Well, MEFA results are trickling in to authors with the final list of winners forthcoming. Celebration already pervades, both of individual results and of the accomplishments of the MEFA staff in another smooth-going and fun season. Fun for most, that is. Because for every cheer and every lifted glass of virtual champagne, there is an inevitable iota of bitterness from those who feel neglected and/or overlooked. Some will speak of it but many more, I suspect, will put on a smile and swallow their hurt. Nonetheless, there it is.

My ambivalence toward awards has been discussed before. Clearly, I have come to terms with my own participation in the MEFAs since I have participated as an author, reviewer, nominator, and volunteer at various times in the past four seasons. But my ambivalence remains. How so? For me, nomination in the MEFAs is the award. A nominator has the chance to choose her or his twenty favorite stories for the year and chose one of mine; that is really high praise to me. The reviews only sweeten the deal. By the time the actual winners are announced, my emotion towards it is largely one of curiosity. In the end, though, no matter how well they’re matched in categorization, I don’t believe that you can judge one work of art against another. That my story about Maedhros was somehow deemed better than her story about Elrond but not quite as good as his novella about Gil-galad really doesn’t say a whole lot. It may well be that the majority of readers did agree with that arrangement but it may well be that the next batch of readers will disagree completely, to say nothing of the myriad factors that influence votes and have nothing to do with the readers’ actual preference for one story over another. (Like I have time to read one of the three and pick the shortest or the one about Elrond because I like him more than the other two characters.)

I don’t say this to diminish the satisfaction or pride of this year’s (or any year’s) winners. The meaning I attach to the awards is mine alone and surely not the only–much less correct–way to look at things. It comes back to that ambivalence: The fact that some people will inevitably walk away from the whole experience with a decreased sense of enjoyment in this community, a lessened view of their work, or a diminishment in desire to be involved in future events (not just the MEFAs). And while I know that is not the intention or even necessarily the dominant experience, it exists, and it makes me wonder, not for the first time, what role awards should have in art.

I don’t write this because I have answers. I have been wrestling with this question since my first exposure to the MEFAs came through a fandom friend who, despite several nominations, did not receive a single award and was hurt by that. And seeing similar experiences every year after. I have been wrestling with this question since deciding to participate as an author and reviewer, then a nominator, then a volunteer. I think I might be even further now than I was then from finding an answer, if such an answer can even exist. Part of me thinks that those who end up bitter just have the wrong outlook. Part of me thinks that works of art should never be pitted against each other; that that misses the point. Part of me thinks that the collateral benefits of recognizing our favorite stories each year and creating an easy means to find new authors make the enterprise, in itself, worthwhile. Then part of me replies that we don’t need awards to do that.

I can only congratulate again those who were nominated this year, thank those who wrote reviews and administrated the awards, and remain ambivalent.

Filed under: Fandom and Online Life, Personal Musings by Dawn
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XXFactor has a post today about the persistent sexism in “geek culture,” which this particular writer identifies as the tech industry. Now I’m not part of the tech industry–unless fumbling through the occasional SQL query in MS Access counts–but I do count myself as part of varying facets of “geek culture” and wonder if the sexism that Ms. Marcotte laments in the tech industry shows up in other realms of geekdom as well.

The post scathes tech companies (like Yahoo!) that continue to engage in behaviors and practices unfriendly to women, such as having strippers at trade shows, which to the writer “implies that there are no women in the audience [and] certainly sends the message that the tech world is the He-Man Woman-Haters Club.” What about other facets of geek culture? Do you, HL readers and most trusted fellow citizens of geekdom, think that males that identify as “geeks” tend to be more overtly sexist than those who do not?

I’m a woman so, of course, I’ve experienced sexism in its myriad forms. For example, at work (in a male-dominated profession), I often feel that I have to stand on my desk and jump up and down and scream in order to get my (male) supervisors to hear my thoughts and ideas on policies relating to my job, policies that often involve knowledge or skills that only I possess. (Fancy that!) And when I worked in the same office as my (male) supervisors, I got mistaken for the secretary an awful lot. But I’ve been lucky that workplace outings have never taken place on The Block, I’ve never been sexually harassed at work, and if my coworkers make off-color jokes and remarks about women, then they do it well out of my earreach. Good thing too.

But now geek culture … I am, of course, part of the Tolkien writing fandom, which is predominantly female, and I’m not going to go into whether sexism/misogynism exists in that community … not in this post anyway. And I’m in the SCA, which is a pretty equal mix of men and women. I’ve had a few SCAdians make comments about my looks, but they were always people I knew well enough to know that they meant them playfully and not offensively, and they knew me well enough to know that I would take them as such. Fair enough.

I also spent a few years as part of the subculture surrounding a popular tabletop game that shall go unnamed. I built and painted models while my husband and friends played the game. It was not uncommon to walk into the small store where we played to find it packed with twenty or thirty people and yet be the only woman in the store. (A few moms and wives would drift in and out but, in my years there, I knew only one other woman who participated as actively as I did.) I used to tell my husband that I sometimes felt, walking into the store, like half the heads would pop up from the tables, noses would start twitching, and the guys would begin gleefully muttering, “Estrogen! We smell estrogen!”

The gaming models primarily represented men, but when women were depicted, they were always buxom to the extent that hauling around that much extra boobage would make walking difficult, much less weilding a sword and exacting fancy fighting manuevers, and they were usually scantily clad or–in a few instances–unclad entirely from the waist up. Needless to say, we few female participants didn’t get the same eye candy from the gaming models that depicted men.

What of behavior? Well, possibly the most blatantly offensive act of sexism I’ve yet faced occurred in that store while I was working on a painting project. I was minding my own business, working on my current project with a few other guys at the table with me. I was wearing a knee-length dress with a halter-type top that tied behind my neck. At one point, I realized that one of my table-mates was crawling under the table. Thinking that perhaps he’d dropped something down there, I looked underneath the table at him and realized that he was trying to look up my dress. Spurred on by his behavior, the fellow beside me took the opportunity to reach behind me and try to untie the halter top to my dress.

I don’t believe that these guys were trying to frighten me much less assault me; they thought that they were being funny or perhaps paying me a compliment. That didn’t make it right, and when one of my friends who was a store employee later heard about it, he was livid. He was much angrier than I was. Interacting with most of the participants in this particular game always felt like instructing young children in the proper ways to behave in public. The two incidents that afternoon were much the same: No, guys, it is not okay to behave that way toward a woman. Even if she is your friend. Even if you’re just playing around. If you like how I look, telling me that my dress is pretty or that I look nice in it it is a much more effective and civil compliment than trying to take it off of me.

I don’t know if it ever sunk in. My husband and I both grew frustrated with that particular community in a large part because of the rampant immaturity and asocial behavior, and we no longer participate. I still have a closet full of models that I would like to paint someday, but then illumination scratches that part of my brain that demands fine motor skills just as well. I might live out my life quite happily with a bucketful of unassembled Elves in the closet in my study and my old paints mainly serving to provide convenient pop-top containers for gold-leaf sizing.

But when I read that post today, my years with this group came back. And I wondered how typical my own experiences (and, apparently, those of female employees for some of these companies) really were. Anyone have thoughts, insights, or anecdotes on this? How do other predominantly male geek communities treat female participants? What do you think is behind this tendency, if it exists?

Filed under: Fandom and Online Life, Personal Musings by Dawn
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One theory of fantasy literature that has always appealed to me is the idea that because fantasy fiction permits stories to occur at a remove from what we understand as “reality,” then fantasy literature can begin to heal inequities that continue to plague the real world and, therefore, must be present in any literature representing that world. From a feminist perspective, female characters in fantasy fiction need not be bound by or defined by gender discrimination, stereotypes, or misogynism, all of which have peppered our human history and continue to manifest, at least to a degree, even today. Fantasy literature, then, is the perfect medium for asking questions about women’s potential and influence on the world; the perfect medium to show strong female characters untainted by gender bias.

The premise of LeGuin’s Lavinia is to depict events from Virgil’s Aeneid from the point of view of Aeneas’s wife, Lavinia. Lavinia is named in the original poem but she doesn’t speak a single line; LeGuin has given her not only a voice but regard worthy of being the point-of-view character.

Lavinia, then, is a perfect model of how fantasy literature can give life and strength to the women that it depicts. Because it concerns an ancient culture of our world, Lavinia is, of course, bound more by reality than fantasy novels that occur at a complete remove from our own world.  LeGuin is bound somewhat by what is known of early Latin history and by the “canon” of the Aeneid. That she takes liberties in breaking with both, when the story (or Lavinia herself) demands it, makes me think of the novel more as fantasy rather than historical fiction, though it is flavored by both.

I would love to say that I was delighted with Lavinia, that I couldn’t put it down, that it represents a zenith of feminist fantasy fiction. Honestly, though, there were times when I was more overcome with my disappointment with the book, when I couldn’t help but to regard it as opportunity squandered. As I finished the novel today and thought on it more while in the comfortably silent company of my herbs and vegetable plants, though, I realized that it is still an important novel, if even if did fall shy of the mark in many regards.

Lavinia is a relatively short book for the subject and time period that it covers. The hardcover Harcourt edition that I borrowed from the library checks in at 279 pages, including LeGuin’s afterword. Typical for LeGuin, there were passages wrought with breathtaking skill and the introspection was beautifully handled and never ponderous; her characters achieve a delicate elevation in worth yet remain grounded, believable as human beings. The short length of the novel should, one would think, make for an intense plot, but the opposite often seemed to be the case. I found myself baffled as page after page was spent summarizing action going on off-screen: battles fought and treaties made, harvests brought in and journeys embarked upon; LeGuin opens the novel with a map, but we are privileged to see inside only three of its cities, although many more are discussed. Surely LeGuin, I thought, who is quite possibly the greatest living fantasist, doesn’t need to be told that cardinal rule of writing: show don’t tell. Yet so much of the novel does show, through second- and third-hand news coming to Lavinia, what is happening in the world that the plot drags and I found myself sighing with relief for an clip of dialogue to relieve the endless parade of off-screen places and people.

The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that this was less a failure of plotting and more a failing of point-of-view. The novel is told from Lavinia’s point of view, so we see what she sees. And she is a woman in ancient Latium; she does not go to battle or even leave her home city for more than a few days at a time, being as her sacred duty is the upkeep of her household. Although a handful of scenes in a dream world where Lavinia converses with “her poet” Virgil give more intimate insights into the world beyond her own, we as readers are largely confined to the “women’s side” right alongside Lavinia, at most getting a glimpse of battle from a rooftop.

Of course, this doesn’t make those sections of the book any more effective because they are hampered by PoV rather than poor plotting. But it does, I think, reveal something interesting about literature in general and about us as readers and the expectations that we bring to stories.

Here is a question worth considering: Why must we hear about the battles at all? We are in a woman’s PoV, and if she does not ride out to battle, then why should battles (and other political maneuvers) be given anything more than cursory attention? Well, of course, the canon demands it; the Aeneid discusses those battles and events and so they form the fictional backdrop for LeGuin’s story as well. Is it possible, too, that we’ve come to expect it? That we’ve come to regard those battles and political maneuvers–the work of men, not women, in ancient Latium–as the meat of such a story? In fact, Lavinia is surprisingly devoid of details about Lavinia’s life and work as a woman in her world. While we do learn of her religious rituals and her expectations (and fears) concerning the life she faces and her political role and her stewardship of the household, I couldn’t help but to wish that more of those passages devoted to summarizing the doings of men outside of Lavinia’s sphere could have been devoted to her life instead.

But, of course, this puts LeGuin in a difficult situation. Lavinia’s character is knowledgeable about the world around her; she is trusted worthy of learning and contributing to both her father and husband’s reigns, and so the focus on the work of men like her father and her husband also proves her competence, her abilities beyond being a good wife, mother, and housekeeper. But, here, we fall into the trap of defining worthiness from a masculine perspective. Why should Lavinia’s work for her household and her people be any less worthy? I felt like LeGuin was seesawing between wanting to show Lavinia as possessing traditional competence–knowledge of the world around her, of politics, of how to get what she wanted from other people–and wanting to show the feminine contributions to that sort of life. In the latter regard, LeGuin did a good job of showing how the women in Latium were often the silent, unacknowledged backbone of the Latin people: those who provided comfort, healing, sustenance, and foresight enough to see beyond a single day’s battle to the deeper future. I just wish that there could have been more of it, and that LeGuin could have embraced tighter the worth of Lavinia’s contributions in these areas rather than attempting to define her competence in masculine terms.

Still, this represents also a shortcoming of our own perceptions concerning competence and worth. We’ve still not reached the point where “the work of small hands” (to borrow the title of one of my own stories that attempted to show how the quiet, unacknowledged influence of a woman saved her people) is appreciated the way that prowess in battle and agility in politics are. In a way, this conundrum parallels closely a conversation between Aeneas and his war-mongering son Ascanius:

“If you are to rule Latium after me … I want to know that you’ll learn how to govern, not merely to make war, that you’ll learn to ask the powers of the earth and sky for guidance for yourself and your people, that you’ll learn to seek your manhood on a greater field than the battlefield. Tell me that you will learn those things, Ascanius.”

This wisdom, gentle guidance, and piety are feminine traits: They are Lavinia. If only the story could have honed closer to Aeneas’s own ideals for his kingship and that of his son, they too could have been Lavinia.

But, as noted, these are hurdles that we are only learning to overcome in trying to depict strong women and show positively femininity in a world that traditionally has and a society that continues to view those traits as signs of weakness. I applaud LeGuin for aiming high in her novel and making a strong attempt to accomplish these goals and, at times, doing so. I give Lavinia 2.75 E.L. Fudge “Elves Exist” cookies out four.

Filed under: Book Reviews, Literature by Dawn
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I am opening this post for any and all who are interested in continuing the slash discussion from LotR Genfic. This discussion has been moved offlist since the list is a gen group and the discussion was starting to touch on issues that don’t necessarily belong on a family-friendly group. So that we could keep to the expectations of that group but also speak freely on more “adult” topics, I’ve opened up a thread here for discussion for any who wish to participate.

All thoughts and opinions are welcome. The only rule I have for this place is that I ask that people remain civil to each other. It is one thing to disagree with a point or idea and quite another to attack a the person expressing it. The first is okay; the second is not.

Finally, although this is a continuation of the LotR Genfic discussion, and although I am the webmaster of the Many Paths to Tread archive, my website is affiliated with neither, and this discussion is occurring independently of the list on which it originated. So, if you find yourself annoyed or angered by the conversation here, please don’t take it out on either of those groups.

My door, however, is always open to questions or concerns at DawnFelagund@gmail.com.

For those of you on the LotR Genfic list, you can find the original discussion thread here.

Filed under: Fandom and Online Life, Tolkien by Dawn
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***SPOILERS AHEAD!***
I am not going to shy from discussing details and outcomes of the plot when they are relevant to the points I am discussing here. So if you want to go into the movie without knowing the details of how it will turn out, get thee to the theater and then come back to this post.

I saw the first preview for 9 before the excellent Coraline earlier this year. (Read my review of Coraline here.) The basic premise of the movie intrigued me from the outset. In a post-apocalyptic world, the only remains of humanity come in the shape of small robotic dolls created by a scientist before his demise. These little burlap-clad characters, known only by the numbers inked onto their backs, are left to navigate a hostile world dominated by intelligent machines.

I have been looking forward to 9 all summer, and I finally got to see it on Saturday. It is a bit outside my usual discussion of literature that goes on here at The Heretic Loremaster, but the movie was intriguing and, to my mind, the definition of speculative fiction, so here we go.

In some arenas, it did not disappoint. Like Coraline, despite the fact that it is an animated feature, 9 is really not a movie for kids. (Although, just as when we saw Coraline, there were a handful of tykes at 9 was well. It makes me wonder if their parents even bothered to look at a preview or just saw “Animation!” and went with it.) Aside from its bleak post-war setting, its sentient machines are often annihilated in–if they possessed flesh and blood–extremely gruesome ways. They are hacked to pieces in large propellers and crushed to “death” by giant cogs. Worst of all is the soul-sucking and unoriginally named Machine, which vacuums the life force from our little burlap-clad protagnonists and leaves them empty-eyed, slack-mouthed shells, their “spirits” abandoned and gazing confusedly around themselves before being dissipated to smithereens.

But despite its darkly detailed landscape and shudder-inducing horror, 9 falls into an unfortunate trap. In order for the viewer to care about the horrors being enacted on the little burlap people, they needed to come to life a lot more. Unfortunately, 9 is dogged somewhat by its storyline, which requires that the characters function as archetypes rather than people and fall flat as a result.

As the movie chugs along, we are made privy to the backstory that leaves the world devoid of life save sentient machines. Returning to the First Room–the room where he awoke–our hero 9 discovers how he and his eight compatriots came into being. The benevolent scientist-creator who engendered them bestowed to each a portion of his personality. Therefore, we get the cautious, the curious, the taxonomists (twice!), the good-hearted, the intuitive, the courageous, the thug, and the idealist: or we get a scientist, or a whole human personality, only fragmented into nine pieces.

While this functions beautifully from a mythological standpoint, it falls short in terms of allowing the viewer to care about the burlappies as people. And, in a movie that is packed full of action scenes, caring about who falls into a bottomless abyss or who gets sucked dry by the Machine is essential. Already, the fact that the characters are animated and the fact that they are non-human distances us from automatically empathizing with them. One of the reasons that 9 can indulge in the degree of character mutilation that it does is because the characters are clearly mechanized and clearly non-human. Remove one of the other and we would have likely ended up with the typical movie treatment of a gruesome death (save in the Saw/Hostel torture-porn enterprise): the camera sweeps away to one of the other characters cringing at his or her shoulder. The same distance that allows these scenes without flirting with a higher rating unfortunately works universally to distance the viewer from all of the characters’ experiences. Characterizing them as personality traits rather than people only hinders the movie further.

It also runs the risks of dualism: shelving the characters as Good or Evil with no allowance for overlap. 1, the conflicted and cautious leader of the burlappies, and 8, his thuggish sidekick, ease across the boundaries a bit and challenge the monochrome worldview, but the other burlappies are without a doubt on the side of good and the machines on the side of evil.

This significantly weakens the story. To contrast, consider Coraline, a story of much greater moral ambiguity. Although Coraline evolves into the classic quest against a villain, it does not shy away from ambivilent depictions of its characters. Coraline’s cruelty to Wybie, her parents’ blatant disinterest in their daughter, and even the Other Mother’s remarkable ability to create things of beauty–even if only as an illusion–suggest something well beyond the dichotomy of good and evil, dark and light, right and wrong but, rather, the human struggle to understand and cope with the shades of gray that we encounter in real life.

Ultimately, this means that the horror of Coraline is that much more potent than the horror of 9. When Coraline inquires of a button-eyed, silenced Other Wybie, “Does it hurt?” she gives voice to the query rattling around in our brains as well, a question that is at once childish and yet outlives childhood. The question and the sentiment behind it appeal to us as humans. When 7 rips a javelin-sized sewing needle from her thigh without a flinch, she marks herself as bigger than us, as more than human. It is hard, then, to empathize with her plights and those of the other burlappies, even as they try to save the world.

And what of that? What of saving the world?

Again, I think that the dualist tendencies of 9 dog its ability to speak meaningfully on its theme of our relationship with science and technology. We are given glimpses of backstory throughout the movie, enough to know that the machines that eventually destroy civilization were devised with benevolent intentions by an idealist technologist working for peace. But he was deceived and the machines were hijacked by a nefarious agency (whether corporate, government, or something else entirely is not clear) and corrupted unto destruction. Indeed, their original creator later gives his soul, piecemeal, to the burlappies to ensure some continuance of society and, eventually, rebuilding.

But, again, this dichotomizes it too neatly. Questions concerning the appropriate roles of science and technology in our lives are the bread-and-butter of many speculative genres and certainly an apt subject for consideration. But technology cannot be plunked into Good and Bad, and modern life makes it nearly impossible to interact solely with the Good while excluding the Bad. Consider, for example, the Industrial Revolution. The same technology that improved almost universally the quality of life in Western civilization (and is since making its way to the rest of the world as well) also pollutes our planet, creates opportunities for sweatshop and slave labor, destoys the skilled and fulfilling trades of artisans, and often tethers survival to employment with (and loyalty to) a factory or corporation.  Automobiles afford us opportunities of which our ancestors could not have dreamed, yet they also pollute and cause over one million deaths worldwide each year. Non-human animals suffer terribly and die to make the medicines and the chemicals that grant us safe, healthy lives. Western women are no longer given a life sentence of spinning, weaving, and sewing clothing but, in exchange, women and children in third-world countries make our warm, comfortable, cheap clothes in sweatshops for pennies each hour. Are we better or worse for the technological advances of the last two hundred years that allow these things? It’s an impossible question to answer definitively, and it is even less possible to point our fingers at any individual, entity, or even moral outlook as the reason for technology’s darker side. There is no evildoer to turn the Machine against us and so a dualist examination of the question is going to fall short.

There were a few interesting points in 9 that I’d like to address before concluding my review. Firstly, there is the presence of a female character. At first, her presence irked me because, as one woman out of nine, her inclusion reeked of tokenism. (Someday, I hope, the creative folks who make movies and write books will realize that women are actually a majority of the world’s population and character groups will be structured accordingly.) Then, when I realized that the burlappies represented facets of their creators’ personality, her inclusion becomes a little more complex. Is 9 recognizing gender as more fluid as absolutely male or absolutely female? It certainly seems so. Without 7, I don’t know that I would have thought much about gender at all. Without 7, I would have been content to accept the robots as asexual, inclined towards male because the creator from whom they were derived was male. As it is, though, I’m curious about the motive behind 7’s inclusion. Is she present because the feeling is that a group of heroes must have a woman, so much so that the writers are willing to overlook gender ambiguity that will be an uncomfortable subject for many mainstream viewers? Or are the writers commenting on gender with 7’s inclusion? Or a bit of both?

Then there’s the ending. When I realized what the ritual at the end was to accomplish–”freeing” the spirits drained by the Machine heavenward–I rolled my eyes a little at the need to conform any discussion of death to Christian mythology.

But then it began to rain. And I understood that the ritual was not to “free” the souls to an afterlife but to free them to effect works upon the world.  Rather than moving “beyond the circles of the world” (to borrow from Tolkien) and no longer affecting or being affected by it, death is instead depicted as a means by which a corporeal and spiritual entity bound to the world it inhabits is transformed to enrich and return to life in that world. It’s a very pagan concept.

This leads me to consider whether our idealistic creator-scientist may have done this deliberately. The raving “disbelief” in global warming perpetuated by the most fundamentalist of Christians originates from the conviction that a single lifetime upon a planet–shorter “come the rapture”–does not require stewardship of it. After all, they expect to move onto a better place after death. Perhaps our creator-scientist recognized this and made sure that such destructive delusions would have no place in the mythology of the future world?

Finally, I have to ask myself if I am missing the point with my main critique of the movie, which is its heavy reliance on archetypes and dualism. But, at the same time, this is really a creation story. It is a story of a world destroyed and renewed. (And, as a student of Tolkien, I can’t avoid mentioning that it is renewed by something a lot like subcreation sans the religious angle.) But with its grand quest against evil and the ultimate purpose of its characters to restore life upon an annihilated planet, it certainly has a mythic feel to it. Am I missing the point in comparing it to stories like, say, Coraline, which concern themselves much more intimately with the conflicts of the individual and family? Are the two going to be at odds with each other?

In conclusion, I give 9 2.25 E.L. Fudge “Elves Exist” cookies out of four. Even if I am asking too much of a myth, the flat characterization and simplified depiction of a complex debate made it difficult for me to become invested in the movie. It had some astounding and creative concepts, and it certainly raised some interesting questions for me. But it fell shy of its potential.

Filed under: Movies by Dawn
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Today is the 32^nd anniversary of the publication of The Silmarillion. Each of us has her or his own story of coming to The Silmarillion, or to Tolkien in general. I’ve written my quite a few times by now and so won’t repeat it here. Suffice to say that I never thought I’d be the sort to study a book in the depth that I have studied The Silmarillion, much less write my own stories about it. Even now, I still don’t feel like I’m the sort to be a “fan writer.” When I read on multifandom sites like Metafandom, I sometimes feel a disconnect with the culture and experiences that other fan writers are reporting. (Of course, yes, “fandom” is an enormous and diverse community, so I’m clearly not going to relate or agree with everything that everyone “in fandom” says. I don’t expect to.) Rather, this disconnect, for me, underscores how The Silmarillion is indeed a special book for me.

I often say that I hated The Silmarillion the first time that I read it, and that much is certainly true. Fresh from my first reading of LotR, I wanted more of the same and, mistakenly, believed that The Silmarillion would meet my expectations. I remember clearly to this day standing in the aisle at the bookstore, in the fantasy section, reading the blurb on the back of the book that mentioned how the Silm was the story of the early history of characters like Elrond and Galadriel. I know them! I thought. They weren’t my favorite characters, no (believe it or not, I was a Hobbit fan before being seduced by the much more turbid history of the Elves), but like the sight of an acquaintance can make an unfamiliar journey more comfortable to contemplate, so the attested presence of Elrond and Galadriel reassured me that I wouldn’t become adrift in the pages of The Silmarillion.

Which is, of course, exactly what happened.

The Silmarillion isn’t a wonderfully written book. It’s not particularly enticing or absorbing. While there are passages that make me sigh with the happy contentment of a wordsmith who has just encountered a perfectly constructed phrase, there are just as many that I have had to read multiple times, mentally diagramming the sentence, to even understand. And most of the lines that get heavily quoted in the House of Felagund are throwaway quips. “Travel lightly but bring your swords!” my husband and I avow each Wednesday before we head off to German longsword practice. “Get thee gone!” I’ll snip at the dogs when they’re being annoying. If I’m in a particularly foul humor, “thou jail-crow of Mandos” might be further appended to that. The Silmarillion certainly isn’t my preferred book to read, even though I’ve probably read it more times than any other and I read parts of it several times a week for my research. But when I hunger for a book where my mind can drift into new worlds and savor the author’s words, it’s not The Silmarillion that I pick up. It’s usually a Romantic- or Modern-era novel for classic/mainstream literature or Ursula K. LeGuin, Neil Gaiman, or Peter S. Beagle for fantasy.

So what is it that makes this book so damned special? Clearly it is. I first read it almost six years ago and yet my passion for it shows no sign of waning.

For me, there are two kinds of books. There are those that I read for the chance to become lost in the author’s vision. The Lord of the Rings was that way for me. I remember leaving Frodo and Sam at Shelob’s lair and shouting, “Noooo!” at the book like some character in a hammed-up melodrama. Then there are those books where the author’s vision stops just shy of satisfaction and leaves me contemplating more questions than the book answered. That is The Silmarillion.

Once I managed to wrap my brain around the Silm (and the fact that it wasn’t LotR), I found that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Fëanor, especially, bothered me. At first, I couldn’t quite figure out why it was that he fascinated me; why I couldn’t stop thinking about him. There was a cult of personality around him; there was a certain injustice in his story that stung me deep; there was my own identification with some aspects of his character; there was his obvious fallibility; there was–most of all–the feeling that I couldn’t quite articulate that I wasn’t getting his whole story.

In writing about what motivated and inspired J.R.R. Tolkien, Professor Shippey writes that “One sees that the thing which attracted Tolkien most was darkness: the blank spaces, much bigger than most people realise, on the literary and historical map …” (38). There are facts–information known, attested, documented–and there is the space between where little or nothing is known. What lives in those shadowy spaces between what we know? Staring hard into them, one begins to fancy that something moves there. There is a form of life and reality, existing just beneath one’s awareness, just out of reach of what one can “put a finger on” and document as fact.

When I read The Silmarillion, I found myself staring into a lot of those shadowy spaces. And the more I read and the more I learned, the more I saw moving there, just out of reach of “fact,” though not imagination. It was not the “facts” of The Silmarillion that so intrigued me. It was the possibilities of what lay in those unknown realms between.

Tolkien studied medieval languages and literature, and the problems we face, in studying The Silmarillion, are much the same as the problems that he would have routinely encountered in his own studies. There is the question of authorship, to start: The Silmarillion being a posthumous work that was still very much in-progress at its author’s death, we have no idea what a “Silmarillion” would have looked like had Tolkien just five more years to complete it more to his satisfaction. Even attempts to trace what was JRRT’s and what was editorial intervention/invention proves challenging: witness Douglas Charles Kane’s Arda Reconstructed. We often have multiple versions of the same texts where each has changes and additions that the others do not. The versions of the text are often imperfect. JRRT was fond of writing drafts in pencil and then writing over them in ink. His handwriting was, at times, worse than Luxeuil minuscule. He liked to compose drafts in a seemingly random fashion in notebooks and on the backs of unrelated papers. He liked to fold his work inside of newspapers. He possessed–like medieval writers–a maddening unawareness of the value of his own work would one day hold for students of that work. And then there are the historiographical questions: If an author takes great pains to invent, declare, and even create histories for his imagined narrators, then are we as readers supposed to ignore that information and take his words at face value? Or are we–as I advocate–supposed to keep the narrator’s point-of-view ever in mind and the story they present only one tiny drop in a vast ocean that comprises “truth”? Suddenly, a book is not a story but history and myth. The more I read, the more I found myself asking these questions and the deeper the shadows became and the more they shimmered with imagined possibilities.

And the more questions I begin to answer, the more questions I find to ask. For me, this is the magic that is The Silmarillion; this is why it’s not the best-written book I’ve read and hardly the most entertaining but my favorite nonetheless: because it invites my imagination out to play.

So happy birthday, Silmarillion. I look forward to commemorating many more.

Filed under: Personal Musings, Tolkien by Dawn
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Since my last post was a little on the heavier (and more controversial) side, I thought I’d post something lighter for a change. After all, even heretics like to have fun. I encountered this article quite by accident today on The New York Times website while reading a much more serious article on food-labeling practices. Among many other nifty gadgets, the artisan featured in the article has made an LED necklace.

Of course, my first thought–upon seeing the photo–was “OME! Light-up jewelry! That’s probably what the Silmaril that Fëanor wore looked like!” It even has that sharp, blue-white light, as I’ve always pictured the Silmarils.

But these he was not suffered to approach; for though at great feasts Fëanor would wear them, blazing on his brow, at other times they were guarded close, locked in the deep chambers of his hoard in Tirion.

In truth, I’ve always had a problem with imagining that passage, at least in a way that makes it seem appealing (as I’ve always assumed it was meant to be). And–with no offense intended to Alison Lewis–her newfangled Silmaril necklace sort of shows why. As cool-looking as it may be in a photograph, can you imagine actually interacting with someone wearing light-up jewelry “blazing” on any body part, much less the brow? It’d be distracting, to say the least. I’ve always had a mental image of Fëanor wearing the Silmarils looking something like one of those cartoonish miner’s hats with the bright lamp on the front of it. That’s all well and good if one is delving for mithril but in conversation at a party? Could you even look such a person in the eye? And wouldn’t it rather ruin the mealtime ambiance? And what if the lights were dimmed for, say, Maglor to play a concert? “Oh, look, there’s Dad standing in for an exit sign over by the door!” “In case of fire, walk–do not run–to the nearest Silmaril-wearing Elven lord.” I mean, these things are bright enough for us to see one of them sailing across the sky with Eärendil; what must have three looked like, worn by one Elf in a confined space? “Don’t worry about the lamps, Anairë, dear. Fëanor just sent word that he’ll be attending.”

Am I reading too much into it? Absolutely. I think this relatively minor matter of Fëanor’s choice in accessories (and the fate of said accessories a couple hundred pages later) illustrates something important about the “canon” one can glean from The Silmarillion: It’s not meant to be taken literally. The image of an Elven lord of unimaginable beauty wearing three radiant (not blazing) stones that he crafted from untainted light is an amazing image. And the notion of that untainted light being preserved in stones and placed within the earth, sea, and sky is a lovely concept. The two, however, don’t reconcile very well. And I think we lose something if we try too hard to make them.

Filed under: Tolkien by Dawn
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I am preaching to the converted here, I know, but I need to indulge in a moment’s rant and hope my kind readers and commenters will forgive me a post for once without footnotes.

Saying “I don’t understand the need for slash in Tolkien’s world” is patently ridiculous. Tolkien’s world is our world. Tolkien’s characters are us, or at least our deep ancestors. Complaining about the existence of homosexuality among a human population is like complaining about the fact that we have noses or cry when sad or seek food when hungry. It’s part of human nature. Always has been, always will be.

Tolkien wrote fantasy, yes, so if I can suspend disbelief long enough to believe in immortal beings that make glowing trees and put that light into stones that get stolen and result in battles between dragons and vampires and werewolves and an immortal servant of a dark power who eventually implants himself into a magical ring that gets thrown into a volcano by a Hobbit (a what?) … yes, I can perhaps suspend disbelief long enough to believe that no one in Tolkien’s world was gay.

But pretending like this is the default or only correct way to see Middle-earth is stupid.

Secondly, claiming that slash “disgraces” Tolkien’s world is offensive. It is no different than saying that people who are gay “disgrace” our world. Homosexuality is one of many sexualities observable in the human species. While not the most common (I would argue that would be bisexuality, in a less heteronormative society), it is no better or worse than any other, including heterosexuality. It is simply the way that people are. We have words for people who judge a person as lesser because of the traits she or he was born with.

When people say that gays and lesbians “disgrace” the world into which they were born because they were born as gays and lesbians, we call those people homophobic. I think some people in fandom need to get used to the label.

Filed under: Fandom and Online Life, Rants in My Pants, Tolkien by Dawn
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In the Arts section of DoubleX magazine this week is an article, The Death of Chick Lit, examining how the quintessential beach-reading genre might have to remake itself somewhat to accommodate its readers’ realities in a world in economic recession. The author, Sarah Bilston, argues that women won’t care as much about conflict spurred by fashion, romance, and high-end exploits when, in their own lives, they are struggling to hold onto their jobs and their homes. The argument she makes is an intriguing one, even if I disagree that writers in the “frivolous” genres should make their subject matter sterner; if any time called for an escape from reality, then this is it. But I certainly understand that Ms. Bilston is a professional writer and must, therefore, be concerned about selling what she produces as well, and if her potential audience is largely throwing aside her novels in disgust at just reading the summary, then she runs the risk of joining them in default, no matter how idealistically “keeping the dream alive” in trying times. Fair enough. But what captured my attention–and raised my ire–wasn’t the article itself but the reader comments on the article.

“Like the rest of America and its genius writers,” writes one commenter,

you’re just another ‘trend-spotter’. Like chick-lit hasn’t been suffering since the START of the recession in 2007. You’re 2 years late! But congrats on being another academic whose ’study’ concludes with “we need more work here” or “______ field needs to re-invent itself”. But then again, your party scene tells that perfectly – getting a glimmer of an idea does not count as executing that idea in itself.

Another chimes in, with respect to Ms. Bilston describing a particular revision that she felt compelled to undertake: “Don’t waste your time cutting up the party scene in your book, it won’t sell any better b/c it sounds like a waste of time to read.” As I read these remarks, I was flummoxed by the fact that commenters feel the need to proclaim the utter lack of worth of a novel that they haven’t even read and to dismiss the writer’s efforts as useless. And I’m having a hard time imagining a similar type of meta article written by a male horror or sci-fi author meeting with the same scathing dismissal of his very craft.

Another commenter broadens the ad hominem attack to point out,

This sort of whiny article is precisely why the writers of chick lit are so embarassed. They should be. They write frivolous books that are basically identical to each other in content and then want to be taken seriously.

I’m not a particular fan of so-called “chicklit” or women’s fiction, and my reasons for that are a lot of the same reasons that some of the commenters give: characters whose lives and conflicts seem so unreal and, yes, frivolous that my interest just isn’t sustained. Yet, reading these comments, no matter my own personal agreeance with them as far as choosing novels to read, I find my hackles raised nonetheless and have to come to the defense of my sister-wordsmiths. Because–as escapist as their novels may be–they aren’t getting a fair shake.

Commenter LaniDianeRich–who identifies herself as an author in the chicklit genre–put it best when she wrote,

Why is it okay for Stephen King to write about grisly evil, for Tom Clancy to write about spies, for Augusten Burroughs to write about his tragic childhood, but it’s not okay for Sarah (or me, or hundreds of other writers) to write about women?

Because the arguments against writing that doesn’t fall into the “literary” genre are familiar; I heard the same spiel about a lack of realism and cookie-cutter characters during a rather uncomfortable writers’ workshop in university where a short story of mine was shredded not on its own merits but by the professor’s assessment that, because it was set in a dystopian future, then it was sci-fi and therefore of inherently less worth than my classmates’ work set in present-day reality. In Tolkien’s “On Fairy Stories,” he addresses many of these arguments, suggesting that they have had a long and vigorous shelf-life despite the sheer bone-headedness of such assertions. So it’s not the arguments, per se, against “chicklit” that I find so disturbing as the vitriol that this particular genre seems always to earn. Why?

I’m just as guilty. I’m quicker to distance myself, as a writer, from chicklit than I am from the gaudily covered hardcore “science fiction” novels that sound like a thinner, dumbed-down Star Trek, even though I am a writer of neither and, in fact, as a reader, would probably prefer Confessions of a Shopaholic to a book from the Warhammer series. And, certainly, the Warhammer books aren’t regarded as fine writing or profound, yet they also aren’t subject to the same vitriol as chicklit. Rather, they’re waved off as harmless–if at times inadvertantly humorous (at least to those of us who don’t “get” the genre)–escapism. I remember once having to sit through a movie based on a Tom Clancy novel that my husband wanted to see and being driven to distraction by the sheer improbability and inanity of the whole thing, coupled with a constant hyper-masculine need to show the size of one’s dick and the heft of one’s balls by packing as many explosions, bombs, guns, guys in camo, dark-sunglassed operatives shouting in code into walkie-talkies, careening helicopter flights, and urban car chases into an hour-and-a-half sustained roar. Replace the bombs and guns with diamonds and yachts and the guys in camo with slim thirty-somethings in designer Italian couture and the car chases with posh parties and–from the description that Ms. Bilston provides of her own novel–you have chicklit. It’s no more improbable than Tom Clancy, certainly. (Perhaps significantly less so since people, presumably, do live such padded lives somewhere yet, as of passing it on I-95 this morning, Baltimore had not yet been nuked by terrorists.)

Yet I don’t see Tom Clancy or Stephen King or Dean Koontz being berated by literati who wish these authors would just get their darned heads out of the clouds and focus on reality and people (as they are in reality, of course) and “things bigger than your everyday troubles,” to quote on of the commenters on Ms. Bilston’s article.

And now this begins to remind me of a discussion that generated on my last post where I mentioned that one of the more interesting comments that I received on Another Man’s Cage accused me of writing the novel for my own pleasure (as a woman) and that of my largely female audience because I dwelled on the emotional and psychological lives of the characters. That comment–”written for a woman’s pleasure!”–was meant to be withering to the entire premise of my novel, I’m sure. It was instant damnation. It marked me, immediately, as a most unserious writer for choosing to aim my content at people with two X chromosomes. I have trouble imagining the opposite accusation–of a story being written for the pleasure and entertainment of males–as carrying the same sort of clout. Even fandom’s obsession with “Mary Sue,” that icon of female escapism, I think, marks how little we value typical feminine fantasy as compared to typical masculine fantasy. Fantasy in general is always regarded with distaste by some. But male-oriented fantasy–Warhammer and Tom Clancy and epic CGI-enhanced battle scenes–are laughed off at worst but generally consumed as the guilty pleasure that most people feel when indulging in obvious escapism. But chicklit? We need to be puttin a stop to that! But why?

Filed under: Literature, Writing by Dawn
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It is an oft-cited fact that JRRT created his stories from the languages of Middle-earth and not the other way around. We fannish folk like this detail, but I suspect that many of us who repeat it with gusto don’t think very much about what it actually means. In fact, I’d never thought much about its meaning either. I’d bought into the popular notion that concocting a story from languages meant building a playground where those languages may be used.

As part of my between-semesters study, I am reading secondary sources about JRRT’s world. It is easy, at times, in fandom (actually, in life), to place myself within an echo chamber of likeminded folks who share many of the same opinions and ideas that I do. Most of my closest fandom friends self-identify as “canon heretics” (as, by the title of this weble, I clearly do as well); if any of them advocate for strict canonical interpretation, they do it outside of my hearing. Yet slapping each other high fives gets old after a while, so I committed part of my break between semesters to reading those secondary sources that have earned acclaim and respect and, presumably, have ideas that are more “mainstream” than mine.

Top of the list, of course, was The Road to Middle-earth by Tom Shippey. Shippey is considered by many as the Tolkien scholar, and part of his appeal comes from the fact that he, too, is a philologist and even held some of the same academic posts as JRRT. If anyone can illuminate what it means to create a universe and write multiple books from a “philological perspective,” then presumably it would be Shippey.

One of Shippey’s theories regarding the construction of Middle-earth concerns “asterisk reality,” which is termed after the philological convention of using an asterisk to identify words that didn’t come from a source but were constructed based on the philologist’s knowledge of and extrapolation from other words and conventions in the language. Shippey maintains that it is this “asterisk reality”–the unknown that lies between two known points–that so enthralled JRRT. He saw stories in words: how they evolved and changed over time in response to happenings in the larger world. The “asterisk reality” attempts to glean those events from language and that–not the ever-popular “playground theory”–explains how JRRT began with a language and evolved a history for Middle-earth.

Perhaps the best-known example of this comes from the Shibboleth of Fëanor, published as an essay in the tenth volume of the History of Middle-earth series, Morgoth’s Ring. JRRT wished to explain how the Noldor came to replace the thorn (Þ) with the s sound. Before this, he had never conceived of the notion of friction between the sons of Finwë, but in explaining how the s began to be used, he delved the history of the House of Finwë and the tensions surrounding the replacement of one of the sounds used in Míriel Þerindë’s name, tension that became outright animosity between the two eldest princes and, eventually, the conflict between Fëanor and Fingolfin that underlies the entire history of the Noldor and without which it is impossible to imagine The Silmarillion. Between the thorn and the s lay this “asterisk reality” and the construction of a story from philological inquiry.

Now asterisk reality might sound familiar. You have known facts at Point A and Point Z and, between them, an infinite body of unknowns. Known Points A and Z might infer what lies between but it’s certainly nothing near to fact. So we start on a path from A and stop when our feet land upon Z. Shippey’s asterisk reality describes creating a story using philology, but it also describes what we know as “fan fiction” and, more specific than that, “gapfillers.”

So we are, essentially, practitioners of asterisk reality. The discussion of “canon” as it relates to Tolkien-inspired fiction also concerns this asterisk reality, perhaps even more so than the “facts” that bracket it. We all know that Maedhros was hung by his wrist from Thangorodrim; canon debates tend to center on how long he hung there and how he was kept alive and whether it’s possible that Fingon rescued him because they were lovers and not just cousins and friends. But all of these things are asterisk realities, so–however sound our conjecture and the evidence upon which it is based–a single definitive solution is impossible.

In The Road to Middle-earth, Shippey discusses JRRT’s work with early manuscripts in an attempt to demonstrate the existence of an “unconquered” (i.e., not French-influenced) version of the English language in the 12^th century. JRRT’s conclusions about the land in which such works were created and the scribes that penned them involved, at times, “a streak of wishful thinking,” in Shippey’s words. “The ghosts would be gentleman, scholars, Englishmen too. Tolkien felt at home with them,” Shippey writes before going on to say, “This sentiment may have been misguided: if we really had the ‘lays’ on which Beowulf was based, we might not think much of them, and if we had to deal with the scribes of Ancrene Wisse, we might find them difficult people” (pg. 41).

The notion of “canon,” as defined by the community in which we write, often seems to impose a sterility upon the texts with which we work. Canon is made up of facts, and if it cannot be appended with a clear citation, then it is not “canon.” To allow conjecture to flourish too much by combining “facts” from the text is acceptable to some, but it is not canon, and the prevailing attitude in the Tolkien-writing community is that such liberties demand explanation from the author (usually in the form of volumes of author’s notes), lest her or his conjectures be mistaken as uninformed and treated as such. But add a dose of the author’s “wishful thinking” and, suddenly, we’ve veered over the line for many people. One of the more memorable comments that I’ve ever received accused me of writing Another Man’s Cage for my own pleasure. Well, yes, as an author, shouldn’t I find pleasure in what I am writing? It is a story, a piece of fiction, not an instruction manual for a newfangled doohickey; if you remove my emotions, as the author, from the story, then what is left? “Canon,” I suppose, which amounts to a bare retelling of The Silmarillion or, in the case of AMC, not much at all. Yet I sometimes feel that this is what some Tolkien-writers feel is adherence to canon, with the expectation of apologies from authors who let too much of themselves show in how they work off of bare texts. They haven’t remained “clinical” enough. They’ve erred. They are often accused of allowing their own nefarious whims trump the “intent” that informed what JRRT placed upon the page. To some, this even amounts to insult against the author whose works we all admire, in one way or another.

Yet, as Shippey demonstrated in the quoted passage above, the very author whose intent we are supposed to descry was himself working in a field that not only relied heavily on hypothesis based on small and seemingly unrelated textual “facts” but allowed his own “wishful thinking” to touch upon the conclusions of his work. So, when I am fulfilling his great dream of having other hands and minds complete his stories, then I am supposed to believe that he would have wished me never to allow myself and my own “wishful thinking” to enter into that task? What, then, I would ask, is the purpose of what we do? Surely, the end result does not take us much beyond what JRRT himself accomplished in his lifetime, and I have a hard time believing that his “intent” ever included a wish for his work to stagnate so.

In describing what inspired Tolkien, both as an author and as a philologist, Shippey writes, “One sees that the thing which attracted Tolkien most was darkness: the blank spaces, much bigger than most people realise, on the literary and historical map …” (38). When I first read that line, I couldn’t help but to think that most of the fans I know who write stories based on JRRT’s books would use very similar words to describe why they do what they do. It is not so much the stories on the page as the unwritten spaces between them; the sense of a deep history behind each character and event, hinted at by JRRT and palpable to us, his readers and fans, that compel us to live part of our lives in Middle-earth. In constructing our stories to bridge the gap between fact, between canon, we rely on informed conjecture, yes, but also a healthy dose of our own wishful thinking, much as JRRT himself has done.

Filed under: Tolkien by Dawn
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