Tolkien's Sandbox

If your humble critic sometimes seem to overpraise J.R.R. Tolkien, it's not because I think his books are beyond criticism. I can acknowledge the flaws. There is indeed something troubling about orcs, a sentient but irredeemably evil species with central Asian racial tinges, though I don't think this is a central concern of the books. What I find remarkable is, rather, the scale of Tolkien's achievement, the degree to which his particular vision of myth, history, and morality has proved itself globally resonant and endlessly inspiring. Although I am not a habitual manga reader, a recommendation piqued my interest in one called "Delicious in Dungeon," where a party of explorers in a D&D-like world figures out how to survive in the dungeon by making gourmet meals out of the monsters they slay. Tolkien's ideas about dwarves and elves have travelled to the other end of Eurasia: the adventuring party at the center of this story includes a human, a half-elf, a dwarf, and a halfling.

The inventors of Dungeons and Dragons liked to claim that sword and sorcery authors like Fritz Leiber and Robert E. Howard were bigger influences on their game than Tolkien.was. Possibly this claim had a touch of legal defensiveness in it, but it's clear that they had sword and sorcery in mind. Their customers, however, were surely overwhelmingly in pursuit of the Toklienian. The lithe elves and stocky dwarves and lucky halflings have stuck around. To get away from Tolkien's framework, you must either excise his fantasy races or make an equally drastic change to the setting—or make a work of explicit critique. Glorantha, for example, comments on Tolkien by adopting a very different view of mythology and religion, and reimagining the dwarves and elves in light of that.

I recently had the opportunity to stroll through a shopping mall, and in that mall was a bookstore called Books-a-Million. I looked at the two bookcases devoted to roleplaying games. In my quick perusal, it seemed to be eighty or ninety percent Tolkien-inspired: Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, Daggerheart, and a few others: all have the family resemblance, and took up most of the shelf space. The remainder was divided between Lovecraft (Call of Cthulhu), George Lucas (Starfinder), and the whole band of creators behind the Warhammer 40K experience. And I think this does represent something about the mainstream of the role-playing hobby: as much as I enjoy the strange individual visions of eccentrics' imagined worlds, most people really want to play in Tolkien's sandbox.