Rowling VS Tolkien, who created the most creative book world

[Craigable]

I've read a few Tolkien works. I've never read any Rowling, but I've seen most of the films. Based on the basic plots/characters in the HP films, I confess that I find Rowling's storylines underwhelming and unoriginal. Mind you, that's not a criticism of her skills as a stylist. She may be a very fine writer, but her basic storylines seem to me to be just more of the same tiresome wizards-and-their-magic stuff that's been pretty well done to death by now. Plus there's the precocious-children-to-the-rescue-because-adults-can't-do-it-themselves trope that's been a staple of fiction, film, and tv for lo these many, many years. Hardly the stuff of inventive genius on Rowling's part. For his part, Tolkien is certainly borrowing/adapting plenty of time-honored literary and cultural components, but his works, at the time of their publication, came at a time when the literary scene wasn't already littered with such stuff.

[claire mckay]

I really like the Harry Potter books and they are fantastically creative and enjoyable, no doubt about that. However, they cannot match the depth and detail of Tolkien. I've read the Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales and he did create an entire world from scratch from the first creation of "gods" to the evolution of various species of creatures and races with full history behind everyone and everything with a few different languages thrown in for good measure too! Rowling created a great story but I feel as if Tolkien lived and breathed in his alternate world that is so detailed it feels like it's actually happened.

[Fran]

Topic Duplication
see forums.onlinebookclub.org/viewtopic.php ... it=tolkien