Is a Song of Ice and Fire better than Lord of the Rings?

[Kuruharan]

I can answer this question by pointing out that Tolkien never used the phrase "as useless as nipples on a breastplate." Case closed.

Now that is not to say that I don’t enjoy ASOIAF because I do very much and I also greatly enjoy the TV series.

The story COULD be better had Martin written the entire series before it's release. As it is, Martin does not even seem to know the END of his tale. And because the first 5 books are already out there, he cannot change anything already written so that the story as a whole fits together better.

I think there is much merit to this statement.

Martin claims to know the ending of the story in broad strokes and to have some sign posts between where he is now and the end but he doesn’t have the entire story mapped out in his head (and I think that is pretty much how he phrases it).

I think he is being honest when he says that he knows the ending he is working toward. However, I think the not knowing how he is going to get there is what is getting him into trouble.

Also he has been working on this series for decades now. Over the course of that time he has changed as a person and as a writer, and as a writer in my opinion he has gained skill in creating detail and lost greatly in plot advancement. I’ve read both of the preview chapters of The Winds of Winter that he has posted on his website and the Theon chapter I thought was pretty good. The Arianne Martell chapter he posted I thought was cringe-worthy and ghastly, to me it felt like it was summing up all the horrifying aspects of A Dance with Dragons and plopping them down into one chapter. It was very discouraging to me as to what Winds is ultimately going to be like.

There is a lot of speculation among his fandom that he needs to get a new and a more critical editor, a contention I agree with.

There is also a lot of speculation among his fandom that deep down inside he has lost interest in telling the Song of Ice and Fire and would rather spend his time telling shorter stories fleshing out the world he has created. I obviously cannot speak to what is going on in the nether reaches of his desires, but based upon the recent evidence which I can observe I can say that writing shorter stories of world building would certainly seem to suit his current skill set better.

As far as world building goes, Tolkien is vastly superior to Martin. Tolkien’s world building was superb or excellent in almost all aspects. Martin’s is pretty good in some places, mediocre in some, and horrible in others. Personally I can pretty much narrow down my greatest complaint against the world building in ASOIAF to one of scale. Martin’s sense of scale is ridiculously outsized in a number of aspects of his world…which is kind of odd in one particular aspect because I read an article that said based on what we know so far the world of ASOIAF is actually smaller than our own. However, being an incurable pedant with a firm historical grounding it sticks in my craw every time I think about how the Seven Kingdoms are supposed to be approximately the size of South America (if not a little larger) and are held together in a loose feudal structure. That structure didn’t work too well in France or the Holy Roman Empire which were much, much smaller. I’m willing to accept that with the aid of dragons one could quickly conquer the majority of a large continent in a medieval setting and level of technology (although the inability to conquer Dorne with those same dragons when you have conquered the rest of the Seven Kingdoms is just bizarre, and Martin knows that now because every time in the story that he tries to explain how in the world that happened he stumbles badly). However, once the dragons are dead there is no way a kingdom of that size could be held together under one dynasty and monarchy via the system described in the book. It’s just preposterous. And I’m not the only one who has noticed this. From a couple things in the TV show I think the show producers have noticed some of the problems as well.

Then we have Essos, which taken as a whole is cover-your-eyes awful and incoherent in so many ways that it would take too long to list them all. That being said, paradoxically I am pretty weird when cut against most ASOIAF fans in that I actually like a number of aspects of Essos much better than I like some aspects of Westeros. I think a lot of it is that I find the cultural and political diversity of Essos more plausible and appealing even with all its risible foundation and conceptualization than the great monolithic sameness of Westeros. For example, I actually enjoyed the descriptions in Dance of Braavos and I also enjoyed the Volantine Freehold (although maybe I just have a taste for the improbably exotic...let’s face it, it is probably that. I would probably just go all to pieces if we were ever taken to Asshai).

I think the reason why I enjoy that level of description and detail in the setting is because that is where Martin’s skills shine the brightest, even though it can stagnate the storyline. Martin excels at fleshing out the details of his world. However, the world as a whole collapses because much of its conceptual foundations are so absurd as to be laughable. Martin is, I think, at bottom a small scale writer and he has gotten himself out of his element with the scale of the world he is trying to write about and doesn’t have the skills (and possibly even the desire) to credibly get himself out of his mess.

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by Kuruharan

Also he has been working on this series for decades now. Over the course of that time he has changed as a person and as a writer, and as a writer in my opinion he has gained skill in creating detail and lost greatly in plot advancement.

This seems to be a condition which afflicts so many Fantasy authors, terminally in the case of Robert Jordan, with his series finished by Brandon Sanderson - and his massive The Way of Kings is meant to be the first in a ten-volume series! Why? Why do they have to be so long? I also think it has the unfortunate side effect of making Fantasy look less 'credible' because the long series' look more 'commercial', whether they are or not, but I confess to being skeptical that a lot of these series' really need to be longer than À la recherche du temps perdu or something of its ilk. At the risk of generalisation most modern genre fiction across various media seems in my mind to be concerned primarily with the two As, Action and Angst, and I'm rarely convinced that what they have to say cannot be expressed without a series of numerous thousand-page volumes.

I apologise if this comes across as curmudgeonly, but it's something that puts me off most modern Fantasy, with authors churning out book after book, usually into an enormous series or two, to little apparent purpose - apart from making a living, of course, but I find it curious that readers are content with reading more and more of the same matter as well. I think verbal diarrhea is something which many Fantasy authors struggle with, and I do believe that one of the strengths of The Lord of the Rings is that despite the nature of its publication it is fundamentally one long book written across a decade (and then some). I think the tension between Professor Tolkien's prolixity and his perfectionism is an interesting one: without the former, there might be no Unfinished Tales or History of Middle-earth and without the latter there might be a truly definitive Silmarillion - but it wouldn't really be Tolkien without both elements, would it?

Having just read Volsungasaga, which has all that juicy incest and murder which Martin and his peers love, but is much more brief, I think there's a curious disparity between this idea that a Fantasy, in the vein of its traditional literary forebears (sagas, heroics, epics and the like), must be grandiose, and the fact that this was traditionally, in some cases at least, accomplished in a much more concise form.

I am, however, reminded of Professor Tolkien's own remark in the Foreweord to the Second Edition of The Lord of the Rings: that of any deficiencies in the text, he would "pass over these in silence, except one that has been noted by others: the book is too short."
On the one hand I feel as if I agree with him; I feel as if the momentous events surrounding the Fall of Sauron, diabolus of the later Ages, are far too significant to primarily take place over the brief six months in which the major action of the story takes place, that the War of the Rings has too few battles, and that events generally move too swiftly: this may be what he meant. If he meant that it needed more detail, or characterisation or what have you I can appreciate this as well. On the other hand, however, I'm not convinced that these things were necessary, and that the relative brevity of the book works in its favour especially in terms of overall subtlety and pacing, especially in comparison to your average modern-day Fantasy colossus.

[Kuruharan]

Originally Posted by Zigûr

This seems to be a condition which afflicts so many Fantasy authors, terminally in the case of Robert Jordan, with his series finished by Brandon Sanderson

-and-

but it's something that puts me off most modern Fantasy, with authors churning out book after book, usually into an enormous series or two, to little apparent purpose

It does seem to have become more science than art in recent years.

It puts me in mind of this thread from the golden days of yore on this site.

Unfortunately, the commercialization of writing I think is something we will have to live with.

On the other hand, however, I'm not convinced that these things were necessary, and that the relative brevity of the book works in its favour especially in terms of overall subtlety and pacing, especially in comparison to your average modern-day Fantasy colossus.

I agree with you on that. There needs to be a balance between world building and advancing the story, and over all in the tale itself it is best to advance the story. I say this as somebody who loves world building. I think Tolkien did it right in putting much of his world building into the appendices.

Then of course there are volumes of his work that also do a lot of world building that were published after his death.

[Aganzir]

ASOIAF is for people who enjoy certain kind of literature, Tolkien for those who appreciate another kind. Still, if people who have read both had a vote, I'm pretty sure Tolkien would come out on top. GRRM is enjoyable, true, but Tolkien is the one you go back to time and again.

Originally Posted by Aiwendil

As for me, of Martin's series I've only read A Game of Thrones, and I found it quite disappointing. The prose was rather poor, I thought, and the practically pornographic material was off-putting.

I found A Game of Thrones disappointing too, enough so to put me off the series for a year until the HBO series came out and I picked up the second part. The latter books (with the exception of the last one) are much better.

I tend to enjoy profanity, adultery and porn, but Martin doesn't write sex well. It's sometimes so detailed and naturalistic that he sounds like a teenager who has just discovered there's something between his legs, if you excuse the metaphor, and it lacks style. Mith put it quite well already, though.

When it comes to moral ambiguity, Tolkien does it in fact better. I feel Martin needs to spell everything out, and although his characters may do conflicting things, there's more poise in Tolkien's characters. What allows Martin to have such morally ambiguous characters is that they fight each other so you can see both sides, unlike Tolkien who has an ultimate villain in the story. But there's little of Tolkien's internal struggle in Martin's characters.

Also, while Tolkien has few female characters, Martin's writing is at times plain sexist. Just sayin'.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Martin also wastes countless pages on pointless derping around and travelling in crisscrossing circles. Tolkien does a fair bit of travel-writing, but it's always to a point.

[Snowdog]

Being I only managed 7 chapters into Game of Thrones after several attempts in reading it, I have to say no.

SIF was written to make a decent TV mini-series. No need to read it.

that said, I think that the mini-series treatment of Lord of the Rings would have been better than those PJ abominations.

[Firefoot]

Agree with what everyone else is saying here with an addendum:

All of the characters I liked in the first book (and kept me reading through the parts about characters I didn't) either have since died or their plotlines have faded into unimportance or seeming irrelevance (Arya, Bran). A handful of characters have gotten more enjoyable for me to read about (Jaime) but for the most part I have just stopped caring. I finished reading all of the currently out books maybe a year and a half ago? but have no intention of reading the new ones that come out. Maybe a plot synopsis because there is a part of me that would like to know who ends up winning, if only because I invested so much time into getting to this point.

A lot of people like the series because it's gritty and realistic but I find it really dull to read hundreds of pages about characters I don't like. And after a point, the sorrow of a character I liked dying started to become something more like, "Are you kidding me? He killed off xxx too?" and none of it was ever matched by the utter devastation I felt when I thought Frodo lay dead in the Pass of Cirith Ungol.

So I guess that comes back to what other people have been saying. For me, Game of Thrones completely lacks the beauty of LotR that really made me fall in love with it.