No idea how right this is

[womzilla]

... but I found the quiz itself interesting.

Which fantasy writer are you? ...
Philip Pullman (b.1946)
15 High-Brow, -19 Violent, 29 Experimental and 21 Cynical!

You are also a lot like Tove Jansson.
If you want something some action, try Gene Wolfe.
If you'd like a challenge, try your exact opposite, J R R Tolkien.

One of the problems with the quiz is that I suspect that they've rated Tolkien at the "traditional" end of the traditional-experimental axis, and he really wasn't: he became the tradition everyone else aped.

I'm most of an outlier on "experimental" and "cynical", and somewhat outlying on "highbrow". All which makes me think that they don't have Tom Disch in their list of outcomes.... (Of course, most people don't think of Disch as a fantasy writer, but he was, especially in the second half of his career--the Minnesota horror novels, The Brave Little Toaster, and a lot of later short stories are all fantasy. One could even argue that On Wings of Song is more of a fantasy than sf.)

Comments

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I think that as a whole, Tolkien's oeuvre is pretty anti-violent. One important point about the overall plot of his magnum opus is that it is about a quest to rid the world of a violent tool. Throughout, the characters who endorse violent means are rejected, chastized, or killed, unless they're fighting purely defensively. The clearest example of this is Boromir, who wants to seize the One Ring so that Gondor can become the military superior of Mordor, but there are many others. Gandalf's words to Frodo--""Many who deserve death, live, yet many who deserve life, are dead. Can you give it to them?"--echo throughout the work, and it's exactly that mercy that Sam and Frodo extend to Gollum, which finally makes peace possible.

(If you want to spoil The Lord of the Rings in a way which is completely misleading, just say, "Frodo fails.")

Which isn't to say that there isn't a lot of fighting in the novel, but it's a war which is won by stealth and mercy.

[sarah-ovenall.livejournal.com]

the explanation at the end says that on their scale, "violent" means 1. tolerating violence in fiction and 2. believing violence is a valid means to achieve a good outcome. Tolkien is definitely 1, there's plenty of violence in his work, but I agree, not really 2.

Georg just took the quiz and scored much lower on "violent" than I did. That has to be a problem with the quiz because he can handle much more violence in movies than I can. Well, actually it depends on the movie. He wouldn't watch either Stalingrad or Suspiria with me, but there are a lot of horror movies he has seen that I wouldn't. (also, he got Pullman.)