I just read a post by sarajayechan on the JournalFen fandom_discuss community about the use and general fandom annoyance with the term muse. Her first paragraph sums it up pretty well:

So in the fanfiction world, “muses” are apparently frowned upon. Authors who have convos with the characters in their authornotes are scorned, people who imagine the characters talking to them or whatever are considered stupid and delusional, and I remember someone once saying “authors with REAL TALENT just make themselves write, only second-rate writers use ‘muses’” (something along those lines).

I admittedly use the term muse a lot in describing my creative process. I even coined the phrase (that I sometimes see on icons that I didn’t design) that “Muses are imaginary friends for grown-ups” after learning that, yes, people look at you sideways when you start talking about your imaginary friends. When you talk about your muses, though, that tends to clarify imaginary activity as having a creative and not social intent. Some people even look vaguely impressed!

Once again, I find the sliver of fandom that I occupy, albeit peripherally, these days, to be at odds with “fandom at large.” But then, I don’t think that the part of Tolkien fandom where I play even uses the term muse in the sense that sarajayechan and commenters discuss in her post. Certainly, I’ve never heard of “soul-bonding” or communing with muses on astral planes. I’ve never even seen an author carry on a conversation with a character in her or his author’s notes.

Instead, I find that I and people with whom I associate tend to use the term muse in different ways.

• It becomes a shorthand for discussing the creative process during which one connects deeply enough to a character to write that character convincingly. I find the idea that “authors with REAL TALENT just make themselves write” to be hogwash. I was nattering under friend-lock on my journal last week about character writers versus plot writers. This sounds like it comes from the plot writers to me. Just as it is easier or harder to connect with certain people, it is easier or harder to connect to certain characters, in my experience. For example, I relate to Fëanor, with his creative compulsions and sense of injustice in the world, more easily than I do to Fingolfin, who is accepting of the Valar and life in Valinor in a way that I can’t imagine myself being. I can write out the explanation that I just did when discussing how Fingolfin’s PoV chapters in AMC are weaker than Fëanor’s. Or I can just say that I have a Fëanor muse but haven’t found a Fingolfin muse yet. Viola. I think most people in the communities I frequent would understand that this refers to a difficulty connecting to Fingolfin’s character, not that I haven’t started setting an extra place for him at supper.
• The term muse can be used playfully, sometimes to deflect criticism. “My Maglor muse wasn’t happy that you made him flee from battle!” sounds less confrontational than, “I think it’s OOC to have Maglor flee from battle,” which opens up the whole can of worms about canon and interpretation and all that that we’ve been over a thousand times before. I’ve certainly seen the term used in this way.
• It can be used just plain ol’ playfully. I might say, for example, that one day, Pengolodh just let himself in the front door, plopped down next to me, and started dictating “Illuminations.” I don’t actually mean that I imagined the front door opening or even that I imagine an Elven loremaster in the chair next to me (which is perpetually piled too high with books to occupy anyway). It’s just a lighter way to express the sudden out-of-the-blue whallop of inspiration that can feel like getting hit by one of those Shire freight trains: One day, you’re not in the least bit interested in writing a particular character, and the next, you suddenly think s/he is the most interesting character in the world.

Some people have brought up in the comments on sarajayechan’s post that muses are a way for writers to deflect responsibility for their own creativity … or lack thereof. Inspiration and creativity can feel magical, like they come unprovoked out of the ether and recede again just as quickly. My own experiences suggest that my creativity, at least, has a strong neurochemical basis … but it still feels magical, and attributing inspiration or lack thereof to something outside oneself becomes a handy way to explain the inexplicable or (in my case) avoid hard truths like, “I’m not writing because I’m dysthymic or stressed out.” Instead, I’m not writing because Maedhros isn’t back from his Caribbean cruise yet.

So what are your experiences with muses? Do you use the term? What does it mean to you? Have you encountered fans or writers who believe that they actually connect with muses? Have you seen disparagement, in fandom or otherwise, of the term muse? Do you think it’s a cop-out, a shorthand, or something else entirely?

Filed under: Fandom and Online Life, Writing by Dawn
11 Comments »

Marta has a post up (The Problem with Eowyn) that is in reply to a post by Anna Wing (Eowyn, Female Agency, blah blah) about the possible gender issues in Tolkien’s depiction of Eowyn. Not being an expert on the LotR canon, I don’t feel that I can contribute to the discussion on Eowyn, but some of the comments drift into gender equality among the Elves, and about that, I have a few things to say.

There is a myth that the Elves had a gender-neutral society, and this premise is often then used to defend Tolkien’s own regard of women. But the Elves don’t have a gender-neutral society. Yes, we have a passage in the dogged Laws and Customs among the Eldar that states,

In all such things, not concerned with the bringing forth of children, the neri and nissi (12) (that is, the men and women) of the Eldar are equal – unless it be in this (as they themselves say) that for the nissi the making of things new is for the most part shown in the forming of their children, so that invention and change is otherwise mostly brought about by the neri. There are, however, no matters which among the Eldar only a ner can think or do, or others with which only a nis is concerned. There are indeed some differences between the natural inclinations of neri and nissi, and other differences that have been established by custom (varying in place and in time, and in the several races of the Eldar).

I see this quote cited perhaps more than any other when people attempt to prove that the Elves had a gender-equal society. I won’t even touch on the problems with the L&C in general right now. We’ll assume that it’s a reliable document that can be taken at its word.

Yes, JRRT concedes that Elf-men and Elf-women are capable of the same things. How big of him. In the very next sentence, though, he immediately begins to backtrack on that, claiming that women mostly invest their energies into children rather inventing and creating things. Next, incidentally, their “natural inclinations” direct them to a life of what is traditionally woman’s work. Not that there is anything wrong with what is traditionally woman’s work, says the woman studying for that ultimate woman’s career in K-12 education. But the notion that women, by their very nature–and their procreative capabilities–are better suited for certain pursuits has been used in our real world history to deny them access to other types of work. This isn’t egalitarian. It’s an attempt to put a rational face on sexism.

And despite the fact that Elf women can do everything the guys can do doesn’t mean that they’re allowed to. One needs to look no further than the ascendancy of Fingolfin to the kingship over his sister Findis to see that the kingship of the Noldor wasn’t work for a woman. There is, furthermore, a pervasive expectancy of female obedience. Turgon believes himself within his rights to deny Aredhel from leaving Gondolin. Lúthien–the poster girl for JRRT’s supposed enlightened view of women–was expected to be obedient not only to her father but also to Beren, when he insisted that she not follow him on his quest. (She didn’t listen either time, but that’s beside the point; a mortal a fraction of her age and abilities felt it his place to order around an Elven princess of considerable wisdom and skill.) Even Fëanor, when arguing with Nerdanel at his departure, says, “Were you a true wife, as you had been till cozened by Aule, you would keep all of them, for you would come with us. If you desert me, you desert also all of our children” (Shibboleth of Fëanor). In other words, a “true wife” is one who follows her husband, against her own conscience even.

In Quendi and Eldar, we have another passage of interest when considering how Elves perceived gender equality:

But three Elves awoke first of all, and they were elf-men, for elf-men are more strong in body and more eager and adventurous in strange places. …

Imin, Tata and Enel awoke before their spouses, and the first thing that they saw was the stars, for they woke in the early twilight before dawn. And the next thing they saw was their destined spouses lying asleep on the green sward beside them. Then they were so enamoured of their beauty that their desire for speech was immediately quickened and they began to ‘think of words’ to speak and sing in. And being impatient they could not wait but woke up their spouses. Thus, the Eldar say, the first thing that each elf-woman saw was her spouse, and her love for him was her first love; and her love and reverence for the wonders of Arda came later.

As in L&C, we have again comments on the “nature” of women–that they are less adventurous than men–and the blatantly sexist declaration that women were literally born to love their spouses above all others. Yes, I realize that Q&E is supposed to be read as a legend, not history. Nonetheless, if these are the legends being taught by the supposedly egalitarian Eldar, it might explain where Fëanor got his ideas about what makes a “true wife” and the other hogwash about feminine nature presented in documents like L&C.

I often see people asserting gender equality among the Eldar when discussing the larger can-of-worms question about how JRRT perceived women in general. JRRT died before I was even born, and it is hardly my place to profess to know his private views. However, his letters and what we can see of how he depicted women in his writing certainly don’t suggest that he had particularly enlightened views. His relationship with his wife, his remarks to his son Michael in Letter 43, and his blatant disdain of feminism suggest that his ideas are actually fairly close to what he expresses in L&C and Q&E: That men and women have inherently different natures, and where women are concerned “it is their gift to be receptive, stimulated, fertilized (in many other matters than the physical) by the male” (Letter 43).

I don’t feel the need to apologize for Tolkien’s views or allow my utter disagreement with them attenuate the joy that I take from playing in his world. Nor do I feel that acknowledging that there is sexism in Middle-earth means that that world needs “fixing,” which often seems to be many people’s conclusion when someone like me insists that she sees sexism there. That is not the case at all. I don’t discuss gender issues in Tolkien’s world with any revisionist intent but, rather, because as an important work of literature that we connect with because we see ourselves in its characters, Middle-earth echoes those same attitudes can be seen on Modern-earth, and knowing to see them for what they are allows us to begin fixing them where it actually counts.

(My thanks go to Oshun and Pandemonium both for their always clear insights on gender in Tolkien’s world and helping me to form my thoughts into hopefully coherent words!)

Filed under: Tolkien by Dawn
8 Comments »

I am jumping through the last leg of hoops in terms of completing my teaching certification, one hoop of which requires me to take two basic linguistic courses. Admittedly, it is probably the most pleasurable hoop to jump through, since it is an area I have wanted to study for some time anyway.

While reading The Stories of English by David Crystal last night for the History of English class I’m taking, I encountered a section on the idea of “language purity,” particularly as it relates to English:

Thre is a curious myth widespread in the world: many people believe that their language can somehow be ‘pure’–comprising a set of sounds, words, and structures that can all be traced back continuously to a single point of origin–and that anything which interferes with this imagined purity (especially words borrowed from other languages) is a corrupting influence, altering the language’s ‘true character.’ In the case of English, it is the Germanic origins of the language, in their Anglo-Saxon form, which are supposed to manifest this character. …

There are certainly important stylistic differences between Germanic and Romance words … but support for any notion of a ‘return to purity’ is misplaced. No language has ever been found which displays lexical purity: there is always a mixture, arising from the contact of its speakers with other communities at different periods in its history. In the case of English, there is a special irony, for its vocabulary has never been purely Anglo-Saxon–not even in the Anglo-Saxon period. (p. 57)

I have encountered the notion of linguistic purity on numerous occasions in the Tolkien fandom. I want to start out by saying that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with people who want to attempt to draw predominantly from a certain linguistic tradition in their writing, if that is what satisfies them and they feel best expresses what they want their stories to say. Apparently, according to Crystal, they’re in good company with the likes of Edmund Spenser, Charles Dickens, and George Orwell. What I’ve always objected to is the rather snobbish insistence that adopting such a style is somehow the superior choice or, worse yet, requisite for a truly respectful treatment of Tolkien’s works.

One of the very first comments I received on AMC noted my use of U.S. English and the reviewer’s distaste with that. I treated it in a rather jokey manner–as the new girl in town, I didn’t know what to expect from reviewers and didn’t want to piss anyone off–but the comment never sat right with me. My initial reaction was to think, “Duh. I write in U.S. English because I was born, raised, and learned to write in the U.S.” I brushed it off, but the remark stuck with me, obviously enough that I remember it more than five years and many hundreds of comments later.

Some years later, on a mailing list for a Tolkien fanfic group, the discussion turned to grammatical and spelling conventions used in fandom, and the following remark was made concerning the use of “American” spellings and grammar:

I am put off reading fanfics based on Tolkien’s work with American spellings, and in particular, American speech patterns.

. . .

I’m not suggesting that everyone has to learn British spellings overnight, but it baffles me when I see people go to the trouble of doing long and complicated Quenyan [sic] or Sindarin translations but can’t be bothered to stay true to Tolkien’s style of spelling and speech patterns.

. . .

I’m sorry for suggesting then that [a] site about fanfiction written based on works by a British Professor who worked for the Oxford English Dictionary might want to use British spellings.

This conversation became quite heated (not that I played any part in that *ahem*) and lots of interesting revelations came out of the woodwork. Several U.S. writers acknowledged that they had tried to train themselves to write using British spelling and grammatical conventions, with mixed success. Others noted that they didn’t read stories that used U.S. spelling and grammar conventions. I later learned that this was apparently a big issue in some corners of fandom, with authors not only avoiding U.S. conventions but attempting to avoid vocabulary with etymologies that did not hail back to Anglo-Saxon, especially French-derived words. I found myself surprisingly angry over the whole thing. The idea that the language with which I had been raised and in which I had written all of my life was not adequate for writing fan fiction was deeply offensive, as was the notion that it was somehow inferior to another set of spelling/grammar conventions. I noted that the language in which an author writes is tied deeply to her identity and that it is troubling, to say the least, to expect people to suppress their identities in service of imitating another writer, no matter how much one might admire him.

Dipping my toe into linguistics has been satisfying in the sense that it has validated my feelings in many ways. For one, yes, language is essential to identity. As a writer, my language is central to who I am, perhaps even beyond the attachment I’d feel toward it if I wasn’t a writer. For another, the notion of one language being “better” or “purer” than another is a load of hogwash.

From a canonical perspective, I can’t help but wonder if this isn’t another example of what I perceive to be a pretty deep divide concerning the motive for writing Tolkien-based stories and the approach taken during the construction of those stories. There seem to be two schools of thought here. One says that stories should be imitative and try to put the reader back into the world exactly as Tolkien constructed it, right down to a perceived “Tolkienesque” style. The other approach says that Tolkien-based stories should be transformative, fill in the blanks, and question or critique Tolkien’s ideas through fiction. I’m not saying that one approach is more valid than the other.

From my perspective, falling squarely into the transformative camp, nothing is more counterintuitive than suppressing my own style as an author in order to imitate a style of writing used by another author. For one, it seems to me an exercise in futility; I best create evocative text in my own language, not a language belonging to someone else, to which I have no emotional attachment and in which I do not perceive the world. For another, it is a distraction to my purpose, which isn’t trying to sound like Tolkien or re-create the experience of reading his books with my stories but expressing ideas related to his writing–again, a task best accomplished, for me, in my native language. As an author, I am not an invisible presence behind the scenes in my stories, trying to create the illusion that I’m JRRT and not Dawn Felagund. No, my stories concern who I am and my beliefs and experiences as much as they concern the world JRRT crafted. That requires the use of my own style, my own language.

Filed under: Fandom and Online Life, Tolkien by Dawn
20 Comments »

The following entry is a guest post by Dreamflower. Dreamflower has been a Lord of the Rings fan since 1967, when she was 15 years old. She has read the books countless times over the years, but did not begin writing fanfic until 2004. She’s written many stories, nearly all of them hobbit-centric; in addition she is a co-mod of the LOTR_GFIC community and of the Many Paths to Tread archive. Her stories may be found either at her author pages at Many Paths to Tread or at Stories of Arda. LOTR and fanfic are her main hobby, but she has several other hobbies as well: calligraphy, cooking, needlework of all kinds, sewing, decorative painting and polymer clay are some of her other creative outlets.

I was privileged this past Christmas to receive The History of the Hobbit as one of my gifts.  The set included The Hobbit, and The History of the Hobbit, Part One: Mr. Baggins and The History of the Hobbit, Part Two: Return to Bag End.  Like HoMe, HoTH consists of examinations of the earliest manuscripts of TH.  Unlike HoMe, these volumes were not edited by Christopher Tolkien, but by John D. Rateliff.  I found these volumes much more “readable” than HoMe.  Mr. Rateliff’s style is more engaging and less dry than CT’s.  And of course, he had a less difficult job.  Unlike the many drafts of material that CT had to wade through, covering many decades of his father’s work and many alterations, as well as multitudes of scraps of paper with scribbled notes, Mr. Rateliff had two early handwritten drafts and two typescripts, and just a few handwritten notes.

One of the fascinating things I learned is that while JRRT was somewhat ambivalent originally as to whether the world of The Hobbit was the same as that of his larger world of Arda, there were more traces of Arda in the early drafts than in the later ones.  For example, in the earliest draft, when Gandalf (whose name at that time was not Gandalf, but Bladorthin, and at the time Gandalf was Thorin’s name!) was explaining to the Dwarves how he came by his father’s map in Dol Goldur, he credits Beren and Lúthien with overthrowing the Necromancer!

“Never you mind!” said Bladorthin: “I was finding things out, and a nasty dangerous business it was.  Even I only just escaped.  However, I tried to save your father, but it was too late.  He was witless and wandering, and had forgotten almost everything except the map.”

“The goblins of Moria have been repaid,” said Gandalf; “we must give a thought to the Necromancer.”

“Don’t be absurd” said the wizard. “That is a job quite beyond the powers of all the dwarves, if they could  be all gathered together again from the four corners of the world.  And anyway [others >] his castle stands no more and [his >] he is flown. [added: to another darker place]—Beren and Tinúviel broke his power, but that is quite another story.” (“The Adventure Continues”, p. 73)

At any rate, throughout the text, Mr. Rateliff points out many places in which the world of TH intersects with his older and as yet unpublished work that eventually became The Silmarillion.

When he gets to the part where Bilbo and the Dwarves are lost in Mirkwood, and encounter the Elves, we are treated to an examination of the Elves in TH, and how JRRT did not quite seem able to make up his mind if they were his Elves or the more common sorts of medieval and Elizabethan Elves better know by readers of the time.  It would be difficult to give all of the evidence that is covered in that chapter, but here is a passage he quotes from the second draft:

…most of [the wood-elves] are descended from the ancient elves who never went to the great FairyLand of the west, where the Light-elves and the Deep-elves (or Gnomes) and the Sea-elves lived, and grew fair, and learned and invented their magic and their cunning craft and the making of beautiful and marvelous things.

This passage was greatly expanded in the First Typescript:

Are the wood-elves wicked? Well, not particularly, or indeed not at all, though they have their faults, and they don’t like strangers.  It is quite true that they are rather different from other elves; for most of them, as well as the few elves that live in hills and mountains are descended from those of the ancient tribes of the elves of old who never went to the great Fairyland of the West, where the Light-elves and the Deep-elves (or Gnomes) and the Sea-elves lived for ages and grew fair and wise and learned and invented their magic and their cunning craft in the making of beautiful and marvelous things before they came back into the Wide World.  Here the wood-elves lingered in the twilight before the raising of the Sun and Moon, and afterwards they wandered in the forests that grew beneath the sunrise.  They loved best the edges of the woods from which they could escape at times to hunt or to ride and run over the open lands by sun or moon or star; thought after the coming of Men they took ever more and more to the gloaming and the dusk.

-1/2/30:3-4, rejected ending to the First Typescript.

(“In the Halls of the Elvenking”, p. 405)

[All subsequent quotations are from this chapter.]

There is a long explanation after this, of the differences in the three Elven kindred, which is probably far more familiar to those of you who are more interested in the first two Ages than the Third, than they were to me.  But he does go on to explain that it seems clear that the Elvenking was of the Teleri, or Sea-Elves, including an explanation for the Elvenking’s golden hair.

Mr. Rateliff goes on to what I found the most interesting theory in this portion of the book:

If Tolkien’s wood-elves as a whole harken back to folklore beliefs about ‘the Fair Folk’, then in his depiction of the Elvenking he is drawing on a specific modern literary source: his own unpublished writings.

He goes on to point out a number of similarities between the Elvenking’s Halls and the caves of the Rodothlim, who later evolved into the Elves of Nargothrond.

Then he goes on to say:  “A much closer parallel to the wood-elves can be found in the woodland realm of Doriath, located in the heart of a dark forest known for its impenetrability, a place where most travellers get lost and perish miserably.”

He points out that Doriath was a place of the Sea-elves, and that at its heart was the cavern-stronghold of Menegroth, reached only by a guarded bridge over a stream.  He also quotes from “The Tale of Tinúviel” in BoLT, a description which sounds uncannily like the description of the Elvenking’s Halls in Mirkwood.

The strongest parallel between Doriath and the wood-elves’ realm, however, is the Elvenking himself, who strongly resembles one of the most famous characters in the legendarium: King Thingol Greycloak, ruler of the woodland realm of Doriath and high king of the Elves of Beleriand.

To understand, then, exactly how the wood-elf king in The Hobbit relates to the earlier stories, it is necessary (as so often) to make the mental effort to exclude from our minds knowledge of what Tolkien later resolved while working on the sequel, or that subsequent layer created as much as  twenty years afterwards will prevent us from seeing clearly what he was doing at the time he created the character—that is, when writing the story of Mr. Baggins adventures as a stand-alone work deriving in varying degrees from his already voluminous writings about Middle-earth.  Seen in this light, while the Elvenking strongly resembles King Thingol in general, the evidence for and against the identification is contradictory.

Two elements Tolkien goes out of his way to include in the narrative support the argument that the two kings are one and the same, while two unstated facts argue against it because of the dissonancy they would create between things we know to be true of Thingol that do not appear to apply to the Elvenking.

The two elements he says argue for the Elvenking being Thingol is  (1) The mention of the three Elven kindred, which means that the wood-elves are part of the mythology of Arda, of the “great Fairyland of the west”.  “In fact, only one Sea-elf in the whole legendarium ever visited Valinor and returned to live in Middle-earth, this being the figure originally known as Linwë Tinto (BLT I, 106) then Tinwë Linto (ibid., pages 130-131) or Tinwelint (‘The Tale of Tinúviel’, BLT II, 8) then from “The Lay of Leithian”, onwards as King Thingol.” and  (2) the enmity displayed between the dwarves and the elves.

The original ending to the first typescript included this passage:

…they did not love dwarves and thought he was an enemy. In ancient days they had had wars with some of the dwarves whom they accused of stealing their treasure.  It is only fair to say that the dwarves gave a different account and said that they only took what was their due, for the elf-king had bargained with them to shape his raw gold and silver and had after refused to give them their pay. If the elf-king had a weakness it was for treasure, especially for silver and white gems, for though his hoard was rich yet he had not as great a treasure as other elf-lords of old, since his people neither mined nor worked metal or jewels, nor did they trade, not till the earth more than they could help.  All this was known to every dwarf, though Thorin’s family had had nothing to do with the old quarrel I have spoken of.

Mr. Rateliff says this is a clear allusion to the Lost Tale known as “The Nauglafring: The Necklace of the Dwarves.”

But this, he says, leads to the first of the two elements that are evidence against the argument: in the original tale, Thingol’s death is a part of the story.  He goes on to say, however, that this is not as certain as it appears, and quotes another passage that implied he still lived.

The second element which is important in the tale of Thingol, but left out of the Elvenking’s story in TH, is the absence of a major player in the story: “There is no  Faërie Queen at the Elvenking’s side in Mirkwood.” Thingol’s queen, Melian the Maia, was a vital part of his story, and her absence here might seem a strong argument against the Elvenking being Thingol.

Mr. Rateliff’s own conclusion is that JRRT left his options open, never identifying the Elvenking by name, so that he could have been either the older character or a new one with many of the same characteristics.  And years later when he wrote LotR, he decided that they were indeed two different characters.

I’ve only briefly summarized his speculations here.  I thought it something that it might be fun to share, and I’d love to see other people discuss the possibilities that it opens.

Filed under: Tolkien by Guest Loremaster
4 Comments »

I am in the midst of reading The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, which I have never read in full. They are very illustrative and have spurred many ideas for future HL posts (and I am only one-third through!), but I encountered one statement the other day that refuses to rest in my mind until I write about it.

JRRT was more than a “man of his time” where his regard of women is concerned. A self-described reactionary, many things from his personal life and his writings point to the fact that he was a rampant sexist in excess of what one would expect even from a man who was well into adulthood before women earned the vote in his country. Yet whenever the question of JRRT’s sexism comes into a discussion, someone trots out Lúthien as an example of how, though not all of his books provide fair depictions of women, his sexism clearly wasn’t entirely unmitigated. Lúthien, after all, is not only gorgeous but has enough super-magical powers to outsmart the Dark Lord, bring Beren back to life, and move Námo Mandos to mercy. She’s a superhero in a cape woven from her own hair. JRRT’s defenders like to point to her as evidence that he valued women’s strength and independence (because, no matter what you think of the Beren and Lúthien story, she clearly possessed both).

I don’t normally put much stock in an author’s intent, as I think I make clear here on a fairly regular basis. Texts must stand on their own, independent of what their authors wished them to say when writing them. In fact, I don’t know that I’ve ever started a sentence with that loathed phrase beloved of canatics: “Tolkien clearly intended …” So this will be a first.

In 1951, JRRT had finished The Lord of the Rings and was corresponding with Milton Waldman in hopes that Collins would publish LotR along with The Silmarillion. In Letter #131, JRRT describes his opus, from the Music of the Ainur to the conclusion of LotR. In discussing the Tale of Beren and Lúthien, we get this revelation:

It is Beren the outlawed mortal who succeeds (with the help of Lúthien, a mere maiden even if an elf of royalty) where all the armies and warriors have failed: he penetrates the stronghold of the Enemy and wrests one of the Silmarilli from the Iron Crown.

Firstly, a show of hands as to who thinks Beren did most of the work in retrieving that Silmaril? Beren would be in a wolf’s belly if not for Lúthien, to say nothing of her later “help,” without which he would also have been dead, many times over. (Impressive for a mortal.) But what struck me here as particularly revealing of JRRT’s attitude towards women is his note that Lúthien is “a mere maiden even if an elf of royalty.”

The sentence before this clarifies what JRRT sees as the significance of this particular story:

Here we meet, among other things, the first example of the motive (to become dominant in Hobbits) that the great policies of world history, ‘the wheels of the world’, are often turned not by the Lords and Governors, even gods, but by the seemingly unknown and weak … .

So, in short, the fact that Lúthien is descended from one of the Powers that JRRT celebrates as exceptionally wise in the very same letter means nothing. (Of course, that Power is also a woman.) Neither does her heritage as the daughter of Elwë, one of the Elves selected as ambassadors to Aman. All of these facts–and her deeds–are attenuated by her status as a “mere maiden,” and the heroics that so many of her fans embrace and cite as evidence that JRRT understood women as competent beings, even a little bit.

(Here we go.)

Tolkien clearly did not intend this. Based on what he told Waldman, he wanted her story to serve in the same capacity as Sam and Frodo’s, illustrating how even the weak can overthrow the powerful. He assumed that his readers would understand this based on her femaleness alone.

Nor do I think that the published story can in any way be defended as a change of heart in favor of recognizing a clearly powerful character as such, rather than a product of her circumstances that serves as an apt vehicle for one of his most valued themes. According to Douglas Charles Kane¹, paraphrasing Christopher Tolkien’s notes in The Lost Road, the published Beren and Lúthien story was based on two texts, completed in 1951, the same year that JRRT wrote to Milton Waldman. In short, the story was likely fresh in JRRT’s mind, and the published Silmarillion shows no major edits in favor of shifting Lúthien from a weak to a powerful character. (Furthermore, the basic structure of B&L was among JRRT’s earliest works in The Book of Lost Tales.)

Lúthien is certainly the best evidence that JRRT wasn’t a complete and unapologetic sexist, and I’ve seen it used as such many times. I’ve probably even used it myself in presenting The Silmarillion as a work that presents women more fairly than do The Hobbit and LotR. This quote not only debunks that idea but flips it on its head. When we see Lúthien, after all, we are not supposed to see one strong enough to overcome impossible odds in pursuit of her goals. We are not supposed to see a hero who earned her place as a cornerstone in the legends of her people. Nope, she is a mere maiden. She proves to the rest of us that, on occasion, even the inherently weak can “help” the privileged and powerful accomplish good things.

1. Douglas Charles Kane, Arda Reconstructed, p. 173.

Filed under: Tolkien by Dawn
39 Comments »

Before I begin, I some housekeeping: Now that I am freelancing full-time and have more writing time available to me (in theory), I am hoping to get The Heretic Loremaster off of the ground again. When I first created this site, I wanted it to be a place for discussion of “heretical” views of literature and the fandoms that grow up around it. So far, the posts have been a one-woman show, but that is not what I want this site to be. So I am looking for more writers to join me on this site.

I have a whole page devoted to my expectations for this site and other writers who join me. In a nutshell, the HL looks at literature and book-based fandom. You do not have to like or write about Tolkien to write for this site. In fact, I would love some posts on Harry Potter other book-based fandoms about which I know little. You do not have to agree with me on everything (or anything!), although this site looks at literature and fandom from the perspective of people typically oppressed or sidelined in mainstream literature and discourse. All posts do not have to address that angle, of course; just looking back at my posts will show that I ramble about all manner of things. Two posts per month are adequate, though more are welcome, of course. My posts are generally long, but this isn’t a requirement. 500 words would be a good minimum to aim for in most cases.

Email me at DawnFelagund@gmail.com or leave a comment on this post if you’re interested and we’ll take it from there!

(Also, guest posts are welcome, so if you’ve written an essay or meta and think it might find an audience here, please contact me and we’ll see about getting it posted as a guest post!)

Now for my real reason for being here. The other day, I was reading another Metafandom post on remixing, since that has been a recent subject of discussion here. The post itself pretty much agreed with my thoughts on “unauthorized” remixing (and, by that, I mean using the universe or characters created by another fan-writer without permission, not lifting whole sections of story and changing the bits you don’t like). What caught my intention was a rather offhand remark made by Angiepen: “Except for Harry Potter, the vast majority of fictional-person fandoms are based on TV or movies.”

Initially, this provoked a “Bwhuuh?” sort of reaction because I don’t think that over 45,000 Tolkien-based stories archive on ff.net exactly makes it a fandom to sneeze at. However, once my initial surprise at being so casually overlooked wore off, I realized that, yes, actually, Angiepen was completely justified in not mentioning us. Tolkien-based fandom is somewhat isolated from fandom in general. It’s not that we’re invisible. It’s more that, in the big noisy banquet hall that is Fandom, we’re off in the corner playing by ourselves.

I’ve always wondered a bit at this. I’ve even talked about it before, in comments here at the HL and on LiveJournal, with some of you. Tolkien fandom seems to differ in a lot of ways from fandom in general, the majority of which is media-based. Here are a few differences that I’ve observed. I’d be interested to know of any others that people can think of.

• Reliance on fandom-specific archives versus LiveJournal (and clones, most notably, lately, Dreamwidth) and general fandom archives like ff.net and an Archive of Our Own. The whole LJ strikethrough incident that happened a few years ago sent far deeper tremors through fandom in general than it did Tolkien fandom. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if most Tolkien fan writers either didn’t know about strikethrough when it happened or didn’t really care, as it didn’t affect independent archives where most work is kept.
• More authors and artists are single-fandom. Reading on Metafandom, it seems to me that in most fandoms, people either create work for multiple fandoms or move on fairly frequently as their tastes change. In contrast, many people I know who create fanworks based on Tolkien’s books have never participated in another fandom and/or have no interest in participating in other fandoms. (Both would be true of me, for example.) Those who do seem to choose fandoms similar in nature to Tolkien–Harry Potter and Chronicles of Narnia, for example.
• Motives for writing vary. A reason I hear Tolkien writers give a lot of times for why they write and read fiction based in his world is a love of the world and a desire to stay there a bit longer. I’ve never seen this reason given for why people write in other fandoms. I’m sure it exists, but it doesn’t seem to be such an overwhelming reason as it is in Tolkien fandom. Instead, other fandoms seem to focus more on issues like social justice that are touched on by only a small contingent of writers in Tolkien fandom. Sexual expression also seems a much stronger motive in general fandom than in Tolkien fandom. While there are certainly Tolkien authors who write primarily for reason of sexual gratification (and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, for the record), the vast majority do not. Again, too, fandom in general seems much more open to exploring contemporary issues relating to sexuality (gender identity, for example) than we Tolkien writers are.
• Critical discussion or “meta” has an internal rather than external focus. Tolkien writers tend to focus more on “canon” and how to interpret and communicate details within the texts. I’ve seen exhaustive (and exhausting!) conversations on character hair color, eye color, family trees, and timeline nitpicks. There are certain questions occurring within the texts that we will never have an answer to and never tire of arguing over. How long did Maedhros hang on Thangorodrim? Was Legolas a blond? Was Celegorm? Did Fëanor & Sons go to the Everlasting Darkness? Et cetera. In contrast, most fandom discussions focus on how fictional universes and our depictions of them communicate about the world beyond the fictional universe. Tolkien fandom does not often discuss issues of race, gender, sexuality, and ability, or of oppression and privilege, and when it does, does so only with great discomfort. In other fandoms, these discussions happen much more frequently and willingly.

What are the reasons for these things? I think there are a few.

• Tolkien fandom is old. Many fans have been active for years, so there was already an infrastructure and some community ties in place when the Internet became more widely available and gave more people access to fandom and allowed new fandoms to be created. Other older fandoms–Star Trek and Star Wars come first to mind–also tend not to be involved in general fandom, at least not that I’ve seen.
• The source material for Tolkien fandom is much more complex than some other fandoms. I do not intend that to insult or diminish other fandoms, but we are talking about, literally, a man’s life work which was, in turn, built on centuries of myth. The published source material itself is complex and contradictory, to say nothing of the reams of unpublished or hard-to-find materials. And then there are the works that are clearly related and cast light on Tolkien’s canon, like looking at Celtic myth to better understand the Elves. It’s no wonder that much of our discussion focuses on resolving our own understandings of those works.
• Because Tolkien fans don’t tend to participate in other fandoms, we are less aware of discussions or issues affecting fandoms outside of our own.
• There tend to be more conservative fans in Tolkien fandom than elsewhere. There are pockets of fans who prefer to look at Tolkien from a Christian perspective and who expect stories written about it to reflect conservative values. These people are also less likely to want to participate in discussion about oppression, and their presence (even if they are a minority) in the fandom make starting such discussions much more challenging when participants aren’t even on the same page about whether or not oppression exists or is important to discuss. When you’re arguing with one person about whether homosexuality is a choice, it’s hard to maintain a discussion with someone else about whether slash fiction is exploitative. So we argue about canon, where the same progressive-conservative divide can also be seen but occurs at one extra remove and, to many, probably seems less uncomfortable. After all, we’re arguing about whether sex between half-first cousins would have been acceptable in Elven culture, not about whether it’s okay to write Maedhros/Fingon in the first place.

Am I missing anything?

I am less certain about whether I would want Tolkien fandom to have more involvement in discussions and issues that are considered important by fandom in general. On the one hand, I think that many of the issues discussed by fandom in general are deeply important and need to be discussed. I have learned a lot from reading meta posts written by people in no way involved with Tolkien fandom. And because I don’t tend to mind confrontation, I wish that we could confront some of the biases in our own fandom rather than having to cloak everything in canon discussion all of the time.

At the same time, I like becoming deeply involved in the discussion of this world. Must the two be mutually exclusive? Not necessarily, but one is likely going to distract from the other.

Filed under: Fandom and Online Life by Dawn
2 Comments »

Recently, on a list where I lurk, the owner made a post banning “remix” stories where an author takes an existing fanwork and rewrites it. And when I say “banning,” I don’t just mean that such stories are not allowed but anyone found writing them, even on locked groups, will be banned.

(ETA: I want to clarify that remixes without permission of the original author are what is being banned.)

Now, I want to be perfectly clear that I am not criticizing the group owner’s decision about what is and is not allowed on a particular group or archive. I remain strong in my belief that this right belongs to group owners; anyone who doesn’t like it can vote with their feet and move on to another group or archive or start their own. There are groups to which I do not belong because I have strong objections to their fundamental principles and rules. I am not objecting to this particular rule. If I was, I would simply leave the group and skip writing a post about it.

What I find curious is the outrage that people feel toward “remixed” fanworks and what this says about our ideas about the ownership of artistic works. This is not the first time that I’ve encountered this idea, although it’s the first time that I’ve seen it incorporated into a group’s rules. Not too long ago, while doing maintenance on one of the sites I manage, I found a user profile that took similar umbrage to people using her original characters without her permission. (Whether this is because someone actually had used her characters or was a preemptive warning I don’t know.) And, in discussing the legal and ethical basis of derivative and transformative works, I have seen authors make similar avowals, that though they write stories based on another author’s work, they would not want stories written based on their own work.

Of course, no one who makes these claims is disingenuous enough to avoid the question of hypocrisy. Generally, this is resolved by pointing out that 1) Tolkien indicated in his letters that he wanted his work carried on by other artists and 2) the Tolkien Estate has made no move to shut down derivative and transformative work based on his books. To the first, yes, this is true:

I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama.
~Letter 131 to Milton Waldman

More on that in a moment. To the second point, I hesitate to interpret the Tolkien Estate’s relative silence on fanworks as tacit approval. Since derivative and transformative works currently occupy a vast legal gray area and since lawyerly types provide good rationale why a challenge to the legality of fanworks quite possibly would expand protections of those works, then it seems just as likely to me that rights holders that currently wield some power to control works created at the fringes of that gray area don’t want more distinct legal definitions to make legal what they’d rather repress.

Personally, I’ve always been entirely laissez-faire with respect to my Tolkien-based works and published original works. I am stricter with respect to my unpublished original works simply because allowing aspects of those works to be made public would “use up” my first rights, which would eliminate most markets–and almost all of the good markets–where that work could be published. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever written anything based on my original work. However, plenty of other Tolkien writers have used aspects of my stories–from details, like names and timelines, to wholly lifting the universe as a setting for their own stories–in creating their own work. Do I care? Nope. I’ve never discovered my work being used without my knowledge. Would I care if I did? Nope. When people email me and ask if they can use details or the whole universe, I always grant permission and tell them that they don’t need to ask me again in the future. Credit is nice because that is the expectation whenever using someone else’s creation, but I don’t expect people to ask for permission to name Maglor’s wife Vingarië or to have Caranthir skilled in osanwë-kenta. Nor do I care if they decided that I did everything all wrong and decide to provide their own take on the questions my stories address. In fact, Another Man’s Cage was borne out of a desire to show the Fëanorians’ side of the story, which at the time wasn’t being widely addressed on the sites where I read. I have always felt that this community’s ability to use art and fiction as a means of expressing opinion and engendering debate is one of its virtues. I would much rather every hateful reviewer on fanfiction.net devote her energy to crafting the stories she’d like to read, to contributing her own perspectives to the ongoing discussion of canon. In fact, I’ve suggested to more than one of them that they do just that.

Given all of that, I find the opposition to using existing fanworks to develop one’s own stories a curious but ultimately illustrative perspective about our perception of the “ownership” of creative work. I’m sure that some of the people who declare their fanworks off-limits have also criticized authors like Robin Hobb and, more recently, Diana Gabaldon who voiced very vocal objections to people writing stories using their characters and universes. Both authors have been mocked by members of fandom for having unhealthy attachments to characters and scorned for their desire to control the way readers think about their stories. How do you reconcile criticism of published authors holding those views with acceptance of fan authors who experience similar horror, disgust, and disapproval at the notion of having their stories “used” by someone else?

I think it shows how close many of us share Hobb and Gabaldon’s views, whether we like it or not. It’s easy to tell a creator to get over the use of her work in ways she doesn’t expect or approve of. It’s a bit harder when it’s your precious character or your well-reasoned perspective that is being “trashed” by someone else. I say this with full admission that my own laissez-faire attitude doesn’t come easily. I can’t say that I would be happy to discover a canatic’s version of AMC up on the web. Or my original stories reduced to porn. I would feel that my work and its purpose were being misunderstood. But, ultimately, I would accept the author’s right to “misunderstand” my work however much she wanted because I believe deeply in the importance of this right.

It is the right that underlies all derivative and transformative work. It is the acknowledgment that creative people will usually respond creatively when faced with strong emotions, be that love or loathing, and that to place some works off-limits to creative transformation is repressive of creativity. It is recognition of the fact that, as humans, our first response to art has always been to redo it or retell it, to personalize it to our own beliefs or experiences, to make it our own.

Judging by the letter above to Milton Waldman, Tolkien knew that. He knew that great myths and stories didn’t arise from a single source but became part of the cultures to which they belonged, which required giving access to those stories to all members of that culture. If we choose to believe that our stories, poems, and art based on his books are carrying on his legacy rather than robbing him of it, then I think we need to think as well about how we respond when others take the same freedom with our own work.

ETA (16 June 2010): Nora Charles has this post on Dreamwidth about remixes, including links to a remix challenge posed by the original creators that went horribly wrong when a story was posted that was unexpectedly critical of the original universe. It’s an interesting look at some of the issues that arise from writing in a shared universe, as we all more or less do.

Filed under: Fandom and Online Life by Dawn
21 Comments »

Another (published) author has come out against “fan fiction”: Diana Gabaldon publicly declared her disgust, disdain, and delusion that fanfic is illegal in a series of posts on her blog. Those posts have since been deleted, but copies can be found on Fandom Wank here or in Google cache here.

It is becoming a perennial thing here on the Heretic Loremaster to declare that fan fiction is fiction. As in the fact that fan fiction is the same as regular fiction (if there is such a thing), only it goes under a different and derogatory name. And as in the fact that treating “fan fiction” and “fiction” as separate is itself a fiction.

I must confess a growing weariness of pointing out to people smart enough to know better (like Ms. Gabaldon) that fan fiction is fiction. Until relatively recently, what would today be termed “fan fiction” was the norm, not the exception. In the Middle Ages, for example, it was more common than not to lift ideas, characters, and whole stories from existing, often contemporaneous, works. This doesn’t even begin to touch on how many stories are derived from myths. In fact, if you think back to the root of creating fiction, there is a knot of people gathered around a fire as one tells a story … or I should say, retells a story. The art was as much–if not more–in selecting, recasting, and expanding upon existing details as it was in adding original changes. I believe that it is a human drive to respond creatively to what moves us the most.

So what happened? When did “storytelling” become “fan fiction”? Ms. Gabaldon’s posts get to the heart of this: when we began to commodify creativity, when we began to draw boundaries (in the interest of making money) around my ideas, my characters, my stories. Interestingly, Ms. Gabaldon–like notorious “fanfic” detractor Robin Hobb Lee Goldberg*–used to make her living writing other people’s characters. Watching her justify that in the face of her ignorant stereotypes of fan writers as oversexed, lazy, bad writers too stupid to create their own fiction is unsightly. You see, like Robin Hobb Lee Goldberg, she wrote her own version of fan fiction for those who “owned” those characters already. There was money to be made for someone, so that made it okay.

* I originally–and mistakenly–identified Robin Hobb as the author who had tried some rhetorical gymnastics in justifying a career spent writing other people’s characters (Monk and Diagnosis Murder) alongside an utter despise of “fanfic.” A blog post discussing this can be found here. Lee Goldberg and Cathy Young have a very interesting (and more than a little wankish!) back-an-forth across multiple posts. Anyway. I misidentified Robin Hobb and apologize to her and to my readers here for being lazy and relying on my memory rather than digging up links to back myself up. Robin Hobb’s original rant against fanfic, via the Wayback Machine (having gone the way of Ms. Gabaldon’s anti-fanfic posts) can be found here. Thanks to Mervi for asking the questions that turned up my mistake!

Now, I will pause to say that I do not oppose in any way a creator’s right to make money on her or his creation. In fact, contrary to many citizens of the Internet and many members of my own generation, I believe strongly that if you like an artist’s work enough to want her or him to create more of it, then you owe that person a fair payment for that work.

But this is a different issue. No one is arguing Ms. Gabaldon’s right to make money on her books, and no one is trying to cash in on her creations; people are responding as people have responded to creative work since the first group of people crouched around a fire to swap hunting tales. That intelligent, creative people fail to understand the need to respond creatively to the stories of others is astounding. That intelligent, creative people make the sorts of slanders against those who respond in such a way–as Ms. Gabaldon makes against “fanficcers”–is disgusting.

In her essay What Fanfic Is (and Isn’t) to Me, Dreamflower points out the difference in how most people respond to creative work and how artists (which includes writers) respond:

You can pick up a book or turn on the TV, and you can sit there and consume what you have been given, and then close the book or turn off the TV and forget about it. Or you can interact with the book or the show, by imagining new scenarios or new ways of looking at what you’ve been presented with.

Most people consume the creativity of others. They buy books and pay for music downloads and sit through television programs that are 25% advertisements and maybe talk at the water cooler the next day about what they’ve read/heard/seen but, otherwise, never move much beyond consumption. Ms. Gabaldon herself points out that creative people find inspiration anywhere. For pity’s sake, I find stories in the swirls of fake marble on my bathroom wall. I can’t help but to lift an eyebrow at the notion that, in Ms. Gabaldon’s perfect world, we would legally and morally be able to respond only as consumers to the creative work of others.

Responding creatively is in us. And, culturally, I believe that we remain a species whose very nature assures that creation will, in part, be a collective act. Until fairly recently, that was just creating; we didn’t need any special or derogatory names for retelling another person’s story. When creators and the companies that profited from them realized that they could inscribe tight boundaries and claim “ownership” of stories that, in fact, are the product of the thousands of collectively derived myths, stories, and archetypes that define our culture did we end up with the sneering term “fan fiction,” the heart of which is fanatic, implying instability, obsession, hysteria (the latter particularly interesting given that “fanfic” writers are predominantly female). In reality it is, and will always be, just fiction.

Filed under: Fandom and Online Life, Literature by Dawn
23 Comments »

When I first started posting my writing online, I kept an open door to anonymous comments when the sites where I posted allowed me to do so. In my mind, someone had just read my work and had some amazingly insightful thought about it and went to comment and … she wasn’t a member of the site, didn’t want to be a member of the site, and so just went away, and I was bereft of her insights. In my naivete, I failed to appreciate how most people use anonymity online, but I wasn’t long catching on. Within a few months of starting to post some of my work there, I disallowed anonymous comments on Fanfiction.net. I don’t remember well enough to say that they were all nasty and vitriolic, but most certainly were … and many registered members of Fanfiction.net aren’t known for their skills in diplomacy. I decided that I could give up that one amazing insight if it saved me from the other ninety-nine comments containing nothing but loathsome vitriol.

Last week, the New York Times published an article by Taffy Brodesser-Akner on anonymous commenting that makes the same observations as I did some years ago on Fanfiction.net. Brodesser-Akner considers the theory that anonymous online snarkiness arises because we have evolved mechanisms to control our social interactions based on face-to-face interactions. Online, without the facial and body-language cues of our conversation partners to tell us when we’ve crossed the line (and the attendant negative emotions that come with such disapproval from a fellow human), we’re left in the dark and can say things that we’d never dream of saying in a face-to-face interaction.

I’ve often observed the same of people in cars. Most people won’t even shush a chatterbox in a movie theater, but the meekest granny will give you the finger for cutting her off. I notice my own perception changing as I drive and become irritated: Suddenly, I am not annoyed with other people but with cars. I perceive the behavior as coming not from a person but from a car and, likewise, any of my own aggression is aimed at a person but at the car, an insensate and lifeless hunk of metal from which I don’t have to fear censure or disapproval.

The same happens online. I know many of the people with whom I regularly communicate. Some of them I have even met. When I read their comments and their emails, I hear their voices in my mind and see their faces. Sometimes, I know what a person looks like from pictures; other times, I have communicated so much–often in more spontaneous forums like instant messenger–with a person that I have developed a voice for that person, despite having never heard her voice. But an interesting thing happens with people whom I know online but do not know well. Just as I come to associate my friends with a face, a photo, a tone of voice, so I come to associate acquaintances with the icons that they use most often. I see that person’s name, and her icon flashes into my mind. Perhaps this is my mind’s way of making sense of faceless communications: by creating a face of whatever handily associates itself with a particular name.

Anonymous comments allow none of that. I have received the rare unsigned comment on my work on LiveJournal, and without any clue as to whom I communicating with, the voice takes on a flat, featureless quality as I read. And it is difficult to respond to such comments too. Everything that I say feels insincere or, if I’m simply talking shop about my writing, overly clinical. I am no longer talking to a person but a blank white box with no notion of who sits on the receiving end.

The NYT article links to a related post by Connie Schultz that delves even deeper into the effects of anonymity online:

It makes for many an ugly day, discouraging thoughtful discussions and repelling readers who don’t have the stomach for the daily dose of vitriol. … Some argue that allowing anonymity is a way of outing the bigots among us. But reading multiple posts, often by the same person using a variety of identities, amplifies voices and exaggerates numbers. The haters are small in number, but they are tenacious, and the resulting echo chamber fuels a growing climate of fear and rage born of false impressions.

Or: sockpuppetry, as we’d call it in fandom. One person with abhorrent views and a lack of civility can create the impression of consensus where none exists. Suddenly, those who play nicely, who are “only here to have fun,” feel like they are marooned on an island in hostile waters. I remember when it seemed people were quitting Fanfiction.net in droves due to the general tone of uncivility there propagated by a few people with multiple accounts; the heads on the hydra that, lobbed off for ToS violation, would spring back in a newly vicious permutation. We still get the occasional registration on SWG from a writer who’s never posted off of Fanfiction.net and wincingly asserts that she can “take concrit” but “doesn’t flame.” Since policies both allowing concrit and banning flames are codified into SWG’s rules, these assertions, to me, speak far more about writers who have become hand-shy in a toxic environment that makes no attempt at insisting on accountability.

When we were working to open the SWG’s story archive, we were faced with a number of choices about what we would and would not allow. I was and am open to many different possibilities, but one thing I continue to insist upon is that anonymous comments will have no place on our site. If you want to communicate with an author, then you can register for an account. It takes ten seconds, and you need never visit us or be bothered by us again. But it creates accountability, however little, and associates comments with an identity.

In Schultz’s article, she notes the same thing. She has experienced with a Facebook page to connect with her readers and finds greater civility there. Now commenters have names and most have pictures associated with their names as well. Though she “knows” very few of them, they nonetheless possess an identity. She writes, “A not-so-amazing thing happens when people feel safe: They start to speak their minds. Dozens, mostly women, tell me they have never before expressed their opinions so publicly.” Does that sound familiar to anyone else but me?

Filed under: Fandom and Online Life by Dawn
8 Comments »

Just like an Elf, SWG has both a recognized begetting day and birthday and, just like an Elf, its parent (that would be me) tends to recognize the former rather than the latter. In fact, I am slightly embarrassed to admit that I don’t know the SWG’s exact birthday except that it is at the end of July sometime. And I usually miss it when it rolls around until I’m writing August’s newsletter and have a serious oooops moment when thinking of what news I have to report and realize that we’ve turned another year.

I don’t often mention SWG’s begetting day because it seems irrelevant to anyone but me since the group was inactive until its birthday in July. But this is the SWG’s fifthbegetting day so enough of a milestone that I thought, what the heck, I’ll mention it just this once. The SWG came into being on the night of March 14th into 15th when I couldn’t sleep. (Insomnia being a generally dangerous thing for me, creatively, considering that I also invented my o-fic universe the Midhavens one night after taking stimulant cold medicine and lying awake until 5:30 AM.) It occurred to me that night that there were a lot of talented Silm writers yet, aside from the Silmfics discussion group, they had no place of their own to call home. And this being soon enough after the LotR movies, Silmfic tended to get drowned on general Tolkien archives by stories written by enthusiastic though largely ephemeral members of the fandom drawn to the sources by the movies. Since I didn’t have much interest in LotR-based stuff, the lack of a centralized place for discussion and stories relating to the Silm was frustrating for me, so I took on that dangerous middle-of-the-night and quintessentially Dawn way of thinking: “It does not yet exist; therefore, I must create it.”

So create it I did. I had no idea how to use LiveJournal, but I signed myself up for an account so that I could set up SWG there, and I created a Yahoo! group too. That was March 15th, the Ideas of March, SWG’s begetting day.

It sounds cliche to say it, but five years seems simultaneously a short a time ago and an eternity. I was a very different person when I started SWG than I am now. Of course, I was a complete n00b in the fandom and really not qualified to be taking on such an ambitious project. I was also incredibly insecure as a writer. I wasn’t sure I was any good at all and thought there was a good chance that I completely sucked. That first year of posting Another Man’s Cage on a weekly basis nearly gave me a peptic ulcer, I was so convinced that, at any moment, someone would denounce me as the fraudulent writer I was sure that I was. Likewise, SWG was a tender part of my fannish self just waiting to be wounded … and it would not take long for that to happen the first time. (I remember my first unsubscription notice to this day and how much that bothered me that my group had clearly made someone unhappy enough to unsubscribe. I won’t say that unsubscriptions don’t ever bother me now–it really depends on the person and/or the circumstances–but this was someone who never spoke once; I really shouldn’t have cared that much. But I did.) In January of 2006, one of SWG’s members (and we were just an LJ community and mailing list then, though we were discussing our website and archive) became most unhappy with me over a perceived insult on the mailing list that she felt that I’d ignored and started a public campaign against my infant Silmarillion group and me personally. That was … distressing, mostly because while I perceived the unfairness of her accusations, I wasn’t sure that my and SWG’s reputation would withstand them, no matter that they were not true. My grandmother–my last surviving grandparent–died right around the same time, and that was a slap in the face to bring me back to reality. My grandmother was a stubborn Polish lady who once rear-ended a car because the driver didn’t go fast enough for her after the light turned green; it felt like, with her death, Nanny was giving me a shake and asking me when I had begun to care so deeply and allow myself to be hurt so much by lies spread by someone who was known to be both unkind and a magnet for drama. When the SWG’s first begetting day rolled around on the Ides of March, 2006, one could say that I was already a much tougher person than I had been just a year ago.

I could sit here and spout many such examples of how the SWG has enriched my life in the past five years and shaped who I am today, but in truth, my experiences as a group and archive owner have been ambivalent. I don’t think I’d ever unwish my insomnia on March 14, 2005, and the subsequent creation of the SWG, but neither have my last five years as the group’s owner been all honey and roses. If I am being totally honest, there are times when I have considered giving it up. When I think of the time for my own writing and art that I have sacrificed to learning web design and building the site and maintaining the site and coming up with ideas to keep the site active and interesting … well, I think, “I am a writer; this isn’t what I had in mind when I started this group.” I have sacrificed most of my Tolkien-based writing and a lot of my o-fic writing too in order to run this group. If I am being perfectly honest, there are days when that breaks my heart. And I would be lying too if I did not acknowledge that there are days when undertaking the sort of effort that it takes to keep such a project afloat (”launching the lead balloon,” as I recently said of B2MeM) does not seem worth it “for love alone.”

But, of course, there are the friends I would not have made, the stories that would not have been written, the things I would not have learned (including web design!), and the experiences I would not have had if, at this precise moment five years ago, I had deleted my nascent group before anyone knew it existed.

So happy begetting day, SWG. I am grateful to you for bringing me to a point in my life that, five years ago, I could have never imagined. I wonder where we’re going next.

Filed under: Fandom and Online Life, Personal Musings by Dawn
15 Comments »