Sites and Vision

25 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by Ollamh in J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods

Tags

Battle of Loos, John Garth, Morannon, Shell Holes, The Great War, Tolkien, World War I

Dear Readers,

Although we said in our last that we were going to pursue further the subject of that post, recently, we’ve been readers of John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War (2003—he has a new book we’re about to order– Tolkien at Exeter College. If this interests you, you should also check out his impressive website at http://www.johngarth.co.uk) and, thinking about JRRT’s time in the trenches brought us to the Morannon:

“Upon the west of Mordor marched the gloomy range of Ephel Duath, the Mountains of Shadow, and upon the north the broke peaks and barren ridges of Ered Lithui, grey as ash. But as these ranges approached one another, being indeed parts of one great wall about the mournful plains of Lithlad and of Gorgoroth, and the bitter inland sea of Nurnen amidmost, they swung out long arms northward; and between these arms there was a deep defile. This was Cirith Gorgor, the Haunted Pass, the entrance to the land of the Enemy. High cliffs lowered upon either side, and thrust forward from its mouth were two sheer hills, black-boned and bare. Upon them stood the Teeth of Mordor, two towers strong and tall…Stony-faced they were, with dark window-holes staring north and east and west, and each window was full of sleepless eyes.”

Although JRRT didn’t come to the Western Front until after the battle of Loos in September-October, 1915, that description reminded us of this:

This is the so-called “Tower Bridge” (actually the top structure of mine elevators), the most striking landmark of the long-drawn-out struggle by the British to push the Germans back from their defensive line. It was common for British soldiers to name local French and Belgian features after things from home. Hence, this

reminded them of this:

The battlefield, however, also has more features similar to JRRT’s description of this bleak and ashy world in the artificial tailings (refuse heaps) from the coal mines which dotted the region.

And, in the midst of this are Sam, Frodo, and Gollum:

“…lay now peering over the edge of a rocky hollow beneath the outstretched shadow of the northernmost buttress of Ephel Duath.”

The area between British and German lines were pockmarked with holes blown in the earth by artillery shells,

sometimes thousands of them, and soldiers advancing would use them as temporary shelters.

which could then be used as the basis of new trench systems.

And, between those trench systems, was the area called “No Man’s Land “, in which whole villages and even forests could disappear into nothing but cellar holes and stumps:

which look rather like the devastation described at the crossroads

“Presently, not far ahead, looming up like a black wall, they saw a belt of trees. As they drew nearer they became aware that these were of vast size, very ancient it seemed, and still towering high, though their tops were gaunt and broken, as if tempest and lightning-blast had swept across them, but had failed to kill them or to shake their fathomless roots.”

JRRT strenuously objected to the idea that he was literally converting his thoughts and feelings and experiences in the two World Wars into Middle Earth prose, but he did say something about what he had seen:

“Personally I do not think that either war (and of course not the atomic bomb) had any influence upon either the plot or the manner of its unfolding. Perhaps in landscape. The Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme…”

How could an intelligent, observant young man could live among such scenes and absorb them without finding some use for them—perhaps even as a kind of exorcism of the horrors he would rather not remember?

As ever, thanks for reading!

MTCIDC

Where is Adventure?

20 Friday Mar 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Fairy Tales and Myths, J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Adventure, Landscape, Sam and Frodo, Story, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always!

In this post, we want to consider the idea of adventure. Usually, we think of this as an event or series of events, things which happen. This is certainly the way Bilbo sees it in the first chapter of The Hobbit, when Gandalf appears and all Bilbo thinks he wants to do is to sit, smoke, and read his mail, saying to the wizard: “nasty, disturbing uncomfortable things. Make you late for dinner! I can’t think what anybody sees in them!”

But what does Bilbo really know of adventure?

Imagine (and what a wonderful word that is), that you live down the hill from Bilbo, in the Shire in the quiet time, long after the wolves had come over the frozen Brandywine and some time before the Black Riders appear. This is a contented backwater of Middle-Earth and Bilbo mirrors this in his strong anti-adventure reactions.

With the world seemingly so safe and day-to-day (not that there aren’t the usual human–or hobbit–tussles—think of the Sackville-Baggins and their plans and jealousies) is there anything to suggest—beyond the idea that they are “nasty, disturbing uncomfortable things”–what real knowledge of adventure might exist in the Shire?

Sam suggests, in the second chapter of The Lord of the Rings, that at least he has some understanding beyond a vague sense that adventure is nasty when he says, “I heard a deal that I didn’t rightly understand, about an enemy, and rings, and Mr. Bilbo, sir, and dragons and a fiery mountain, and—and Elves, sir. I listened because I couldn’t help myself, if you know what I mean. Lor bless me, sir, but I do love tales of that sort. And I believe them too…”

Adventure, to Sam, then, isn’t a thing, but a story, and a believable one, too. It’s a story which he and Frodo talk about much later in the narrative, when they are about to encounter the treachery of Smeagol, Shelob, and the terrible march into Mordor and Sam has now realized that he and his master are in a story, too.

“The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo” Sam says, in one of the most profound moments for us in all of Tolkien, “adventures I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of sport, as you might say.”

So now we see a kind of equation, which (beginning with Bilbo) might read:

(Nasty, disturbing) thing = adventure = story (Sam’s addition)

But Sam, the second half of his first name now being truer than he knows, continues his definition:

“But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually—their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t.”

And here, with words and expressions like “paths” and “turning back” we can add another step to our equation:

(Nasty, disturbing) thing = adventure = story = going somewhere

There are, of course, folk and fairy tales where adventure comes to the protagonist, but it seems to us that when we began to run through the big stories, stories like the Odyssey, the Ramayana, and Beowulf, the narrative is mostly laid outside the world of home—Odysseus is coming home, but the bulk of the story takes place otherwhere, Rama and his wife and brother are in the forest, far from the palace when their adventure begins, and Beowulf has come from southern Sweden to Denmark to help King Hrothgar with a pest-control problem. And there are, of course, Frodo and Sam, who have traveled, mostly on foot, all the way from home in that safe-seeming Shire.

So, imagine that adventure can mean Somewhere Else, and that that place needs to be traveled through (or at least traveled to) for it to be an adventure, and for it to make the transition from adventure to story. For Sam, the choice to travel to and through adventure seems all-important. As he says of those who turn back:

“And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on—and not all to a good end, mind you; at least, not to folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things alright, though not quite the same—like old Mr. Bilbo. But those aren’t always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in.”

These, then, are the possible consequences of going to (and through) Somewhere Else: on the one hand, you may come back and, if you do, you may find things have changed, but are survivable, as Bilbo does when he returns to find himself considered dead and his house and goods up for auction. On the other hand, you may not come back—and yet may still be part of “the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind.”

There is, of course, a paradox here: by Sam’s definition, it’s only by not turning back that one is in an adventure and a successful story, but a successful story (meaning, to Sam, a memorable one) may not ultimately be a successful adventure: what’s good for the listener/reader may not be good for those traveling to or in Somewhere Else.

Somewhere Else, itself, can be like any place in fiction: seas, mountains, forests, Middle Earth has them all and much of the story is about the simple act of marching along those many long miles, where the only quality necessary for heroic behavior seems to be persistence and, for Sam, and for us as readers, this becomes an heroic quality in itself—the ability to keep going, no matter what, a quality which is tested to the extreme degree in that last trek through the worst landscape of all, Mordor, half volcanic wilderness, half industrial wasteland. The landscape almost becomes another character here, a geographic Sauron who opposes those who would destroy his ring and through it, him. This, in turn, presents us with the idea that, just as characters good and bad give a story life, so do surroundings and the more complex the surroundings, might we see the greater the power of that life to make the story one that “stays in the mind”?

We’ll end this here, but, at the same time, we’ll add a “teaser” for our next. Sam and Frodo talk about adventures from the viewpoint of people who have read or heard them, all the while being inside an adventure themselves, as they—Sam in particular—acknowledge:

“Still, I wonder if we shall ever be put into songs or tales. We’re in one, of course; but I mean: put into words, you know, told by the fireside, or read out of a great big book with red and black letters, years and years afterwards.”

And yet there is an authorial fiction here: when they talk about being in a story, they mean that, through all the consequences of the Ring, their lives have been significantly altered and they have been “landed” in the current narrative. We know that they are, in fact, completely fictitious characters literally put into the story and that it only exists because the author has chosen to locate them there. All around them is a narrative which they cannot hear, as well as a listener whom they cannot see but who sees them and records every word and act, and this is just as true for Homer as it is for Tolkien. If Sam and Frodo went to Mount Doom without that listener, but didn’t return to set down what happened, as we’re told they did, what story would there be, even though they didn’t turn back and therefore should have been part of a story that “stays in the mind”?

More on that next time.

Thanks as ever for reading!

MTCIDC

From Master to Pupil

13 Friday Mar 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Howard Pyle, Kidnapped, King Arthur, N.C. Wyeth, Robin Hood, Treasure Island

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always!

Last time, we looked at some works by Howard Pyle, the great 19th-century illustrator and painter. Today, we want to look at the work of one of his most prominent students, N.C. Wyeth.

To give you an idea of what captivates us, we could just show you this:

This sums it all up: the way in which reading allows you to step into imagination as if it were a country. It also suggests a certain propensity for romanic daydreaming on the part of certain people!

Here is an easy example of the difference between master and pupil. This is a Howard Pyle from his version of King Arthur. It’s beautifully detailed with a somewhat hard edge to it.

And here is a work by his pupil from his King Arthur:

There is an almost dream-like cloudy quality to his work. In fact, that dream can even seem something like a nightmare in this Wyeth illustration from Kidnapped.

We’ve read that there are those who have criticized such works as “melodramatic”, but we think that that misses the point– they aren’t melodramatic, they are simply dramatic.

But, for us, it truly is the case of picture = words x 1000. And so, we’ll content ourselves with showing you a few more of our favorite pictures.

This last one, for us, may be as suggestive as the first one. We can feel ourselves deep in the beechwood behind the next tree, our bows creaking with the strain, waiting for the Sheriff of Nottingham.

And, for this time, we invite you, dear readers, to join us there.

Thanks, as always, for reading,

MTCIDC,

Pyle of Pirates

06 Friday Mar 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Military History, Research, Writing as Collaborators

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Bunker Hill, Howard Pyle, Illustrating History, Jack Sparrow, Pirates

Dear Readers,

Welcome!

In recent posts, we’ve talked about the wonderful Russian fairy/folktale illustrators of the late 19th, early 20th centuries. We thought it might be fun, as we work on the sequel to Across the Doubtful Sea (Empire of the Isles) while editing The Good King’s Daughter for our second series, to continue the conversation by looking at other illustrators, beginning with two Americans, teacher and pupil Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth.

We begin, however, with a familiar contemporary image:

We think it goes without saying who this is, don’t you? He’s a wonderful actor, but, for someone who’s supposed to be dressed as a mid-18th-century sailor, he owes more to Howard Pyle, who, as has been pointed out more than once before, has exerted a strong influence upon Hollywood’s view of such people, than to actual 18th-century sailor’s dress.

Pirates were, in fact, sailors with, shall we say, non-mercantile goals. They were workmen and wore very practical workmen’s clothes, like those in the following 18th-century illustrations.

(This is, in fact, a contemporary illustration of the casting adrift of the notorious Captain Bligh, a British naval officer, although you see him only in his shirtsleeves here, rather than in his blue officer’s coat. His men, however, did not wear uniforms at this period, and, as you can see, would have looked like any other sailor.)

Okay, it might be argued, he’s “Captain” Jack Sparrow–what about officers? Here’s a Hogarth painting of a more-or-less mid-century civilian captain.

As the illustration shows, he simply wears ordinary clothing– no uniform.

Now, here are a few Pyle pictures.

Typical Pyle touches: the bandanas and the huge sashes, not to be seen in period illustrations.

One might argue that Pyle lacked readily-available visual sources: someone in the 1890s certainly didn’t have Google Images. It has been said, that, like Detaille in France, Pyle collected period uniforms, etc., and sometimes dressed up students in them, but, one has only to look at his illustration of Bunker Hill, to make you wonder what he actually collected.

There are numerous errors here, from the cut of the coats, to the lace on the breast, to the packs and that’s only the beginning. The study of the history of uniforms was, of course, only in its infancy in this period and even serious military artists, like H.A. Ogden, could go very wrong.

And yet, there are also Pyle illustrations like these, in which he seems to have gotten things– at least, non-piratical things–right.

In these, you see a depiction of 18th century sailors which looks much more like those in actual period illustrations.

So what was Pyle up to? Let’s look at a much more modern depiction of Bunker Hill, by the American military artist, H. Charles McBarron.

McBarron was a member of the Company of Military Historians and Collectors. He was well-known not only as a skilled artist, but as a thorough researcher, and the owner of an extensive collection of militaria of the past. What you see in this picture (minus the graphic depiction of violence) would have been as accurate a depiction of the event as anyone might imagine.

Suppose, however, you were attempting to picture this event in dramatic terms from the British side. You would want long lines of red-coated, determined men, marching steadily uphill through their own casualties, as in Pyle’s illustration.

Imagine, then, that even if you had much more visual information about pirates than Pyle may have had, but you wanted people to see pirates painted broadly and dramatically, what better than flowing headscarves, and big, blood-red sashes?

And this is why people in the past–and we in the present– love Pyle. Strict accuracy certainly has its place, but we’re perfectly willing to let it walk the plank in favor of romantic strokes and bold depictions.

And, as always, we ask you readers, what do you think?

Next, Pyle’s pupil, N.C. Wyeth.

Thanks for reading,

MTCIDC,

Magic or Growth?

25 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Fairy Tales and Myths, J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Gandalf, Heracles, Magic, Tolkien

Dear Readers,

Welcome!

As we write the Across series, and the series we’re calling Grey Goose, we think about magic. It’s a tricky business, and we’re reminded of what happened to Apollonius of Rhodes in his Argonautica. The Argonautica is, basically, the story of how Jason assembled a group of heroes and went to find and bring back to Greece the golden fleece. In Apollonius’ time, it was already an old story. Because he was working with traditional material, then, and clearly felt obliged to do so, Apollonius included of all the heroes traditionally said to have been on the Argo. At the same time, this left him with a dilemma: one of those heroes was Heracles. Imagine having such a powerful figure on the ship– was there any need for anybody else? The thought obviously occurred to Apollonius, because he removed Heracles as quickly as he could.

The thought must also have occurred to JRRT when he was writing The Hobbit. After all, he had a wizard along on the trip to the Lonely Mountain. We presume that the focus of the book is upon Bilbo, however, and his spiritual growth from Baggins to Took, as he is challenged again and again to go beyond what he thinks he knows about himself. With a wizard along, just like Heracles in the Argonautica, what chance is there for Bilbo ever to prove himself? And so, where do we see Gandalf actually do anything magical? He can show the way with a lighted staff, and he can set fire to pinecones, but, for most of the book, he either simply travels along, or he has simply disappeared.

And so, we come to our books. In Across the Doubtful Sea, we have, on the one side, people with strong religious beliefs, the Matan’a’e Amavi’o– the people of the goddess, Matan’a’e. Although they have the power of their goddess and their other gods, they are forced to rely almost entirely on themselves because we feel it is important that our protagonists prove themselves with only minimal divine help. Thus, we follow in the path of JRRT here.

The principal antagonists, however, are a different matter. These are the Atuk, whose god gives his principal followers tremendous magical powers, but powers which are limited to the forces of winter (rather like the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe). Thus, they can be fought, in a sense, just the way Aslan fights the White Witch with the opposite of cold, heat.

As our series continues, we will have more to say on the subject of magic and gods.

Thank you, as always, for reading!

MTCIDC,

More Russian Favorites

10 Tuesday Feb 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, Medieval Russia

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Adventure, Epic, Fairytale Illustrators, Fantasy, Heroic, Medieval, Russia, Song

Dear Reader,

Welcome, as always.

We are very visual people. A picture in a museum, an illustration in a book, something in a film, will always catch our eye and sometimes inspire our writing.

This was certainly the case in our first book, Across the Doubtful Sea, where the drawings and paintings from the three Cook expeditions to the South Seas (1768-1779) filled us with a combination of wonder and curiosity. Although they were sometimes strongly influenced by period ideas of the sublime, here were images as close to historical photos as we would ever see.

In the case of our second book, The Good King’s Daughter, however, because it was set in a world based loosely upon the medieval Russia of fairy tales, we looked to other sources, particularly those later-19^th and 20^th-century Russian artists who illustrated moments from the Russian heroic songs (byliny) and from the fairy and folktales themselves.

In our last, we showed you a few images from the work of perhaps the most famous (outside Russia, at least) illustrator, Ivan Bilibin (1876-1942). Pictures like “The Island of Buyan” (1905):

In this posting, we would add two more artists, Victor Vasnetsov (1848-1926—not to be confused with his equally-talented brother, Apollinary 1856-1923) and the more recent Nikolai Kochergin (1897-1974).

As you can see from the pictures below, Vasnetsov can move from the grandly (and grimly) heroic world of the byliny and its bogatyr (epic hero) to a more fanciful world of fairy tales like The Firebird (but still rather grim and grand).

Kochergin strikes us as more like Bilibin—brightly-colored, folk-influenced.

What inspires us in these pictures? To a degree, it’s what attracts us to the fairy/folktales: the strange scenes (even when you know the story), the swirl of color, that suggestion of a complex world of patterns from a different time and place, one in which there were yagas and firebirds and heroes who could be helped by wise animals.

And you, reader, do these pictures inspire you?

Thanks for reading!

MTCIDC

If you would like to know more about Russian heroic song—and for free—you might try:

Hapgood, Isabel Florence, The Epic Songs of Russia (1916)

Harrison, Marion Chilton, Byliny Book: Hero Tales of Russia (1915)

at archive.org. They are clearly older books, but, for those on a budget, they can provide a starting place into a rich world worth visiting.

Tracking

09 Monday Feb 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Maps, Narrative Methods, Research

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Adventure, Book, Exploration, Fantasy, Fiction, History, Maps, Tolkien

Dear Readers,

While working on Across the Doubtful Sea, the Doubtful Sea series, and a forthcoming series that takes place in an alternate medieval Russia, we discovered for ourselves what our friend J.R.R. Tolkien worked on meticulously during the course of his work—the importance of maps in a story, whether they are real, fictional, or a mixture of both, in the case of our work. “If you’re going to have a story,” he said, “you must work a map; otherwise, you’ll never have a map of it afterwards.”

This became apparent when we were working on Across, using previously drawn maps of the theoretical Terra Australis:

To give us a sense of where our characters and we were (and still are) going.

When we began talking about the geography of our alternative Russia, we began to ask ourselves, first, how do you make a map in relation to a story? It was a start to look over the shoulder of JRRT, and to see what was done before us. From there, we go on to ask, what is it that made Middle-earth Middle-earth? It’s clear that Tolkien took a considerable amount of time and care to chart out his elaborate fictional world, from Bilbo’s own maps of the Shire and the world beyond.

Some were detailed enough to follow the day-by-day travels of the Fellowship, while others were used to record specific moments in time, both historically and geographically.

In his letters, Tolkien often addressed the subject of his maps. Much of his enthusiasm in creating maps for his worlds had to do with the pleasure of doing so, and the satisfaction of building the physical structure of such an elaborate story. He was, however, sometimes overwhelmed by them—perhaps as if the more landscape he made, the more he had to carry—and said to his publisher that it was a matter of a “lack of skill combined with being harried” (Tolkien, letter 141). He was fortunate to have, in this aspect of his work, collaboration not unlike ours—his son, Christopher, was a talented cartographer, and after discussing the landscapes with his father, would draw the intricate world in accordance with Bilbo and Frodo’s adventures.

Tolkien, by creating the maps first, created a landscape which seems to exist not only before the story, but is bigger than the story. When Frodo travels eastwards, for example, there is more of the Shire and beyond than that which he actually travels over. In our case, it was rather like someone laying track while driving a train over it. The tracklayer decides where the train will go, but, looking back, can see a landscape left behind as it moves on. In this way, the story and its landscape are written as they progress, and a narrative railroad is left behind on which readers may ride. And so, unlike Tolkien, by constructing a map this way, we appear to be providing primarily a view from the track itself. If there’s more landscape, we can only know it from the map we’ve constructed afterwards.

With the previously-drawn map, we can see the journey, in contrast, from a bird’s eye view.

But this leaves us with a question: is it best to construct a bird’s eye view first, then to lay the track, or to lay track and then to look back?

This brings us to a second question: by either method, how does one make a fictional map credible?

MTCIDC,

For an example of simultaneous train-driving and track-laying, see Wallace and Gromit, The Wrong Trousers.

Picturing Wonder

02 Monday Feb 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Medieval Russia

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Fairytale Illustrators, Ivan Bilibin, Russian Fairy Tales

Dear Readers,

Welcome!

In our last, we mentioned that we have a second book in the works. It’s part of a series whose titles (and elements) are based upon this mysterious nursery rhyme:

“Grey goose and gander,

Waft your wings together

To carry the good king’s daughter

Over the one-strand river.”

The second book in the series, The Good King’s Daughter, is now a complete draft and is currently being given its first editorial run-through. Then it will be checked, rewritten where necessary, then formatted and published, like Across the Doubtful Sea, on Amazon and Kindle, we hope by early March. In the meantime, work goes on for the first in the series, Grey Goose and Gander, as well as on our sequel to Across, Empire of the Isles.

The Grey Goose series takes place in an imaginary medieval Russia, with yagas, talking animals, warriors, invaders like the historical Mongols, magic, saints, singers, and a young woman warrior, Unegen. The story is original, although there are elements from Russian history, as well as from folk tales.

We also mentioned in our last our favorite Russian fairy tale illustrator, Ivan Bilibin (1876-1942).

If you look him up on-line, you’ll find out that he was strongly influenced by his exposure to traditional Russian folk art and architecture. Like these:

There is scholarly argument over how authentic this sort of thing was by Bilibin’s time: by 1700, Peter the Great was actively westernizing Russia. This lead to everything from laws about dress to regulations about beards (Peter taxed them—but so had Henry VIII, who had one, and Elizabeth I, who did not).

(The second picture is of a government token to show anyone who would ask that you’ve paid the beard tax.)

And here we come to that fork in the road where “strictly accurate” may get in the way of creativity. Anyone who has read The Lord of the Rings knows that Rohan has wide, grassy plains. There are no such plains in New Zealand, so Peter Jackson did what he could to give at least the rolling effect. It’s not grassy, as JRRT described, but we have yet to meet anyone who has complained about the look of Jackson’s Edoras or the Rohirrim (one of our all-time favorite parts of the films, in fact).

Bilibin was inspired by something, no doubt. He wrote about it in Folk Arts of the Russian North (1904). And he produced illustrations like these—

We hope you enjoy them as much as we do and imagine that, in our world of Grey Goose, Bilibin would feel right at home.

Thanks for reading.

MTCIDC

Amazon carries Golynets’ Ivan Bilibin, but if you would like to see the illustrator in his natural habitat, you can download Wheeler’s 1912 Russian Wonder Tales (in a 1917 reprinting) with Bilibin’s illustrations at Archive.org for free.

PPS

We’ve just discovered a very interesting site at Textualities.net. It’s full of images and interesting ideas.

Terra (Increasingly) Cognita

30 Friday Jan 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Imaginary History, Military History, Narrative Methods, Terra Australis

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Adventure, Book, Exploration, History, Research, Terra Australis, Writing

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always. Now that Across the Doubtful Sea is out in print on Amazon, we’ve turned our attention towards two projects:

the “prequel”, Empire of the Isles
editing and publishing the complete draft of the first book in a new series, Grey Goose and Gander, which is set in an imaginary medieval Russia. (Yes—it’s a distance from an alternate 18^th-century Pacific, but we love Russian literature, both poetry and novels, and we especially love Russian fairy tales and that outstanding illustrator, Ivan Bilibin.) More on that series in future blogs!

Among the main characters in Empire is Lucien de St. Valerien, the father of Antoine, from our first book and we follow his adventures in two periods: as a senior cadet 30 years or so before Across and then as a captain, 10 years before. The latter will lead right into Across and explain various things only hinted at in that volume in the series.

As his adventures take place in our imaginary Pacific (called “The Calm Sea”) and on our imaginary Terra Australis, we’ve been busy researching and inventing more geography. In doing so, we’re aware that we are violating a dictum which JRRT once set down about creating and mapping:

“If you’re going to have a complicated story you must work to a map; otherwise you’ll never make a map of it afterwards.”

That we are doing so clearly shows the larky beginnings of this project as well as our desire to allow the Muse to take the story (and the storytellers) where she will.

Although we follow this ideal of inspiration, we would also agree with the Victorian English novelist, Anthony Trollope, who said of inspiration:

“To me it would not be more absurd if the shoemaker were to wait for inspiration, or the tallow-chandler for the divine moment of melting.” (A particularly apropos statement for a man with the goal of writing 10,000 words a day!)

In our case, however, we are using our research as a substitute Muse. And what particularly strikes us at the moment is the interesting clash of world views of early geographers on the subject of Terra Australis.

As we’ve mentioned before, Terra Australis, as a concept, dates back at least to Aristotle in the 4^th century BC and the concept of the need for a balance of continents. If there’s a big one on the north side of the earth (call it Terra Borealis), it would be necessary, for the equilibrium of the earth to have a second one on the south side (Terra Australis).

The next step in the thinking, however, can diverge. There are those who imagined that such a place would resemble the continent on the northern side, having as many peoples and cultures. (This idea appears to be associated with Crates of Mallus, who lived in the 2^nd century BC.) In our imaginary world, this is the standard belief, just as it was in the real pre-Captain Cook 18^th century Europe. (The idea was contested, however, as it is in our books.)

In our research, however, we’ve also happened upon a second view. This was popularized by a 5^th-century AD scholar named Macrobius, who wrote a commentary on the last-century BC Roman author, Cicero’s, “Dream of Scipio”, itself the last part of Cicero’s longer philosophical work, De Re Publica.

Cicero begins with the theory of more than one inhabited continent, but then shifts to describe an earth divided into five climate zones (reading from top to bottom: cold (and so uninhabitable), temperate, torrid (uninhabitable), temperate, and cold once more. This zonal view if followed by Macrobius and a number of the maps which appear in the earliest surviving manuscripts (which date from the period before 1100 AD) shows this very clearly.

What impressed us about this idea was how it mixed what we know to be true in the real world—uninhabitable poles (as some of the maps say, terra nobis incognita frigida—“a frozen land unknown to us”)

with temperate regions. It then added, however, a central belt simply too hot for human existence. (Was this derived from early reports of the Sahara?).

We’re still researching and creating, but our Terra Australis combines the two world views: we have a habitable southern continent, but one which is gradually falling under the control of a god—Atutlaluk—whose power is gradually turning Terra Australis into terra frigida—although it is gradually turning from incognita “unknown” to cognita “known” to us—and will be to you, in our next Across book, Empire of the Isles.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

For a detailed and very interesting article on Macrobius and maps, see Alfred Hiatt, “The Map of Macrobius before 1100” available as a download at http://dx.org/10.1080/03085690701300626.

A Forward– at the End

14 Wednesday Jan 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Writing as Collaborators

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Adventure, Book, Collaborating, Fantasy, Fiction, Formatting, History, Hodges, Publishing, Self Publishing, The Waterspout, Writing

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always.

The Kindle version of our first novel, Across the Doubtful Sea , has just appeared, and the paper version will be available, we believe, in just a couple of days.

The whole experience, from beginning work in early June to now has been a wonderful one. Neither of us had ever collaborated on such a project before and it was a learning experience every day of our work together. We thought that, in this blog, we would discuss what appear to be the biggest areas of our project: creating together, research, cover design, expenses, making the actual (or virtual) book, and facing the reality that, at least at first, all of this was going to be, in the immortal words of MGM, Ars Gratia Artis. (Cue the lion.)

First, we had to figure out how we were going to write together. There were models, of course—you could think immediately of people from the musical theatre tradition, from Gilbert and Sullivan to Rodgers and Hammerstein, for example. Or, in terms of novels, you might look to older authors from Erckmann-Chatrian to Nordhoff/Hall, or to all of those fantasy/science fiction couplings you can find on the shelves of your local bookstores.

In our case, however, we didn’t model ourselves on anyone. Instead, as the plot progressed, one of us might do more of the actual writing, but every line was, ultimately, the work of both: ideas, editing, changes, inspiration—there was nothing the two of us didn’t do at some time and in some way together.

This changed, however, when it came to the actual self-publishing. One of us, it turns out, has a wonderful (and newly- discovered) talent for the technical side—creating covers, the complex process of formatting the text—and has produced what we feel to be a beautiful and absolutely professional outside for our first book. (Perhaps books can be judged by their covers?) For this later stage of the process, that one of us was completely in charge—and the other looked on, admiringly.

Research was an important element in our work and one of us kept busy figuring out just what we needed to know and acquiring it, from books on naval warfare to work on Inuit and Polynesian languages and cultures. We’ve discussed some of this in earlier blog postings, but there was much more and it created its own puzzle: this was to be a series of fantasy/adventure novels, after all, so how much would we actually depend upon actual history and how much would we create? As well, we wanted to avoid magic per se, which has always struck us as an easy out—and can look very much like an easy out, too! (JRRT was so right to allow Gandalf to show off his real powers so infrequently.)

Once we were into a good working routine, we began to consider what our cover should look like. In our research, we had discovered the work of William Hodges, who was the main artist for Captain Cook’s second expedition (1772-1775). Considering elements in the plot (if you read Across, you’ll know at once what we mean), Hodges’ painting, commonly called “The Waterspout”, but actually entitled “A View of Cape Stephens in Cook’s Straits (New Zealand) with Waterspout”, fit perfectly.

A quick internet search showed us that this painting was not in the public domain, but was the property of the National Maritime Museum, in London. This meant that we had to request permission to use it. We e-mailed the NMM, and with the friendly help of the Image Librarian there, Emma Lefley, we obtained permission.

There was a contract, however, and a fee, which we gladly paid, but this brings up another step in the process: expenses. As new to all of this as we were, we hadn’t expected that publishing our first book would be free, but it was another step in our education to watch how the expenses could mount. Our internet research cost us nothing, of course. A certain number of the books—mostly on naval warfare—were already in one of our personal libraries, and we could have gradually acquired more through academic and public libraries, although some of the titles we used would have required ILL searching, but we decided to buy some, as we knew that we would need them for the entire series. (And we like building up our libraries anyhow.) The Hodges’ image was our first big expense, however.

When we began to think about how we might encourage interest in our work, we decided upon a blog and a Facebook page, for starters. The Facebook page was free, but we needed a domain name (that’s “dot.com” )for our blog and there was another expense. (There are lots of other potential expenses with a blog—but we’ll save those for another post.)

Our last big expense came when we had finished the book and we planning its on-line publication. To sell it effectively, it was necessary to have an ISBN—in fact, we needed two: one for the paper book and a second for the Kindle version. An ISBN is not cheap, but two obviously have been double if Bowker (the chief supplier of ISBNs) wasn’t running a deal: buy a ten-pack and the price for the individual ISBN goes down significantly. So we bought the pack—and have used two already.

Then, when we felt that we were ready, we went to Create Space and began the process of turning hundreds of pages of manuscript of what we had decided was the final draft into a self-published book—and in two forms. One of us has already written an informative post on our Facebook page (The Doubtful Sea Series) about the challenges in doing this (a euphemism—but that collaborator was very patient—to say the least!—about the various problems which arose), so, perhaps it’s best just to say here to our readers: be prepared for snags!

And there came at last the moment of truth: how much should we charge for this? And how much would we get in return? (That really was a secondary concern—honest!—but no novelist, at least since Nash turned out The Unfortunate Traveler, has written in the belief that there was no profit motive, at all, no, truly! in the process.) We were torn, of course: a lower price might mean more buyers; a higher price might bring higher profits. Then we hit those buttons at Create Space and received an education in expenses and royalties and realized that we were fortunate to be doing this as an experiment, and not as a new career. This is worth its own post, but, trust us for now when we say that, even if we sell 10,000 copies of Across the Doubtful Sea and even more of its sequels, we will not be banking in the Cayman Islands and thinking about that summer home in New Hampshire. (And now we understand why some of our favorite fantasy/sf novelists are so prolific: volume and more volume is the only way to make enough money to feel that you’re really earning something.)

We said that every moment was a learning experience, however, and, truly, it has been—and every moment has been beyond price. Like people who teach themselves to repair their own cars, we’ve climbed into the engine of writing and publishing a book and have so much more appreciation not only for the creative process and the editing/publishing process, but for all the talent and heart which each of us has shown the other in producing the first in what we hope to be a long line of novels full of fantasy and adventure.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

doubtfulsea

~ adventure fantasy

Sites and Vision

Where is Adventure?

From Master to Pupil

Pyle of Pirates

Magic or Growth?

More Russian Favorites

Tracking

Picturing Wonder

Terra (Increasingly) Cognita

A Forward– at the End