XI: Discourse

The Rings of Power is a talisman and a surrogate for a certain kind of toxic fan schism. I think that you think that I am a gatekeeper; you think that I think that you are a dyson airblade (*). The rest is discourse.

(*) Not a proper fan.

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(*) Not a real fan. 

X: History

The Rings of Power plays fast and loose with the imaginary history of Middle-earth. But historical TV shows and movies play fast and loose with real history all the time. People who know about these things tell me that Braveheart was a laughably inaccurate depiction of medieval Scottish history. People who care tell me that the Crown was a dubiously accurate fictionalisation of the life of Elizabeth Windsor and her family. And many cowboy yarns are set in an imaginary country only tangentially connected with America. Heck, Shakespeare's Richard III probably only has a passing connection to the dead historical guy they found under the carpark. 

So maybe the Rings of Power is not an inept dramatisation. Maybe it is a new and separate work that happens to use a pseudo-historical setting as its inspiration?

When I was Discoursing upon this subject, I said, frivolously, that someone with a knowledge and love of the history of the American West could be forgiven for objecting to Cowboy Movie in which all the characters had English accents; which placed California on the East Coast and made Abraham Lincoln the exact contemporary of Alfred the Great. My interlocutor pointed out that someone had, in fact, taken a story set in Medieval Japan and filmed it as if it happened in the Wild West; and indeed taken a story about Renaissance Verona and placed it in 1950s New York. 

Which is a slight non-sequitur. But I concede: if someone wanted to create a radical reimagining of Lord of the Rings set in the First World War, I'd be all on board with it. Frodo and Sam as a senior and junior officer carrying a dangerous new kind of bomb to a munitions dump behind enemy lines? A disguised Prince George pretending to be a scout named Strider? The Kaiser in his dark tower sending out nine secret service agents to assassinate them? 

Why not? Why not Tom Sawyer with the geography and social attitudes of a 1970s British sit-com? Oliver Twist in the modern American residential care system? 

This kind of thing is really done, all the time. And I am normally highly in favour of it. I liked (though I didn't fully understand) the production of Wagner's Lohengrin in which the knights were substituted for laboratory rats and the Swan was a Kubrick-esq space embryo. I thought the play about Queen Lear and her three sons illuminated Shakespeare's text in unexpected ways. It's normally the rest of the world who says "Oh, but Andrew, I don't think Richard the Third would really have been driving a tank."

I went to see the Lord of the Rings stage musical. Twice. I wish I had seen the original Canadian production that everyone says was much too long. As regular readers know, the show made many changes to the story. It describes the Rings as the source of magic in Middle-earth and insinuates that when the One is destroyed, magic in general will go away. It conflates Theoden and Denethor into a single figure called the Great King Of All the Lands of Men. It jumps from the Prancing Pony to Weathertop in single dance-routine. 

Why am I prepared to defend this kind of thing; but draw the line at being told that Isildur was a young man at the time of the forging of the Rings?

I don't have a satisfactory answer to that question.

But here is part of it.

The Jackson trilogy failed as an adaptation of Lord of the Rings but it worked, brilliantly, as an action movie. It ran rings around anything in the roughly contemporaneous Star Wars prequels, and it was also much funnier. The Guardian film critic of the day, who appeared to have no interest in fantasy and may not have read the book, said the Helms Deep sequences were as good as anything Kurasowa ever did. And in some cases (not all) it did a good job at dubbing Tolkien's epic language into the patois of the summer blockbuster: 

Book:  'But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Eowyn I am, Eomund's daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone, if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him"

Movie:  "I'm not a man."

One thinks of the modern Bible paraphrase which renders "Am I my brother's keeper?" as "Am I meant to be the baby-sitter?"

The stage musical works pretty well as a musical -- the songs remain forgettable, but the bollywood inspired dance routines in the revival were a lot of a fun; and it did a creditable job of turning the accomplishment of half a million words into an hourglass. The shrinking exercise had been undertaken by people very much in touch with the spirit of the books. The sudden eruption of paper flowers and rose petals at the end of the London version, and the distribution of packets of seeds to the audience at the end of the recent Watermill show don't reproduce the exact plot of the Scouring of the Shire. But they are in touch with its mythic emotions. Sam uses Galadriel's gift to heal the Shire. Jackson chopped out the healing and gift. 

The Rings of Power adapts an historical story, removes the history, and in return gives me...

Some pretty speeches and nice backdrops. Some generic fight scenes in cookie-cutter forests, Some Irish people claiming to be Hobbits. Some short, funny Scotsmen with silly beards. It is not a translation of Akallabeth into the language of a TV mini series. It's not a new story using the Fall of Numenor as a background. It really is an artistic vacuum. If it didn't have the title of my favourite book tattooed on its bottom, I wouldn't give it a second glance.  And neither would you. 

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IX: Sources

Does Tolkien contradict himself?  Very well: he contradicts himself. 

He contains multitudes. He never finalised his meta-narrative; at any rate he never brought the texts embodying that meta-narrative to a publishable state. He could see the whole history of Middle-earth in his head. Some parts he saw more clearly than others. Whenever he wrote one thing down, another thing went out of focus. Wikipedia refers to a non-scholarly source which distinguishes three distinct Middle-earths (Middles-earth?). But probably there are hundreds. We have 6,000 pages of textual variations and footnotes. We have one pretty good editorial stab at presenting those variations as a single text.

In the last years of his life, Christopher Tolkien seemed to be working towards a compromise between the Silmarillion and the History of Middle-earth: three books which presented Tolkien's writings about Turin, Gondolin, and Beren and Luthien in a non-scholarly format, accessible to the general reader, but still reflecting the unfinalised state of the manuscripts. Since his death, the estate has allowed Brian Sibley to present everything Tolkien wrote about the Second Age as a chronological narrative.  

I wonder whether, at some point in the future, some scholar might be let loose on the History of Middle Earth and be allowed to produce an alternate Silmarillion -- a beginning-to-end collage of Tolkien's Unfinalized Tales that makes different choices from the ones that Christopher made? Maybe a readers' edition of the Book of Lost Tales or a Round Earth version of the Silmarillion?

Why not? That text of Hamlet you have your shelf is one editor's set of choices about how the various Folios and Quartos ought to be treated. Even your Penguin Classic Frankenstein is a compromise between the 1818 and 1831 editions: and we now know that some of the boring bits in the first version were written by Percy rather than Mary.  

I wish that were the conversation we were having. I wish that when we watched Rings of Power, we split into the faction that thought that was a good idea to incorporate elements from the Lost Road and the faction who thought they should have stuck rigorously to the published Akallabeth. I wish we were debating which version of the courtship of Galadriel and Celeborn they should run with. I wish we were being shocked to find that they'd dumped the Silmarillion altogether and were treating the abortive re-write as canon. 

I doubt if one in a hundred people watching Saturday evening fantasy TV in the 1980s knew about the textual history of the Robin Hood ballads.  And even fewer cared. But Richard Carpenter did; and he cleverly made the discrepancy between the earlier ballads (where Robin is a yeoman) and the later ones (where he's a nobleman) part of the story.  That kind of thing can be done if it's the kind of thing you want to do.

The Silmarillion is not sacred. 

But some people speak as if -- some people may honestly believe -- Christopher Tolkien created the Silmarillion out of the whole cloth. I hear every day apologists for the Rings of Power asserting on social media that Silmarillion is not really by Tolkien; that it is new work that Christopher made up based on his father's notes; that those of who object to the TV show's dumping of the lore are clinging to a "head-canon" that we ourselves made up. 

Now, writers' kids sometimes do invent new books; and they sometimes even put their dad's names on them.  And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. We all know about Brian Herbert writing new Dune novels based on synopses discovered among his late father's papers, and going on to create many further volumes out of his own imagination. Many people have told me that they are not very good; but there is nothing sinful about their existing. There are twenty-five more or less official sequels to the Wizard of Oz written by persons other than Frank Baum. A licensed continuation of Tolkien by Other Hands might be very interesting. I am frankly astonished that no one has attempted, officially or unofficially, to write The New Shadow based on Tolkien's thirteen page opening chapter. 

But that is not where we in fact are. 

Where we are is that some gate-leaver-openers are using the admittedly unfinalized state of Tolkien's mythos as a nuclear option to deploy against those of us who honestly don't think the Rings of Power is very good. Tolkien didn't publish the Silmarillion so the Silmarillion is not by Tolkien so no version of Middle-earth is any better than any other so there is no lore for Rings of Power to be faithful to and everyone else should jolly well shut being so horrid about it.  And that is fannish trolling and gate-leaving of the silliest kind. 

However....

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Arts Diary: Gladiator 2:  The richest, cleverest and most powerful man in the world has declared that this film is woke....

VIII: Fantasy

Then we are decided.

Pointy eared people talking posh and furry footed people living down holes are in the cold light of day, every so slightly incredibly silly. And the idea of light skinned goodies and dark skinned baddies is a tiny little bit incredibly racist, and it doesn't become less incredibly racist because a few of the light skinned people now have dark skins.

It isn't true that all Tolkien's good characters are purely good and all his evil characters are purely evil and it never was. But it is perfectly true that Tolkien's brand of mythology turns psychology into geography; that the good side of human nature is externalised and put in a woody glade overseen by a pointy eared B.V.M and the darker side of human nature is externalised and put in an industrial hellscape populated by bestial cockneys. Even Michael Moorcock's barbs about class; about the Hobbits romanticising a fictional upper class rural England and the Orcs demonising the urban working class majority sometimes hits home.

It's more complicated than that. Lothlorien only remains Edenic because of the tainted Ring. Orcs aren't evil at source. Frodo fails and Gollum completes the quest. Gandalf as ring-bearer would have been much worse than Sauron.

But we are talking about the Lore, even the Deep Lore, and we are asking if that Lore really and truly matters? What would the text of Tolkien, separated from that lore even look like? 

I think it would look slightly reactionary, slightly racist, slightly superficial, and slightly silly. It would look, in fact, as exactly as it looks to the literati who haven't read it: a stream of mumbo-jumbo and psychedelia. 

Remember Private Eye's review of the Nature of Middle-earth? 

"Yet, amid much that is obscure and recondite, the Elvish chronicler Naffly in his Annals of the Second Age insists that he was the son of Shagpile, a fell warrior, and cunning withal, whose mighty deeds included the sack of the Llareggub Mountains, the pillaging of the Snurdlings of Westernesse and the forging of the great sword Bolok, first wielded at the Battle of the Thirteen Armies, at the sight of which the elf-princes fled in terror, with only Tarragon of the House of Herb resisting...." 

But none of this matters. Because Tolkien's fairy-tale archetypes, do, in fact, exist in a world with past, with a mythology, even a theology. C.S Lewis said that when you scratch Middle-earth, you find history underneath. Nine-tenth of the time, that history is not literary sleight of hand, but an allusion to manuscripts which actually existed and would one day be published.

Tolkien didn't create a story. He didn't create a series of stories. He didn't even create an imaginary world -- not in the way that Frank Herbert or Greg Stafford or Oliver Postgate created imaginary worlds. Tolkien's (if you insist) legendarium is best thought of as imaginary history: history-as-art.

To some extent, history is always art. "History" is the story about plucky little England standing alone against the beastly Germans; not a database of facts and figures about the years 1939-1945. When people pull statues down or demand that new ones are erected they aren't arguing about the facts of history; they are arguing about which story they prefer. That is why discovering, or drawing attention to, a new or neglected piece of information is called "erasing our history". CS Lewis made out the case that the popular scientific account of the universe (as opposed to the one which actual scientists believe in) gained traction because it hits all the expected narrative beats. Evolution is a good story and Genesis is also a good story, regardless of which one you think is literally true.

There are lots of stories about Atlantis: stories about Atlantis before it fell, stories about heroes who survived Atlantis; stories about modern archaeologists seeking for Atlantis. But only Tolkien, I think, made Atlantis an element -- a character almost -- in a narrative stream. We see the High Men migrate to Numenor; we see them living on Numenor; we witness the destruction of Numenor; we see the survivors establishing themselves in Middle-earth; and we and we stick around long enough that "Numenor" has become part of a long-ago golden age that the men of Gondor turn their heads towards before they say grace. 

The Star Wars Universe and all three Marvel Universes have histories. But we aren't invited to step back and contemplate that history as an artefact, with a shape and a structure and a narrative form. They are made up of the immediate present-tense moment: the present supervillain or the current space-ship-battle.

Writers -- or at any rate, writers' manuals -- are inclined to treat World Building as a dirty word. Build as much world as you need for your story to happen in, but anything else is displacement activity. Some fans, similarly, treat Lore as a something a little bit naughty -- the small print marginalia that other people obsess over.

But we are not here talking about detachable easter eggs distinct from the work of art. We are talking about the entirety of Tolkien's artistic project. We are talking about the one thing that makes Tolkien enjoyable, or even bearable. Tolkien's elves and hobbits and dwarves are embodied in Tolkien's meta-narrative. They can't exist any where else. 

Even if they still have pointy ears and beards and furry feet. 

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VII: World Building

The Rings of Power abandons Tolkien's internal chronology.  The opening credits claims that the series is "adapted from the Lord of the Rings and Appendices", but it appears entirely uninterested in Tolkien's tally of years.

But does this matter? Does this really, really matter?

The simple answer is that if Rings of Power were giving me something else, anything else, to enjoy it probably wouldn't.  As long as I Dreamed a Dream is a good song it hardly matters if Schonberg and Boubil take liberties with Victor Hugo's enormously long novel.

But the Rings of Power proves, experimentally and empirically, that orcs and dark lords and hobbits, in an of themselves, detached from the lore and the mythos and the world building that Tolkien spent sixty years tinkering with, are not remotely interesting. There are dwarfy caves and there are hobbity burrows, and the caves and the burrows look quite pretty, but if I wanted to look at whimsical interiors I am not at all sure that I don't prefer the Clangers.

I'm fairly serious. Oliver Postgate's world building, although it consists entirely of surfaces, is second to none; and the CGI extension of his work, overseen by his son, develops it very imaginatively. It would be silly to talk about Clanger Lore or Clanger Mythos or Clanger Canon. It's a puppet show. But the experience of watching those puppets is a little like staring into a very intricate aquarium. 

Some people have said the same thing about Fraggle Rock.

There are worlds which seem real because they feel real.  And there are worlds which seem real because there is solid world building behind them. Stars Wars and the Clangers in the first category: the Lord of the Rings and Thomas the Tank Engine are in the second.

And there are worlds which do have solid world building behind then but which don't feel in the least bit real, like your first Dungeons & Dragons campaign and the Harry Potter books. But perhaps that means that the world building isn't that solid after all. 

Someone very wise once said that the reality was made up of facts, as opposed to things. Perhaps fantasy worlds are made up of feelings, not facts. Perhaps a good fantasy world is composed of what the young people call vibes. Sometimes you need a card index system or a transformational grammar to evoke the correct vibes. Sometimes a vague gesture in the direction of the Clone Wars will do the trick.

But can't a card index system and a book of grammar be works of art in their own right? 

Don't some of us enjoy reading world books for RPGs we will never play in? 

Would it be completely mad to be fascinated by the timetables and route-plans of Sodar without having the slightest inclination to ever read any of Rev Awdrey's actual stories?

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VI: Adaptation

People who had read Lord of the Rings -- and even people who had read it twice -- were mostly okay with what Peter Jackson did to Fellowship of the Ring. They thought he had done a literate job of translating Tolkien's long, difficult book into the language of the Hollywood summer blockbuster, even if some of them thought that turning that kind of book into that kind of film was a pretty weird thing to do in the first place.

But some of the people who had read Lord of the Rings three times were rather discombobulated by what Peter Jackson did with the Two Towers. They felt that he had pretty much abandoned Tolkien's storyline. And they thought that what he had replaced it with was, on the whole, a bit too silly: CGI hyenas, elvish cavalry, skateboarding elves and dwarf-tossing.

Some people didn't think this mattered and enjoyed the film on its own terms. But when some of the people in the first group expressed their disappointment that Jackson's Theoden had only a passing connection with Tolkien's Theoden and that Jackson's Helm's Deep had no connection at all with Tolkien's Helm's Deep, some of the people in second group embarked on a campaign of gate-leaver-openingism. 

"Well, naturally" they cried "If Peter Jackson gets one letter of an elvish inscription wrong, you are going to tell the rest of us that we aren't allowed to enjoy the movie."

Actually, Peter Jackson pretty consistently got his elvish inscriptions right: it was the broader stylistic decisions -- the Moria theme park ride, the fist fight in Theoden's hall, the Indiana Jones cliffhanger on Mount Doom -- that some of us had issues with.

With big, complicated, important books like the Lord of the Rings and the Bible, there is always going to be a certain amount of friction between people who are too pedantic and people who are not nearly pedantic enough. 

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V: Gatekeeping

There is nothing wrong with loving Dogtanian and the Three Muskhounds and having not the slightest intention of ever reading Dumas. 

You really don't have to wait seven years for your ticket to Bayreuth before you are allowed to think that Ride of the Valkyrie is a good tune. 

You're not a bad person because you like your steak overcooked.

Actually, food is interesting edge case. It is very likely that a steak chef, or a coffee barrista, or a sommelier really, really, likes steak, coffee and wine and really, really wants you to like it as well. So he may be tempted to say "I think you will like that coffee better without sugar" or "That cut of steak really needs to be enjoyed pinkly." And I think some of them might out-and-out refuse to chill your red wine or serve your white wine at room temperature. "If you want latte, sir, I am using this coffee: I am not prepared to put milk into these unusual and expensive single estate beans." 

But many others would probably allow you to ruin the food you have payed for.

Gate-keeping is very annoying. But the contrary, which I might as well call "gate-leaving-open" is very nearly as bad. If I happen to mention that I am a big fan of Victor Hugo's original novel, the gate-leaver-open is apt to think that I have somehow spoiled his enjoyment of I Dreamed a Dream. If I remark that Bob Dylan's later work repays close listening, the gate-leaver-open may think I have prohibited from liking Blowing in the Wind.  To the gate-leaver-open, any criticism is an attack and any negative opinion a prohibition. 

If I say that 1970s Doctor Who was the best Doctor Who (which it obviously was) it does not follow that I am declaring the ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteen and fourteenth Doctor's non-canonical.  And even if I am, that does not mean that I am declaring that the tapes should be expunged.  And even if I am, no-one is likely to pay any attention to me.  Your enjoyment of Jodie Whitaker is not impacted by my enjoyment of Tom Baker, any more than my enjoyment of Tom Baker is impacted by your enjoyment of Jodie Whitaker. 

It is equally true that some people will read any positive criticism, or any push back against negative criticism, as gate-leaver-openerism. 

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Arts Diary: Wicked

Arts Diary: Wicked: The audience applauds after the final song; they applaud during the end credits, and the stragglers applaud when the house lights go up. The...

IV: Fantasy

Some time ago I confessed that I didn't particularly like comic books. What I like is superheroes. I grok that Heartstopper is marvellous, but I don't generally read YA romantic fiction when it's written in words, so I am not likely to read it when it happens to be told in words and pictures. However marvellously.

Here is a much worse confession.

I don't particularly like fantasy.

Please read the next paragraph before throwing your computer out of the window.

Tolkien created a new thing. We can see him creating it, right there on the page, as part of a dialogue with his friends in the pub: the fantasy novel. There had been fantasy stories before, obviously. And there had been novels about wizards and magic, not all of them necessarily for children. And there had been modern prose romances -- that line that goes from William Morris to ER Eddison via Lord Dunsany and James Branch Cabell. But a long prose work about dragons and goblins, told in the narrative voice of a naturalistic novel was something new and strange. As if Enid Blyton had developed Toytown in the style and on the scale of Middlemarch and turned Big Ears into a tragic hero.

Which might, as I always say at this point, have been awesome.

Tolkien didn't have a novelistic model in mind when he began creating his, if you insist, legendarium. Or he wouldn't have written "know then aforetimes that in the days of Inwe" on the one hand or "this for their hearts uplifting did Halog sing them as the frowning fortress clasped then and nethermost night in its net caught them" on the other.

I don't think the pictures we see in our head when we read Lord of the Rings are necessarily the pictures that Tolkien wanted us to see. The Pauline Baynes map illustrations he partially endorsed; and that Jimmy Cauty poster that everyone had on their wall in the 1970s are a long way from Peter Jackson and even further from World of Warcraft. Tolkien never quite told us what a balrog looked like. He didn't describe orcs, but I think he probably imagined them as rough, grotesque, humans; not piggy faced Games Workshop miniatures or dark skinned CGI ogrons. Lord of the Rings begat Dungeons & Dragons and Dungeons & Dragons begat Games Workshop and Games Workshop begat genre fantasy and genre fantasy begat Peter Jackson and Peter Jackson begat the Rings of Power and there is now a Consensus Fantasy Universe which these kinds of stories happen in.

I spent a lot of time playing Dungeons & Derivatives and feel quite at home in Consensus Fantasy Land. But if all you see in Lord of the Rings are ugly orcs and beautiful elves and funny dwarves and talking trees and grey wizards and dark lords on dark thrones in lands where there are very probably some shadows, you are only seeing about 12% of what Tolkien actually does.

I once said that I liked Dickens, apart from the Dickensian parts. I am quite tempted to add that I like Tolkien apart from the Tolkienesque bits: at any rate, the Tolkienesque bits are not the bits I like the most. It's the operatic dialogue and the mock epic scenes which I return to over and over again. This will I take as a weregild of my father. Through the fate of Arda is bound up in it, you will think me generous. Master of doom by doom mastered. Nevertheless they will still have need of wood.

And the little character moments too. Sam sulking because the farmer gave Frodo a slap when he was little. Pippin wanting to quit smoking because he misses Theoden. The rabbit stew. Silly songs in the bath-tub. There are no Games Workshop box sets recreating those scenes.

So am I, after all, a gate keeper? Am I saying that if you go to Tolkien to get your fix of orcs and wizards but have not the slightest interest in variant reading of the Lay of Lethien then you are a Dyson Airblade? [*]

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III: Canon

It is often said that Tolkien never finished the Silmarillion. It would perhaps be truer to say that Tolkien finished the Silmarillion several times; leaving a paper trail of mutually contradictory versions in his wake. Christopher Tolkien had to select material: the published Silmarillion can't, by definition, represent Tolkien's final intentions. Christopher didn't automatically regard the last thing his father wrote as authoritative: he went for the versions that were most polished, most finished, most consistent with the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, or simply "best". And we know that not every word in the Silmarillion is exactly what Tolkien wrote: Christopher made amendments and added bridging passages to create a sense completion and consistency. That's what editors do. At some point between 1980 and 1983 Christopher decided that this had been a mistake and embarked on a thirteen year project to produce a scholarly edition of the exact words his father wrote, false starts and contradictions and crossings out and all.

We could, if we wanted to, say that the only canonical Middle-earth texts were the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings ("including appendices"): since these were the only works that Tolkien approved for publication during his lifetime. We could add -- I think most people implicitly do -- the Silmarillion and the Unfinished Tales, because they contain writings that Christopher Tolkien felt to be broadly consistent with what was already published. You can read the Silmarillion, the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, in that order, with the Unfinished Tales as a kind of appendix, and feel that you have read a complete history of an imaginary world in various styles and from various points of view.

It would seem odd to say "the island of Tol Eressea is canonically England" (because that was Tolkien's idea in the very early Lost Tales manuscripts), or "Numenor canonically became the continent of America" (because Tolkien explored that idea in a very late "round earth" revision). But it would be equally odd to say that the story of Sam's daughter Eleanor becoming Arwen's hand-maiden was "apocryphal" or "part of my headcanon" because it occurs in an epilogue which Tolkien was persuaded (fairly reluctantly) to take out of Lord of the Rings. And I assume that no-one in their right mind would say that the magnificent ending of Beren and Luthien ("The quest is fulfilled; even now a Silmaril is in my hand!") was "only fan fiction" because it was one of the manuscripts that was published posthumously.

So perhaps, if we are talking about Tolkien, "the canon" had better refer to "what Tolkien actually wrote" (as opposed to what was invented by David Day, Iron Crown Enterprises, Peter Jackson or Amazon TV.) 

But "canon" can too easily become a weapon to be wielded in fan disputes. It is not enough to like Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit. Unless and until you jump over twelve heavily footnoted hurdles, you are a Dyson Airblade. (*).

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II: Canon

I've been listening to Bart Ehrman's podcasts about the Bible, provocatively entitled Misquoting Jesus. Prof Ehrman has forgotten more about the New Testament than I am ever likely to know, and I have learned a lot from them. His explanation of how the "lost chapter" of Mark's Gospel was discovered; and why it is very probably a forgery is great fun.

But occassionally, his language wrankles slightly. Ehrman has a tendency to refer to the apocryphal gospels -- the Christian texts by people other than Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and sometimes Paul -- as "books which never made it into the Bible."

Which is literally true. Oliver Twist is a book that never made it into the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, and Sailor on the Seas of Fate is generally excluded from the Harry Potter series. But there is a danger that a listener could infer that Judas and Thomas and Peter and that huge body of second and third century fan-fic might have become of the Bible.

I suppose there could have been a world where "the Bible" never stopped growing: where books written by the disciples of the disciples of the disciples had the same status as the big Four (or sometimes Five). Maybe the Sermons of John Wesley and the Broadcast of C.S Lewis might have been canonised as part of the Twenty Eighth Testament. Don't the Quakers have something like that -- a collection of "testimonies" that each generation adds to? 

But the phrase "never-made-it-into" plays into the story that Once Upon a Time (TM) there was a big pile of books, all equally valid or equally invalid, and then one day an unruly mob armed with surprise, fear, nice red uniforms and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope unexpectedly burst in and arbitrarily deleted the ones they happen not to like.

Ehrman, obviously, doesn't remotely believe this story. He is clear and interesting and helpful about where the canon actually came from. The catholic church didn't have an official list of all the books that were definitively in the Bible until as late as the sixteenth century. But everyone who called themselves a Christian had been working from the same list for about thirteen centuries before that. The 1546 decree only came about because Martin Luther was making noises about excluding James and Revelation. 

But I think it's the story Richard Dawkins and Dan Brown and the journalists who got excited about the Gospel of Mary hoax believe in. Thomas and Mark are "the same kind of thing" and only random chance or inquisitorial suppression put one between big black leather covers and relegated the other to the Loeb Ancient Greek Texts series.

When Ronald Knox started to talk about the Sherlock Holmes "canon" in the 1930s he was making a scholarly religious joke. But once you've stopped laughing, the Holmes canon isn't particularly hard to define: it's whatever Conan Doyle wrote. Fifty something stories and a handful of novels. I am told that some people play a meta-game where, for example, Laurie King's Mary Russel books are treated as canon, but that's all part of the joke.

Comic book canon is quite a bit more fiddly. There are an awful lot of Spider-Man comics out there and it takes a monumental act of faith to believe they are all true at the same time. But if I say "Is Captain America canonically Irish?" or "Is Jimmy Olsen canonically gay?" I think you understand the question. Captain America's heritage has been alluded to in the comic books themselves; Jimmy Olsen has only been said to be Superman's Very Special Friend in fan-fiction.

You might very well say that it doesn't make any difference; but you understand the question. 

So: how, as readers, scholars, and adaptors, should we define the Tolkien canon?

Rings of Power

Season 1 Reviews

Season 2 Reviews

Season 1 Reviews (Book)

Season 2 Reviews (Book) (Available Soon)

Complete Reviews Season 1 - 7 (Available Jan 2035)

I - Gatekeeping

My mother went to the opera all her life: as a young woman she used to queue to get cheap back row tickets at Covent Garden ('the gods'); she went the Paris Opera during her honeymoon; and in later years she had a season ticket for the English National Opera. So she was understandably annoyed when a work colleague bought a single of Pavarotti singing Nessun Dorma and thereafter claimed to be a Devotee. I don't think she ever said that there was anything wrong with listening to fat Italians singing the famous bits. She certainly didn't say that people shouldn't be allowed to do so. But it annoyed her.

If I went out in public wearing a Motorhead tee-shirt, there is a real danger that someone would approach me and ask how many times I heard them perform live and the title of my three favourite albums. If I couldn't answer, there is a good chance that they would accuse me of being a Dyson Airblade. (*)

There used to be a comic book writer called Neil Gaiman. He wrote a comic called Sandman. Lots of people who never thought they would like comics really, really liked Sandman. As a matter of fact I really, really liked it. But some of the people who really, really liked it really really really liked it. It wasn't just the best fantasy comic of the early 1990s. It was the best fantasy comic of all time. It was the best comic book of all time. The first good comic book. The only good comic book

I am still a little surprised that people who didn't like comics managed get to the end of the first graphic novels, what with the constant references to Golden Age vigilantes, aborted Jack Kirby strips, Martian Manhunters and 1950s horror narrators. But that was part of Neil Gaiman's cleverness. Sandman was a dense web of fannish in-jokes; but the in-jokes weren't told in such a way as to lock anyone out. His stuff on Satan plays pretty well if you know your way around Milton and the Bible but equally well if you don't.

I am afraid I became rather insufferable around this point. Perhaps it was fair enough to feel irritated when people who had (by their own admission) never read any other comic book fansplained to me that prior to Sandman, all comics were puerile, disposable rubbish about people in brightly coloured underwear who said SOK and KAPOW a lot, and that Neil Gaiman had single-handedly turned them into serious English literature. But this very easily shaded in to my saying out loud that if you hadn't read Doctor Strange or Little Nemo you had no darn right to like Neil Gaiman.

A lot of the people who really, really, liked Sandman have recently discovered that they never liked it to begin with. 

In recent times, the argument has started to go the other way. I really, really like Cerebus the Aardvark, while acknowledging that it is really, really, really problematic. But when I point out the very great strengths of Dave Sim's artwork and story telling, some people are inclined to reply "I expect if I had read as many comics as you have, I would be able to see this skill and innovation that you talk about, but since I haven't I won't."

Gatekeeping is definitely a thing; and it's a very silly thing; although sometimes it is a very understandable thing. "Your opinion doesn't count because you know less than me" and "Your opinion doesn't count because you know more than me" are both forms of gatekeeping. "I don't think this is very good" should never be taken to imply "You are not permitted to enjoy this."

Rings of Power

Season 1 Reviews

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Season 1 Reviews (Book)

Season 2 Reviews (Book) (Available Soon)

Complete Reviews Season 1 - 7 (Available Jan 2035)

Digression

I must not digress.

Digression is the blog-killer.

Digression is the general point which brings total excursus.

I will ignore my digression. 

I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

And when it has gone past, I will fire up scrivener and read my notes. 

When the digression has finished there will be nothing. 

Only content will remain. 

Rings of Power - Afterparty

RINGS OF POWER

AFTER PARTY

Digression

I: Gatekeeping

II: Canon

III: Canon

IV: Fantasy

V: Gatekeeping

VI: Adaptation

VII: World Buidling

VIII: Fantasy

IX: Sources

X: History

XI: Discourse

Season 1 Reviews

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Season 1 Reviews (Book)

Season 2 Reviews (Book) (Available Soon)

Complete Reviews Season 1 - 7 (Available Jan 2035)

Rings of Power 2.8 -- Out-takes

 Rings of Power Outtakes

Rings of Power 2.8

 Final part of my deep dive into the Rings of Power

Arts Diary: Folk Music -- Or What I Did While The World Ended

Arts Diary: Folk Music: Various

Donald Trump is not in fact a supporter of an Italian political movement between 1919 and 1945. The British and the Americans use the word "liberal" in different ways. The only thing which matters right now is that we all get this right. Everyone knows exactly what "woke" means and anyone asking for a definition is an elitist pedant. I am very clever indeed.

 So I won't deny any of what you said. But there's one more thing to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, government of the people by the people for the people, even America itself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. That's why I'm going to stand by the play world. I'm going to live as like an American as I can even if there isn't any America.