What The Lord of the Rings Does Different

 Fantasy has always been a popular genre for people looking for a little bit of escape from their daily toils, but as Tolkien himself knew, fantasy could be much more than escape. A good writer, as K. M. Weiland puts it, writes more than "mere entertainment". Tolkien and his friend C. S. Lewis both agreed that stories were a good way to explore certain issues and teach people about the different sides, and while they disagreed passionately on the different ways to do this, Lewis wrote a plain-out allegory and Tolkien valued applicability over allegory, it was still true. A lot of times people who start reading modern fantasy and then go back to read the classics everybody tells them are so great struggle to get through it because a lot of modern authors have forgotten about this. They've become too lost in crafting huge, vast, detailed worlds and plots, which certainly are impressive and oftentimes beautiful, but none of them manage to capture the beauty of Tolkien, whom currently every fantasy author on earth is attempting to plagiarize. These stories become almost pure escapism with almost nothing redeeming besides that, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing. People can't go, go, go all the time, but it ceases to become art and becomes entertainment at that point. As people have stated when comparing series like The Lord of the Rings to The Wheel of Time. Robert Jordan crams as much plot and worldbuilding as possible into his series, and at times it makes your head swim, even split up over fifteen books along with an encyclopedia of his world as it is. Tolkien, on the other hand, only tells you little bits of the world he created and only the ones that apply directly to the story. It leaves you begging for more because you can tell that what he's telling you is only the tip of the iceberg. I felt that after the very first chapter of The Hobbit, Tolkien's first novel. Tolkien also purposely introduces things that don't follow the rules of his world and then never attempts to explain them, which will have readers arguing about what they meant until the end of the world. The point is, Tolkien didn't set out to write a "fantasy epic," like Robert Jordan, as it's called nowadays. In fact, he intended the Lord of the Rings to be one book (Which would've been a whopping 576,459 words long!). He set out to write a story about the nature of good and the nature of evil. People like Goerge R. R. Martin have complained about Tolkien not explaining things like the politics of his kingdoms, such as Gondor, but the thing is, it doesn't matter. Who cares about Aragorn's tax policy (And honestly who reads a fantasy series to learn about the tax policies of the author's fictional nations...)? None of that matters, because it doesn't have anything to do with the point Tolkien set out to tell in his story, and if a story doesn't have a point, well, it isn't a story.