Cheers!
Doug Kane

Dawn, I’m glad you still enjoy the book. Russandol, I hope you like it too!

Cheers!
Doug Kane

It’s certainly possible that Kane was in a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t scenario with respect to analysis. I enjoyed the analysis if only because I enjoy reading about how other people interpreted the text, and the analysis doesn’t interfere with the reference material, which is presented in tabular form apart from the commentary. He clearly has his canonical bugbears … but then so do I, so I can relate, though I can also understand how some would be uncomfortable conflating the more-of-less factual reference material with more subjective content.

After several weeks of anxious waiting, the bbok arrived from some NY library yesterday. I am looking forward to tackling it properly.

I wonder… if the author had not given his subjective views follwowing his painstaking analysis, might there be criticism as to his lack of opinion?

I suppose I’m one of the skeptics who thinks that ultimately a ‘heliocentric from the beginning’ Ardaverse wouldn’t work – but of course there’s no way to be certain of that, given that JRRT didn’t have much time to play around with the whole concept before his death. Like everyone else, I do wish we could have seen how his attempt would have worked out. (I certainly could be wrong!) The sad thing about Tolkien, though, is that “Leaf by Niggle” is clearly autobiographical. No matter how much time he would have been given to work on the Silmarillion, it wouldn’t have been enough, because the thing had captured his heart in a way that “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” never quite managed to do. He was never, ever going to be finished with it. I’m just very grateful for what we do have, and even more grateful that his son Christopher has done so much work to make his father’s kingdom of the heart accessible to us all.

And I agree with Dawn and the others who note that there’s a big difference between unconscious misogyny and deliberate misogyny. It’s no stain on JRRT’s character to note that as a man of his time and place, he doubtless harbored some unconscious misogyny which made its way into his published works. We all do likewise; no one is uninfluenced by their culture, or completely aware of their biases. The real problem comes when people deliberately close their eyes to misogyny and so go on to perpetuate it unnecessarily – or alternatively, condemn an entire work for containing an understandable flaw (as though any human art will ever be flawless).

It is important to realize that the “report” that Rhapsody quotes from is reporting on a sample of a much earlier and very different version of my manuscript that I sent to Christopher through the Tolkien Estate, as a courtesy. That version literally tracks the differences between the source material and the published text word by word and punctuation mark by punctuation mark. Christopher’s response to me through the Estate was brief; he did not send me this whole report. He did indicate that HoMe could not be relied on to determine what changes were made with manuscript authority. He also indicated that he did not believe that such a line by line comparison would be of sufficient interest to justify publication. He therefore politely refused to offer any assistance in moving forward with the project (which meant I was not going to get access to the actual manuscripts).

After getting this feedback, and other feedback, I radically changed the work, moving all of the tracing of the source material into the tables, and only commenting in the text on the most significant differences and trends in the choices that I felt clearly were shown to have been made. And I made sure to include the disclaimer at the beginning of the book that has already been quoted here about the limitations that I was working under.

It may well be that some day someone else will be able to produce an even more accurate analysis of the creation of the published Silmarillion, if they have access to the full manuscripts (or at least Christopher’s complete unpublished analysis of them). If so, I will celebrate that day. But until then, I think _Arda Reconstructed_ is the best we are going to get.

Thanks for allowing me to clarify these points.

It would be interesting to see what fantasy books were published in and around 1977 and what the cast of characters were liked. If there was a trend back then that male characters in fantasy sold better than female characters (for me Marion Zimmer Bradley felt like someone who made a break through on that, but I am not sure if Julian May or Andrea Norton went before her), but I find it noticeable that in the nineties there was a rise in fantasy novels featuring female leads.

Well, the tables are worth it, if you do that sort of research, but I think the commentary is also worth it: incredibly interesting, even if I don’t always agree. It really comes down to what each potential reader wants to get out of the book, I think, but I don’t want to give the impression that if the tables are useless to a person than the rest of the book (the commentary) will be useless as well.

I pooked a bit around at the site where Doug is active and there a member quoted from a letter that Christopher Tolkien send him:

In his correspondence with me, Christopher provided a copy of the report he wrote for the Estate after reviewing Doug’s sample in Nov. 2006, in which he expands on this, in terms even more directly bearing on the interview statement which Doug mistakenly takes as affirmation of his approach:

Thus, to take as an example the history of the Ainulindalë, I made it clear (Morgoth’s Ring p.30) that I cited only the differences of version D from version C (which I printed in full) which had ’significance for the conception’. Mr Kane says, however, that ‘unless otherwise indicated, where version C is referenced as the source, there are no differences to that passage cited in version D, and it can be presumed that the passage appeared in the same form in version D’. I have annotated, and send herewith [i.e., to the Estate; these were not copied to me —CFH], several pages of Mr Kane’s documentation of differences in the Ainuindale, as published, from the texts given in Morgoth’s Ring, to show how The History of Middle-earth does not by any means provide, nor was it intended to do so, all the evidence necessary to determine which alterations were made with some manuscript authority and which were not. But a full investigative analysis of the construction of the published Silmarillion would require examination of the whole body of original manuscripts (a vast task), or at the least the close perusal of my History of the Silmarillion.

Reading this, especially the bit in bold is making me go like hmmm. If this is not all, is it possible that perhaps someone else who does get access to the archives and such can make a better work like this? Can Arda be constructed by perusing HoME alone? I really would want to see if it is handy for me, but I will just see if I can get a better bargain.

I have to say that I personally bridled at Mr. Fisher’s comment that “lots of men were dropped from the narrative, too,” which has a whiff of apology.

Now that I’m not on the SWG and don’t have to behave as well, then I can admit that my first thought, upon reading that, was to think, “Stupid man totally doesn’t get it.” Not only is his argument numerically unsound (because I don’t think it’s possible to argue that, proportionately, men received equal/greater cuts than the women), but where is his head that he doesn’t understand that diminishment of women in a genre that has done our gender few favors is going to be loaded with meaning in a way that cutting male characters will not? Argh.

I think he could have crafted appealing tales around the scientifically satisfying heliocentric Arda.

I agree. As I told Ithilwen, I would have loved to have seen where the story went with ten–even five–more years of JRRT’s life. It has always seemed to me that he was coming to understand how to reconcile the reality (heliocentrism) with the pretty myths (the Lamps, the Trees, “Of the Sun and Moon”), and I think the work really would have been better for it.

Without the book in front of me (not that I’d be replying to comments at work or anything like that! ), I think Kane’s argument is less that JRRT couldn’t/shouldn’t have attempted it (which I have always gotten the impression from MT was CT’s argument) than it is that CT shouldn’t have attempted to put it into place based on what little JRRT had drawn up so far and put into place himself. I tend to agree with the latter; especially with CT’s apparent disdain for JRRT’s heliocentric vision and his seeming belief that the mythological framework of the Silm was of secondary importance* to the story, I don’t think he should have made those extensive of revisions. So I’m stuck wishing that JRRT had lived five or ten more years so that we could have seen his realization of that vision, as one who had respect for both scientific reality and pretty myths.

* Based on the fact that he cut all mention of the narrators from the Silm and couldn’t seem to reconcile two mythological sources into a single work, a point where I really do agree with Kane.

Good luck with the Wordpress venture! I must confess that I am eagerly awaiting the “Science of Middle-earth” …

Rhapsody:

I have the impression that literature and fantasy were very muchly geared towards men, so it might as well be that the ratio male vs female characters will reflect that.

I’m not as inclined as to give it as innocent an excuse. This is not just the modern fantasy genre; this is literature, almost as far back as it existed, and a centuries-long tendency to marginalize, eliminate, and depict negatively any woman who stepped into its pages. (Of course, yes, literature for a long time was written for men: Because women weren’t taught to read!) If such blatant misogynism is necessary to sell books, then it is because our gender expectations and our expectations of the roles women are “allowed” to play in literature are warped to require it. It is still misogynism either way–intentional or not–and I can’t pardon its continuation into the modern day.

If there is a male audience, they probably will connect better to a male cast in a work

Again, I’d have to say that, if this is true, then it is because of warped gender roles and expectations and does not get an author/industry off the hook anymore than it does to say, “Well, we just keep calling them ‘n*gg*rs’ and showing them as buffoons because our audience is white and they relate better that way.”

When looking and valueing books one also needs to have a look at the timeperiod the author lived back then.

I agree. JRRT was about thirty years old, iIrc, before women in England even earned the right to vote. He was certainly part of an old boys’ academic network throughout his life. I have no doubt that the time in which he lived and the subculture of which he was part influenced his construction of his books.

However, I think that a book can be identified as misogynist without condemning that the author should have done better. Medieval Arthurian legends are almost always misogynist, but in an era when it was considered wrong for women to learn to read, should we blame the authors? Of course not; that is ridiculous. I’m sure that, fifty years from now, the books being written in 2009 will be studied for how they ignore, marginalize, and stereotype non-heterosexual characters. Can we be blamed for that? No entirely, though that doesn’t change the fact that most books being written today are heteronormative in the way that most books being written in the 1950s were misogynist.

Given that, I find the argument that JRRT’s books are not misogynist in places very hard to swallow. Any book with a ratio of 1 woman for every 5 men is probably going to be misogynist unless it has good reason for that disparity. A culture that does not allow women to rule–as the supposed gender-equal Elves do not–is misogynist, even if it mouths support for equality.

But my point in harping constantly on the gender issues in JRRT’s books is not to flagellate JRRT for a cultural awareness that he wasn’t apt to possess. The point is to become aware of how gender is depicted in fiction and how our expectations of how women should appear in fiction continues to influence our depiction of them, even in this supposedly enlightened age.

For example, I think the notion of a questing party common to fantasy literature is automatically one that is male or maybe contains one or two women (to show how enlightened we are, of course! ) This is largely inspired by LotR (and JRRT was influenced, of course, by medieval works like Beowulf and Roland where the adventurers were always men because … well, adventurers were always men! ), and it continues to this day. To represent a questing party in a story that is half or more than half female would be an anomaly. Such an author would probably be suspected or accused of trying to make a “statement,” where a questing party that is mostly or all male would not be regarded similarly. What does that say about our “enlightened” culture that this is so?

To give an example (and I hate to keep picking on him, but he is convenient, having written a book that is a direct parallel to LotR), Terry Brooks’s Sword of Shannara was published in 1977. He is a U.S. author, and this was the heyday of the women’s lib movement in the U.S. He doesn’t have the excuse that JRRT can use of having been born in a time and place where women simply didn’t act as equals to men. If anything, he would have been more gender-conscious probably than even some young men today, given the political climate in the U.S. at the time.

Yet Shannara actually treats women worse than JRRT at his worst. The single on-screen female character is an incompetent, clinging moron whose mere presence tempts the Aragorn-character from saving his city to rescue her instead. Is Brooks a misogynist? Even though his book is certainly misogynist, I don’t think that we can say the same of the author, with certainty, even though he was writing in a gender-conscious age. Shirl’s character embodies the worst stereotypes and archetypes of a female character, but all of these stereotypes and archetypes have a long literary history. They are, therefore, acceptable to us, being the default for a woman in an action-adventure novel. But, when we really stop to think about them, we often conclude that, “Wow. That’s actually really messed up.” But it takes identifying how these stereotypes and archetypes have evolved throughout literature–including JRRT’s generation–in order to stop seeing them as the only acceptable way to write female characters. So, for that reason, I think it’s important to talk about gender, even in books where we’re more inclined to give the author a pass for his caveman mentality.

And then there is that, the book to me reads as if it reflects the author’s opinion, but not as much as the complete picture. But ai, only for the tables?

Well, the tables are worth it, if you do that sort of research, but I think the commentary is also worth it: incredibly interesting, even if I don’t always agree. It really comes down to what each potential reader wants to get out of the book, I think, but I don’t want to give the impression that if the tables are useless to a person than the rest of the book (the commentary) will be useless as well.

I think with a fandom that is filled with mostly female writer and a changed reader audience of fantasy these days, people are a tad too eager to label CT as misogynist. From a marketing perspective, I have the impression that literature and fantasy were very muchly geared towards men, so it might as well be that the ratio male vs female characters will reflect that. If there is a male audience, they probably will connect better to a male cast in a work (these days it feels the exact opposite way where mostly female readers wonder what happened to the women). In Tolkien’s defense, he did also write a rather liberal Erendis in a kind of myth form (the amazon’s comes first to mind), so I am not buying the misogynist label to the both of them. When looking and valueing books one also needs to have a look at the timeperiod the author lived back then. I sometimes wonder how people decades later will look back on the massive amoint of chicklit with sparkling vampires.

But I think the book should have done more to remind readers of the limitations posed by its methods and should have taken more care in assigning responsibility for choices with which the author did not agree.

And then there is that, the book to me reads as if it reflects the author’s opinion, but not as much as the complete picture. But ai, only for the tables?