FoolOfATook
04-13-2003, 03:44 AM
As a writer, and a student of literature, I'm always interested when I see writers who I respect discuss the importance of J.R.R. Tolkien to their craft. This is one of the reasons why I can't recommend the book Meditations On Middle-earth enough.
I was re-reading Stephen King's introduction to his novel Salem's Lot, and I came across a passage that I thought others here might be interested in. King, of course, has expressed his admiration of Tolkien numerous times, both in interviews and within his fiction, where in several books he has made allusions to LOTR. His novel The Stand, which I consider to be his masterpiece, has often been compared to LOTR, as both are books which feature the banding together of characters to make journeys in the hope of a desperate struggle to destroy a seemingly invincible evil. Anyway, in this introduction, King says this:
When I discovered J.R.R. Tolkien's Rings trilogy ten years later, I thought, "S--t, this is just a slightly sunnier version of Stoker's Dracula, with Frodo playing Jonathan Harker, Gandalf playing Abraham Van Helsing, and Sauron playing the Count himself."
-From the introduction to the 1999 Pocket Books edition of Salem's Lot. Profanity altered by the transcriber (myself) as an attempted compromise between a respect for the author's integrity and the accepted rules and mores of the Tolkien Forum.
I don't really agree with King, and while I wouldn't be extraordinarily surprised if our favorite philologist had read Dracula (Tolkien makes references to all sorts of novels contemperary to the novel in his letters, and in his lecture "On Fairy Stories") I am extremely skeptical of the notion that Tolkien had Stoker's masterpiece in mind at any step in the creation of LOTR. Still, I thought it was an interesting quote, and therefore worth sharing.
I was re-reading Stephen King's introduction to his novel Salem's Lot, and I came across a passage that I thought others here might be interested in. King, of course, has expressed his admiration of Tolkien numerous times, both in interviews and within his fiction, where in several books he has made allusions to LOTR. His novel The Stand, which I consider to be his masterpiece, has often been compared to LOTR, as both are books which feature the banding together of characters to make journeys in the hope of a desperate struggle to destroy a seemingly invincible evil. Anyway, in this introduction, King says this:
When I discovered J.R.R. Tolkien's Rings trilogy ten years later, I thought, "S--t, this is just a slightly sunnier version of Stoker's Dracula, with Frodo playing Jonathan Harker, Gandalf playing Abraham Van Helsing, and Sauron playing the Count himself."
-From the introduction to the 1999 Pocket Books edition of Salem's Lot. Profanity altered by the transcriber (myself) as an attempted compromise between a respect for the author's integrity and the accepted rules and mores of the Tolkien Forum.
I don't really agree with King, and while I wouldn't be extraordinarily surprised if our favorite philologist had read Dracula (Tolkien makes references to all sorts of novels contemperary to the novel in his letters, and in his lecture "On Fairy Stories") I am extremely skeptical of the notion that Tolkien had Stoker's masterpiece in mind at any step in the creation of LOTR. Still, I thought it was an interesting quote, and therefore worth sharing.