Suggested reading for Tolkien fan?

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Hello all,

I recently finished really reading Tolkien in-depth, and finished all the main books, Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, and the Silmarillion, and really fell in love with his vision. I’ve began moving to other periphery works, such as the History of Middle Earth series, Letters of J.R.R. Toklkien, etc.

However, I would like to start reading new stories, but I’m kind of at a loss what to read next. I even tried using a website like Good Reads for suggestions, but so much of the fantasy looks uninteresting, I hardly know where to start.

Can anyone offer any suggestions? I’m looking specifically for something in the fantasy genre that won’t irritate me, that isn’t anti-catholic like Pullman’s Golden Compass, or trashy like Game of Thrones. I’m not particularly interested in CS Lewis’ Narnia series (though I might read his sci-fi Space Trilogy someday).

tyia
 
It’s a long series that kind of gets bogged down toward the end before it picks back up, but I’d highly recommend Robert Jodran’s The Wheel of Time series. He died before the series was completed and it was ultimately finished by Brandon Sanderson. His books are really well written in the series.

With Brandon Sanderson in mind, I’d also recommend his Mistborn trilogy.
 
I HIGHLY recommend CS Lewis’ Space Trilogy-- it is real food for thought.
 
If you’re a Tolkien fan, may I suggest Stephen Lawhead’s works? He writes mainly historical fiction and historical fantasy.

My favourites of his include the Song of Albion trilogy. It has been a few years since I last read it, but there are scenes that still haunt me to this day. I couldn’t stop thinking about the ending. This series especially shows just how much the themes of Tolkien’s and C.S. Lewis’ works influenced his writing. This series has a lot of Celtic mythology, but also has strong Christian themes (Lawhead is a Christian author).

Another one of his favourites is Byzantium. It’s about an Irish monk in the 8th century who has to deliver the Book of Kells to the Byzantine emperor. Another fantastic book, with amazing character development. 👍
 
Charles Williams, mentioned by Dwyer, is one of my favorite writers. He wrote seven supernatural thrillers, which are an acquired taste for some. but if you’ve made it through all of Tolkien’s works, they should present no challenge. Here are the titles.
They are more complex and adult-oriented than Tolkien’s books and I like them better than C.S. Lewis’ space trilogy, although Lewis is unmatched for essays and theology.
 
Some more recommendations:

George MacDonald’s ‘The Princess and the Goblin’, which had a strong literary influence on Tolkien and Lewis.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_MacDonald

Tolkien’s ‘Farmer Giles of Ham’ if you haven’t read it yet.

I would strongly recommend C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, even though you said you aren’t interested in the books.

You might also want to try reading some works of Medieval literature like Beowulf; The Song of Roland; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; The Nibelungenlied.
 
I strongly recommend you investigate Le Morte D’Arthur, by Sir Thomas Malory, and see if you can develop a taste for it. It’s one of the high-water marks for all of English literature, and it was deeply loved by Tolkien and Lewis, as well as by Charles Williams and George MacDonald. It has to be one of the most absorbing narratives ever written.🙂 It’s quite old, however, and it’s language will seem very strange to you at first. That strangeness makes it all the more fun though, and after about fifty pages or so your brain will have adapted to it, and from that point on it will read more or less naturally. So it is challenging, no doubt about it, but it honestly is a wonderfully pleasurable reading experience. You’ll already be familiar with the story, but that won’t detract from the fun one iota! I could go on and on about this book, because I madly love all things Arthurian, but maybe I should just keep it brief. I’ll just add that, especially as far as Heroic Epics are concerned, Le Morte D’Arthur touches on all kinds of fanciful Christian-suffused stories and ideas, including chivalry and Galahad’s grail quest, etc.

This is the best version, the unannotated Winchester manuscript:
amazon.com/Morte-Darthur-Norton-Critical-Editions/dp/0393974642
A word of advice though: train yourself to ignore and disregard all footnotes, and there are many, because they seriously mangle and disrupt the narrative flow. And trust me, this book is all about narrative flow. You’ll become adept at figuring out the meaning of words through the context in which they’re used.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Morte_d’Arthur
 
Dwyer said:
This author is another one of the Inklings Literary Circle; I’ve never read any of his works

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Williams_%28British_writer%29

Here are some other suggestions (I’ve never read these; just looked at them a bit ⭕ ):

Lloyd Alexander: The High King (Part of a trilogy of Children’s fantasy fiction books).

Rosemary Sutcliff: Warrior Scarlet; Eagle of the Ninth series (not fantasy but historical British fiction)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Sutcliff
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I loved Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain series when I was young. They’re (very) loosely based upon the Welsh Mabinogion. I recommend that anyone with kids check out Alexander! Your children will thank you.
 
You might like Gene Wolfe’s two books “Knight” and “Wizard”. Wolfe is generally considered one of the finest, if not the finest, living fantasy and SF authors. He’s also a very orthodox Catholic. He doesn’t beat the reader over the head with it, but an essentially Catholic view of the world permeates his writing.

He’s written in everything from hard SF (The Long Sun series) to historical SF (like his very interesting “Pirate Freedom”) to horror (“Freedom”). “Knight” and “Wizard” are probably the closest to Tolkien’s kind of fantasy.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51EQ086Y89L.SY344_BO1,204,203,200.jpghttp://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51saI64xZvL.SY344_BO1,204,203,200.jpg

Also available in an omnibus edition


(Bonus: Wolfe invented the machine that makes Pringles back when he was an engineer.
It’s probably unintentional, but the man on the Pringles can kind of looks like him:
(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/71/Pringles.svg/220px-Pringles.svg.png
 
Thank you for the suggestions 🙂

I think I’m going to start with Gene Wolfe, largely due to Pringles 😛

Any recommendations for additional contemporary authors? There seem so many choices from the fantasy section, they are bound to be hidden gems I don’t know about.

@Exiled Child, Dwyer - I have to admit medieval literature is hard for me to read, and when I have, I didn’t come away with much due to being unable to understand the prose. Even with Tolkien I was already relying on my Tolkien encyclopedia during my second read. :o
 
minion said:
Thank you for the suggestions 🙂

I think I’m going to start with Gene Wolfe, largely due to Pringles 😛

Any recommendations for additional contemporary authors? There seem so many choices from the fantasy section, they are bound to be hidden gems I don’t know about.
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I would again suggest Stephen Lawhead if you’re looking for a contemporary author. He’s still writing (his most recent series, completed just last year, was called Bright Empires, though it’s a bit more science fiction-oriented).

I mentioned Song of Albion and Byzantium in my previous post, but his Pendragon series (his take on the Arthur legend) and the King Raven trilogy (a more realistic version of Robin Hood) are also great reads.
 
I have Lawhead’s Paradise War coming, so if I like that one, I’ll move to his other work.

To be honest, I often don’t like stories where people from modern times, or “the real world” visit fantasy worlds (which is why Narnia is so low on my reading list), so I’m a little worried 😊

But I’ll see 😉
 
minion said:
I have Lawhead’s Paradise War coming, so if I like that one, I’ll move to his other work.

To be honest, I often don’t like stories where people from modern times, or “the real world” visit fantasy worlds (which is why Narnia is so low on my reading list), so I’m a little worried 😊

But I’ll see 😉
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I know what you mean…usually I find those sorts of stories cheesy as well, especially when they are more fan fiction quality. Narnia, however, is classic literature (though it is aimed at children of course), and the Song of Albion is good at avoiding cheesiness IMO.

I’m glad you’re checking it out, though. 🙂

The King Raven trilogy and *Byzantium *are both examples of Lawhead’s works which do not have a person travelling from the real world to a fantasy world, though they are more straight-up historical fiction. From the sounds of it, it seems like you are more interested in fantasy so those might not interest you as much.
 
Poul Anderson would also be a recommendation. His sword and sorcery (which often included elements of hard SF) was a strong influence on later generations of writers (like Michael Moorcock, who borrowed a lot of his themes). I think of him as “modern,” but then I’m old. Anderson was writing them at the same time as Tolkien was writing Lord of the Rings.

Anderson did have a strong moral underpinning to his stories, which you’ll probably appreciate, and his characters, even the truly evil ones, act with believable motivations. He also had a really deep knowledge of theology, history, and technology.

I’d recommend The Broken Sword (1954) and Three Hearts and Three Lions (1953) to start with if you’re interested. He also wrote what could be called “hard” fantasy, where the rules of magic are codified as another form of technology. I like his Operation Chaos,(1971) set in a parallel modern earth where magic developed as the dominant technology and where the eixstence of God has been scientifically proven, and in which a Czech-American werewolf and his sorceress wife face a variety of threats from the Adversary, finally culminating in an invasion of Hell (which is a non-Euclidean continuum that doesn’t follow our rules of physics), to rescue their infant daughter, who has been kidnapped by a demon, with a changeling left behind. They are assisted by his wife’s cat-familiar, and the spirits of the real-life non-Euclidean mathematicians Nikolai Lobachevsky (a saint who has been given dispensation to assist the heroes) and Janos Bolyai, who has been released from Purgatory to assist. That gives you a sense of the anything-goes plot. A lot of fun.
 
I will recommend David Eddings’ Belgariad series. It is a bit lighter than some of Tolkien, but he too has created a new world, with its own history, myths, and legends. The Belgariad follows an ensemble cast as they try and save the world from the evil god, who is trying to “enslave” all the people to worship him. It is fun, easy to immerse yourself in, and you can even get lost trying to orient yourself in the direction they are traveling. 😉 (That is my biggest quibble with Tolkien, is that I have keep looking at the map at where they are going and what direction they are traveling in, or I find I “get lost” in the world).

amazon.com/The-Belgariad-Vol-Books-1-3/dp/0345456327
 
thanks for the suggestions everyone ^^

I’ve went through most of the suggestions so far, but in the end the only one I liked was CS Lewis’ space trilogy (and Unum was right, I was kind of looking for fantasy, lol)

I didn’t want to seem ungrateful, so I just wanted to thank everyone again. I won’t critique anything, since some of my reasons for disliking stuff can be rather poor, such as a great distaste for stories written in first-person. I realize that is kind of a failing on my part, so I don’t want to dissuade anyone from reading the suggestions if the story sounds interesting.
 
minion said:
thanks for the suggestions everyone ^^

I’ve went through most of the suggestions so far, but in the end the only one I liked was CS Lewis’ space trilogy (and Unum was right, I was kind of looking for fantasy, lol)

I didn’t want to seem ungrateful, so I just wanted to thank everyone again. I won’t critique anything, since some of my reasons for disliking stuff can be rather poor, such as a great distaste for stories written in first-person. I realize that is kind of a failing on my part, so I don’t want to dissuade anyone from reading the suggestions if the story sounds interesting.
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That is interesting about not liking first person narrations, and pretty rare (most stories have some first person narration). If you critique the works we might be able to make better suggestions of things you would like. 😉

p.s. you’re a fast reader.
 
jilly4ski said:
That is interesting about not liking first person narrations, and pretty rare (most stories have some first person narration). If you critique the works we might be able to make better suggestions of things you would like. 😉

p.s. you’re a fast reader.
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Well, i’m not really fast. If I don’t like the way the books is going after getting around a quarter of a way through, I set it aside and go on to the next.

I don’t like critiquing, as it usually brings out a side of me I don’t really like, and can come off rude. Example, I wanted to really like Charles Williams, and the synopses for his stories sounded interesting, but the writing was dry and the characters so boring (I mean “realistic”) I couldn’t read him. So, I can criticize it, someone could argue against it, but it doesn’t really change the fact I didn’t like reading Charles Williams, or probably will ever like it.

Still, I can come up with a criteria that might help.

-Written in third-person narrative
-Preferably fantasy
-Something not written “down” to children
-No storylines with plot-devices that send people to a “fantasy world” (ex. Alice in Wonderland, Narnia, etc.)
-I generally don’t like Wagner’s Ring or Arthurian themed stories
-I don’t like stories dumbed-down disney style, with talking rats or singing tea-kettles
-Not allegorical
-Not one of those “grimdark” stories, or trying to shock me with super-violent/morally reprehensible rubbish to show me how “gritty” or “adult” the story is, or keeps shoving sex in my face
-Not centered around politics

I guess that will do 😛 I guess I sound pretty close-minded now, but if anyone still feels inclined to give a suggestion, thanks 🙂
 
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