cimorene

the thing about both harry potter and lord of the rings are the universes*. they're neither one of them totally invented, of course, the one drawing on literature and pop culture and folk legend, the other on, well, language and anthropology and legend and myth. and they're both flawed, though more or less deeply, when you really critique them. but they both have these millions of devotees, a tremendous mass appeal even to those who can't or don't care to really understand them, and it's NOT because they're the greatest literature. there are better books out there which have LESS of the dynamic magic of these books. and it's the universe. it's the world-building. that is what sets each of them apart--the lush detail and the very way they're derived from other things we know. that's what make the universes capture the imagination.

i envy their world-building, and i don't know that it's even the building that i envy. we know how hard tolkien worked on it, how long. THAT is the building. but the, er, germ of the world, the world-building drive--that is something which really impresses me. that's something i envy.

*i've heard more or less the same thing said of star wars, but i was thinking of written literature more, at least at first.