***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.

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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.

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For Tolkien researchers (including fan-writers), the published Silmarillion has long worn a blazing red question mark in terms of authorship. It is no secret that the book was pieced together by Christopher Tolkien using multiple different drafts of JRRT’s writings, and that Guy Kay–a fantasy author–assisted CT with this endeavor. The History of Middle-earth series was published, in part, to answer the question of the origins and sources of The Silmarillion, but it still didn’t reach far enough for many: CT was silent on most of his decisions as to what he used in putting together The Silmarillion and to what degree “editorial intervention”–and invention–was involved in creating a book that, for many Tolkien fans, stands forefront in their mind as the “canon” of the earliest ages of Arda.

Douglas Charles Kane’s Arda Reconstructed is an attempt to take those published sources and answer some of these questions. Kane painstakingly, word for word, traces each line of The Silmarillion and locates from where in JRRT’s early writings it came. When first I’d heard of Arda Reconstructed from a fellow fan, I was over the moon. I had attempted this on my own as part of research projects before, and it is not an easy task. To have a book providing at least a starting point for this sort of research would make my own forays into Tolkien’s legendarium that much easier. However, I also operated under the assumption that the results of such a study would make for rather dry reading and would stand primarily as a reference, to be opened at need and otherwise unread.

I was wrong on the latter as well. Kane’s research reveals several interesting trends as far as the construction of The Silmarillion is concerned. Several of them hit my own buttons as a researcher and fan-writer.

During a discussion of Arda Reconstructed on the SWG mailing list, the most frequently asked question was, “Exactly what is this book?” I feel like the book has two important components. Firstly are the charts–one per chapter with the exception of the chapters where CT has already provided a similar breakdown of sources as part of the HoMe series–that detail the sources of each line of The Silmarillion. At times, CT (and Guy Kay) took whole swaths of JRRT’s original sources and plunked them, nearly verbatim, into the published Silmarillion. At other times, they created a patchwork from numerous sources by cutting and pasting in ways that are dizzying to behold. These charts show this and, for me, these alone are worth the price of the book. I don’t even want to imagine the combined number of hours spent on such sleuthing. I’m just glad that, now, I don’t have to do it.

The second component of the book is the author’s commentary, which is largely based on observations made while, presumably, compiling the charts. Here, the book gets interesting and here, also, the book will prove problematic for some. The saying goes that if you put two Tolkien fans together, you will end up with three opinions, and Kane is not shy about expressing his, which I’m sure will imperil him in the minds of others in the community. But so it goes.

He traces several trends that occurred during the compilation of The Silmarillion that I found particularly interesting because, as noted, they relate directly to research interests and “canon” interpretations of mine. Firstly is the diminishment of female characters during the compilation of the published Silmarillion. I’ve already heard this idea poo-pooed: They were minor characters to start and were cut as part of a general goal of downplaying minor characters. Only this isn’t what Kane’s evidence shows. Nearly all of the women of Aman, for example, had at least one detail removed by CT and Guy Kay, seemingly without reason. Other roles were eviscerated, shoving female characters into the background when, according to Kane’s research, it seemed that JRRT intended them to maintain more prominent roles, often illustrative of some of the philosophical ideas that the “Silmarillion” was meant to include.

Míriel Serindë is one such character. With the total elimination of “The Story of Finwë and Míriel,” not only is Míriel moved to the margins of the story, but the philosophical and cultural concepts that she was meant to illustrate are lost as well. Ungoliant undergoes a diminishment that greatly reduces her complexity: the complexity of character that JRRT achieved in very few words being one of the truly notable aspects of the “Silmarillion.” Nerdanel is reduced from a strong and independent woman to one who, as I illustrated in my essay A Woman in Few Words, receives only four mentions in the text, all of which concern her status as a wife and mother. JRRT’s original material on her character, as my essay also illustrates, shows her importance beyond her relationship to important males.

Still other female characters–like Andreth and Nellas–were eliminated from the published story altogether, despite evidence in the published sources that JRRT meant to include them.

Also taken from the published Silmarillion are all references to the mythological sources of the stories being presented. Again, this is an argument that I have been making for years, largely in the context of fan-writings and the attempt to establish an absolute “canon” regarding events and characterizations. My point has always been that this is complicated–even rendered impossible–by the fact that JRRT framed his stories as tales told not by himself as an omniscient and omnipresent narrator but by sources that either lived through the events being described (as in Pengolodh’s depiction of the fall of Gondolin) or received information from other sources (as in Rúmil’s construction of the Ainulindalë based on what he was taught by the Valar). That this was JRRT’s intent is hard to argue against, even though I am generally averse to assigning “authorial intent” to any of the posthumous published works. From The Book of Lost Tales on through the final written sources, JRRT often directly ascribed a source of the tales he was telling or information he was presenting. Some of his later ideas–such as the attempt to integrate a round, heliocentric world with his existing mythology–directly rely on this framework. Yet this information is completely missing from the published Silmarillion. Where did it go and why?

Kane makes a compelling argument that, in an effort to achieve consistency, CT eliminated these attributions because they themselves presented inconsistencies. JRRT ascribed tales as being passed through two lines: from the Elves on Tol Eressëa to the mortal mariner Ælfwine, or from the Elves via the escaped Númenóreans. Kane suggests the CT thought it should be one or the other but not both–that having both would introduce inconsistency into the story–and so struck them altogether. Kane regrets this choice, and I agree. As a reader, it adds the illusion of historical depth and context that the published Silmarillion lacks. As a fan-writer, I wonder, if these attributions had been made clearer, would we see a greater allowance for imagination and invention in Tolkien-based fanworks? It would be more difficult to argue something from The Silmarillion as inarguable fact with a living, breathing narrator easily perceived just on the other side of it.

Kane makes a third intriguing point: the complexity of characters presented in The Silmarillion. The characters in all their shades of gray are what first seized my imagination about the book over even LotR, which is much more prone to dualism where its characters are concerned. “Silmarillion” characters, though, have always defied such easy classification. Just ask a room full of Tolkien fans whether Fëanor or Maeglin or Manwë are good guys or bad guys and observe the variety of responses that you get.

Yet Kane demonstrates a tendency of CT, during the assembly of the published Silmarillion, to edit the texts in such ways that characters are greatly reduced in complexity. Ungoliant has been mentioned; Melkor receives similar treatment. Fëanor and his sons are deprived moments that show them more sympathetically. Manwë’s tendency to look like an ignorant buffoon is not present in the source texts, but many readers walk away from The Silmarillion with this impression–I certainly did. Kane doesn’t suggest this, but I wonder if these changes were aimed at satisfying the notions of really evil villains and really fabulous heroes that seem present in many of the epics on which The Silmarillion is patterned. Garnering sympathy for the bad guys is a relatively new phenomenon and still not one that is universally liked, especially among fantasy fans. Perhaps CT felt that taking the book in this direction would be keeping truer to the epic form and make it appealing to the same fans who adored LotR.

Without having researched any of Kane’s claims for myself, I come away from Arda Reconstructed with just one major complaint. Arda Reconstructed uses only the published source texts–The History of Middle-earth, Unfinished Tales, and so on–which is advantageous in that it allows any reader to reconstruct Kane’s work (Arda Reconstructed Reconstructed?) but is also limiting as far as drawing conclusions about the correctness of CT’s decisions in putting together The Silmarillion.

Kane acknowledges this up front in the book:

It is possible, even likely, that som eof hte changes, omissions, and additions that I describe reflect textual material not included (for whatever reason) in those works, or some other source only available to Christopher (including, perhaps, personal conversations taht he had with his father). (pg. 25)

However, as the analysis proceeds, the reality of the methodological limits of the book sometimes seems to fall by the wayside in favor of expressing a strong, certain opinion about how The Silmarillion was created. On the one hand, I understand this desire. Few are the Silmarillion fans who don’t maintain a least one negative opinion as far as CT’s choices go. At the same time, one of the quips I hear uttered at times by Silmarillion fans is, “I could have done a better job of putting together The Silmarillion than Christopher Tolkien did,” and this unfailing makes me grit my teeth because, no, chances are that if just about anyone besides CT had attempted to create The Silmarillion, we would have an inferior book. I think that–given the time and effort put into it–the “mistakes” in the published text illustrate the enormity of the task more so than any shortcomings CT possessed.

Kane doesn’t go so far as this, obviously; in fact, he speaks in gratitude for CT’s role in bringing JRRT’s posthumous writings to fans and also points out the special relationship between them that made CT the ideal choice for compiling his father’s writings. But even with all of this, I don’t feel as though his conclusions are qualified enough in terms of their shortcomings. For example, when he discusses the diminishment of women in the published Silmarillion, he is often quick to place the responsibility for this onto CT’s shoulders, identifying these changes as wrong or, at best, puzzling. For example, in discussing the removal of the detail that Nerdanel, as well as Fëanor, learned metalsmithing from Mahtan, Kane remarks, “This is one of the most blatant examples of how Christopher’s changes appear to weaken an important female character” (pg. 80). And, true, the changes are puzzling, but the reason doesn’t necessarily lie in any choice that CT made. That is a spurious conclusion to draw based solely on the fact that the published material does not immediately illuminate the reason behind such changes.

In fact, another secondary work about J.R.R. Tolkien underscores the perils of drawing such conclusions. Shortly after finishing Arda Reconstructed, I found a copy of Paul H. Kocher’s Master of Middle-earth at the library. Master of Middle-earth was published in 1972, five years before The Silmarillion, so nearly everything about the Elder Days was left to piecing together details from LotR and The Hobbit or pure speculation. Even after the publication of The Silmarillion, The History of Middle-earth, and the other supplementary texts, I was often amazed at how on-target Kocher was in his speculations about the Elder Days. Yet, at times, he was also dreadfully off-base. For example, he writes,

If the navigable sea has any such boundaries Middle-earth cannot be a rounded sphere as we now conceive Earth. In the imrama tales this point posed no dificult to the wonder-oriented Celtic mind of the Dark Ages, which popularly accepted the world as bounded and flat anyway, or, when it did not, was quite willing to forget roundness under the spell of a good story. But is such a prescientific cosmology intended by Tolkien for Middle-earth? He never discusses the question explicitly one way or the other. He leaves us to survey the text of the epic and its Appendices for ourselves. Quite possibly he considers the question to be of no real importance to the story, and so is indifferent whether it is raised or not. (pgs. 12-13)

Never explicitly discussed? Of no real importance? Indifferent?? With access to the texts we have now, we know to be as wrong-headed as Kocher’s assertion that Idril must have become a mortal because she married one. The question of how to integrate scientific reality–so important to the underlying philosophy of “subcreation” that JRRT used in his stories–with the primitive but beautiful myths he had constructed actually pre-occupied JRRT quite a bit at the end of his life, and he’d even begun changing some of his writings to reflect a round, heliocentric world. My point isn’t to berate Kocher for not having read texts that weren’t even close to publication when he wrote his otherwise insightful book about JRRT’s mythology. My point is that the sources that build all of JRRT’s works are unbelievably complex, and even after the publication of The Silmarillion and more than a dozen texts to support it, there are still troves of unpublished notes and documents to which most of us don’t have access. And this is to say nothing–as Kane himself admits–of conversations between JRRT and CT to which even the most devoted researcher will never have access.

It may well be that CT is a misogynist intentionally bent on diminishing the roles of prominent women; it may be that he possesses a less nefarious (but no less harmful) bias that caused him to choose certain details over others when editing the book to a reasonable length; it may well be that he simply made some unfortunate changes in the interest of slimming and simplifying the text that gives that impression. Or it may be that there is somewhere a scribbled note indicating that Nerdanel should not have learned her father’s art. Or it may be that JRRT expressed to CT his uncertainty about the direction Ungoliant’s character was heading. It may be that we will never know, or that what seems a “trend” is really no more than an unfortunate coincidence, and the label of “misogynist” is too dire, in my mind, to attach to a person without full proof of malevolence or ignorance underlying his decisions.

And this, I think is the major shortcoming of Arda Reconstructed. If CT’s theoretical intellectual heir publishes another twelve volumes of the History of Middle-earth illustrating why CT made the changes that he did, then Kane’s book will become as much of an anachronism as Kocher’s: useful in some regards but generally unreliable for its opinions that fail to account for texts and information that it knows exists but cannot access and the possibility that such information will fundamentally alter one’s conclusions. It is not that those opinions should not be expressed. To the contrary, I suspect that Kane’s conclusions will make for some wonderful discussion and debate in the fan community. 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.

So should you buy the book? Its price tag was a little wince-worthy on my starving student’s budget but, yes, it is worth every penny. As a researcher, I cannot be anything but grateful to Kane and relieved at not having to compile the information that he makes available in tidy tabular format in this book. The tables alone are worth the price of the book and, I suspect, will be well-thumbed in the years to come. The discussion is lively and moves surprisingly fast, given the density of the material that Kane covers. Aside from my misgivings about his certitude at points, he brings to light interesting trends that I think are worth considering and discussing, even if we never reach any definite conclusions.

As a fan-writer, too, Kane’s work if anything demonstrates the frailty of what we fans often identify as “canon”: that notion that there exist facts in JRRT’s writings that can unequivocally be determined as “right” or “wrong.” Several of my fellow fan-writers raised the question of how Kane’s work will change how fiction based on JRRT’s writings is perceived. Pie-eyed optimistic heretic that I am, I believe that Arda Reconstructed defends a less stringent notion of canon. It is a firm reminder of the state of flux in which many of JRRT’s writings were at the time of his death. While any single fan can take a work or works and pin it down as “This is truth to me”–as many do with the published Silmarillion–that really cannot be defended beyond personal preference, and Arda Reconstructed illustrates why.

I give Arda Reconstructed 3.5 Keebler E.L. Fudge “Elves Exist” cookies out of four.

Filed under: Book Reviews, Tolkien by Dawn
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Before I begin, I really should explain what posts categorized in “The Crackpot” are, since they’re different than the posts that I usually write. As is, I hope, fairly evident, most of my posts here are researched somewhat (some are researched extensively, like the current in-progress series on the depiction of Maglor’s character by the Tolkien fan community) and generally take me a few days to write, in Notepad, before publication. The Crackpot category, on the other hand, is for wild, off-the-top-of-my-head theorizing. I begin with ideas swimming in my crazy head more so than facts pulled from books, and I force myself to write the post in a single session (allowing for interruptions like having to put the dogs outside or drive home from work). My hope is that my fellow heretics and loremasters and heretic loremasters will add their own wild, off-the-tops-of-their-heads theories to mine. The idea behind The Crackpot is to get ideas for topics that I might want to research in greater depth someday.

So. Welcome to The Crackpot. Please theorize, discuss, and debate to your heart’s content!

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As part of my goal to catch up on my reading list during the semester break, I am trying to track down and read secondary sources of information about JRRT’s writings. I recently found at the library the book Master of Middle-earth by Paul H. Kocher and have been slowly working my way through it. It’s mostly about LotR and was published in 1972–five years before The Silmarillion hit the bookshops–and so is quaint in some places and, in others, mind-bogglingly accurate regarding aspects of the mythology that remained, at that point, unpublished.

So I’m up to the “Aragorn” chapter. And, while reading at lunch today, this passage leaped out at me regarding some critics’ contentions that Aragorn needed more complexity as a character in the form of “a sharp taste for sin”:

It is not clear why this demand, more appropriate to a realistic novel than to heroic fantasy, should be made . . .. What is clear is that if it were made of all alike it would blur the clear dichotomy between good and evil on which Tolkien has chosen to build his epic. (pg. 128)

Now, it’s really easy for me to say, “Pssh. This was clearly written before The Silmarillion made its way into the ‘canon,’” and disregard it as an anachronism. Only this is a point I’ve also seen made by people who have read The Silmarillion.

I remember when I was first dipping my toe into the Tolkien fandom, I had an almost insatiable hunger for textual analyses done by people who had read more than me. Which, at that point, was nearly everyone. This was in the heyday of TheOneRing.net before it became primarily a source for information and gossip about the movies, when Green Books still had a prominent place on the homepage and tORN still published fan fiction. Green Books was a favorite of mine in those days, and in reading a Q&A written by one of their columnists, I encountered the semi-rant against modern literature, which sullied its heroes and where one of Aragorn’s unquestionable goodness had no place and represented weak writing. Abashed, I realized that that was me: I had been taught and had myself aspired to write “complex characters,” who broke free of the constraints of “good guy” and “bad guy.” Yet, as I read more of JRRT’s writings and gained the confidence to question how others interpreted the texts, the more I realized that I did not agree with this columnist’s opinion at all. Traditionally, yes, epics make use of moral dualism, but I felt that JRRT’s writings were, largely, not so simplistic.

In fact, a “clear dichotomy between good and evil” is exactly the opposite of how I see JRRT’s writings. Especially in light of The Silmarillion, which–if anything–muddies the waters of clear good-evil dualism that LotR gives the impression of existing. With few exceptions, there are none in The Silmarillion who can be plunked neatly into Good or into Evil. Even Melkor: I remember once writing on the SWG email list that no one in the Silm is entirely evil except Melkor, and Rhapsody rightfully called me on it. Is Melkor even fully evil or is he the product of his circumstances? It’s a valid question to ask, I think, and once you start debating whether Melkor might be something other than fully evil, then the dichotomy to which Kocher and others refer goes out the window.

Of course, LotR presents characters that are more easily dichotomized, especially without knowledge of the earlier “Silmarillion” mythology to complicate characters like Sauron who appear, in LotR and The Hobbit, to be utterly evil but are shown as being more complex in the Silm. But I still don’t think that LotR is a “clear dichotomy between good and evil.” Firstly, there are characters like Boromir, Denethor, and Gollum, who walk the line. Secondly, there is the broader context of the novel as a history or set of myths passed down from loremasters who lived through the age (like Bilbo), presumably to JRRT in the role of the modern “loremaster” charged with bringing the forgotten myths back to our culture. This allows characters like Aragorn (or Lúthien, in The Silmarillion) to achieve a degree of moral perfection that they never could have possessed in reality. So while the story as it is told to us certainly creates that impression, awareness of it as a story about a period in history rather than an accurate historical account allows us to understand that the good-evil dualism is more in the bias or imagination of the storyteller than anything factual. (Of course, Kocher likely would not have been aware of this broader framework in which JRRT set his stories, but modern students of his work certainly should be.)

At the same time, when I read the History of Middle-earth books, I’m left with the impression that, in many ways, JRRT was pushing his characters, morally, to one side or the other as his work on the legendarium progressed. The Book of Lost Tales is rich with characters that are hard to place in one bin or the other as far as morality goes. Námo and Nienna, for example, are delightfully creepy, and Makar and Meássë certainly liven things up. The sons of Fëanor, at different points in JRRT’s early writings, all had their moments when they were depicted more sympathetically, as did Fëanor himself. Of course, as Douglas Charles Kane meticulously demonstrates in the recently published Arda Reconstructed, a lot of these losses were the result of Christopher Tolkien’s edits, not his father’s, and we often do not know why those edits were made. Perhaps JRRT indicated to CT that he wished the stories to move in this direction, or perhaps it is, as Kane argues, “editorial intervention” on CT’s part. Regardless, without even considering the published Silmarillion, the stories have always seemed, to me, to progress toward moral dualism as they evolved.

So, heretics and loremasters, what are your thoughts on this? Do you think that any of JRRT’s books show a good-evil dichotomy? Do you think The Silmarillion can be read this way? I realize that my reading of the books falls at one extreme and readings like Kocher’s at the other, but I’m curious what is out there in the way of middle ground.

Filed under: The Crackpot, Tolkien by Dawn
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Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon has been on my reading list for some time now, ever since my husband and I rented the television mini-series last year. A few months ago, as part of my course on women writers, I wrote a term paper on the idea that the fantasy genre is a perfect vehicle for promoting gender equality. Mists was one of the novels that was consistently mentioned and highly regarded as an example of the genre serving a feminist purpose, rocketing it to the top of my reading list.

Mists joins a tradition of exploring the Arthurian legends, a tradition that includes hundreds of works and spans centuries, but differs from the vast majority of these treatments in that its concerns with the cultural mainstays like King Arthur and Sir Lancelet are secondary to the women of the legends. The story centers itself on the life of Morgaine, Arthur’s half-sister and priestess of the isle of Avalon, where old magics hold sway amid an increasingly Christianized Britain. The lives of the other women in the Arthurian stories are also focal points of the story: Morgaine and Arthur’s biological mother Igraine, Morgaine’s foster-mother Viviane, Arthur’s wife and queen Gwynhyfar, Morgaine’s aunt Morgause, and Lancelet’s wife Elaine.

The unique perspective would not be nearly as notable if the Arthurian tradition didn’t have such a lengthy history of misogyny. In works dating from the medieval period to the present, the best a woman in an Arthurian tale can hope for is to be sidelined, to be a name in a text notable only for her marriage or mothering of an important male. Her unfortunate sisters are cast as villains prone to open malice or astounding weakness, particularly in matters of self-control and morality. In The Reclamation of a Queen, Barbara Ann Gordon-Wise traces the literary history of Gwynhyfar, perhaps the most maligned of Arthurian women. Gwynhyfar’s improper sexual desires serve to bring down her husband’s paradisial kingdom in many of the works in which she plays a part while her most frequent partner in crime–Lancelet, the most beloved of Arthur’s knights–tends to be regarded favorably, despite his illicit activities in the Queen’s bed. Her inability to provide Arthur with a son and an heir is also scorned by literary history for its weakening of Arthur’s kingdom. Saddled with the lowest of expectations–to be an obedient wife and provide a child to her husband–Gwynhyfar fails at both, and literature has judged–and continues to judge–her harshly for it.

Morgaine is generally a more active villain, with the fact that she bore a child to Arthur–her half-brother–usually used as proof of that. Despite the fact that it takes two to tango, Arthur’s role in that pregnancy tends to go unexamined or is excused by Morgaine’s skill in deception and trickery. Relying on a motif that goes back to the moment that Adam first bit into the apple, he is an innocent victim of the wiles of a woman. Their son Mordred goes on to destroy the peace that Arthur has so carefully wrought. Once again, the vile actions of a woman destroy the accomplishments of a man.

To say that women have been mistreated throughout the history of literature is to state the obvious, and bemoaning the lack of gender equality as it is reflected in the literature of medieval Europe is pointless. What is disturbing is the tenacity with which these negative depictions of women have held their places in literature and other forms of entertainment, despite their coming to light in a society that is supposedly moving toward gender equality. In this, fantasy literature holds its unique power for promoting the empowerment of women.

To write historical fiction or even fiction set in the modern day is to be constrained by gender expectations and inequalities that are represented in the interest of accurately depicting reality. I have had conversations with people who complain about stories masquerading as historical fiction that attempt to level the gender playing field by showing empowered women where, in all likelihood, there would have been none, or who portray cultures with much more progressive attitudes toward gender than they in fact had. I am forced to agree, even as I lament that harmful stereotypes of women must be thrust forth again and again in literature because of it. Herein, fantasy literature possesses a unique advantage. In its most elemental definition, fantasy literature changes an aspect of reality (without concern about the mechanism of that change, unlike science fiction) and follows that change through to its conclusion. Fantasy literature is perfect for exploring a world that is not constrained by inequality towards women or that–as with Mists–turns patriarchy on its head to show what a matrifocal civilization might look like. Throughout this, there is no need to “suspend disbelief” as one must when encountering the same ideas in most historical fiction or fiction set in the modern day.

I picked up Mists for my interest in it as a piece of feminist fantasy literature. However, I found its feminist cant secondary to and dependent upon its tendency to look critically upon organized religion. While there is no doubt that Mists is meant to criticize patriarchal institutions–the Christian church in its more conservative incarnation receives particularly scathing treatment–then I felt like it looked unfavorably on both the Christian and the pagan institutions shown in the novel. Although the critiques of Christianity were much more noticeable, the institutions of heathen Goddess worship of which Morgaine and Viviane are part are certainly far from glorified. To the contrary, Mists shows both faiths–Christian and pagan–to be uplifting, positive entities in their purest forms. When tethered to power, ambition, and moral certitude, however, both institutions wreak terrible harm.

Although the pagan faith shown in Mists is Goddess-centered and treats women as higher than men in its institutions and traditions, it certainly is not a pro-woman institution. Morgaine’s mother Igraine is the most shining example of a woman treated as a tool in order to advance her sisters in a male-driven world. Igraine is given in marriage to Gorlois–a Roman much older than she whom she detests and who treats her with disregard bordering on contempt–and she is given by her own sister Viviane, a priestess of Avalon who otherwise affirms the superiority of women. It is clear, though, that this does not include all women so much as it includes women in power. When it is to Viviane’s benefit, she is no better than Gwynhyfar’s father, who gives his daughter to Arthur in marriage as part of a parcel of horses; Igraine, likewise, is used to buy Avalon favor with the Romans. Deserted by her sisters, Igraine’s life becomes focused on pleasing men, and it is no surprise that she dies in a convent, scorning her own daughter Morgaine for her autonomy. In contrast, Lancelet and Gwydion (Mordred) are both connected to Avalon and the Lady of the Lake, and neither is used as a pawn quite in the way that Igraine (and, to a lesser extent, Morgause) are used.

Likewise, Morgaine’s treatment of Kevin the Bard at the end of the novel also shows the pagan institutions as comparably brutal as the Christian church. (Actually, at this point, they are probably more so, but the novel hints at the end of the growing fervor of the Christians that will, presumably, lead into the extreme fundamentalism that characterizes the Middle Ages and continues, to an extent, today.) Kevin is most guilty of not being a religious fundamentalist; his aim is to bring the two religions together as much as possible and to preserve the old ways in conjunction with the flourishing Christianity. To Morgaine and others with a fundamentalist bent, this is unacceptable. Morgaine’s brief embodiment as the Goddess at one of Arthur’s feasts demonstrates the potential of the Britons to receive the old powers, but her refusal to compromise threatens to drive the faith in its entirety into oblivion. When Kevin is discovered to have used the regalia of Avalon in conjunction with Christian ceremonies, he is decried as a traitor, and the original sentence is that he should be brought alive to Avalon (through the trickery of the priestess Nemue, who in the process of ensnaring him must also herself fall in love with him) and there flayed and shut alive inside of a tree.

Even as she herself hands down this sentence, Morgaine is tormented by doubts. For all that she despises Kevin’s actions, he has been her friend and lover, and she wants to do him no harm. When he is delivered into her hands, she makes the decision to grant him a quick death, even if it means that she herself must bear his punishment as a traitor to Avalon. Morgaine’s refusal to play a part in cruel malice is viewed–by her at least–as a weakness; she feels that she has failed in her duty to her Goddess. In despair at Kevin’s fate, Nemue commits suicide. Again, in pursuit of their aims, the machinations of the religious elite have led to the destruction of a woman.

Throughout the novel, Kevin’s sentence remains the most explicit example of such cruelty, though Mists hints that such “blood sacrifices” were once commonplace and that ordinary people (or criminals in their places) were expected to lay down their lives in rituals to ensure a good harvest or in homage to the Goddess. The elite and powerful were, of course, exempt, unless they were traitors, in which case they were subjected to the same cruelties that would become part and parcel of their religious successors, the Christians. This seems to show, again, the short-sightedness of religious institutions, no matter what name they use in worship, and the dehumanization to which they are inclined when they believe that larger spiritual matters require it. Mistreatment of women is a part of this.

So, in the end, what did I think of the book? It is not without flaws, in my opinion, but overall, I really, really enjoyed it. I felt that the feminist purposes were a little too explicit in places, borrowing too heavily from modern discourse common on this subject (particularly in the earlier sections of the book, when Igraine is growing accustomed to living in a patriarchy and often thinks like Gloria Steinem being made to live among the Amish) and would have liked had I felt less like I was being told what to feel about this rather than being shown Igraine’s life and permitted to draw my own conclusions. (Yes, the old adage “show don’t tell” rears its warty head!) Morgaine was constantly realizing that another character was “the only friend she’d ever had” or “the only one she’d ever loved,” which would have been fine except that I think she realized this, independently, of Kevin, Lancelet, Viviane, Gwynhyfar, and Arthur. Since I am prone to this sort of hyperbole and waffling over affections in my own fiction, it leaped out at me here. And the ending happened much too fast. Mordred becomes a delightfully wicked character, and I looked forward to his climactic scene with Arthur but … there wasn’t much there. His betrayal should have been so much more memorable given the skill with which Ms. Bradley constructs his character and installs him in the hearts of those in Arthur’s court. I felt like the book rushed much to fast to its conclusion. Maybe the copy I had from the library had pages missing? It did feel that way.

But, for the past month, there were times when I would want to forsake other activities and things that needed to be done in order to read this book. It is not only an ingenious rendering of one of the most familiar tales in Western mythology but also highly entertaining. I give it 3.75 E.L. Fudge “Elves Exist” cookies out of four.

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Hey, we all have those words and terms for which we bear an illogical (or maybe not-so-illogical …) loathing. Here are my fannish five.

(I should add that this list is relevant to the Silmarillion fandom, perhaps the broader Tolkien fandom in places, but they are hardly representative of Fandom as a Whole, if there is any such thing, and they are not meant to be.)

5. AU. Short for alternate universe, this term isn’t bad if it’s used for what it is meant to represent: stories that are set in an actual alternate universe. This term’s shortcoming comes from the way that its definition has been distorted unto meaninglessness by confusing unpopular interpretation with distortion of the canon. I’ve discussed this elsewhere, so I won’t say much more here except to note that it is unfortunate that a term intended to delineate a distinct, legitimate genre has instead become an aspersion and used to attempt to shame authors into a mainstream, fanonical, and crowd-approved interpretation of JRRT’s texts.

4. OOC. Short for “out of character,” I’ve seen this used as a warning, as a form of AU (i.e., “Warning: I’ve made Maedhros really mean and OOC!”), but most often as a criticism of stories where the reader feels the author strays too far outside the bounds of believability.

But, in Silmfic, “OOC” is almost meaningless.

We recently had this discussion on the SWG list. As I pointed out in my post, even the most written-about characters are barely mentioned in the text; for example, Maedhros–who commands an impressive 22% of stories on the SWG archive–is mentioned only eighty-eight times in The Silmarillion. This isn’t a whole lot to go on.

Silmarillion characters, by and large, are not characters at all. They are archetypes; they are familiar faces throughout literature, here, being used to illustrate broad points about an imagined history. While a perceptive reader can and will detect complexity in these characters, this is more often derived from implication than anything explicit that JRRT has done in terms of characterization. For example, Fëanor is widely regarded as a complex character. What The Silmarillion actually says about Fëanor, though, is anything but shades of gray: He is depicted negatively, representing the worst qualities of pride and arrogance; he is the quintessential fallen character who serves a broader purpose as a vehicle for expressing ideas about possessiveness, pride, and obedience to authority.

These are Fëanor’s canonical traits: He’s a proud jerk. Readers, though, see complexity in his relationships with his family, people, and the Valar. They read between the lines to determine that he was not always such a negative character; that his negative traits evolved from what was done to him rather than from core character flaws.

Most of Tolkien’s Silmarillion characters are this way. They have a handful of defining traits and not much else. It is possible to see much more implied in the story, but this is largely conjecture and interpretation and can hardly be called “canon.” So what of OOC?

OOC, I think, is a completely irrelevant label in Silmfic 99% of the time that it is slung against a story or author. “Keeping to canon” in terms of characterization is limited to understanding the roles that a character plays in the broader framework of the story and not much else. In other words, understanding Fëanor the symbol/archetype requires that he maintain certain traits in order to function in the same way in fan-authored stories as he does in the texts. Making him a meek and pie-eyed boot-licker of the Valar is likely to irrevocably change his character’s function in the story*. Making him chronically anxious or empathetic or a great teacher or a loving father … not OOC. Those things can all coexist alongside his necessary role as the proud jerk to create a portrait of Fëanor the man (not Fëanor the symbol/archetype). As authors, moving characters beyond their roles as symbols or archetypes is usually a good idea.

In Silmfic, OOC is rarely a legitimate critique. More often than not, it is wielded against those stories that do not conform to the reader’s personal interpretation of a character. For example, Another Man’s Cage was once deemed “OOC” by a reader because Fëanor hugged his kids. This particular reader–who clearly wasn’t inclined to see characters rounded beyond those few key traits JRRT gives us–couldn’t see how one as “evil” as Fëanor could ever do something so sweet and cutesy as hugging his kids.

There is absolutely nothing in the texts to support this idea. There isn’t, of course, anything in the texts that definitively states that Fëanor did hug his kids either. Which left that reader and me at an impasse, neither of us wrong but neither of us right either, hurling textual facts at each other that proved nothing definitive.

Slathering “OOC” onto any interpretation which one does not agree is not the solution.

* I would not be me if I did not mention that one can actually justify some of these “OOC” 180-from-the-texts depictions by remembering that The Silmarillion was written as fictional myth or history, with all the thorny issues of finding “truth” in myth or history present here as well. This takes more convincing in a story, I think, but is not outside the realm of possibility.

3. Mary Sue. “Mary Sue” is another one of those terms that has lost its meaning. When I first joined the Tolkien fandom, Mary Sue was usually defined as “ya know her when ya see her.” As I did more and more reading, Mary Sue came to be a character with flawed characterization: Instead of being possessed of all the round, complex traits that we know we should invest our characters with, she was flat and unequivocally Good. Because she represented the author, of course, and the author was simply acting out a fantasy.

Later, Mary Sue was redefined for me as an actor that warped the plot or the other characters. The problem with her wasn’t her flat characterization but the way that she had of hijacking canonical plotlines or skewing canon characters into “OOCness” (see the gripe above this one), i.e. making Frodo’s choice to take the Ring to Mordor not an act of self-sacrifice but because he was enamored of her, and she was going along with the Fellowship because she and Legolas could not be parted from each other. She could be the most believable female character in the world, but her exertion on the storyline and her fellow characters (as understood in the canon) was too strong.

Naturally, “Mary Sue” is not the only fannish term to have different definitions depending on who you ask. (Just ask a few people what “PWP” stands for …) That’s not my problem with the term.

The concept of “Mary Sue” is often itself misogynist. Like “AU” and “OOC,” it often becomes a criticism broadened to include any story with an original female character. This is problematic for a number of reasons. First, it suggests that there is something wrong with giving the spotlight–or even part of it–to a woman. One of my major critiques against JRRT’s writings is that they are an old boys’ club. Yes, he did better than many–even most–male fantasists, but his stories are still about males shaping their world to suit their vision. It’s called the Fellowship of the Ring for a reason. There is also a reason why even gender-conscious fans do not blink at the term “Men” being used to refer to mortal human beings of both genders: Because mortal women in JRRT’s writings so rarely give us reason to apply it to them that we don’t usually get the chance to notice the sheer wrongness of a sentence like, “Haleth was a Man who led her people to victory.”

One of the major positive functions of Tolkien-based fiction (aside from its value as entertainment or personal fulfillment or as a fun community-building hobby) is that authors can give voices to the unnamed, unvoiced women in the stories and begin to correct the gender imbalance in JRRT’s works. Pinning a derogatory label on the front of every female character who does not appear on the short list with which we have to work in “canon” is one way of further stifling creativity in this regard.

Secondly, the oft-mouthed definition of Mary Sue as a (female) character who is “too perfect” is problematic. What does that mean? That a woman can’t be beautiful, smart, and charming? (I do not believe that. I know some.) Characters that are “too perfect” appear throughout JRRT’s writings. They are both male and female. Critiquing a character as not relatable because of his/her unreal perfection is fair game. Claiming that, as a whole, female characters that are “too perfect” can’t function in a story is sexist. Despite the existence of terms like “Gary Stu” and “Marty Stu,” I’ve never actually seen these terms applied to a story. The message I come away with is that “perfect” women (read: strong, beautiful, assertive, charismatic) are problematic. The same traits in a guy are Finrod.

Thirdly, the accusation of “Mary Sue” is most often made against those characters appearing in stories authored by young women. They are problematic (it is said) because they are shameless self-inserts and represent a female fantasy and nothing else.

And what, pray tell, is wrong with that?

It seems to me that male-authored literature and media is full of self-inserts that represent male fantasies. How many skinny nerds become superheroes or martial arts masters or secret agents charged with saving the world? How many of them get ripped and get the girl? How many adolescent males authoring fan fiction do you think make their male self-inserts well-rounded characters? And how much critique do you think these young men get when they fail to do so?

We not only critique young women; we made up a whole term to point out their literary sins!

No, “Mary Sue” has to go. Not only is it being applied too broadly to exclude female characters in general, but it is being used to devalue the writings and fantasies of young women. It asks, why should they be writing about themselves as an equal, as a Tenth Walker, when they could just pick one of the boys that JRRT gave them to write about?

2. Slash. As I’m writing this, I’m sensing a trend in my loathing of most of these terms: once-accurate (and largely neutral) terms become pejorative and are broadly applied to anything that even vaguely resembles what the term was invented to actually define. Or: if it quacks like a duck, that means it must be a duck, even if it’s really a goose, my dogs’ honking stuffed duck toy, or my crazy uncle dressed like a duck on Halloween.

Slash, as I understand it, was a term originally coined for stories with a prominent same-sex non-canonical consummated pairing. Despite the awful-sounding name, it really was meant to be neutral: “Slash” referred to the literal slash between the characters’ names when indicating the pairing, i.e. Maedhros/Fingon, Aragorn/Legolas, Kirk/Spock. It was a distinct subgenre of fiction that represented the author’s purpose in writing the story–to present sexually a non-canonical homosexual (usually male) couple–and not to act as an indication of non-sexual content.

These days, though, I get the impression that “slash” has come to mean “anything gay.” If your characters just happen to be gay and just happen to have an off-screen and completely non-sexual same-sex pairing, then that is slash. If I want to look at the social issues that might have been present in Gondolin if Ecthelion and Glorfindel really were a couple, even if I never venture beyond the council rooms and parlors of the city to look at their personal/romantic lives, even if they never kiss, then a certain subset of readers will expect me to label that story as slash. It’s not remotely incestuous; it doesn’t “violate canon” in any way, but it depicts gay characters, so people need and deserve a warning.

Among my friends who write mostly same-sex pairings, there is lately a revolt against the term. They don’t like it, and I don’t blame them. Broadly defined as it is, it becomes a way of enforcing homophobia. Readers who don’t like slash often use sexual explicitness as the reason for that. They’ll often affirm, in the same breath, to dislike graphic het stories too. The difference is that a lot of these readers won’t blink at a story that mentions Maglor’s extra-canonical marriage but will pitch a fit if Glorfindel and Ecthelion have an extra-canonical off-screen romance. That’s homophobia, folks. Allowing homophobic people to avoid that truth by aiding them in sweeping anything “gay” under the same label as “gay sex” is wrong.

1. Canon. Tolkien’s stories are full of mythical entities. A coherent canon is one of them.

If one defines “canon” as basically the same as “inarguable facts” (implying that the writer cannot deviate from them without making a mistake or writing an AU), then there are precious few of those in JRRT’s writings.

That is not the problem. That is, in my heretic’s estimation, what makes JRRT’s writings such a fruitful playground for my own creative endeavors and why, I suspect, unlike many other fandoms, one doesn’t see too much migration of Tolkien fans.

The problem is that discussions of canon often begin with the belief that it is possible–with enough study of the texts–to find out answers, “what really happened” in the stories. That it is possible to grade most scenarios, tidily, as right or wrong in terms of canon. That “canon-compliant” and “AU” do not occur on a continuum.

I’ve already made the argument elsewhere that precious little truly counts as canon. Few of the “facts” presented in the stories can’t be challenged in some way. I’ve argued yet elsewhere that where people are hung up on questions of canon, they need to be asking questions about stories and writing. I stick by those beliefs and, in my perfect fannish world, would no longer see discussions of canon framed as finding right or wrong answers but as looking at myriad possibilities with the goal of creating a thoughtful or entertaining story.

So … what terms would you strike from the fannish lexicon?

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