What fantasy book have you read that gave you the same 'feel' LotR?

[Galadriel]

When I read 'Lord of the Rings' I get a distinctive feeling. It's sort of a mixture between nostalgia, bliss and wistfulness. Unfortunately, no other fantasy book has managed to give me the same experience.

What about you?

Edit: Sorry, meant to say 'feel as LotR.'

[Galadriel55]

There was no other book that made me feel exactly the same as LOTR (or other legendatium books) did. However, many of Jack London's books made me think about and compare the two authors and what they "try" to make the reader believe, all that different-perspective-thing... They are just as deep/"philosophical" as LOTR, but in a different sense...

But Jack London's stuff isn't really fantasy. More like History Fiction...

[Morthoron]

The Once and Future King by T.H. White. Funnier and in many ways sadder than Lord of the Rings. In any case, the best modern adaptation of the Arthurian cycle.

[Galadriel]

Originally Posted by Morthoron

The Once and Future King by T.H. White. Funnier and in many ways sadder than Lord of the Rings. In any case, the best modern adaptation of the Arthurian cycle.

I'm reading that It's very nice. Though the Robin Hood bit was a tad tiresome

[Anguirel]

Ah the Orkney Faction, the only clan who can compare with the sons of Feanor; and I've always been in love with Morgause

I'm currently eating my words, swallowing Kuru's and reading George R.R.R.R. Martin at delirious speed. The prose isn't pretty but the plot and grandeur of conception is like drowning in Malmsey wine

[Galadriel]

Originally Posted by Anguirel

and reading George R.R.R.R. Martin at delirious speed. The prose isn't pretty but the plot and grandeur of conception is like drowning in Malmsey wine

'R.R.R.R Martin'. Lol.

Yes, his plot is very good, though did you really get the same feeling as when you read Lord of the Rings? I found reading ASOIAF very...different. Very dark and dingy.

[Lotrelf]

Is there any?? I haven't read much (no fantasy except HP books), but I can't think of any other book giving the same feeling. After finishing the LotR (& before finishing it) I couldn't sleep at night thinking how the story is going to end. While reading the books, I wanted all of it to end very soon; but was sure there're going to be tears too. Shockingly, I didn't cry at all. But, later when I grasped the facts, I felt very bad. I was like, "Why Frodo, Gandalf, Bilbo had to leave?" I read few other books, but none of them affected my head so much.

[Zigûr]

We could define "feel" a number of ways I suppose but if you want "Fantasy" with similarly-styled language I can recommend the prose romances of William Morris, especially The House of the Wolfings which was an inspiration for Professor Tolkien (by his own admission: see Letter 226) in addition to its sequel The Roots of the Mountains and various others. Morris' The Glittering Plain is about the unsuitability of changeless immortality for mortal people. Unlike the spiritual or moral conflict of Professor Tolkien's narratives, Morris' work often uses a quasi-early-Germanic setting to to explore socialistic themes about ideal communities and social systems.

The adventure novels of H. Rider Haggard, which also incorporate a fair bit of the fantastic, are comparable in some respects in terms of their style. Certainly She has a level of comparability and supposedly was also something Professor Tolkien read in his youth.

While I don't think any other book could give me quite the same "feel" as Professor Tolkien's work, I do think that those seeking out comparable material would be better served looking at this sort of proto-Fantasy of the 19th century as opposed to the 20th and 21st century Fantasy "novel." I think the modern Fantasy novel is actually quite a different beast to, say, The Lord of the Rings, which definitely gave rise to the modern genre but perhaps as a consequence of that is actually, in my opinion, more a part of the tradition that came before.

[jallanite]

A difficulty is that I can think of fantasy tales that remind me of Tolkien and fantasy tales that I like, at least at times, as much, but these books are seldom the same.

So I will give two books that are not very like Tolkien but which I feel are magnificent.

The first is Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice, by James Branch Cabell, published in 1919. The name Cabell rhymes with rable. This book I discovered when I found a volume detailing all Arthurian fiction in English and decided I would read it all. Most, of course, proved mediocre. But Jurgen took me by storm.

Cabell, at the time, mostly wrote tales set in medieval Europe or the southern U.S. and the occasional fantasy work. But this work took the world by storm and set Cabell up as the foremost fantasy author of his time. He faked it as a genuine medieval tale and faked it as an obscene tale by removing innocuous paragraphs and replacing them with rows of asterisks.

The book was duly banned by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice but won free after two years when the judge found very little that he felt would even be found by those who were looking for it and was duped into believing that Jurgen was a genuine medieval tale.

The story can be read with illustrations at http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/CABELL/title.htm and elsewhere on the web. It is a wondrous tale in which an aging pawnbroker regains his youth and travels through wondrous lands and wins the love of even more wondrous women. The tale is extraordinarily witty and clever and erudite. Jurgen wins again the first woman he ever loved, the young princess Guenevere, a ghost, the Lady of the Lake, fails to win Helen of Troy, wins a dryad, and a vampire in hell. Then he ascendeth unto heaven.

Notes are available at http://home.earthlink.net/~davidrolfe/jurgen.htm .

Cabell later jested that reviewers claimed that his later works were just Jurgen all over again, and apparently in contradiction that they were not Jurgen again. But to my way of thinking both criticisms were equally true. Cabell indeed wrote novel after novel that seemed to be attempts to redo Jurgen but none of them reached its heights. In 1930 he published all his previous eighteen volumes in revised and expanded versions as the Storisende edition of the biography of Dom Manuel. But the tales were often different enough that ones liked by some were disliked by others and Cabell’s career went into decline. In the following 28 years he wrote only eight further books, all fantasies.

But Cabell remains highly esteemed and honored by the likes of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.

The other work I love is The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918). Hodgson’s work most closely resembles that of his younger contemporary H. P. Lovecraft. For The House on the Borderland see the Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hou...the_Borderland . Two tourists in Ireland discover a partially destroyed journal written by a recluse telling of his battles with the mysterious swine-creatures, journeys through time and space, and hints of an old love affair. No explanations are given, which does not matter.

The book is available on the web at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10002 .

[FerniesApple]

There is nothing that has the 'feel' of Tolkien, thats why I often feel disappointed by books that on the face of it have similar fantasy ingredients. But if I want Faerie, if I want to 'feel' part of a magical world, I have found no one better than Alan Garner. His Elidor, Weirdstone of Brisingamen and Moon of Gomrath have great charm and are thrilling.

I also love Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising series.
and the Bartimaeus trilogy by Jonathan Stroud

[Zigûr]

Hello all,

I wanted to point out something I noticed today while it was fresh in my mind, before I forget. I didn't think it was worth starting a whole new topic for, so I thought I would post it here. I know this thread is notionally about "fantasy" texts but personally I think that if you want to find literature with a similar "feel" to Professor Tolkien's work it can be found, but not in the modern fantasy genre.

As I believe I have mentioned before, I'm a scholar of utopian literature (I'm hopefully submitting a PhD on the topic in about ten days, in fact). As a result I've read a number of significant works by H.G. Wells, and today I was finishing off The Sleeper Awakes, which I began some time ago and was distracted from. This item from the climax of the novel came to my attention.

In the finale the protagonist Graham, the titular Sleeper, now owner of all the world's wealth, is using an aeroplane to hold off airborne attackers who have come to reinstate plutocratic-oligarchial rule after Graham has vowed to bring the working classes out of drudgery. At one point during the fighting, one of the "flying stages" use for launching the aeroplanes is destroyed to stop the enemies using it and it is described as follows:

The eastward stage, the one on Shooter's Hill, appeared to lift; a flash changing to a tall grey shape, a cowled figure of smoke and dust, jerked into the air. For a moment this cowled figure stood motionless, dropping huge masses of metal from its shoulders, and then it began to uncoil a dense head of smoke. The people had blown it up, aeroplane and all!" (Wells, 1910)

As you can probably imagine, this reminded me very much of a comparable passage from The Lord of the Rings:

"'The realm of Sauron is ended!' said Gandalf. 'The Ring-bearer has fulfilled his Quest.' And as the Captains gazed south to the Land of Mordor, it seemed to them that, black against the pall of cloud, there rose a huge shape of shadow, impenetrable, lightning-crowned, filling all the sky. Enormous it reared above the world, and stretched out towards them a vast threatening hand, terrible but impotent: for even as it leaned over them, a great wind took it, and it was all blown away, and passed; and then a hush fell." (Tolkien, 1955)

I don't know how much Wells Professor Tolkien read, beyond the fact that he presumably read The Time Machine given his occasional references in lectures and correspondence to Eloi and Morlocks, but I thought this similarity was extremely interesting.

In both cases the image represents a notionally threatening, authoritative figure. The flying stages of The Sleeper Awakes are the heart of air power, the means by which the elite of the year 2100 maintain much of their military and economic control of the world. Sauron is, of course, Sauron. Yet both are also fundamentally very impotent things, brought down by the actions of the humble.

Despite the fact that Wells and Tolkien, I believe, had rather different philosophies - Wells supported a form of socialism and was opposed to a lot of organised religion, for instance - I often find that they often deal in similar ideas and similar imagery.