Tag: Vance
Enge v. Elves
by jamesenge on Oct.13, 2009, under James Enge and Matthew Sturges
Every writer begins as a reader, so it makes sense to start this conversation about writing by talking about our influences.
My first brush with fantasy (like that of lots of people) came with Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings was a big book on campuses at the time and some of my parents’ hip young friends had given them a copies to get them up to speed. I don’t know if they ever read it, but I was fascinated by the weird covers and the alien runes decorating the splash pages.
Reynolds, cover for "Fellowship of the Ring"
Everyone in the world seemed to have given it a good review, including people I’d never heard of like C.S. Lewis and W.H. Auden. So I read it and instantly became obsessed with it. I took all-too-seriously Tolkien’s gravely flip remark that “the book is too short” and, after I ‘d read LotR and The Hobbit a couple times, I launched on my own multi-volume fantasy epic. This one was going to be five volumes long–I didn’t want to repeat the one mistake Tolkien himself admitted making. I wasn’t very far into it before I gave up, but I did, of course make a map. I don’t remember much about it, but there was a mountain range that ran west-to-east and it had a dangerous pass through it called the “Kirach Kung”. There was a scary Mirkwoody sort of forest in it, but I’m not sure if I was already calling it Tychar (the winterwood, at whose verge readers first encountered Morlock a few years ago in “Turn Up This Crooked Way”).
