The Road (No Longer) Taken

21 Wednesday Sep 2016

Posted by Ollamh in J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Maps, Military History, Narrative Methods

Tags

Adventure, Fornost, History, Isengard, Medieval, Middle-earth, Numenorean road, pack horses, Ridgeway, Roman bridges, Roman occupation of England, Roman Roads, Stonewain Valley, the Greenway, The Lord of the Rings, the North Road, The Salt Road, Tiber River, Tolkien, Via Salaria

Dear Readers, welcome, as always. In this posting, we’ve been thinking about the subject of roads in Middle-earth and, in particular, the North Road, also called the Greenway.

This was the North-South Road, which ran, once upon a time, from Isengard to Fornost, described by Christopher Tolkien as “the great Numenorean road linking the Two Kingdoms, crossing the Isen at the Fords of Isen and the Greyflood at Tharbad and then on northwards to Fornost”. (Unfinished Tales, 314, n.32)

Mostly, the roads of Middle-earth seem to be what you’d expect in a text which is based upon the actual medieval world: dirt tracks.

In the real English medieval world, most of these were not really for carts or carriages,

but rather for pack horses and their loads, which only required the narrowest of paths.

packhorsetrain1

The_Marsden_pack_horse_road,_Marsden_-_geograph.org.uk_-_826758

Bridge in Marsden, West Yorkshire

There had been simple pathways in Britain since earliest times, like the Ridgeway.

Ivinghoe Beacon seen looking north from The Ridgeway.

And yet there were still the remains of a different sort of road in Britain, those built under the Roman occupation of England, from 43 to 410AD.

Roman.Britain.roads

The Romans had begun their rise to power in Italy by controlling a road, the Via Salaria, which ran inland from the Mediterranean. A major purpose of this road (you can see it in its name, “The Salt Road”) was to further the salt trade.

The salt came from salt pans on the Mediterranean coast.

saltblocks

saltpans

The early Romans had been lucky (or wise) in founding their city at a major ford of the Tiber River, where the Via Salaria crossed it.

archaicrome

And out from Rome spread a network of roads.

roman-roads-italy-map

In time, the main roads were not simply dirt tracks, but very-carefully-constructed, well-laid-out stone-paved roadways.

Eli dis 2

These included sturdy bridges, as well, some of them still in place.

alcantara-bridge

Over these roads marched Roman armies

romantroopsonroad

and Roman commerce, as well.

plaustrum2

Eventually, there were over 50,000 miles (80,500 km) of paved roads, as well as many miles more yet of unpaved. roman_empire_117_ad

As far as our current research goes, we have no actual proof that the Greenway was paved like Roman roads. One road for which there is a hint of evidence is that which runs through the Stonewain Valley:

“Through the gap the forgotten wain-road long ago had run down, back into the main horse-way from the City through Anorien; but now for many lives of men trees had had their way with it, and it had vanished, broken and buried under the leaves of uncounted years.” (The Return of the King, Book 5, Chapter 5, “The Ride of the Rohirrim”)

A comparable illustration—with grass instead of trees and leaves—is this of a Roman road in Lancashire, in northeastern England.

Roman Road walk Lancashire

The idea of a road nearly abandoned and covered with grass—therefore “the Greenway”—seems to fit both this modern photo and JRRT’s idea, though, doesn’t it?

One of the spooky, but wonderful things about the ancient Roman world is that, for all that it’s been gone for 1500 years or more, there is so much of it still there for us, above ground and below—as it was for Tolkien. Thus, when we think about what was once one of the major thoroughfares of Middle-earth, we imagine that he, like us, saw a Roman road, decaying, but still useful.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

Knowledge, Rule, Order

06 Wednesday Jan 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Fairy Tales and Myths, Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods

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Adolf Hitler, Anduin, Benedict Cumberbatch, Benito Mussolini, British Government, Charlie Chaplin, dictatorships, England, Gandalf, George V, Germany, Gondor, gothic script, Government, History, India, Isengard, Kaiser Willhelm II, Lenin, Mehmed VI, Middle-earth, monarchs, Mordor, Nazis, newsreel, Numenor, Ottoman Empire, Oz, Peter Jackson, Queen Mary, Queen Victoria, Rohan, Saruman, Sauron, Scott, Smaug, Stalin, Stock Market Crash of 1929, Sultan, The Great Dictator, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Treaty of Versailles, Valar, Victoria Louise, Weimar Republic, William Morris, Writing

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always.

Have you ever wondered what Middle Earth would have been like if the Fourth Age had begun on a calendar written by Sauron?

That of the Third Age was hardly a democratic paradise: a king rules Rohan, a stand-in for king rules Gondor. Elrond and Celeborn/Galadriel behave and are treated like royalty and Thranduil, as we learn from The Hobbit, is the king of Mirkwood. The dwarves have hereditary rulers. Only the outliers—communities like Bree and the Shire and the earlier inhabitants like Tom Bombadil and Fangorn—appear to be completely independent. (The Shire even has elections and a mayor, although the actual government, except for the shire reeves, appears to bemostly token—you wonder who’s running their seemingly-efficient postal service.)

This is not surprising, not only for an author born during the later years of Victoria,

but also for someone powerfully influenced by the medievalist interests of everyone from Scott

Sir_William_Allan_-_Sir_Walter_Scott,_1771_-_1832._Novelist_and_poet_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

to William Morris.

(We might add that the world of fairy tales, full of princes and princesses, queens and kings, was also a powerful influence at the time—and not only on story-tellers born in monarchies—after all, even Oz is ruled by a queen—

Yet, after Smaug—who could better be a medieval fantasy villain (especially with the voice of the incomparable Benedict Cumberbatch attached)?

—something changed in Tolkien’s world. In fact, something changed in the whole outside world. With the end of World War One, monarchs toppled all over Europe and beyond, from:

Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany

to Mehmed VI, last Sultan of the Ottoman Empire.

In place of the former, there appeared the always-troubled Weimar Republic, full of good intentions, but badly crippled, not only by the war which had sapped its manpower and resources, but by all kinds of social unrest and then by the Crash of 1929, which notoriously destroyed the value of its currency.

weimar currency.jpg

As early as 1919, there had been clashes among the forces of different ideologies—

CombatesEnBerlín19190903.jpg

And, amidst all of the unrest, there was a failed coup attempt in 1923 by the man in the overcoat in this picture.

Bundesarchiv_Bild_102-00344A,_München,_nach_Hitler-Ludendorff_Prozess.jpg

He, of course, was only following the footsteps of this man, who had pushed his way into power the year before—

to be followed, in turn, by the man on the left, from the mid-1920s.

That first man, having failed at obvious violence, tried again through more complicated means (although still employing violence, if it suited his purposes) and succeeded in 1933.

He was, so we are told, a riveting public speaker, but, if the newsreels we’ve seen are evidence, we guess you would have had to have been there.

Some people thought the style exaggerated in the 1930s and caricatured it even then.

He had a definite social agenda, which he outlined at length and often, although concealing certain of the most horrible aspects. And he liked big words and big concepts, like:

It would have been impossible for someone as intelligent and generally well-informed as Tolkien not to have been very much aware of this man and all of the other like men, busy oppressing as much of the world as they could. And this would have been especially true in a time when radio and film were changing how people received news—and how those interested in influencing others might shape what people saw. As early as 1911, the British government was using newsreel film to show the might and reach of its empire (2/5 of the globe was in their hands) when the king, George V, and his wife, Queen Mary, visited India.

Delhi_Durbar,_1911.jpg

Not to be outdone, Kaiser Wilhelm II encouraged a grand—and filmed–event in 1913, for the wedding of his daughter, Victoria Louise—and some of the film was even in color.

The Marriage of Victoria Louise Color Film

It would be easy to imagine, then, that the weight of such public figures might have influenced Tolkien in his depiction of late-3^rd-Age villains. We can see it in Saruman’s unsuccessful attempt to persuade Gandalf to join him:

“ ‘He drew himself up then and began to declaim, as if he were making a speech long rehearsed. ‘The Elder Days are gone. The Middle Days are passing. The Younger Days are beginning. The time of the Elves is over, but our time is at hand: the world of Men, which we must rule. But we must have power, power to order all things as we will, for that good which only the Wise can see.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”)

Thus, unlike the script of Jackson’s version, there is no plan to wipe out men and replace them with orcs. Instead, men are to survive: to be ruled—perhaps under what definitely sounds like it should be a translation from something written in Fraktur—the fake Gothic script favored by the Nazis–

die-schöne-deutsche-Schrift-detail1.jpg

“ ‘We can bide our time,’” says Saruman, “ ‘we can keep our thoughts in our hearts, deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose: Knowledge, Rule, Order; all the things that we have so far striven in vain to accomplish…’ ”

Such abstract, but somehow menacing, words sound like a translation of something from Hitler’s Germany: Kenntnisse, Herrschaft, Ordnung. They do not sound in the least like Gandalf’s goals, ever, and he, in fact, replies by implying that not only are they not really Saruman’s words, but that Saruman is foolish for believing them:

“ ‘Saruman,’ I said, ‘I have heard speeches of this kind before, but only in the mouths of emissaries sent from Mordor to deceive the ignorant.’ “

As really the words of Sauron, however, they give us an idea of what to expect in a world under his control. Knowledge would be for Sauron alone, we suppose, perhaps after regaining his lost ring? Certainly he wouldn’t share it with Saruman, whom, it will become clear, he never trusted. As for Rule and Order, the world would be a place full of rules and those watching that they be obeyed. And here we can remember Sharkey’s Shire, with its “by order of the Chief” signs—and its gangs of human enforcers. As well, we can think of its grey, industrial character, as we’ve discussed in a previous post, a universal Mordor, devoted to production. To this, we can add the Mouth of Sauron’s recitation of surrender conditions, delivered to the allies before the Morannon:

“ ‘These are the terms…The rabble of Gondor and its deluded allies shall withdraw at once beyond the Anduin, first taking oaths never again to assail Sauron the Great in arms, open or secret. All lands east of the Anduin shall be Sauron’s for ever, solely. West of the Anduin as far as the Gap of Rohan shall be tributary to Mordor, and men there shall bear no weapons, but shall have leave to govern their own affairs. But they shall help to rebuild Isengard which they have wantonly destroyed, and that shall be Sauron’s, and there his lieutenant shall dwell: not Saruman, but one more worthy of trust.’ “ (The Return of the King, Chapter 10, “The Black Gate Opens”)

In keeping with the influence of current events in this world, we might see this as being a parallel with the 1919 Versailles Treaty, in which Germany was to be forced to make huge territorial concessions, to disarm almost entirely, and to pay massive amounts in reparation to the victorious allies.

Treaty_of_Versailles,_English_version.jpg

The Treaty of Versailles– Wiki Article

Such terms as Sauron offers would also destroy Rohan as an ally and set up a permanent garrison between it and the north. We might also expect the restored Isengard to be a staging area for an assault upon Fangorn and the ents, to their ultimate destruction. As well, “west of the Anduin” is a very vague expression—does it include Gondor, as well as Rohan?

Religion in The Lord of the Rings has always been the subject of debate: how much or how little? Of what kind? Tolkien is quoted as saying that it was monotheistic, although, when attacked by the Mumak, Faramir’s men called on the (plural) Valar. There is no mention, in what is often extremely detailed landscape description, of any kind of temple or shrine, however. Nevertheless, we would like to conclude with an eerie thought about religion in this alternative Fourth Age. The Mouth of Sauron, aka, The Lieutenant of the Tower of Barad-dur, is described as:

“…a renegade, who came of the race of those that are named the Black Numenoreans; for they established their dwellings in Middle-earth during the years of Sauron’s domination, and they worshipped him, being enamoured of evil knowledge.”

Could we imagine that, in this other Fourth Age, a new and horrible religion might have appeared, one dedicated to the worship of Sauron—and to that Knowledge which Saruman finds so important? What do you think, dear readers?

As always, thanks for reading.

MTCIDC

The Man Who Was Killed

30 Wednesday Dec 2015

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

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"The Man He Killed", Adventure, British Infantry, British Militia, Crimean War, Damrod, Fantasy, Faramir, Frodo, Haradrim, History, Lamellar, Mablung, Middle-earth, military history, Military recruiters, Napoleonic Wars, Sam Gamgee, Second Boer War, The Dynasts, The Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers, Thomas Hardy, Time's Laughingstocks, Tolkien, Waterloo, WWI

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always. In this posting, we propose to suggest a connection—one, at the moment, at least, which we can’t prove—between Tolkien and the late-Victorian/Edwardian/Georgian (he was born in 1840 and died in 1928) poet/novelist, Thomas Hardy.

We begin with a quotation from The Two Towers, Chapter 4, “Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit”. Sam and Frodo have been taken by Faramir’s rangers and, with Damrod and Mablung as their minders, they are about to sit out the ambush staged by Faramir to destroy a column of Haradrim. Unthinkingly, Sam has become an eager spectator, and:

“Then suddenly straight over the rim of their sheltering bank, a man fell, crashing through the slender trees, nearly on top of them. He came to rest in the fern a few feet away, face downward, green arrow-feathers sticking from his neck below a golden collar. His scarlet robes were tattered, his corslet of overlapping brazen plates was rent and hewn, his black plaits of hair braided with gold were drenched with blood. His brown hand still clutched the hilt of a broken sword.”

The Haradrim are from the far south, but, wherever this man was from, he was wearing a type of armor called “lamellar”, from the Latin word, “lamella”, meaning, “a little, thin plate”, it being a diminutive of “lamina”, “a thin piece of something/a plate, leaf”. It’s a kind of protection worn over many centuries in many parts of the world. Basically, it looks like this:

It can be made, as the one described, of lamellae of bronze, or of iron, which are sewn to an underlying fabric.

So, perhaps, this dead warrior looked a bit like this:

Sam’s curiosity was quickly dampened by the sight—and it makes us wonder if what we are also seeing here is Lieutenant Tolkien’s first glimpse of a dead enemy soldier.

tolkien-x deadgerman

“It was Sam’s first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man’s name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace—“

It was this brief meditation—abruptly interrupted by the appearance of a Mumak—which reminded us of this Thomas Hardy poem, “The Man He Killed”:

“Had he and I but met

By some old ancient inn,

We should have sat us down to wet

Right many a nipperkin!

“But ranged as infantry,

And staring face to face,

I shot at him as he at me,

And killed him in his place.

“I shot him dead because —

Because he was my foe,

Just so: my foe of course he was;

That’s clear enough; although

“He thought he’d ‘list, perhaps,

Off-hand like — just as I —

Was out of work — had sold his traps —

No other reason why.

“Yes; quaint and curious war is!

You shoot a fellow down

You’d treat if met where any bar is,

Or help to half-a-crown.”

The language—“nipperkin”, “ ‘list”—and the social situation depicted: “was out of work—had sold his traps” (“traps” being slang of the time for “personal possessions”)—would suggest that the speaker is a working man. Such, along with farm boys, were prime material for military recruiters

in the Victorian world in which this poem was written (1902—published in Hardy’s Time’s Laughingstocks, 1909 ). The speaker is, in his own words, however, from an earlier day. When Hardy wrote the poem, the Second Boer War (1899-1902) was just ending, but it was hardly a war in which soldiers did as the speaker says, “but ranged as infantry,/and staring face to face,/I shot at him as he at me,/and killed him in his place.” The war had begun with British infantry attacking in spread-out lines, but still very visible on the landscape and it had cost them dearly.

Their enemy—mostly all militia—that is, part-time soldiers—had dug in from the start.

Colenso,_KwaZulu-Natal_-_Project_Gutenberg_eText_16462.jpg

British losses had taught them to do the same.

What the speaker is describing sounds much more like earlier European wars, in which soldiers stood in long lines at a narrowing distance from each other and fired. The last of these, for Britain, had been the Crimean War (1854-56).

download-193789-The-23rd-Regiment-Royal-Welsh-Fusiliers-at-the-Battle-of-the-Alma-on-20th-September,-1854.jpg

Hardy, however, had a strong interest in the Napoleonic wars of the late-18^th-early 19^th-centuries, had published a massive dramatic piece, The Dynasts (1904-08), set in that period, and had even twice visited the battlefield of Waterloo (1876, 1896). Thus, we imagine that the poem’s speaker is actually describing something like this:

Had Tolkien read the Hardy poem and perhaps have even been inspired by it? Both scenes include a battlefield, a battle death, and a lingering sense of regret—although Sam hadn’t killed the man from Harad, he displays that same sense of “this was just a person, an ordinary person, once” which gives the Hardy poem its power.

As ever, we leave it to you, dear readers—what do you think?

Thanks, as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

Tracking

09 Monday Feb 2015

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

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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.

Terra (Increasingly) Cognita

30 Friday Jan 2015

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

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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

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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

It’s Out! On Kindle!

09 Friday Jan 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Writing as Collaborators

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Tags

Adventure, Book, Collaborating, Exploration, Fantasy, Fiction, Formatting, French Navy, History, Kindle, Publishing, Research, Royal Navy, Self Publishing, South Pacific, Terra Australis, Writing

Dear Readers,

For us, a very short post. Our first novel, Across the Doubtful Sea, has just appeared on Kindle. As of early next week, the book form will be available on Amazon.com. We hope you’ll be interested! As of next week, we’ll have one of our regular essays here, but we just wanted our readers to know that, after all of this time giving you information about the book, the book will actually be available.

Now–on to the second in the series–Empire of the Isles!

As ever, thanks for reading.

MTCIDC

Sequels and Prequels

05 Monday Jan 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Narrative Methods, Research, Terra Australis, Writing as Collaborators

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Collaborating, Fantasy, Fiction, History, Writing

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always!

As we put the finishing touches on Across the Doubtful Sea (we’ve just realized that we need to have a title on the spine for the print version—oh, and a bar code on the back–yep, the things we never thought about when we were reading someone else’s book), we’ve already begun work on the second in this series, entitled Empire of the Isles.

So, where are we going in this book? Logically, you might say that we should continue in chronological order, begin the second book where the first concluded. After all, at the end of the second book of The Fellowship of the Ring, JRRT didn’t double back into earlier times to the previous defeat of Sauron in which he lost finger and ring and gradually work up to Gollum, to Bilbo, to Frodo . Elements of the past of Middle Earth, of course, appear everywhere in the text, often in geographical features like barrows, the Greenway, and Weathertop, very much the way the past was always present in JRRT’s England in barrows and stone rings and Hadrian’s Wall and castles and the ruins of monasteries. For us, this is one of the book’s great attractions and strengths . The specific past of the ring itself appears in “The Shadow of the Past” (with its resonant title, suggesting not only that the past casts a shadow upon the present, but that, involved in all, is The Shadow—Sauron) and “The Council of Elrond”, chapter 3 of the first book and chapter 2 of the second.

But is that where we want to go?

And, the answer is, no. Instead, we’ve decided to go into the past, but not just in flashbacks or explanations. As we wrote Across, we found it necessary to make reference to earlier events, but this was always done in bits and pieces, where needed for the present narrative. (No spoiler alert here—although this makes an interesting challenge in essay-writing for us: how can we discuss that narrative without too much specificity? How can we inform but tantalize at the same time?) Suppose, however, that we wrote a second book whose plot was based entirely upon events which had happened before Across.

We knew from Across that our main male protagonist, Antoine de St. Valerien, was in the Calm Sea (our Pacific) in part in search of his father, Lucien de St. Valerien, who had disappeared there on an earlier mission. Instead of fragmentary glimpses of his father and his doings, as was the case in Across, why not make the whole next book about him?

As we have written in an earlier posting, a basic premise of our trilogy is that Terra Australis, the southernmost continent which explorers and cartographers and sometimes corporations and governments once believed existed , is, in fact, real. (For those of our readers who would like to know more about this idea, we recommend: William Eisler, The Furthest Shore: Images of Terra Australis from the Middle Ages to Captain Cook, David Fausett, Writing the New World: Imaginary Voyages and Utopias of the Great Southern Land, Glyndwr Williams, The Great South Sea: English Voyages and Encounters, 1570-1750, among many other interesting works.) In our contemporary world, this is Antarctica, of course.

In this alternative world, however, it is not an endless sheet of ice which covers a land mass of rock, but rather the place which those earlier explorers and others believed it to be, a country with a mixed climate, fertile land, and growing seasons. In our imaginary world, however, things are changing, owing to the influence of the people who live at its center, the Atuk, and to their god, Atutlaluk, whose power lies in cold and whose chief followers can mobilize the elements of winter against their enemies. Opposed to the Atuk are the Matan’a’e amavi’o, a Polynesian people who have long inhabited a string of a dozen islands to the north and who have more recently colonized the western fringe of Terra Australis.

Much of this was already in place in Across, but now we could use this second novel to fill in so much more: the history of colonization, the beginnings of the war between the Matan’a’e amavi’o and the Atuk, more about the Atuk, who they are, where they come from, all as a background to the story of Lucien and the part he plays in the greater narrative of the struggle between these peoples.

As we write Empire of the Isles, we’ll do what we’ve done for Across and invite you into the literary equivalent of backstage, in hopes that you’ll enjoy knowing more about where it all comes from and how it all comes about.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

Frigates

16 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by Ollamh in Heroes, Military History, Research

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Adventure, Exploration, French Navy, Frigate, History, Napoleonic, Research, Royal Navy, Sea, Warship, Writing

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as ever.

In this post, we want to add a bit more about the ship used by our European protagonists and antagonists, in the Doubtful Sea series, the frigate.

For a brief but convenient history of the vessel, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frigate, but, in short, as you can see, a frigate is a three-masted warship.

Unlike the bigger ships, those used in the large-scale fleet actions

like HMS Victory

or its French counterparts

their armament was much lighter, ranging in number of guns from the upper twenties to the low forties. Here, for example, is a French forty-gun ship.

And a comparable English one.

These ships were designed to be fast and maneuverable, acting as scouts for fleets of the bigger ships, but also as warships on their own, in blockades and in actions against enemy ships of about their own class.

After the American Revolution, the United States Navy began with six of these frigates, including the USS Constitution.

(For a useful article on these, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_six_Frigates_of_the _United_States_Navy. On these ships and others, see Mark Lardas, American Light and Medium Frigates, 1794-1836 and American Heavy Frigates, 1794-1826, For US frigates from their inception through the War of 1812, see Henry E. Gruppe, The Frigates.)

First in fighting the Barbary pirates off the North African coast and then against the British Royal Navy in the War of 1812, these ships and their captains and crews earned the new navy a reputation for seamanship, gunnery, and their sound design and construction.

(For the US Navy in the wars against the Barbary pirates, see Gregory Fremont-Barnes, The Wars of the Barbary Pirates, Richard Zacks, The Pirate Coast, Mark Lardas, Decatur’s Bold and Daring Act, and Frederick C. Leiner, The End of Barbary Terror. A recent popular history of the US Navy in the War of 1812 on the high seas is Stephen Budiansky, Perilous Fight.)

As far as we know, there is only one of the larger ships which survives: HMS Victory, in Portsmouth harbor, on the south coast of England.

There is one original US frigate, the USS Constitution, which is located in Boston harbor. It is still in commission, being the oldest ship in the US Navy. See the website: www.history.mil/ussconstitution/index.html for further information.

In the UK, there are two frigates, HMS Trincomalee,

which may be visited at Hartlepool. See the website at: www.hms-trincomalee.co.uk.

And HMS Unicorn, its sister-ship. The Unicorn is unusual in that, unlike the Trincomalee, is has not been restored as an active warship. Instead, it has been brought back to its state when it was out of commission and stored (said to be “in ordinary” in naval language) to be used as a store ship—or even a prison ship, like these, in Portsmouth harbor.

Here’s the Unicorn—

You can find out more about it at its website: www.frigateunicorn.org

There is one more frigate, one we have mentioned briefly in an earlier post. It is not an original, but a very impressive reproduction, the French frigate L’Hermione.

For an English-language website on this very impressive ship, see: www.hermione2015.com.

We hope that you’ve enjoyed this post. Within the next week or so, we expect to have the first novel in our series, Across the Doubtful Sea published on Amazon/Kindle. If you find our posts interesting, we hope that you find our novel even more so!

As always, thanks for reading.

MTCIDC

Research

09 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by Ollamh in Narrative Methods, Research, Terra Australis, Writing as Collaborators

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Exploration, Fiction, French Navy, History, Napoleonic, Research, Royal Navy, Sea, South Pacific, Terra Australis, Warship, Writing

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always.

In this post, we want to talk a little about research. We’ve already shown you bits and pieces of what the world of Terra Australis and its peoples look like to us—and we hope to you– but we want to add a bit about some of our sources.

As we’ve said in an earlier blog, the idea of setting our Doubtful Sea series mainly in the Calm Sea (Pacific in our world) and on Terra Australis (which only exists as the forbidding Antarctica for us), was just a lark, a spur of the moment thing. We had already known a little about the French admiral and Pacific explorer, de Bougainville. Most of what we knew about him, however, came from his early career as an aide de camp to the Marquis de Montcalm, the commander of French regular troops in New France during the bulk of the French and Indian War (1756-59). (He left behind journals of that time, which have been published in English as Adventure in the Wilderness, translated by Edward P. Hamilton and published by the University of Oklahoma Press.)

And we were aware of Captain Cook, who was also involved in that war and even must have sat across the St. Lawrence River from de Bougainville at the siege of Quebec, in 1759, although neither would have been aware of the other at the time.

So what then? Lots of conversation first, based upon nothing more than our imaginations. Who would our characters be? Where would our characters go? What might happen to them?

As we talked, we began to see that, now that we had a very general idea of the beginnings of a book—and, soon, a series– we needed to know more—lots more. And here was where our plan to base our new, alternative world on the actual later 18^th century of the actual world quite easily supplied a great deal of useful knowledge. We embarked upon a period of research even as we began to write a draft of the first chapters.

Because we knew so little, our questions to ourselves could have seemed as endless as the Pacific to those first explorers, but we quickly found that they could easily be grouped into a small series of main categories:

18^th-century European Pacific exploration
the French and English navies of the time
the history of Polynesian exploration and colonization of the Pacific
Terra Australis/Antarctica
languages/cultures as models for Pacific protagonists/antagonists

And this research quickly proved helpful in two directions. First, it began to answer our questions about the 5 categories. Second, the answers would inspire us, not only to ask further questions, but to further creativity.

It was important, however, to feel a certain wariness about research. One of us, some years ago, began work on a novel, called Swallows Wintering, set during the American Revolution. Chapters were written, and things seemed to be humming along, but then there was a question and everything stopped for more research. And more research. And then everything stopped for good. Insecurity triumphed, perhaps? A lack of conviction disguised as a need for further sources and greater “authenticity”? (And here we might want to consider just how much “authenticity”—maybe “accuracy to the time” would be a better way of saying this—one needs even in an historical novel. You don’t want to have an Elizabethan using safety matches, as we once read in a mystery set in the late 16^th century, but, perhaps it’s possible to suggest a period without being slavish about it? This is, we think, worthy of a long essay on its own!)

With that previous experience in mind, perhaps it was just as well that we decided not to write an actual historical novel, although we can certainly see that there are lots of possibilities there (we might cite our ancestor-collaborators, Nordhoff/Hall, and their series on the Bounty mutiny and its consequences, for an example). By making this an alternative world, we could use whatever we liked from our world, but never feel quite so bound as one might in a work of historical fiction.

We are both very visual people (and, we suspect, so is our audience), so, as we wrote and assembled a little library of what appeared useful books, we really began by spending hours on Google images. We searched for everything from “Antarctica” to “Versailles”, from “catamaran” to “frigate”, from “Cape Horn” to “Captain Cook” and much more besides, gathering several hundred illustrations, a few of which have appeared in our previous blog entries. (And one of which will appear, thanks to the good folk of the National Maritime Museum in London, on the cover of Across the Doubtful Sea in just a week or two.)

As well, we extended our on-line research to include articles on Polynesian and Inuit history and languages and cultures, the religions of the Pacific, the writing system of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), along with material on real Pacific explorers like La Perouse and Wallis, and the bibliographies attached to those pieces gave us more ideas for further research. (We are aware, of course, of the danger of unsubstantiated or even wrong material on the internet, but, because we were—and are—engaged in work s of alternative- world fiction, rather than historical scholarship or even historical fiction, this was not an active concern.)

In our own reading, we very much enjoy learning about earlier authors and how they wrote their books. And so, in these posts, we want to provide you, our readers, with information which, before you read our first book, we hope will entice you to do so and, after you’ve read it, will help you to see something of how we wrote it.

We intend, after Across the Doubtful Sea appears, to include a complete bibliography—including a list of websites and their addresses we found useful or just too interesting not to read (and everyone who surfs the web knows the dangers of this)—in our blog, but, for now, here are a few books we found particularly stimulating/useful. As we said in an earlier post, we experienced some difficulty in our research, owing to the period in which we were working, the 1750s to about 1790. There was plenty of material for the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1793-1815, but much less easily available for this earlier time. Our advantage in alternative writing, however, stood us in good stead here: we didn’t feel that we had to be accurate down to the last fact, and we could use what we learned from this slightly later time to flesh out what we could discover of the earlier time. So, for example, the Osprey books on Napoleonic naval wars—books like Terry Crowdy’s French Warship Crews 1789-1805, or Gregory Fremont-Barnes’ Nelson’s Officers and Midshipmen and Nelson’s Sailors, or Chris Henry’s Napoleonic Naval Armaments 1792-1815–proved very helpful in getting a general sense of life on board the warships of that world. We would add, from a Time/Life series, Henry Gruppe’s The Frigates, as well as books like Iain Dickie et al., Fighting Techniques of Naval Warfare 1190BC to the Present, Nicholas Blake and Richard Lawrence’s The Illustrated Companion to Nelson’s Navy, and Brian Lavery’s Nelson’s Navy.

As for Pacific exploration, an easy read is Alistair MacLean’s Captain Cook (with Peter Beaglehole’s more scholarly work for those who want to learn more). For two different views of its consequences for the native cultures and peoples , we would recommend Alan Moorehead’s The Fatal Impact: The Invasion of the South Pacific 1767-1840 and Bernard Smith’s European Vision and the South Pacific. For a more general view, we would add the relevant portions of Erik Newby’s The Rand McNally World Atlas of Exploration.

This has been a long entry, and we never intend to overwhelm our readers, so we’ll end here for the present, with promise of more, both on books and on websites, in our next.

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

doubtfulsea

~ adventure fantasy

Tag Archives: History

The Road (No Longer) Taken

Knowledge, Rule, Order

The Man Who Was Killed

Tracking

Terra (Increasingly) Cognita

A Forward– at the End

It’s Out! On Kindle!

Sequels and Prequels

Frigates

Research