Season 8 Episode 8
Aug 13, 2012 18:21:24 GMT -8
Post by Deleted on Aug 13, 2012 18:21:24 GMT -8
Its not even old fashioned, at least not American old fashioned. Its especially not old fashioned for the area he was born and raised in. Gygax was born in Chicago, inner city Chicago in the late 30s. Then he moved to southern Wisconsin for his teen years. Neither of those places would have given him the grammar or syntax he used to butcher language so well.
And even if one wants to point to those novels you mention as his influences, most of the books were written a decade or more before Gygax was even born and most of them by English Authors. By the time he would have read them they would have been twenty or thirty years old at the least.
By the late seventies when he was writing D&D those books were fifty or sixty years old, and the purple prose they were written in was never proper English to begin with. So you had someone poorly emulating overly flowery and imagery laden prose while attempting to explain what was really a complex and fairly dry rules systems. Its no wonder they come across as confusing nonsense half the time.
I don't fault him for wanting to write like that, it was what those classic fantasy novels that appealed to the genre he loved and was targeting was written in. Even Tolkien has some touches of it. I do find it amazing that as the years went by his writing never really evolved beyond it. As you mentioned language changes, and peoples writing style typically evolves and changes within their lifetimes. Gygax set himself in that purple prose niche and never moved.
And even if one wants to point to those novels you mention as his influences, most of the books were written a decade or more before Gygax was even born and most of them by English Authors. By the time he would have read them they would have been twenty or thirty years old at the least.
By the late seventies when he was writing D&D those books were fifty or sixty years old, and the purple prose they were written in was never proper English to begin with. So you had someone poorly emulating overly flowery and imagery laden prose while attempting to explain what was really a complex and fairly dry rules systems. Its no wonder they come across as confusing nonsense half the time.
I don't fault him for wanting to write like that, it was what those classic fantasy novels that appealed to the genre he loved and was targeting was written in. Even Tolkien has some touches of it. I do find it amazing that as the years went by his writing never really evolved beyond it. As you mentioned language changes, and peoples writing style typically evolves and changes within their lifetimes. Gygax set himself in that purple prose niche and never moved.