Food for Thought

20 Wednesday May 2015

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

Tags

Eating, Gollum, Isengard, Lembas, Longbottom Leaf, Lorien, Man-Meat, Mordor, Orc, Rivendell, Rohan, Saruman, Sauron, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien

Dear Readers,

Welcome!

In this posting, we’re continuing our discussion of villains, specifically in Tolkien, but, for a change, we mention the good guys, as well.

We begin with a wail by Gollum, when assured by Frodo that, if there’s no other way to go, he will enter Mordor by the Morannon, the Black Gate.

“No use that way! No use! Don’t take the Precious to Him! He’ll eat us all, if he gets it, eat all the world!” L637

It’s not surprising that Gollum would express his fear in such terms—after all, in his first appearance in The Hobbit, his first words were

“Bless us and splash us, my precioussss! I guess it’s a choice feast, at least a tasty morsel it’d make us, gollum!”

And this from a creature who appears ready to consume anything living, as the narrator says of him:

“He was looking out of his pale lamp-like eyes for blind fish, which he grabbed with his long fingers as quick as thinking. He liked meat too. Goblin he thought good, when he could get it…”

What were goblins in The Hobbit have become the Orcs in The Lord of the Rings and Gollum would still be interested in them, but now we’re told what they eat—and drink.

“Ugluk thrust a flask between his teeth and poured some burning liquid down his throat: he felt a hot fierce glow flow through him. The pain in his legs and ankles vanished. He could stand.”

“An Orc stooped over him, and flung him some bread and a strip of raw dried flesh. He ate the stale grey bread hungrily, but not the meat. He was famished, but not yet so famished as to eat flesh flung to him by an Orc, the flesh of he dared not guess what creature.”

“”We are the servants of Saruman the Wise, the White Hand: the Hand which gives us man’s –flesh to eat.”

To judge by what Merry and Pippin find when they come to Isengard, Saruman certainly didn’t stint himself, including casks of Longbottom Leaf from the Shire.

And here is a glaring contrast between the two sides in The Lord of the Rings, and it has to do with plenty and enjoyment. Saruman seems to have all the wealth in the world, but always wants more, and what he has does not appear to be shared out equally. Sauron, Gollum says, wants to eat the world, but would he ever be full?

Contrast the traveling supplies of the orcs as you see them above in our text with lembas

As the elves describe it, “…it is more strengthening than any food made by Men, and it is more pleasant than cram, by all accounts.” To which Gimli agrees enthusiastically, “Why, it is better than the honey-cakes of the Beornings, and that is great praise, for the Beornings are the best bakers that I know of…”

Only contrast the look of West and East to see the difference. Here is what the plains of Rohan must look like:

And here is an artist’s rendering of Mordor:

It’s a striking difference topographically, but the difference is even greater in terms of behavior. Isengard is a fortress and a factory, a little Mordor set against the greater Mordor to the east. It can also be a prison, as Gandalf finds out. In contrast, think of the welcome in Rivendell

and Lorien

The West doesn’t plan to eat the world, instead, it lives in a fruitful land, which it makes more fruitful, and it offers this in hospitality to those who come in peace.

This is what is really at stake in The Lord of the Rings, that sense of bounty, generosity, and pleasure, which it must defend from what would eat all the world.

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

Thanks for reading,

MTCIDC,

Personae

15 Friday May 2015

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

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Alan Lee, Antagonists, Bosch, Bruegel, Christina Rossetti, Corsairs, Easterlings, Gorbag, Gruenewald, Haradrim, Minions, Nazgul, Orc, Sauron, Shagrat, The Wind, Tolkien

A man is known by the company he keeps.

Old Proverb

Who Has Seen the Wind?

Who has seen the wind?

Neither I nor you:

But when the leaves hang trembling,

The wind is passing through.

Who has seen the wind?

Neither you nor I:

But when the trees bow down their heads,

The wind is passing by.

Christina Rossetti from Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872)

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always!

In our last posting, we talked about villains visible and invisible and suggested that, in the case of Sauron, rather than showing him as a searchlight eye,

(This is from the LOTR Project— a great site, much recommended).

there were other and more potentially convincing ways to depict such a menacing figure.

One was seeing his reflection in his minions.

(Can you wait for this?)

Imagine that seeing him this way is like seeing the effect a strong wind has on trees.

Sauron’s minions fall into three main categories: the Nazgul, various humans, most from what appear to be the less-civilized peoples of the south—Corsairs of Umbar, Easterlings, and the Haradrim.

The Nazgul

are the most daunting, but we’re told only a limited amount about them, we see them very selectively, and their speech is recorded mainly as threats. We see the humans even less and we really don’t hear them at all. It’s the Orcs of whom we’re shown the most.

Sauron is described as once being “comely”, but his present condition (except perhaps for his eyes—make that eye) is hard to determine. Tolkien could never quite settle on the origin of the Orcs, but, they are definitely less than attractive.

Illustrators of Orcs tend, we think, to be strongly influenced by early-Renaissance northern German painters, like Bosch, who depicted devils and demons as hybrids between humans and birds and animals.

This does not, however, seem to be in line with Tolkien’s thinking. If as Fangorn says, they were created as a mockery of elves, one would presume that they would be much more human in look, but perhaps with exaggerated features, and this seems to be closer to what Tolkien had in mind, although physical description tends to be less detailed.

Here’s an Alan Lee which we think is more like what Tolkien imagined.

If they are northern Orcs—those whom Sauron employs—they tend to be smaller and paler. If Uruk-hai, primarily used by Saruman, larger and black. (Although a tracker for Sauron is described as small and black.) Here’s the contrast of the two types in the confrontation between Ugluk and Grishnakh:

“…a large black Orc, probably Ugluk, standing facing Grishnakh, a short crook-legged creature very broad and with long arms that hung almost to the ground.”

As Orcs may be a mockery of Elves, their speech sounds like it’s derived from the conversations Tolkien heard among his nco’s in the trenches—foul-mouthed (in a modified form), cheerfully abusive, and full of casual threats.

It’s also instructive to note that there appear to be no Orcs in command positions beyond captain—the rank of Ugluk and Grishnakh, Gorbag and Shagrat. Beyond are the Nazgul, whom the Orcs both dread and envy. (“Those Nazgul give me the creeps…But He likes ‘em; they’re His favorites nowadays, so it’s no use grumbling.”) When we hear these Orcs talk, then, we are being given the mass of Sauron’s soldiery, as below them there is only a babel of cries, cheers, and curses, like a translation of the baying of a pack of hounds.

Throughout all of the Orc conversation, there runs a joint theme: criticism of superiors (no names—but even up to Sauron himself) and fear of being heard doing so, as when Gorbag says:

“They don’t tell us all they know, do they? Not by half. But they can make mistakes, even the Top Ones can.” “Sh, Gorbag!” Shagrat’s voice was lowered, so that even with his strangely sharpened hearing could only just catch what was said. “They may, but they’ve got eyes and ears everywhere; some among my lot, as like as not…”

This suggestion of internal spies reflects a basic uneasiness to be found everywhere under Sauron’s rule: no one trusts anyone else at any level in what Frodo calls “the spirit of Mordor”, leading to murder between rival bands of Orcs and even between individuals, as Sam and Frodo witness, when soldier and tracker trade threats and insults before tracker kills soldier with an arrow.

So what do Sauron’s minions mirror, which would provide us with any clearer image of the nearly-invisible villain?

Certainly, we might see that he is incapable of gaining any kind of following at all among the dominant peoples of western Middle Earth. First, his armies are led by the ancient undead, who frighten their own side as much as they do the enemy. Second, his human recruits are half-civilized people from the far south, plunderers, with no stake in things beyond gain. Third, the bulk of his armies are made up of creatures who are, in a sense, not genuine, but simply mockeries of actual living beings and whose loyalty to their maker is, at best, questionable, even as they fear him.

Thus, we might imagine that, for all that he is powerful enough to command magic ghosts and armies of primitive men and mutants, Sauron is, ultimately, fearful, suspicious, and divisive and so transparently a source of instability that he can neither convince nor menace any of the free peoples of Middle Earth into having anything to do with him.

So, as always, we end by asking you, dear readers, what you think? And, as always, we thank you for reading.

MTCIDC

Now You Don’t See Me, Now You Don’t

07 Thursday May 2015

Posted by Ollamh in J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods, Villains

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1984, Antagonists, Big Brother, Hobbits, Invisible, Palantir, Paradise Lost, Prince Valiant, Ramayana, Ravana, Saruman, Sauron, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Villains, Visible

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always.

Imagine this—and we’re sure it’s happened to you. You’re working, somewhere by yourself, maybe downstairs. It’s late. Very. Everyone else is long asleep. And you suddenly, for no easy reason, look up. It’s nothing. Nothing…visible. Is it something you heard, then? But what? Is it even a sound—and certainly not something distinctive, like things in old horror movies—chains, groans, thumping footsteps from overhead—but maybe something very quiet—almost nothing more than the disturbance of familiar patterns like appliance hums. In fact, maybe it’s the silence under the familiar patterns which magnifies it. No matter what it is, it’s there. And, at the moment you actively take notice, the creepy feeling catches hold, and you sit, listening ever more intently. (Holding your breath is optional, but a popular choice for times like this.)

Recently, we wrote about two kinds of villains, those we called “open-ended” and those we called “terminal”. Another classification which might spring from that eerie feeling described above: villains visible and villains invisible.

Let’s return for a moment to that not-so-quiet place where your work was disturbed by…what? If you were a small child, perhaps it would be easy to give it shape from a fairy tale book you’d read, or a movie you’d seen. One of us, for example, was haunted in far childhood by a Hal Foster Prince Valiant illustration in which Prince Valiant has been drugged by Morgan le Fay. Every night, creatures like those in the picture would creep out of the eaves doors at the far end of the room and clutch at the bottom of the bed…

As we’re adults (sort of), however, do we necessarily embody whatever it is at such moments? And there’s that second question: do we want to? For all that we may be creeped out, is there some odd, perverse pleasure in being creeped out? Certainly those who make horror movies think so! But is there a difference between seeing what scares you and only feeling it?

With that in mind, suppose that you’re not you, spooking yourself (yes, pun intended) late at night in your living room, but Tolkien constructing a long and complex combination of myth and adventure. You’ve got a wide assortment of protagonists, beginning with some of those beings you created in an earlier story, Hobbits.

What about villains, antagonists? As we’ve discussed in a previous posting, they are necessary to provide friction, that resistance which pushes against the heroes and creates the motion which is a plot.

Commonly, such a figure is visible, like Lucifer, in Paradise Lost.

Or he’s very visible, like Ravana in the Ramayana, with his ten heads.

For us, however, this is to risk circumscribing the villain, his visible body suggesting his visible limits. After all, it was a Sauron with hands who lost the Ring to a sword blade. To have a body, then, is to be vulnerable (literally, in the case above) and, more perhaps more important, in terms of story, more predictable, more bound by conventions.

You (as JRRT) create Sauron, then, who once had a body, but now you make him nearly disembodied, being represented physically as a single, fiery eye.

This gives the effect of a brooding, ever-watchful presence, a bit like all of those posters in 1984’s London of Big Brother.

This presence can be captured in the text in all sorts of ways, both direct and indirect. You have only to look up “Sauron” in the index to The Lord of the Rings to understand this: “Dark Lord, Enemy, Black One, Black Hand, Black Master, Base Master of Treachery, Dark Power, dark hands of the East, Nameless One, etc.”

A brooding presence, however, is a real challenge for anyone trying to transfer The Lord of the Rings to the screen, which is why, after the previous defeat of Sauron, in which he appears as a huge being in black armor, he is reduced to that eye, sometimes captured in a palantir

Or Galadriel’s mirror, though, more often, as Sam and Frodo come closer to their goal, as the equivalent of a tower-mounted searchlight.

Film and fiction are different media, with different needs and tools to satisfy those needs, as the script writers never tire of explaining to us. In our opinion, however, this extremely literal depiction so strongly smacks of old black-and-white prison escape films,

that we wish that those script writers could have left the Dark Lord offstage entirely, if this is the best they could do.

With our feeling that an bodyless villain might be more powerful here than an incarnated one—remember feeling spooked at night by a subtle change in the ambience?—we would wish that the writers had been a bit more imaginative—and had read their author a little more closely. After all, he had plenty of good ideas about how to depict villains. And it is perhaps a sad commentary on their work that, increasingly, in their years of using JRRT, they abandoned him, choosing, instead, to bloat his story and turn it in directions he clearly never intended. Why not, for example, do as Tolkien did and mirror the villain not only in that long list of titles, but also in the actions and words both of his subordinates and his opponents? Would this have worked? Perhaps a reference to the amount of time “You Know Who” appears on-screen in the first Harry Potter movie in contrast to how often he is mentioned would suggest how this might have worked.

As for villainous subordinates and their actions, we’ll have more to say about them in our next.

Thanks, as always, for reading. Remember: we want to encourage discussion and debate. If you agree with us, say so. If you don’t, say so and we can have fun working through our views.

MTCIDC

JRRT: Editorial Comment

22 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by Ollamh in J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Andrew Lang, de Montesquieu, Hawthorne, Hobbit, Persian Letters, The Lord of the Rings, The Scarlet Letter, Tolkien, William Morris

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always. We had intended to go on with our discussion of villains, which looks like it will form a series, but we were distracted for a moment by the following– so more on villains to come.

“This book is largely concerned with Hobbits, and from its pages, a reader may discover much of their character and a little of their history. Further information will also be found in the selection from The Red Book of Westmarch, that has already been published, under the title of The Hobbit.”

So begins The Lord of the Rings, a novel. But a novel which pretends not to be a novel at all, but, rather, an edited version of a true history of someplace and sometime else: Middle-earth, the Third Age.

It’s hardly a new ploy, to pretend to be only presenting something already written by others. Often, it’s done to deflect attention from the sensitive matter within the novel: de Montesquieu’s criticism of France in Persian Letters or Hawthorne’s use of the theme of adultery in The Scarlet Letter.

The adventures in The Lord of the Rings, or, for that matter, The Hobbit, are hardly controversial, however, so why go through this pretense, we wondered?

As we thought about and discussed this, we came up with a whole series of possible reasons– and none of them necessarily excludes any of the others.

First, and perhaps most obvious, was that being an editor and translator formed a major part of what JRRT did in his academic life. What would seem more natural?

Second, he lived in the academic world of Oxford, among academic friends, who formed a large part of his initial readership, and who themselves could be editors and translators.

Third, based in part on one and two above, it fits into Tolkien’s and the Inklings’ desire to produce more of what they liked to read: an adventure, but in the guise of a “scholarly” work, yet one wholly invented.

Fourth, unlike real scholarly work, this one was not bound– and never would be– by the limits of available knowledge. There is only one Beowulf manuscript, after all. Because the only bounds placed upon the “research” for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were the limits of the author’s imagination, this material was, potentially, endless, and every point within could be infinitely expanded, as we see in the twelve volume edited by Christopher Tolkien. One might imagine that JRRT, frustrated at how little Old English verse there was, felt enormously freed– and, should there be criticism, well, at one level at least, he had no need to respond, not being the author.

This leads, in turn, to a less comfortable idea: suppose JRRT wasn’t completely at ease with his own creation. After all, he was a professor who was spending a great deal of his time and energy fabricating a fictional world rather than doing research and writing about literary/linguistic activities in the actual world of academia. Could this have been a kind of subconscious defense– I am doing scholarship– see?

And then there’s reason five, which one might see as informing, at some level, all of the others. JRRT had been drawn, from childhood, towards stories from Lang’s Fairy Books through the prose and poetry of William Morris. He was also an active literary scholar. By playing editor and creating a second scholarly shell around the primary adventure, he could neatly combine the two halves of his life into one and, in the process, produce works which please reader and scholar alike– and combined.

As always, we ask for your opinion.

Thanks for reading!

MTCIDC,

Sites and Vision

25 Wednesday Mar 2015

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

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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

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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

Magic or Growth?

25 Wednesday Feb 2015

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

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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,

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.

doubtfulsea

~ adventure fantasy

Tag Archives: Tolkien

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