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

[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