Literary the Lowest Form of Literature - Why Tolkien Rose ABOVE Literary Fiction - Myths Never Die & Why Fantasy is the Highest Form of Literature

Literature Never Dies

Fullscreen Bossfight

had some wise words to say about the nature of Genre and Gaming in general over on Twitter the other; “Perhaps genres and games are never really "dead" and all it takes is the right team or person with vision to revitalize them?”

Wise words indeed. Just as wise were the words of

The Black Sun Archives

, who vocalized the view in his disagreement with several of those who criticized Tolkien and Lewis that what is sought here is ‘exclusivism’ something they would not admit to me (I also it must be admitted went about things gentler than him. The view that Black Sun took was that Tolkien is for the masses and if they find joy in him and not the ancient epics or those of the Medieval or Classical periods that’s fine.

My own views fall in with his.

I will add several more stinging rebukes towards those who intend to attack or criticize those who read Tolkien and not much else. The thing that is despised is that he did not appeal to the Academics. He sought instead to tear open a veil, and make no mistake there is a veil hanging over this world and it cannot be denied that the likes of T.S. Elliot, Dostoevsky, and all the rest reinforced the veil. They helped to build it whether advertently or inadvertently. But Tolkien went around the ‘clerical’ caste to preach directly to the masses, to sing for them as Homer, Virgil and all the other greats once did.

The veil has a name; modernity. And modernity has effeminized men, and sought to tear apart women that they would be alone and abjured. It has torn children from their parents arms, and introduced divorce and genocide of whole populations and civilizations on a scale never seen before.

This was what Tolkien was fighting against by re-introducing the ideals of duty, the ideals of love, of courage and of honour of faith and all other virtues. He was in short REVIVING a now dead genre. He was seeking to bring back Myths and Legends, but under Catholic auspices so that England might breathe again as he once did.

The call for people to read only what is approved and dubbing Tolkien ‘insipid’, or ‘a threat to Christianity and literature’ is pure folly. It is because Tolkien as with ALL Mythic/Fantasy/Medieval Literature is NOT for the Elitists, it is always and forever for the Masses. It was written for the working class, it was sung for them and is a ‘love-letter’ to them.

Academics you see love modernity because it gives them a great deal of exclusivity. It allows them to dodge consequences, to enforce creeds and hypothesize on the best ideas imaginable for humanity in their midwitted manner. The trouble is that they are cut off. They are living in ivory towers, divorced from reality.

So diversity works better for us? Who would think such a thing? Academics.

So they ask; why would you read the Bible, Homer, Virgil, the Medieval classics, or Ivanhoe, or Perrault, Yoshikawa, Brothers Grimm and others like them? Why would you read Tolkien and Howard, and Lewis and the rest when you ought to be reading about failed men. Because ‘Literary’ Fiction as I established the other day is about the Conquered.

Fantasy is about the Conqueror. This is the difference; one celebrates the failed, the conquered and the depleted (literary does this) or the debauched, the hedonistic failures of lesser men. While the other such as Tolkien and Howard celebrates those who failed, regained their feet, failed again and got back up again. It celebrates their conviction, their strength, their vigour and their glory!

This is the key point of contention; in spirit would you rather be a broken mess or the man who put himself back together?

Fantasy is as a liturgy that calls for all to sing and join their voices to in celebration of all-mighty God. This is because it follows after classical, traditional stories. It is Faerie-Stories in new form.

Are they insipid? Only if all of humanity is. Are they the death of Christianity and literature? Nonsense as they are PART of Christianity and Literature. Far more so than Literary Fiction. Remember the concerning with lowly deeds by the below ordinary and their failures is Low-Fiction. While the concerning with great and kingly deeds is High Fiction.

You’ll never hear me say otherwise.

As I said the other day; the first Dostoevsky I love, the one who wrote the Brothers story. But the second one I dislike. The second one who reinforced the veil of modernity, who has been propped up by Modernists and Academics.

If I sound particularly biting towards them it is because I’ve walked their halls, ate with them and spent years repressing what I loved and having to listen to their drivel. When they’d find out my love for Fantasy there were those who accepted it (mostly in the History department), but most felt the need to pontificate, call me an idiot and humiliate and demand I do homage to them and their authors.

They had little regard for the tastes and attitudes of the ‘common man’ and any defence of them was laughed at before they began to mock it. Tolkien was regarded as low, Howard was despised (though the female profs would sometimes fan themselves, I’ll let you determine why) and the modern Fantasy authors they disregarded.

Only strangely Lewis was accepted by them, though they didn’t bother to read his works with all that much seriousness. Him, Forgotten Realms and Ursula Le Guin. FR because they tried to fit it into their agenda, and Le Guin was considered one of them and therefore acceptable.

“Superior to Tolkien,” was often bandied about which is blatantly untrue.

I mention this only to give insight into what I’ve observed. The Genre was considered in need of ‘reform’ in their eyes. And when GOT got popular I had more than one fellow student, more than one prof celebrate, crow and cheer at it for ‘taking the fight to the Patriarchy’ or ‘defying/subverting expectations’.

They cannot abide Tolkien, and Howard even less so precisely because they sing to people directly. They cannot be contained, they cannot be interpreted in a modernist manner, as they were Anti-Modernist. Both were fiercely Christian, fiercely traditional, and fierce and ferocious readers of all that came before.

Both read the Norse Sagas, which have been repressed. They read Homer, Virgil, El Cid, Roland and all others who have been repressed.

They read them and delighted in them.

They know in their bones that Literary is Lowly. It is the literature of a ‘slave caste’ of a ‘slave people’ who wish to be slaves. How many of them carry over Sex scenes as has been pointed out lately? How many are about the fall of hedonists? Why obsess about the orgies, drugs and boozing of Hedonists? Because this is what preoccupies Academics in the English departments. They are debased, sex-obsessed embarrassments.

Gone are the days when they preoccupied themselves with Myths, Legends and Folk-Tales, gone are the Joseph Campbells, the Tolkiens, and the Lewises. All gone! And whither have they gone? To sing to the common man, to substack, to youtube. And why? Because the midwit academic has chased them out.

The Dead Genre

What is Dead cannot rise again, or can it?

Maybe as with Christianity, some Genres never truly die. I’ve mourned and spent time weeping over the grave of the only Genre I’ll ever write in. I’ve wept for it because to me it was all I had as a child. It was the finest Genre, and dated back to Gilgamesh.

Yet here it is rising from the ashes, rising again as Fullscreen nobly pointed out. Maybe it never truly died.

And this is something to bear in mind. While the likes of the Literary authors simpered and wrote stuff that frankly was propped up by the media, and academics they could never compete with Dumas, Hugo, Scott, Tolkien and others who were far more intelligent, exciting and who combined good plots with great prose and the like.

The Tain is more well-remembered and has lasted for centuries more than any story about Dublinites struggling with sex on one particularly lazy Friday-Night for a reason. The Genre didn’t die, it merely hibernated for a time.

It’s now coming back into full force. People are to be quite blunt rediscovering Tolkien, and Robert E. Howard, and Perrault, Grimm, Andersen, Scott, Dumas and all the rest. Why? Because they wrote High-Fiction, where literary is Low Fiction.

Where Modern Fiction would like to preach to you, leading to less sales than 5,000 copies of books, and would like to preach that the Genre is dead. We find it alive and thriving hereon Substack. I mean how in the hell did I get almost 2,200 subscribers? How in the hell do I see Eric Falden coming up at almost 2k subs also? We write Fantasy fiction. This is the lowliest of the low, for the absolute dregs of society. And yet we’re doing well for ourselves.

The Genre of Fantasy never died, because it cannot die. It is Humanity’s oldest Genre of Fiction. It is enduring and beautiful, and comes closer to the Truth that lies beneath our bones, beneath our flesh than any other. It is a Liturgy to Success, the Triumph of our people and something that celebrates Europe & Asia and the vast accomplishments they’ve built up.

People would rather read about Norse adventurers struggling against the Winter-storms and foreign Lizards hunting their people than they would about some failed Parisian girl from the 1920s who can’t find a husband so she engages in a series of debaucheries, to dull the pain of childlessness.

People would rather read about Herakles, and his heroics. Hell they’d rather watch it on TV in the form of Kevin Sorbo’s excellent tv series, than they would read Dostoevsky. And is this wrong? Nope. It’s perfectly alright, healthy even.

The reason that the Publishing, Academic and Media circles don’t like this is that it removes power from them. It keeps them from continuing the ‘de-sacralization’ of our world, the continued ‘de-enchantment’. They push back against ‘toxic masculinity’ push back against Tolkien and his likes, precisely because the Genre cannot be contained, or controlled.

Sure, they’ve made their Rings of Power nonsense, but people haven’t properly tuned in. People didn’t want to be lectured at. Why would they? That stuff is trash, pure and simple. People don’t want a Galadriel who hisses and sneers and shrieks at people, they want the figure who is ethereal, who stands tall and offers wisdom. The one who will diminish and go into the West to meekly prostrate herself at the feet of the Valar. Why? Because the People, your common man, your average ‘Normie’ has instinctively more wisdom and awareness of the real world than any publishers, academics or other such fellows have.

And it must be said that they will always choose what they think is good and tasteful. They decide tastes, not we. I might read Dost but I know Tolkien to be greater. Why? More people have read the latter. And if you read the two, the descriptions, the imagination, the philosophical arguments and explorations and the like are far more pervasive and abundant in the latter.

Tolkien IS greater.

Howard IS greater.

There’s no shame in acknowledging it. Accept it. They’ve sold far more copies with Tolkien selling more than 200 million copies of his various books world wide while Howard’s sold upwards of around 100 million or so (and that’s not counting comic book adaptations of his stories).

Tell me; who’s more well known to the general public; Mr. Darcy, the Great Gatsby or Conan the Barbarian? Guess what, Conan will get more of a reaction out of them. They know him on some level better.

The Fantasy Genre never died, it was resting. Nowadays, it outsells all its competitors at Conventions, at Book Fairs, in book stores, in comic-book format and the like.

Because Fantasy is an Art form. A much higher form of art than tripe literary nonsense. And make no mistake it is nonsense. Because what do you walk away with? Despair? Depression? The philosophy that life is meaningless?

These aren’t real philosophies. They are ideas peddled out by people who’ve never stepped out of ivory towers, never suffered, never endured the real world. They’ve locked themselves away and then fallen prey to loneliness that they cannot comprehend. They fear the uplifting, they fear the presence of God precisely because they are afraid.

I mean has anyone ever asked themselves why it is that Pulp took off and was so successful? Pulp Fiction was more than scantily clad babes on a cover. It was an entire grassroots literary movement. Yet the Academics shun, slur it and make it out to have been vulgar while they pump out and study with giddy delight porn or hedonistic stories. So who is the degenerate?

Ludwig Van Beethoven endures in defiance of all norms, expectations and thought, why? Because he aspired higher and to bring people together whilst respecting the Traditions of the Art form he sought to celebrate.

Celebration of what is ancient is not ‘insipid’ it is beautiful and the oldest tradition in the Occident ever made. Just as it is the oldest tradition of the Orient. Our ways are more similar than people might realize as we have the oldest of traditions imaginable.

I mean Bulgaria dates back to 5,000 BC, just as China does to 2,000 BC or so. Ours are ancient customs, ways and tales and legends. To honour them is right and honourable.

In turn the Marxist Academic Literary tradition dates back 200 years and is on the cusp of failure, of falling apart. They have collapsed in on themselves. Why is this? Because the people never took to them.

They need only throw open the window, cast open the door and step outside and run in the fields and see what has happened outside to realize that the world isn’t that scary and if it is, it is because of their ideas. They need only admit themselves wrong and step outside for five minutes and confront the world.

And in terms of stories, they need only admit they are wrong. That their tastes in fiction is eclectic, and peculiar. They are the odd man out, not the norm and that the average man in the streets likes high adventure and to escape to distant dungeons, and castles and dreams of standing on the great castle walls. If you’re wrong admit to it. The Genre will always triumph and will be studied in a thousand years. Dostoevsky, T.S. Elliot even Dickens will not. If they are studied it’ll be purely for university exercises before they work themselves up towards serious stories such as those of Tolkien, Howard and the like.

So in short; Dostoevsky and T.S. Elliot and the others are overrated. They are not as interesting, and didn’t write the sort of profound, civilization making and soul-quaking literature that Tolkien, Dumas, Hugo, and all the rest did.

Their works aren’t as philosophical, aren’t as deep on account of the fact that they wrote of despairing figures who were conquered by their destinies.

Conrad coined the excellent phrase; ‘To Master your Fate’ and that is precisely what Tolkienian and Howardian heroes set out to do. Except where Lord Jim is mastered by his fate, the heroes of more popular, more beloved fiction tend to do the mastering.

Literature is a thing that is passed down, uplifts, inspires and fills people with Wonder. If it fails in this regard it is not the fault of the masses, or of those who like it. Tolkien wrote Literature. Literary authors did not. They wrote fiction that is popular with a small clique, and that casts a veil over the world. Tolkien wrote Literature.

The Collapse of Pretense

As to the Publishing Industry they’ve failed us again in that they’ve allowed Manga to overtake all western sales of Comics and books. So the public IS reading, but not the trite nonsense that Academics champion in their meaningless halls and classrooms, and that Publishing fellows might prefer you buy and read so that you might despair and collapse.

I mean let’s look at what’s happened in a Barnes and Noble;

Someone posted this on twitter. Think about it; if our Fiction much of which is literary nonsense were really doing well why would we need to import foreign literature?

Clearly something’s wrong. We’ve failed somewhere.

People don’t want to read about ordinary life. Or ordinary failures, they get enough of that in day to day life. They’d rather read and experience greatness.

Tell me; which is more interesting to you Caesar’s life? The struggle of Octavius for the throne? Or the reign of Antoninus Pius? How many actually know who Antoninus Pius was?

He was a mid third century Roman Emperor who ruled over the most peaceful, quiet period in all of Roman history. I quite like him. But is he as sexy and as interesting to study as Aurelian? As Caesar? Augustus? Nope. Not by a long shot.

I mean, shouldn’t the Manga section with its proliferation of action heroes, of impulsive leads of the hyper masculine characters that they boast of be unpopular? Is it that they are KILLING Literature? Nope. They are part of it.

The difference is that the Japanese Mangaka while not all are all that talented, they are beloved because they are willing to step into the void and fill it. You can do that or cry about it. The Japanese do not cry about things but prefer to offer solutions.

Solving the Problem

So while Academics and the Exclusionists and Modernists might well argue that they seek to safeguard ‘Christianity and Literature’ or that they seek to critique certain authors we should interact with some of them in a genuine manner. We should humour but we must never forget that what they defend is brittle. It is made of glass and has already cut them.

It is a broken thing, and it is of the past. It is something that has shattered itself and that was never built of solid stones.

We must continue to press forward, we must market and persist in the Truth. We must also treat them as outside the norms, as the strange ones. Because they are the strange ones. They are strange because they would prefer to read books without descriptions, books without substance and form, without Tradition.

What is Literature without Tradition? It necessitates Tradition. Literary is not built on Tradition, it is built on the undermining of it, on prattle and dialogue. It is the husk placed onto the altar, with people pretending it to BE the altar. It doesn’t work that way. Horror. Science Fiction. Fantasy. These are Altars. They have extensive histories, extensive traditions.

There may have been a collapse in Old Pub or ‘Trad Pub’ but it is called Dead Pub for a reason. It is a dead thing that has collapsed under its own weight and that cannot sell to save its life.

Meanwhile, Indies or ‘New Pub’ as some call it are selling considerably better. I like to call it Neo-Pulp for fun, as it seems to have its own form, its own clinging to old things, old legends, styles and modes.

That’s for a reason; because people in what was once called Christendom like tradition. They like old things and are resolved to uphold their old ways of life in some form. They are returning to Tradition. Some may not like it. Too bad.

Tradition and Literature and Philosophy are like gravity. You cannot resist it. It will inevitably win out, and anti-Traditions, Anti-Literature and Anti-Philosophies cannot long hold out against the oncoming tide of water.

The victory of Traditional Literature must win out, because it is predicated upon solid footing, solid ground. It is predicated upon Gilgamesh, upon Homer, Virgil, the Biblical traditions and also upon History itself. What can hold out against these things?

Now if you enjoy Literature and wish to support this substack do check out my story of the Olympnomachi that seeks to build on Tolkienian Silmarillionish tradition and to weave together the ancient Myths of the world and bring them together into one magnificent piece of literature.

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Also Crown of Blood has a new edition, with maps, character bios and more!