Fionavar swooner here!
The Fionavar Tapestry is the only fantasy series I have ever been able to get into besides LOTR. It was like reading LOTR with sex.
But, IMO, Guy Gavriel Kay is too good a writer to be merely copying Tolkien, and his world is too Celtic and Arthurian to remind me that much of Middle-earth ... although obviously he pays tribute to many of Tolkien's ideas, names and indeed themes. But he puts his own original spin on it all, and he's a terrific storyteller.
Melodramatic? Well, yes, in places. But I still loved the Fionavar series, and found it very moving.
Although how on earth Kim and Dave could possibly want to get back to Toronto after all that high drama and apocalyptic warfare is quite beyond me.
I liked what Estel said, about the similarities and differences between GGK and Tolkien. Tolkien is all about 'music and sight', whereas Kay is a very earthy, sensual writer. There is a lot of spirituality in Fionavar, but it's a much more pagan and earthy spirituality than in Middle-earth.
And Kay writes well about sex.
And I find all of his characters, both the human ones and the non-human ones, very believable.
Jennifer's rape had quite an effect on me: it haunted me for days. Kay really makes you feel the icy cold and terror and claustrophobia of Starkadh ... but he never portrays the horror in a gratuitous way. Now that's good writing, in my book.
I must try his other books at some point.
But there is some sex in Tolkien too.
There is certainly quite a lot of sex in The Silmarillion: not explicit sex, and it's all rather dark and traumatic (Turin's incest with Niniel, Eol the Dark Elf and his twisted relationship with Aredhel, and so on) but it's there.
Now, try this on for a sensuous effect. It's one of my favourite passages from FOTR, when Frodo is listening to the Elvish music in the Hall of Fire at Rivendell:
At first the beauty of the melodies and of the interwoven words in elven-tongues, even though he understood them little, held him in a spell, as soon as he began to attend to them. Almost it seemed that the words took shape, and visions of far lands and bright things that he had never yet imagined opened out before him; and the firelit hall became like a golden mist above seas of foam that sighed upon the margins of the world. Then the enchantment became more and more dreamlike, until he felt that an endless river of swelling gold and silver was flowing over him, too multitudinous for its pattern to be comprehended; it became part of the throbbing air about him, and it drenched and drowned him ...
I do find that a gorgeous - and sensuous (as opposed to sensual) - piece of writing.
And it describes perfectly the effect that reading Tolkien has on
me, the reader .... he takes me away to mysterious worlds with infinite horizons, where seas sigh on never-ending shores. A rapturous experience indeed.