I really, really need to start getting caught up on Triverse, and... Wait a minute, I've finished that Jasper Fforde re-read before next week's Fforde Fiesta, and finished the first two Tékumel novels which I wanted to get through because my RPG group has detoured into a Tékumel campaign, no, yeah, I'm ready to catch up!
Ok, lets make most of this response actually relevant to your post. This will touch back to last week's as well.
First, I appreciate the term "Minimum Viable Product World-building (MVPWB)." Certainly, for the majority of stories this should be the goal (especially in franchise/shared worlds that need to pump out stories on a regular basis, but that's really TV/Film/Comic books and doesn't truly apply to novels, novellas, and/or short stories - except on a historical level where writers like Dickens serialized and were paid by the word and started padding things out). How much that requires will be up to the individual writer.
Obviously, Tolkien is/was a different beast, but... Tolkien's legendarium seemed more of a personal playground for his mind than something expressly designed for publication. Let us note the original manuscript for "The Hobbit" is not connected to "Lord of the Rings," and it took multiple rewrites of both to enmesh the two properly. Tolkien did a crap-ton of world building which, almost incidentally, became a novel.
All the rest of "Middle Earth" lore we have is Christopher Tolkien making money by selling his dad's rough drafts and personal notes, and can be (mostly) ignored for this discussion (until I touch on the upcoming Amazon series) - harsh, but also true.
Above I mentioned Tékumel. Tékumel is the creation of Professor MAR Barker, and is a fictional world Barker worked on for over 50 years. Like Tolkien, Barker was a linguist, and he also developed several languages. Barker was also an anthropologist and the Tékumel setting is ridiculously detailed.
Oddly, Barker did NOT first publish Tékumel in story setting, but as a table top role playing game. Search for "Empire of the Petal Throne" for more about that (the Tékumel setting has been published in multiple TTRPG sets across several companies over decades, and has new material still being produced)! Barker did wrote five novels, but the first wasn't published until about a decade after the first edition of EPT.
The (first two) novels are...let's say that they are short stories or novellas in terms of plot and character depth, but have been padded out to long novels with information about the world. The Tékumel novels are much more accessible as background to RPG players than the dry text of a rulebook! But, really, the only reason that the 2nd novel needed to send the heroes into a Ssú city for a couple of chapters is so Barker could expound upon the Ssú before an action scene of escape. The Ssú chapters can be totally removed from the novels without affecting plot or theme.
I've only read the first two Tékumel novels. The others are not available in print or Kindle currently, and eBay copies of the older printings are vastly overpriced.
Barker's creation will likely never be more popular than it is now and will undoubtedly fade away over the next couple of decades. It's recently been confirmed that Barker wasn't a particularly nice man, and was an active anti-Semite. The current court of public opinion tilts towards marrying the artist to the art, so, Tékumel just basically became impossible for anyone to push for reprints of the latter novels and any kind of TV or Film production went away forever. A bit of a shame because Tékumel isn't a "nice" setting - it's violent, brutal, and most of its cultures are uncivilized by our standards, but it's also radically different from the standard northern European inspired fantasy everything. It's really a fascinating world and it's built in a way which seems to reach beyond the author's prejudices (much like Orson Scott Card should be much more like his most famous character, Ender Wiggin). Art vs artist isn't the topic of discussion today, so, moving back on topic...
Probably our best example of writing a ridiculous amount of world building and backstory is Frank Herbert's "Dune" series... Here we have the writer who spent years developing geology, history, culture, backstory, etc, SPECIFICALLY to write the novels. Herbert had a ridiculous amount of lore built up. Also, like Tolkien, his kid had to come along and make a quick buck. Unlike Christopher Tolkien, who merely published everything of his father's he could find, Brian Herbert had the unmitigated gall to actually *change* Frank Herbert's backstory, then declare his own fan-fiction to be more canon than the origina. Let me be clear, that is not me being snarky, sarcastic or exaggerating for comedy, the author's notes in the first Brian Herbert/Kevin J. Anderson book literally states when there is a conflict between their book and the original series, assume the Herbert/Anderson novels are correct. This would be like Peter Jackson sneering at LOTR fans and declaiming, "There is no such character as Tom Bombadil, what exactly ARE you talking about?"
But, all this ridiculous detailed world building can be quite tedious to read. I will cheerfully admit on a re-read of LOTR I basically flip ahead any time someone starts singing, or telling some long epic poem about 20,000 years ago. Especially if it's in Quenya or Sindarin. Yes, it's very impressive Tolkien designed a whole bunch of languages, but I just cringe when I get to:
"A Elbereth Gilthoniel,
silivren penna míriel
o menel aglar elenath!
Na-chaered palan-díriel"
Probably doesn't help that Tolkien doesn't bother to translate within the novel, so it's literally just pretty noises.
Oh... Well, here's where we thank Christopher Tolkien, because without his publishing all the other lore, I doubt LotR would still be as beloved. It would be a highly detailed, but highly obtuse book.
I already discussed how Barker padded out his Tékumel novels with lore and backstory.
Herbert is, I'd argue, the most effective with his lore-vs-drama ratio. Partially because he doesn't suddenly veer off into multi page poems in made up languages without translations, but via an efficient use of epigraphs. We've discussed before the value of a good epigraph, and how they are a great way to inject a healthy amount of exposition. Have your exposition illuminate the chapter's content and themes and you've got an efficient way to illuminate your world and lore.
Note to self: never attempt merging three different universes :D
A fascinating look backstage. I keep thinking I ought to look into Scrivener
I really, really need to start getting caught up on Triverse, and... Wait a minute, I've finished that Jasper Fforde re-read before next week's Fforde Fiesta, and finished the first two Tékumel novels which I wanted to get through because my RPG group has detoured into a Tékumel campaign, no, yeah, I'm ready to catch up!
Ok, lets make most of this response actually relevant to your post. This will touch back to last week's as well.
First, I appreciate the term "Minimum Viable Product World-building (MVPWB)." Certainly, for the majority of stories this should be the goal (especially in franchise/shared worlds that need to pump out stories on a regular basis, but that's really TV/Film/Comic books and doesn't truly apply to novels, novellas, and/or short stories - except on a historical level where writers like Dickens serialized and were paid by the word and started padding things out). How much that requires will be up to the individual writer.
Obviously, Tolkien is/was a different beast, but... Tolkien's legendarium seemed more of a personal playground for his mind than something expressly designed for publication. Let us note the original manuscript for "The Hobbit" is not connected to "Lord of the Rings," and it took multiple rewrites of both to enmesh the two properly. Tolkien did a crap-ton of world building which, almost incidentally, became a novel.
All the rest of "Middle Earth" lore we have is Christopher Tolkien making money by selling his dad's rough drafts and personal notes, and can be (mostly) ignored for this discussion (until I touch on the upcoming Amazon series) - harsh, but also true.
Above I mentioned Tékumel. Tékumel is the creation of Professor MAR Barker, and is a fictional world Barker worked on for over 50 years. Like Tolkien, Barker was a linguist, and he also developed several languages. Barker was also an anthropologist and the Tékumel setting is ridiculously detailed.
Oddly, Barker did NOT first publish Tékumel in story setting, but as a table top role playing game. Search for "Empire of the Petal Throne" for more about that (the Tékumel setting has been published in multiple TTRPG sets across several companies over decades, and has new material still being produced)! Barker did wrote five novels, but the first wasn't published until about a decade after the first edition of EPT.
The (first two) novels are...let's say that they are short stories or novellas in terms of plot and character depth, but have been padded out to long novels with information about the world. The Tékumel novels are much more accessible as background to RPG players than the dry text of a rulebook! But, really, the only reason that the 2nd novel needed to send the heroes into a Ssú city for a couple of chapters is so Barker could expound upon the Ssú before an action scene of escape. The Ssú chapters can be totally removed from the novels without affecting plot or theme.
I've only read the first two Tékumel novels. The others are not available in print or Kindle currently, and eBay copies of the older printings are vastly overpriced.
Barker's creation will likely never be more popular than it is now and will undoubtedly fade away over the next couple of decades. It's recently been confirmed that Barker wasn't a particularly nice man, and was an active anti-Semite. The current court of public opinion tilts towards marrying the artist to the art, so, Tékumel just basically became impossible for anyone to push for reprints of the latter novels and any kind of TV or Film production went away forever. A bit of a shame because Tékumel isn't a "nice" setting - it's violent, brutal, and most of its cultures are uncivilized by our standards, but it's also radically different from the standard northern European inspired fantasy everything. It's really a fascinating world and it's built in a way which seems to reach beyond the author's prejudices (much like Orson Scott Card should be much more like his most famous character, Ender Wiggin). Art vs artist isn't the topic of discussion today, so, moving back on topic...
Probably our best example of writing a ridiculous amount of world building and backstory is Frank Herbert's "Dune" series... Here we have the writer who spent years developing geology, history, culture, backstory, etc, SPECIFICALLY to write the novels. Herbert had a ridiculous amount of lore built up. Also, like Tolkien, his kid had to come along and make a quick buck. Unlike Christopher Tolkien, who merely published everything of his father's he could find, Brian Herbert had the unmitigated gall to actually *change* Frank Herbert's backstory, then declare his own fan-fiction to be more canon than the origina. Let me be clear, that is not me being snarky, sarcastic or exaggerating for comedy, the author's notes in the first Brian Herbert/Kevin J. Anderson book literally states when there is a conflict between their book and the original series, assume the Herbert/Anderson novels are correct. This would be like Peter Jackson sneering at LOTR fans and declaiming, "There is no such character as Tom Bombadil, what exactly ARE you talking about?"
But, all this ridiculous detailed world building can be quite tedious to read. I will cheerfully admit on a re-read of LOTR I basically flip ahead any time someone starts singing, or telling some long epic poem about 20,000 years ago. Especially if it's in Quenya or Sindarin. Yes, it's very impressive Tolkien designed a whole bunch of languages, but I just cringe when I get to:
"A Elbereth Gilthoniel,
silivren penna míriel
o menel aglar elenath!
Na-chaered palan-díriel"
Probably doesn't help that Tolkien doesn't bother to translate within the novel, so it's literally just pretty noises.
Oh... Well, here's where we thank Christopher Tolkien, because without his publishing all the other lore, I doubt LotR would still be as beloved. It would be a highly detailed, but highly obtuse book.
I already discussed how Barker padded out his Tékumel novels with lore and backstory.
Herbert is, I'd argue, the most effective with his lore-vs-drama ratio. Partially because he doesn't suddenly veer off into multi page poems in made up languages without translations, but via an efficient use of epigraphs. We've discussed before the value of a good epigraph, and how they are a great way to inject a healthy amount of exposition. Have your exposition illuminate the chapter's content and themes and you've got an efficient way to illuminate your world and lore.
(continued in first response, below)