanquish evil; either by exploiting the weaknesses those sins entail or by the monster itself making a mistake because of said flaws.
They are different approaches but both coincided with the need for “meandering”. That’s why I don’t consider such complaints as valid criticism. The pacing is mostly fine in the sense that it’s how the author intended it to be to tell that particular story. You are entitled to not like it, favoring more plot-focused stories instead, but you can’t call it a storytelling flaw.
P.D.: Of course, this doesn’t apply when it’s genuinely bad pacing. If the author wants a plot-driven story and doesn’t care/need all that padding yet still ends with a slowly-going story, then *that’s* an issue; the author possibly being too unexperienced or unskilled in that regard.
>my friend said he had always struggled getting through the books because of how much walking, singing, and descriptions of mountains there were. I hear similar criticisms…
I agree with your friend, but as far as I’m concerned, that’s not a criticism. That’s just your friend telling you why they aren’t interested in LOTR.
I have read novels that nothing happens, they are the most amazing reading experiences I can think of.
There are at least three different styles that a novel that can be written about your life in Africa: A diary style about your thoughts (and Africa is just location) – that I would read. A novel where the narrator tells us how bored you are in a shallow way – not interested. A novel where your entire time there is described as if it’s all in a week, with a beginning, middle, and end (not as interesting as the first)
Simply your friend (or at least me) doesn’t like the type of adventure LOTR is. And that’s fine – me and your friend are by far not the only ones.
I tried reading LOTR with the songs, and by ignoring the songs. It’s not my thing. “Nothing happens” wouldn’t be my critique. Just that what happens is not interesting.
u/Bjarki56 wrote
>I think the real culprit here is that narrative tastes have changed. People today expect non stop action. Tolkien’s original audience did not.
But that’s surely the same now!! Even now there are tons of people that love this work (his audience), and I’m 100% confident that plenty of people weren’t interested in LOTR even when it came out (I have no research to back that up but I’m 100% sure – as it’s normal)
Meandering post meanders
I like LOTR, but personally I don’t like all the description of forests and other scenery because I can’t picture it. And the singing is whatever because I have no idea what cadence it wants so its just whatever. I always just skim over this stuff, to me it might as well say “there’s a forest” or “and then they sang”
Books have editing, life does not.
>Perhaps you’ll disagree.
Yes. You had your one adventure and feel now ready to *understand,* while assuming everyone else just doesnt have your insight (due to lack of adventourus experience). Assuming anything about people you dont know isnt the best take imho.
We’re literally reading books to go on an adventure that doesn’t exist in our real lives. Makes sense to me.
That sounds like an variant of the “it is realistic so you can’t dislike the story for it” argument, which I am not fond of. People who have thought at all about it know there is a lot of down time where nothing exiting happens in adventures, but that doesn’t automatically make someone want to hear about those parts. Preferring that uninteresting parts get skipped doesn’t mean you don’t understand adventure.
Btw while from the parts of Moby Dick I have it might fit the comparison (I will finish it at some point), LOTR does skip the downtime. (Maybe aside from the opening chapters I guess) The thing it keeps aren’t interesting to everybody but are interesting to quite a few people. It shows pretty little minutia of their daily travels it is not like it regularly talks about them setting up camp, complaining about bad weather, who got blisters or their ration management. When it shows travel it is usually either leading up to something happening, involves character interactions or in the case of Frodo + Sam is more to show them struggling. (That Tolkien likes landscape description is true though.) It has a comparatively low fighting to other stuff ratio but it is not like it spends its pages on the kind of thing you describe from real life either.
Just to throw this out there, but writers from Mellvile’s the period got paid by the word. Some people don’t like reading three pages of pointless descriptions of an inanimate object so an author can buy a new house.
As for Tolkien, we’ll, not all who wander are lost.
I love hiking. I love hiking with family. I love hiking solo. Reading about walking does not hit for me.
But the point of fiction, especially fantasy, isn’t to portray real life as realistically as possible. Someone could write a book that accurately depicts my daily life, and no one would want to read that book, because it would be boring.
I’m aware that adventures in real life often involve boring parts. That’s not some brand-new revelation for most adults. Anyone who’s done air travel or has kids knows that. But just as fiction doesn’t tell us every single time a character uses the bathroom or pays a bill or answers an email, fiction doesn’t *have* to explicitly depict all the boring parts of adventure just because they happen in real life.
I’m not saying that books should be non-stop action scenes. I actually tend to find action scenes boring. I’m just saying the fact that real life is often boring doesn’t mean that I want to be bored while reading fiction. I read fiction precisely *because* it’s more interesting than my real life.
Did you just compare high fantasy fiction to working in the Peace Corps?!
My friend, I admire your sense of adventure and your mission to help others. But there’s no comparison to be had.
**You have conflated two very different definitions of “adventure”.**
Yes, it was adventurous of you to join the Peace Corps, in one sense of the word. But, as you pointed out, your day-to-day is not an adventure. It’s the tedium of living and working a fairly normal life. In the end, it’s your DECSION to join the Peace Corps, to travel and live in another culture, that folx consider to be “adventurous”.
This is very different than striking out on a mission with a wizard to save the world from evil forces. On such an adventure, it’s understandable that people might want to hear less about day-to-day tedium and more about the unique experience of fighting an immensely powerful demonic force.
that’s just jumping to conclusions. yes it’s what’ adventure’s like but it does.not translate well into a written text of so many pages. some stuff doesn’t translate well into movies either or into games etc. some stuff is better to be experienced in real life because it feels off in some or any type(s) of media
It’s not about being realistic, it’s about being entertained.
Or… they just don’t like meandering ?
Some people travel to take a picture of the Eiffel Tower, some people take the trip just to stroll around and enjoy being somewhere new. Theres room for all of us, luckily we all dont have to travel together.
>don’t understand what adventure really is like
I do understand (and I did my share of mountain trekking back when I was younger, **far** away from any large civilized areas, without any “intense, exciting action” happening during many days of doing that). Doesn’t mean it’s enjoyable to read about that in such overwhelming amount of (mostly redundant) detail, though.
I spent a good chunk of my life as an arctic explorer. Let me tell you about cribbage 😉
Fiction is always about personality. Some people don’t recognize or empathize personal feelings or the revelations of others. They like dinosaurs, math, subjects with specific boundaries. Even “Hello Kitty” and “Batman” have specific rules. Literary fiction slowly reveals personal observations and revelations and changes in the characters.
same for Count of monte cristo
As someone who worked in humanitarian aid for 7 years and worked on ships most of that period, I agree. Sometimes we’d be in a raging storm and would be working feverishly to make sure everything and everyone was accounted for; other days we’d see nothing on the horizon all day, we’d plot course and read books and that was pretty much it.
It’s the same as people moaning about books being more than 3-400 pages. Them being longer is a GOOD thing if you’re enjoying the journey. If you’re just reading the book to find out how it ends then read the Wikipedia page instead. There’s no rush to finish the book. Irritates me when I see ‘read X amount of books in 2024’ challenges where they just speed through as many short books as they can so they can brag about it. Bizarre.
I’ve been on plenty of adventures, when I relate them to people I tend to leave out what birds flew overhead. It ruins the narrative flow for me to have all that extraneous detail.
/r/iamverysmart material, even though you’re right
Yeah life is tedious at times, I do not want my entertainment to mirror that
Every time I see an r/books post, it’s just these horribly gate-keepy posts like this one.
People who criticize LotR “*don’t understand*”?
People understand it just fine, they just don’t like it. Who are you to tell me I don’t understand adventure because I don’t think it’s necessary to describe in detail every blade of grass in a field?
I just simply don’t find the style engaging. But posts and attitudes like this just drag discussions down by acting higher than others.
More realistic != More entertaining
But LOTR isn’t a realistic depiction of adventure, nor is it trying to be. It’s inspired by myths (especially Icelandic sagas and similar) and fairy tales. Whether it succeeds at its goals has little to do with its realism.
Also an author has complete freedom in everything they depict. Even a story that is aiming to be completely realistic in, say, how long it would take to trek across an expanse of wilderness can choose how it relays that story to the reader. If the events are tedious and that serves the goals of the story, the writer can explain the journey in great detail. Or they can state that the journey was long and arduous in a sentence or two and then move on to the story they want to tell.
I at least don’t mean the descriptions of the day-to-day life of traveling on the adventure when I say it meanders.
I mean stuff like dedicating an entire page to describing a single river, or several to describe a field in loving detail for so long that I actually forgot what was currently happening in the story, or what the previous thing described was.
The descriptions themselves are meandering and as a result actually communicate the scene in a way that is both frustrating and bad at painting a good picture in the mind of what the characters see and feel because the beginning of the landscape has left short term memory before I read the end of its description.
People who criticise these types of criticism don’t understand how little time in my life I have to be able to read and how little patience I have for vivid descriptions of the development of the Paris sewer system or the history of French slang when I just want to read my damned story about one man’s path to redemption.
Like sure. I get it. If I had infinite time to read and the vaguest bit of interest, maybe I’d be interested. But I don’t. And since I’m free to complain about how frustrating it is to buy a book, invest time into it, spend what little reading time I get during the week reading a chapter thinking it will be relevant to the plot only to discover it’s just the author inserting his or her wee hobby that they’re keen on, and then getting frustrated, I will.
I completely fail to see how the tedium of everyday real life is at all relevant to the world a fictional novel.
But I don’t want a *real* adventure. I want an entertaining reading experience. I have tried the fellowship of the ring like 3 times, and each time I get frustrated and give up at the council of Elrond. That doesn’t mean the book is bad, it means the book is not for me, and I’m way past the point of forcing myself to read a book just because other people like it.
Not sure how you can compare one of the most enjoyed books of all time with one of the most loathed books of all time. Moby Dick is fucking boring as shit.
> Having started volunteering for peace corps in Africa several months ago, my American friends have this idea that this must be a never ending adventure
This has nothing to do with a book being boring.
You’re going to be insufferable later in life, and begin every story with “When I was in the Peace Corps” aren’t you?
Just because someone doesn’t like something, it doesn’t mean they don’t understand it…