Showing posts with label Tolkien. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tolkien. Show all posts

Sunday, February 26, 2023

The Fall of Numenor

This is, I suppose, the first volume of what will become the Fourth Wave of posthumous Tolkien publications. The Silmarillion was Christopher Tolkien's attempt to produce an accessible version of Tolkien's unfinished legendarium for people who had read Lord of the Rings and wanted access to the lore. The Unfinished Tales was supposed to complete the canon: the sections that didn't fit into the Silmarillion but were too interesting to consign to the waste paper basket.

The long, definitive, twelve volume History of Middle-earth didn't quite amount to a critical edition of Tolkien's extensive literary residue, but it gave keen readers a close fly-by of the raw materials Christopher Tolkien had to work with; his father's extensive, fragmentary, repetitive and frequently inconsistent legacy. It really ought to be called the Complete Works of Tolkien: as close as we are ever going to come to fitting his actual life's work between two covers. (Or twenty-four, to be exact.) We can talk about what he should have written and what we wish he'd written, but these 6,000 pages represent the sum-total of what he actually wrote. The recent Nature of Middle-earth is really the thirteenth and final volume of this magnum opus. There are print-on-demand editions of technical Elvish texts for anyone who want them.

Towards the end of his life, Christopher Tolkien embarked on a third phase of mining Pa's writings. The Children of Hurin, the Fall of Gondolin and Beren & Luthien are slightly less intimidating presentations of material we'd already seen in the History of Middle-earth. You still have to navigate stories which don't come to an end, and multiple variant versions of the same basic narratives, but the intimidating footnotes are gone; the material is no longer scattered across multiple volumes; and the type-face is considerably clearer. It would be cruel to call these books Good Parts Abridgements of the History of Middle-earth, but they are essentially Good Parts Abridgements of the History of Middle-earth.

The Fall of Numenor is the first publication which owns up to being a secondary text. So far as I can tell, Brian Sibley hasn't consulted any primary manuscripts at all. Possibly no-one but Chris could have deciphered Ron's handwriting. But Sibley has studied the Silmarillion, the Book of Lost Tales and the Unfinished Tales a good deal more closely than you or I have. He is also passingly familiar with the BBC Lord of the Rings Radio adaptation, and supplied "Hobbit gibberish" for the Drury Lane musical. He has taken some of Tolkien's writings, re-ordered it, polished it, wiped its nose, and sent it out into the world in a lovely new dust-jacket and only a tiny seasoning of absolutely essential footnotes. The Usual Suspects have complained that Sibley is fraudulently asking £20 for material they have already paid for (in some cases, twice); that he is engaging in literary necrophilia and is, moreover, woke. But for those of us who still enjoy books as opposed to franchises, it's an utter delight. I ploughed through Nature of Middle-earth out of a sense of loyalty. I read Fall of Numenor for fun.

Linguists and philologists are interested, not only in what words mean, but in how words change. A word isn't just what it means today, but what it meant a hundred or even a thousand years ago. It was CS Lewis who taught me that the word "world" originally meant "were-ald", man-age, and passed through phases of meaning epoch, universe, solar-system and ecology before settling down to mean planet. 

But very many people are linguistic fundamentalists. Words have true, fixed meanings, which Bad People deliberately change and distort. Don't pay any attention to what your Comp School English teacher told you the word means: there is always a truer, purer meaning to go back to. Witness the recent kerfuffle about the Oxford English Dictionary's amending the definition of "woman" to reflect current usage; re-read Simon Heffer's comic masterpiece, Strictly English.

Many people feel the same way about literary characters and texts. There is a singular Robin Hood, a true Superman and an unsullied Doctor Who which different texts reflect faithfully or else wilfully distort. But other people feel that the word "Hamlet", or come to that, "Jesus", necessarily refers to a construct that has undergone multiple transformations and will continue to do so as long as intelligent monkeys exist to tell stories to one another. Henry Irving's Hamlet is not Kenneth Branaghs's Hamlet. "Hamlet" encompasses both of them and neither of them. 

And this is, I think, what makes Christopher Tolkien's work threatening to a particular kind of purist. At one level, it is meaningless to say that the Melko who threatens two elves called Beren and Luthien in a 1917 text called the Tale of Tinuviel "is" the Morgoth to whom Sauron offers human sacrifice in the Akallebeth (1958) or that the Necromancer alluded to in the Hobbit (1937) "is" the Lidless Eye from the Return of the King (1955) -- or that either of them "is" sodding Halbrand. Tolkien re-used ideas from old books in the creation of new ones, and the nature of 21st century literary fame means that "other hands" are going to start using those ideas in their own work. 

Hell, it's pushing it to say that the Hal of Henry VI Part 2 "is" the Henry of Henry V, although producers can have great fun pretending that he is.

But it is equally and oppositely true that we wouldn't be ploughing through this stuff to begin with if we didn't think we could enter into "secondary belief" in Middle-earth; if we couldn't think about it and talk about it as if it was the history of a place that happens not to exist. It is very, very interesting to see the process by which Tolkien created it; in the same way that it is very, very interesting to see the process by which Mat Irvine turned an empty washing up liquid bottle and some piano wire into a Sontaran flying saucer; but if every time you watch the old sci-fi show you think "it's only a plastic bottle" and "I can see the wires" then you aren't watching the old sci-fi show. If we can't see Strider without also seeing Trotter, if Bingo always lies behind Frodo and Gandalf is still a little man called Theoden then Middle-earth is no longer "a world more real than any other". It's no longer anything at all.

A man on Twitter today welcomed the second wave of franchised Lord of the Rings TV shows, saying "I just want to be in Middle earth. I don’t care which story or which characters we will see, I just really want to be in the world." 

To which I say, simultaneously "I know exactly what you mean" and "I don't think I understand, in that context, what you mean by 'Middle-earth'. Or, for that matter, 'be'".



So. Pull up that battered old copy of Return of the King.

Page 453, the Tale of Years.

Year 1: Foundation of the Grey Havens.

Year 1700: Tar Minastir sends a great navy from Numenor to Lindon."

Flip over to the Unfinished Tales: page 219, the Line of Elros, King of Numenor, From the Founding of the City of Armenelos to the Downfall.

"Tar-Surion was the third child of Tar-Anarion, his sisters refused the scepter. He ruled for a hundred and fourteen years. He was born in the year 1174"

The Silmarillion, of course, has a saga-like description of the Numenorian empire which feels a lot less like homework.

"And Isildur said no word but went out by night and did a deed for which he was afterwards renowned..."

What Brian Sibley has done is treated each entry in the Tale of Years as a chapter heading, and interleaved everything Tolkien wrote about that particular year in its chronological position -- not only the Silmarillion and the Unfinished Tales, but relevant chunks from History of Middle-earth, Tolkien's letters and the narrative material from the Council of Elrond in Fellowship of the Ring. We end up with a more or less linear history of the Second Age, which we can more or less read straight through, as a story.

It's a physically beautiful book: definitely worth getting the hardback as opposed to reading it on kindle. Two colour printing, with the chapter headings in blue and the fire letters in red; Alan Lee line drawings at the top of every chapter and a goodly number of colour plates. The only thing I'd have added is some family trees. It reproduces Christopher Tolkien's maps from the Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion, but it would have been nice to have some purpose built diagrams to help us keep track of who was where at each point.



The presentation of texts affects how we read them. The Silmarillion feels more definitive than it has any right too: the Unfinished Tales feel, well, unfinished, and in the History of Middle-earth, textual scholarship keeps interrupting the story. Sibley's treatment can feel bitty and fragmented. Some of the chapters are very short indeed. The Akallabeth may not be enhanced by being split into ten or a dozen chapters. But on the whole, Sibley has opened up obscure and dry passages from obscure and dry works. 

The Unfinished Tales included a 40 page story -- unfinished, obviously -- called Aldarion and Erendis, the Tale of the Mariner's wife.

It starts, off-puttingly, like one of the monarch-notes:

"Meneldur was the son of Tar-Eledil, the fourth king of Numenor. He was the king's fourth child, for he had two sisters..."

Even the keenest reader could be forgiven for saying "Who was the son of whom, exactly, and when was this, and why ought I to care?" Sibley splits it up into four sections, entitles them "The Voyages of Aldarion", "Aldarion and Erendis""The Wedding of Aldarion and Erendis" and "The Accession of Tar-Aldarion" and places them in their correct slots between the years 600 and 750 SA. We can now see where it fits into the overall saga -- how the first reigning Queen came about, and why there was a kind of schism between the King and the Queen in the next generation. And, in nice clear print with pictures and hardly any footnotes, we can also recognise it as a pretty good story.

We revere Tolkien for his world-building; we mock him slightly for his genealogies and etymologies; but he was a brilliant, brilliant, storyteller. Even if he wasn't much cop at actually finishing anything. Aldarion and Erendis is a pretty simple tale: the Prince of Numenor wants to sail to Middle-earth and have adventures; his lover wants to stay at home. He goes off for a few years, he comes back, they get married, but he longs for the sea again. She makes him promise to come back after a year; but the years roll by and he doesn't come home. Eventually he returns, but she won't have him back. It's full of Tolkien's understated narrative flourishes:

"You come late, my lord" she said "I had long ceased to expect you. I fear there is no such welcome prepared you as I had made when you were due."

"Mariners are not hard to please" he said.

"That is well", she said, and she turned back into the house and left him.

Did the tale of Aldarion just drift into Tolkien's head while he was working on his Monarch Notes, and get written down almost as a distraction from the main line of thought? Or was one of the purposes of the History of Numenor to provide a context for just such a story? I wonder if there was an original, impossible scheme in which each of the Kings on the list was supposed to be the seed of a story as long as this one; growing eventually into a vast narrative history of Numenor that would have run to double the length of Lord of the Rings. The one thing he definitely didn't do was create an independent story and paste it into the Second Age as a backdrop. Story and history are in a kind of dialectic; the history shaped by the story, the story a close-up view of the history.



The final days of Numenor is a masterpiece of Highe Fantasie. Sauron taken as hostage to Numenor; constructing a great temple to Morgoth; giant clouds in the shape of eagles amassing on the island; Sauron laughing on his fiery throne at the exact moment the island sinks beneath the waves; the Queen trying to reach the top of the highest mountain to survive the deluge...

"And the first fire upon the altar Sauron kindled with the hewn wood of Nimloth, and it cracked and was consumed; but men marvelled at the reek that went up from it, so that the land lay under a cloud for seven days, until slowly it passed into the west."

We've become used to fantasy stories taking the forms of novels: with viewpoint characters, physical descriptions and characters with realistic psychology. Tolkien doesn't write like George R Martin or Stephen Donaldson or even Terry Pratchett: I can see how a certain kind of reader might say "Har-har it sounds like the Bible" and walk away. The normal word order is inverted ("the fire he kindled with wood" as opposed to "he kindled the fire with wood") which might make a different person say "Bah, poetry" and close the book. Some of the language is slightly old fashioned --"kindled" instead of "lit", "hewn" instead of "chopped" and "reek" instead of "stink" -- but no words we don't know the meaning of. You could modernise it, of course, a kind of Good News Silmarillion, but there would be a mismatch between the language and the tone:

"Sauron lit the first fire on the altar with the wood he had chopped from Nimloth; it crackled as it burned away; and everyone was surprised by the bad smell that came from it, which left the country dark for a week, until the smoke slowly drifted westwards."

That's simply not the way this sort of story is told. There are no Hobbits to mediate the narrative, but it's clear from the voice that we are hearing the tale as it was told in days of old by the men of Gondor as they sat round they great log fires.

Could there have been another viewpoint? Could those two words, "men marvelled" have been extended into chapters and paragraphs and entire volumes?

"Call me Isildur. Tomorrow Last Ally Gil Galad and I will go to war with Sauron, and it is entirely possible that he will pass into darkness and I shall encounter some kind of Bane. But I still recall that fateful morning in my youth when I opened the shutter of my father's house and noticed that the suin had not risen and the whole land smelt like...." 

Like what? Do they have public loos and rubbish dumps and tanneries in the blissful realm? And what do we call them to avoid breaking the mood? 

"'It bain't be natural, that be it not'" said the landlord of the Leaky Chalice as he poured foaming nut-brown ale into his artisanal cup 'There ain't been no sun for nigh on a week and I don't know why, unless it be from all that smoke that Master Sauron, gor bless him, 'as been making in that sodding big church, for reasons which I am sure are good...'"

The impact of the paragraph depends on its being embedded in history. We are shocked that Sauron has burned Nimloth; because we know what Nimloth is, and indeed, why the West is important. It's meaning stretches back into the first pages of the Silmarillion, and its story will continue into the final pages of Lord of the Rings: the narrator can only explain it in terms of other stories:

"And a seedling they brought of Celeborn, the White Tree that grew in the midst of Eressëa; and that was in its turn a seedling of Galathilion the Tree of Túna, the image of Telperion that Yavanna gave to the Eldar in the Blessed Realm. And the tree grew and blossomed in the courts of the King in Armenelos; Nimloth it was named, and flowered in the evening, and the shadows of night it filled with its fragrance."

There are other ways of telling a story: Tolkien could have taken the Miltonic or Homeric route, given us the Saga of Isildur and gradually brought us up to speed via epic flashbacks.

And to the white tree Nimloth did
Isildur the reckless son of Elendil boldly creep 
That same tree of whose sire in Valinor
Before the rising of the first sun stood,
When Yavanna, gentle spouse of mighty Aule
Who in defiance of the One first forged the dwarves
Upon the hill in the Far West did stand
And to the serried ranks of Valar pure
Who in the primal music made the world
Did speak....

But he didn't.




But Tolkien did make an attempt to cast part of the story of Numenor into a more naturalistic form. Sibley includes a chapter from Tolkien's unfinished novel the Lost Road, which is related to an earlier, unfinished novel called the Notion Club Papers. He puts it in an Appendix because it doesn't really fit into the chronology. It was going to be part of a sprawling epic about reincarnation, in which a contemporary father and son have a vision quest through history from the contemporary era to Anglo Saxon times and ultimately to Atlantis-Numenor, where they would turn out to be reincarnations of Elendil and Isildur. It was part of the famous literary pact with CS Lewis: Lewis would write a space travel story if Tolkien would write a time travel story. Lewis's entry was straight out of HG Wells; Tolkien's, not so much. Tolkien hasn't finalised the story at this point: indeed the characters are called Elendil and Herendil. The tiny little fragment which survives takes the form of a conversation between father and son. Sauron has been living in Numenor for nearly fifty years; he has corrupted the king and instigated the worship of Morgoth; and promised to make the King lord of the whole world. Herendil/Isildur has grown up with this, and regards it as a normal state of affairs. He's rather shocked that his father doesn't think that lordship of middle-earth and worship of Morgoth is the birthright of Numenorean kings. He fears that his father will be accused of treason. "Even to dispraise Sauron is held rebellious". But Dad is clear where his loyalties lie:

"'I would not break faith with the king, nor do I purpose anything to his hurt. The house of Earendel hath my allegiance while I live. But if I must choose between Sauron and Manwe, then all else must come after. I will not bow unto Sauron, nor to his master.'"

It's a fascinating text in many ways. Elendil's summary of the first age and the fall of Melkor is subtly different from the one in the Silmarillion, and it gives us a sense of how the people of Numenor percieved the old gods. And we get a dramatic description of Sauron's first arrival on the island. It seems that the waves virtually spit his boat out and deposit him on dry land:

"He stood upon a rock and said 'This is done as a sign of my power. For I am Sauron the mighty, servant of the Strong...I have come. Be glad, men of Numenor, for I shall take thy king to be my king and the world shall be given into his hand.'"

But it is easy to see why Tolkien abandoned the book. On the one hand, Sauron the Mighty is a demonic figure; second in command to literal Satan, and Elendil knows it. But at the same time, he is an evil councillor to a mortal king, and the language is that, if not of the House of Commons lobby, then at any rate of Henry V's council chamber. An older dude and a younger dude are talking politics in a nice villa by the sea; but the politics they are talking about involves Voids and Far Wests and Deathless Ones. And this leads to a mismatch of tone, which teeters on the edge of being unintentionally comic. Tolkien has decided they are going to talk in thees-and-thous: I don't know whether to emphasise the familiarity of father and son or just to make it sound old fashioned. 

In places, it comes out sounding clumsy:

"Do not ask. And do not speak so loud. Thou knowest it is dangerous -- to us all. Whatever he be, Sauron is mighty, and hath ears. I fear the dungeons.."

In other places it sounds merely ridiculous:

"How thou dost grow..." 

"Why dost thou mock me? Thou knowest I am dark, and smaller than most others of my year. And that is a trouble to me. I stand barely to the shoulder of Amariel, whose hair is of shining gold, and she is a maiden, and of my own age."

It is as if a perfectly normal conversation, that might have taken place round any 1950s breakfast table, has been translated back into fantasy-speak. Hast thou read the parchments of news upon this morning, my spouse? It seemeth that the cost of fish in the market riseth, and our nation faireth poorly in the ball games at the forum. Please, pass unto to me the orange condiment with the picture of a southron child upon the label. (It doesn't help that Tolkien mentions that Helendil has been bathing, and is naked during the conversation.) Ordinary talk sounds silly in High Speech; but mythology sounds silly in ordinary language. It is ironic that this is precisely the rock which the Rings of Power wrecks itself on. It doesn't work for Isildur to talk like a teenager and Galadriel to talk like a military officer; but it doesn't work for them to talk like anything else. It seems Tolkien himself couldn't get this quite right.

Everything in Tolkien, with the exception of the Lord of the Rings, is unfinished; trapped in the transition between two states, and the Fall of Numenor is necessarily artificial, even synthetic. But the new book does a very good job of making the jumble of material accessible. The First Age stories are much more confused and confusing, but can one hope for a Forging of the Jewels or Flight of the Noldor volume in the not-too-remote future?

Hi,

I'm Andrew.

I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.


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Monday, October 24, 2022

Does Andrew In Fact Hate All Television Programmes on General Principles?

ANDOR
Disney +

Everyone agrees that the first Season of the Mandalorian is marvellous, but thereafter the Star Wars Television Universe seems to generate surprising amounts of controversy. Some people are cross because it references the various animated Star Wars shows; other people are cross because the de-aged Mark Hamill isn't 100% convincing. Some people are cross because it treats the sequels and prequels as canon. Some people are cross because it is made by Disney. Other people are cross because they don't like Star Wars in the first place. (And, of course, the Usual Suspects are cross because it is Insufficiently Racist.)

I can see how you might find the sheer volume of Star Wars material a little intimidating. I can see how you might think "I can't possibly watch the Mandalorian because it continues the story of Asoka, which I am not familiar with" and :I can't possibly become familiar with the story of Asoka because I don't have time to watch seven seasons of Clone Wars and five seasons of Rebels." (I believe some people also have sectarian objections to watching animation.) But holistic concerns apart, the TV Universe seems to have a consistent look and feel and outlook; as well as clearly working towards a vast multi-season meta-plot. If you like Star Wars, these are very much the sequels and prequels and offshoots and sidelong glimpses into the far away long ago galaxy that you have always wanted.

Opinion is understandably divided about how good or bad the prequels and sequels were and there is pretty universal agreement that Solo was a bit of a wasted opportunity, but virtually everyone thinks that Rogue One was awesome. It somehow managed to be a nostalgia fest, plunging us back into the pre-1977 universe of A New Hope, and to repaint that universe in more realistic and dark colours. But it didn't seem to be deconstructing or undercutting the concept of Star Wars, as the Last Jedi arguably did. 

That said, when I heard that the next TV show was going to be about Andor, I was slightly inclined to say "Who the hell is Andor".

Not being able to quite remember which one Andor was is not a particular handicap, because the show is, necessarily, a prequel to the prequel. Andor in episode one is just some guy, hanging out on some planet, getting into trouble with some bad guys. He stupidly kills a pair of corporate goons who come after him because he asked the wrong sorts of questions in a night club. He gets recruited by a Mysterious Figure who, unsurprisingly, is part of the Rebel Alliance; sent on a heist mission to rob an Imperial payroll, and, the last we saw, was being sent to an Imperial Prison. I believe the plan is for there to be a two season of ten episodes each, which will presumably show how Nobody Very Much became an established Rebel operative in time to meet Jyn in the stand alone movie.

It's definitely slower paced, more dark and even realistic, than any Star Wars product we've seen before; a spy/heist/war story that happens to be set against a familiar backdrop. We are told that it is going down particularly well with people who have never seen Star Wars, if such a beast can be imagined. The Rebel who recruits Andor has secret meetings with someone called Mon Motha on a planet called Coruscant; and she is seen making speeches about someone called Palpatine in front of something called the Senate; but nothing in the storyline particularly depends on your being able to identify these characters.

It takes a little while, particularly in episode one, to come up with a reason to care about what is happening. And the thought that a guy talking to high class prostitutes in a cocktail bar was not quite in keeping with the U-certificate comic-strip vibe did cross my mind. Where Boba Fett and Obi Wan pointedly show us familiar hardware and aliens, Andor pointedly doesn't, so we have to take it a bit on trust that we're even in the Star Wars universe. But things very much come together when Andor is embedded in a Rebel unit. The heist itself, which naturally doesn't going precisely according to plan, is genuinely exciting. The group includes sinister and unreliable cynics as well as full on revolutionary idealists who write Marxist manifestos in their spare time. It feels like a terrorist cell: well meaning and idealistic and quite reluctant to kill people, but still made up of scary paramilitaries. 

We also get a behind the scenes look at the Empire: not as comic book villains, but as a genuinely nasty fascist bureaucracy run by relatively plausible human beings, all watching their own backs while looking for the opportunity to stab someone else in theirs. Col. Yularen's sarcastic chairmanship of internal imperial briefings is a joy to behold.

A mild reimagining of Star Wars and the Empire Strikes Back: it doesn't so much undercut them as open the curtain, shine in some light, and let us see the Empire and the Rebellion from the other side. But it stands alone as a science fictional thriller. 

If I despise Rings of Power for not being recognisably Middle-terrestrial, I honour Andor, and pretty much Disney's entire outlook) for continuing to point a camera into what is quite clearly still #myStar Wars.


The Expanse
Amazon Prime

The Expanse reminds me a lot of the the 2004 version of Battlestar Galactica. It's dark, it's dense; it has multiple plotlines going on at once; it's interested in politics. The spaceships feel like big military or industrial vessels: there is no attempt to give us the Red Baron in space. Space feels big and empty and frightening; there are chunks when we could almost believe that we were watching documentary footage from the future. The characters are multi-layered and human. I am quite interested to know how it all comes out in the end. But like Battlestar Galactica, starting a new episode always feels like a bit too much effort. It's compelling without being fun. I have to concentrate slightly harder than I'm sometimes ready for. It's just a bit, how can I put this, mumble, mumble, dull? Big spaceships are only cool to the extent that oil-rigs are cool. Politics involving Mars and the Belt isn't automatically more rivetting than politics involving, say, Egypt and Suez.

Still, it's a convincingly assembled world; and there have been passages of genuine tension. The bigness and the smallness of the plot impressively coexist: the action shifting between Politicians having important congresses; a small team of spacers having a bad time; and a Blade Runnerish private eye in over his head. Doubtless, in the way of Game of Thrones, the whole thing will fit together by the end. I will certainly remain on board until the end of Season One, but there are something like 50 episodes to get through....


Ms Marvel
Disney +

A realistic young person in a realistic setting is transformed into a superhero and has to deal realistically with the consequences. For whatever values of "realistic" are appropriate in a universe where people can be turned into superheroes, obviously. 

Ms Marvel really isn't "A Muslim Superhero" any more than Daredevil is "a Catholic Superhero". She was in 2013 very much what Ultimate Spider-Man had been in 2001, and come to that, what Spider-Man had been in 1962. A fresh, sassy, street-wise engagement with the whole idea of superheroes. A fantasy about the hero who could be you, or at any rate, your mate. A teenager with the attitudes and world-view of a teenager; who happens to be of Pakistani Muslim heritage. (The original Spider-Man was very probably Jewish.) Ultimate Spider-Man was originally shunted off into a parallel universe, but Ms Marvel takes place in mainstream Marvel Continuity. "Realistic" comics and "comic booky" comics no longer have to be kept apart: social realism, of a kind, is the new normal. 

So far as I can tell "Ms" is pronounced Miss rather than Muzz. When the first Muzz Marvel comic book appeared in, good lord, 1977, "Ms" was felt to be rather a feminist statement: I think it is now a pretty standard female honorific.

The Disney+ / MCU series is quite a freeform take on the comic book. The characters are all in place: the over protective Ammi, the rather embarrassing Abbu; the super-religious but also incredibly cool elder brother; and of course, Bruno the almost-too-nice on/off white boyfriend. Kamala herself is a head-in-clouds superhero geek, specifically a fan of Carol Danvers: the first episode involves her and Bruno sneaking out of the house to attend AvengersCon, which her parents don't approve of ("You want to go to a party?" says her mother in disbelief.) I like very much the way that superheroes are treated as celebrities in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and that superhero fans are like comic book nerds. (The Captain America Musical was one of the high-points of last year's Hawkeye series.)

Her origin is quite a bit different from the comic book. It no longer involves the Inhumans and the Terrigen mist: instead, she is connected to a group of extra-dimensionals called the Clandestine, her powers activated through a magic bangle, that once belonged to her grandmother. Given that the Inhumans, give or take a cameo, don't yet exist in the MCU, this was probably inevitable. Comic book Kamala is interacting with the denizens of Marvel New York within a couple of issues; but TV Kamala's encounter with her heroes is left to the last possible moment.

The comic book Ms Marvel's powers were arguably the least interesting thing about her: she can change size and stretch her body not entirely unlike Reed Richards; but on TV she achieves similar results by creating and manipulating a sort of crystal webbing. (I am slightly disappointed that this means she has lost her catch-phrase "embiggen".) As is par-for-the-course, we only see her fully operating as a superhero in the final episode, when she also acquires her costume and nom de guerre. "Kamala" could be understood as "marvel" in Urdu, allegedly.

Iman Vellani is quite ludicrously good in the role; heroic and down to earth, childish (she travels with a cuddly sloth as a nap pillow) without ever being cute, funny without being flippant. We will imagine the comic book character as her from now on, in the way that Tony Stark is become Robert Downey Jr and Samuel L Jackson is forever Nick Fury. 

I wasn't completely onboard with the middle episodes where the action shifts to Kararchi, and Kamala briefly time-slips back to 1947. (There's a lot of it about.) This seemed to foreground the characters ethnicity just a little too much. Ms Marvel is kind of the first Muslim superhero (unless you count The Arabian Knight created by uber-hack Bill Mantlo as far back as 1981) -- but her religious heritage isn't the most interesting thing about her. It also means that we got to see less of her New York supporting cast: I thought the series really came into its own in the final episode when Kamala and her friends are besieged in their school by a nasty anti-superhero quasi-police organisation called Damage Control. Kids and the local community pulling together to defend themselves with science projects, softballs, fire extinguishers and mostly the power of friendship seems much more what Ms Marvel is about than Indian Partition. (I did enjoy the "British Occupied India" caption.) That said, the cultural stuff is really well handled: I loved the brief scene at an Eid celebration where on-screen captions identified the different groups in the Jersey City Muslim community (the trendy young Mosque Bros; the mostly white Converts). Kamala goes to Mosque, takes it for granted that there is a separate women's section, but complains that it isn't as well maintained as the men's. The imam is cool and likeable.

The series only runs to six parts, and our next meeting with Kamala is in a forthcoming film called The Marvels where she (presumably) gets to hang out with her namesake heroes. While the whole point of the wider Marvel Universe is that the characters become part of it, I hope that Ms Marvel's meeting up with the actual Avengers doesn't deprive Kamala of the relatable ordinariness which is kind of the whole point of her. Peter Parker didn't get to be Peter Parker for long enough before he was hanging out with Tony Stark and helping to defeat Thanos.


NOTE: 
Captain Marvel was created in 1939 by Fawcett comics, but ceased publication in 1954 after a lawsuit from DC Comics. DC themselves acquired the rights to the character in 1972; but in the intervening years Timely comics had become known as Marvel, so Captain Marvel became simply known as Shazam! 

Captain Marvel is completely unrelated to Captain Marvel, an alien superhero created by Stan Lee in 1967, specifically to establish Marvel Comic's right to use the name. The pretext was that his real name was Mar-Vell, which is now such an established part of the lore that fans can't see how silly it sounds. In one Apocryphal story he merged with Eternity and became the Mar-Vell Universe. 

Captain Mar-Vell had a human girlfriend called Carol Danvers who became known as Ms Marvel when she acquired superpowers. When Mar-Vell dies of cancer, Carol Danvers becomes Captain Marvel in her own right. Although Kamala admires Carol Danvers this Ms Marvel has no connection with Ms Marvel apart from the name. 
 
Captain Marvel, Captain Marvel and Captain Marvel have nothing to do with Captain Marvel a black female police officer with the ability to transform herself into a beam of light, who first appeared in 1982. (Her real name is Monica Rambeau, and a character of this name has appeared in the MCU Captain Marvel movie and the Wandavision TV series.) 

When Captain Marvel ceased publication in the 1950s, British publisher L Miller created a similar character called Marvelman. Where Captain Marvel's powers depended on the magic word Shazam, Marvelman's depended on the word Kimota. (Shazam is, of course, Mazahs spelt backwards.) When Marvelman was revived by Alan Moore in the 1980s, Marvel Comics insisted that his name be changed to Miracleman.

Captain Marvel shared his magic word with a number of other heroes, creating a Marvel family which included Captain Marvel Junior, Mary Marvel, and Hoppy the Marvel Bunny. If Baz Luhrmann is to be believed, Captain Marvel Junior was one of the main causes of Elvis Presley. The magic word was also used by an Egyptian wizard; who became a super-villain but was then partially rehabilitated. He took the name Black Adam but is so obscure that no-one would ever consider putting him in a movie. 

The Elgin Marvels are sculptures in the British Museum, but many people think they should be returned to Greece



Paper Girls 
(Amazon Prime)

Sat down to watch Ms Marvel; found my Disney+ link had temporarily gone away; picked Paper Girls off Prime more or less at random. Instantly hooked.

I'd seen adverts for the comic book at least seventy six times, and never been particularly intrigued by them. It's written by Brian K Vaughan who wrote the remarkable and still ongoing Saga saga, which has been described as "Kinda like Star Wars meets Game of Thrones". Saga isn't actually very much like either of those two franchises; but it's hard to sum up a hundred and fifty issue graphic novel in ten words. Paper Girls is equally unlike Back to the Future meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

In 1988, four twelve-year-old girls (Erin, Karina, Tiffany and Mac) are out delivering newspapers on their bicycles, which was a thing which kids did in the Olden Days. They time-slip into the future, which is to say, the present, which is to say, 2019. The first four episodes of the series are about them figuring out what is going on, coming to terms with how the world has changed, and attempting to go home.

There is the thinnest possible science-fiction backstory. Some baddie time travellers from the far future are trying to change the time-line to their advantage, and some goodie time travellers are trying to stop them. But the interest in the show, so far at least, depends on the basic time-travel situation, which skilfully avoids going in any of the most obvious directions. Naturally, the girls are sometimes bemused by modern technology. When one of them inadvertently sets off a voice-activated Alexa smartphone, they assume that there are "really robots" in 2018. But relatively little space is given to the dropping of jaws or "gosh, isn't the future amazing" moments. They are much more worried about the realisation that their parents (and pets) are mostly long dead, and that familiar buildings have been pulled down and built on. The bulk of the drama comes from character situations. Erin encounters her fifty-year old self, who has entirely failed to fulfil any of her childhood ambitions. Mac tracks down her now-middle-aged elder brother who has unexpectedly turned into a successful middle aged doctor. He somewhat reverts to childish attitudes around his younger sister, who is distinctly unimpressed when he acts like a responsible dad around his own kids. ("So, it started with me and Dr. dіldо, over here, shooting off illegal fireworks, then he took me on a shopping spree, but then the clock struck 3:00, and he suddenly turned back into a total prick".) 

I've just got to the part when the guy from the Rebel Alliance reveals that he has a giant robot in the barn, and everyone flies off through a wormhole, presumably ending up in an entirely different time-zone. If it's anything like Saga, plot threads are going to multiply as things proceed: but so far it is both clever and compelling and I really want things to turn out well for the main characters.

Erin is Chinese-American, Karina is Jewish, Tiffany is black and Mac is white. Mac is sometimes quite prejudiced and Karina pulls her up for it. I assume that some people in the writers' room consume large     quantities of tofu.





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Wednesday, October 19, 2022

Oh F*ck, Not Another Elf

 





Hi,

I'm Andrew.

For the last month my lovely Patreon subscribers have been getting early access to my essays on the Rings of Power and matters arising. 

I've now collected the whole thing into a lovely little PDF booklet, running to a shade under 100 pages. 

It is currently available on Ko-Fi as a pay-what you like down-load. 

My Patreons have mostly pledged $1 for each essay, meaning they've paid around $10 or £8 for my thoughts: do please pay whatever you think my writing is worth. (That's your actual moral pressure, that is.) 

What I would like best is for you to join the select crew of Rilstone Fans who pay me a quid or so each time I publish something substantial: all my Patreons have already got access to the virtual book. 

I can't actually stop you subscribing to Patron, reading the essays, and then unsubscribing without paying anything, but I will know who you are and I will judge you. 

I shall now rejoin the human race for a few days and then start writing about something else. The Rings of Power essays were rather "shooting from the hip"; the next set may be a little more through. 

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Tuesday, October 18, 2022

Rings of Power Episode Eight, wherein these reviews come to an end

 https://www.patreon.com/posts/rings-of-power-73404984






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Monday, October 17, 2022

Rings of Power, Episodes 8, part 1





 https://www.patreon.com/posts/rings-of-power-8-73380435







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I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.

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Monday, October 10, 2022

Appendix

This week, Private Eye dusted off a hoary old joke that was first used, to my certain knowledge, in 1977.

A fictional academic, Dr Euydice Pipkin, complains that Rings of Power is insufficiently faithful to Tolkien's work. The script, she says, ignores Tolkien's stipulation that "in strictly dynastic terms the Herbs were scions of Akond the Swat" and references "Christopher Tolkien's splendid Scraps Retrieved From My Father's Waste Paper Basket, 1957-1963."

In fairness, Private Eye has been making the same jokes every fortnight since 1961. Every issue, teenage poet E.J Thribb writes an excruciating obituary in free verse ("So, farewell then, Hilary Mantell..."); nearly every week student radical Dave Spart gives an incoherent and self-contradictory op-ed on some left-wing theme. (Unfortunately, Owen Jones has rather stolen his act.) The regular book review column is generally intelligent and perceptive, and sometimes even fair. (The Eye is half satire and half actual journalism.) But it generally includes a spoof entitled What You Didn't Miss which parodies some dull, pretentious tome -- often a biography which lovingly records the lunch dates and voting record of a long-forgotten back-bench Tory MP. So Tolkien is certainly not being singled out for six column inches about "Lord Twiglet, high marshall of the Snurdlings."

The joke about Christopher Tolkien recycling texts that his father had thrown in the bin is very old and not very funny. The six thousand or so posthumous pages were not discarded scraps but documents that Tolkien himself had preserved, labelled, annotated, placed in rough sequence but never prepared for publication. But he did intend them to be published: at one point he issued an ultimatum that Unwin could only publish Lord of the Rings as a four volume work, with the fourth volume being the never-completed Silmarillion. This would, in fact, have been a much better way to proceed: The Lord of the Rings In Four Volumes With Epilogue and Backstory is one of the most interesting tomes in Morpheus's library. The rather haphazard Appendices are a poor substitute.

The Private Eye joke relies on a very familiar trope: people who don't like Rings of Power, or Peter Jackson's parody of the Hobbit, or indeed Ralph Bakshi's 1978 cartoon, are extreme pedants and purists who no work could possibly have satisfied, and their opinions can safely be ignored. Don't mention that the cognoscenti were on the whole very pleased with the 2007 Drury Lane musical and Brian Sibley's 1981 radio series.

This stuff happens around other geeky properties. No-one will ever believe me if I say that I dislike a particular episode of Doctor Who because I think it badly written or poorly acted: they assume that my real objection is that it contradicts a footnote to a reconstruction of a lost 1966 black and white William Hartnell story. Why on earth would people who like Star Trek think they have the right to an opinion on Star Trek? That's not who Star Trek is for.

Very few Marvel Comics fans complained when Thanos, a deity who has conceived a courtly romance with Death was transformed in the cinematic universe into an alien with a Malthusian theory about population control. Avengers: Endgame was basically just a very good film, regardless of how selective it was about its use of half a century's worth of superhero lore. A giant purple gorilla who wants to kill everyone in the entire universe with a magic glove is a lot of fun regardless of the fidelity of his backstory. 

Certainly, some critics can be a little on the pedantic side: but it is does not follow that all criticism is pedantic. 

Oddly enough, Sir Lenworth Henry's sweet interview in this week's Guardian also lapsed into stereotypes. He could have said that the people who objected to the dark-skinned Harfoots being played by actors with, er, dark skin were racists. He could have sent they were unperceptive critics, or that they hadn't read their Tolkien carefully enough. Instead, he pushed back against them for being bloggers:

"They’re sat in their pants, eating Hobnobs and looking at their computers, slagging off anything different."

They're not wrong; they're sad. 

I don't know exactly where the pants thing originated. Simcha Jacobovici has repeatedly described people who are skeptical about his claim to have discovered the grave of Mr and Mrs Jesus as "underwear blogger". He imagines these people -- including some very eminent New Testament scholars at prestigious universities "sitting in their underwear, eating out of pizza boxes, spending their days and nights attack me and others personally." He even provides a cartoon so we know what pizza and underwear look like.

If a writer doesn't bother to get dressed in the morning, the article isn't worth reading, if the article isn's worth reading, the writer can't be properly dressed. In the olden days they used to wear dressing gowns and silk pyjamas. Maybe we should all move back to garrets.

According to the Tale of Years, Ar-Inziladun came to the throne of Numenor in or about the year 3175 of the Second Age. Ar-Inziladun is an Adunaic name; Adunaic being the ordinary language spoken by the men of the West. But he adopted the Quenya Tar-Palantir as his Regnal name, to signify a renewed friendship between Numenor and the Elves.

Tar-Palantir had one daughter, Miriel, and a nephew, Pharazon. Tolkien does not say that Miriel ever acted as Tar-Planatir's regent, but he doesn't say that she didn't: the history of the Second Age is necessarily a bit sketchy. He doesn't say that Miriel was blind, either,  but since her father's name means "the farsighted" the idea has a certain mythic irony. 

Now, Numenoreans practiced primogeniture -- the crown (or, in fact, the sceptre) passes automatically on the monarch's death to the eldest child, regardless of gender. So when Tar-Palantir dies, Miriel ought to become Queen. But in fact, Pharazon will seize the throne. (He's already appeared in Rings of Power: he's the slightly shifty chancellor who assured the guildsmen that Galadriel wasn't going to take their jobs, but I don't think he's been identified as the king's brother's son.) He is going to force Miriel to marry him, even though Numenor does not generally permit marriage between "those more nearly akin than cousins in the second degree". He'll then embark on an humongous war, which will end with the complete and utter defeat of Sauron. But instead of destroying or exiling him, he will have the bright idea of dragging him back to Numenor in chains, which is, of course, precisely what the Dark Lord wanted all along.. In Numenor, Sauron will take on the role of Bad Councillor in the mould of Wormtongue. (I imagine that Tom Hiddleston has already read for the role.) He will sows in the king's mind the idea of cheating death; and Al-Pharazon will take a war fleet to Valinor with a view to stealing immortality from the gods. This will result in the complete and utter destruction of Numenor. It will also result in the setting being transformed from a disc world to a spherical one. God evidently feels that if he is going to react, he might as well over-react. Someone called Elendil will escape from the devastation with his children Isildur and Anarion, and they will found a kingdom called Gondor and not live particularly happily ever after. Isildur's bane, and all that... This is all going to happen in the next century or so: in the lifetimes of the Isildur and Elendil and Miriel. Numenoreans live longer than ordinary humans, but not nearly as long as elves. (They are also quite a bit taller than humans, incidentally: which is why the four foot Hobbits are known as Halflings.) 

Now, according to the introduction to Lord of the Rings, Hobbits first show up in Middle-earth over a thousand years later, at the end of the first millennium of the Third Age. But Tolkien -- probably writing in the persona of Merry -- says that Hobbit legends tell of a time when they lived in the land between Mirkwood (nee Greenwood the Great) and the Misty Mountains. That's roughly where the Harfeet are plying their caravan trails in Rings of Power. (Tolkien talks about Hobbit legends recalling their "wandering days", which presumably suggested Poppy's song in Episode Five.) I don't think Tolkien intends us to think of there being proto-Hobbits in Middle-earth in the Second Age, but I don't think the text positively says that there weren't any.

What it definitely does say is that the Istari -- the five wizards -- arrived in Middle-earth, not un-coinicidentally, at the same time Hobbits were first noticed, about the year 1,000 of the Third Age. We know that they are Maiar -- lessor deities, clad in mortal flesh -- but they are specifically said to have come over the Sundering Sea in ships. That's why to start with Cirdan the shipwright was the only one who knew who they were. Valinor is a physical place accessible by ship, where embodied beings have infinitely prolonged lives. Even after the world becomes round, you still get to it in a physical boat, across a kind of magic bridge. The Istari did not drop out of the sky at the end of the Second Age. 

Tolkien also tells us that during the Second Age, the Elves of Eregion became allies of the Dwarves of Moria. He says that it's the closest friendship the two races have ever had, as a result of which, the Elvish smiths of that time became the most skilful that there have ever been. He says that the Elves initiated contact with the Dwarves because Mithril had been discovered in the mines, and that Gil-Galad-Was-An-Elven-King sent Elrond to Eriador as an embassy. That's reflected quite closely in the TV show: the idea that the Elves need the Mithril to stop themselves from "fading" is a rather unsubtle embellishment, but the brotherly love between Elrond and Durin Jr is as good a way of personalising a fairly dry chronicle as any.

However the friendship of the Elves and the Dwarves happened in the the seventeenth century of the Second Age -- a millennium and a half before the time of Elendil and Isildur. The Rings of Power were forged even earlier, between 1500 and 1600; Celebrimbor dies in 1697, when Sauron has already been active and operating from a Dark Tower in Mordor for five hundred  years. The idea that the black land magically turns black, and Mount Doom starts spitting fire, during the reign of Tar-Palintir seems to delete about three thousand years from the Time Line. (The idea that the land is blackened on one particular afternoon as a result of a deliberate action, as opposed to being gradually ruined over centuries of neglect and exploitation seems very much against the spirit of Tolkien.)

I can't see any way of reconciling this. The Moria plot and the South Lands plot are both taking place in the same time-frame, because Galadriel and Elrond meet at Gil-Galad's palace in the first episode. Events in Tolkien's history has been squished together: the resurgence of Sauron, his defeat, the corruption of Numenor, and the forging of the Rings now take place over decades rather than centuries. There seems to be no narrative space for a fair-faced Sauron to prowl Middle-earth disguised as Santa Claus Annator Lord of Gifts. 

Adaptations are allowed a certain amount of freedom. There are scenes in Shakespeare in which messengers rush in and say "The Irish are revolting" and "The Irish have surrendered" thus condensing months of politics into thirty seconds of stage time. It's quite all right to make up words for Elrond to say to Durin, or imagine what Tharazon said to Miriel on their wedding night, just as much as it is to imagine a conversation between Thomas Cromwell and Anne Boleyn. That's the job of historical fiction. But there comes a point when the sequence of events are so scrambled that what you have has ceased to be historical fiction altogether. And that can work, I suppose. There are Westerns that care a great deal about their American History, and there are cowboy stories in which "Billy the Kid" and "Butch Cassidy" fight at the siege of the Alamo. (I distinctly remember Frank and Jesse James visiting Laura Ingalls in Minnesota. I think Bob Ford sat next to her in Miss Ingles' schoolroom). And, I mean, if you want to write a story in which Tony Blair defeats Saddam Hussien in single combat and is knighted on the deck of his own ship bt Queen Elizabeth, I can't stop you. But it's disconcerting to think you are watching one type of drama and discovering you are watching the other. 

"Men of the Middle-ages! Today is the first day of the Hundred Years War."

I am at this moment wearing the same jeans I wore yesterday and a rather natty red pullover from Primark. I may not have quite showered or shaved but I have drunk a great deal of coffee. Under no circumstances would I put biscuits or pizza near my keyboard. 






SECOND AGE:

1500-1600: Forging of Rings

1695: Gil Galad sends Elrond to Eregion

1697: Death of Celebrimbor

3175: Tal Palintir becomes King

3209: Birth of Isildur

3319: Fall of Numenor

3441: Sauron defeated, Isildur and Gil-Galad die

THIRD AGE

c1000: Harfoots cross the Misty Mountains

c1000: The Five Wizards come to Middle-earth

1600: Hobbits settle in the shire

2941: Bilbo's big adventure






Hi,

I'm Andrew.

I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.

If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider backing me on Patreon (pledging £1 each time I publish an article.) 

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Saturday, October 08, 2022

Rings of Power Episode Seven

 https://www.patreon.com/posts/73050558








Hi,

I'm Andrew.

I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.

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Rings of Power Episode 6

 


https://www.patreon.com/posts/rings-of-power-6-73038659



Hi,

I'm Andrew.

I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.

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 Please do not feed the troll. 

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Friday, September 30, 2022

Rings of Power: Digression

This weeks Quite Interesting discussion on the Twitter was "What is the difference between science fiction and fantasy."

My answer was "If it has swords it is fantasy, but if it has ray guns it is science fiction." 

More pedantically: if it has only swords (Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings) it is fantasy, but if it has both swords and ray-guns (Dune, John Carter of Mars) it is science fiction. 

My favourite answer was "Science fiction has light swords because the writer believes they might be possible; fantasy has light swords because the writer believes they are impossible."

Definitions of this kind always break down: to sustain your argument you have to say that beavers are fish, carrots are fruit, and Star Wars is science fiction. Since people like George R.R Martin and Robin Hobb appear at science fiction conventions and Forbidden Planet sells Tolkien books, the distinction is probably not all that important.

The most useful definition is "Science fiction is the kind of thing that is liked by the kinds of people who like science fiction." This definition also works for Folk Music and Socialism, incidentally. 


Tolkien was troubled by Orcs. There is a scene in Lord of the Rings where Sam looks at the body of a human soldier who has been killed fighting on Sauron's side, and wonders if he was misled rather than evil. Orcs on the other hand are a kind of vermin that can be killed freely and without compunction. Gimli and Legolas have a competition to see how many they can kill at Helms deep. (Peter Jackson turns this into a running joke across two movies.)

Tolkien toys with the idea that Orcs are a kind of automata, mere extensions of Morgoth's will; or at any rate that their wills have been totally overridden by Sauron. They talk among themselves, in lower class English accents, obviously, but he speculates that they may merely be imitating the sounds of human speech without understanding what it means. But the published texts seem clear that Orcs are people: they have agency and feelings and subjectivity. In origin, they are probably twisted or corrupted Elves. This is a fairly major theme in the mythos. Evil does not create, or have independent existence: it only twists and corrupts the good. Trolls are broken Ents, Orcs are broken Elves, evil itself  is a discordant counter melody which God will incorporate into the great cosmic concerto.

Unlike the Christian Satan, Sauron is capable of repentance: Morgoth himself may come back to the light at the very, very end of time. But there is no hint that there are, or could be, good Orcs, or that Orcs can be redeemed. Dead humans pass beyond the circles of the world into an unspecified but presumably Christian afterlife; dead elves' spirits find their way back to the Undying Lands and may become re-embodied. I suppose dead orcs remain in middle earth as ghosts or demons.


Joseph Campbell, who is generally wrong, said that "mythology is psychology misread as biography". Ursula Le Guin, who is usually right, said that poetry and dragons speak "the language of the night" -- they follow dream logic rather than logical logic. 

Le Guin is thinking about the way in which characters can be both people in a story and also symbols: that at one level Gollum is a Hobbit who desires a powerful magical Ring, and happens to become the guide of Frodo, another Hobbit who resits the Ring's temptation. But looked at another way, Gollum is Frodo's distorted reflection: he represents what would have happened if Frodo had succumbed to the Ring. Gollum tripping over his silly feet and falling into a volcano is a dumb event which just happens to happen; but it also represents the fact that the Quest can only be completed by Frodo's dark side -- what Le Guin calls his Shadow. (Astonishingly, this is also the plot of a Wizard of Earthsea.)

C.S Lewis complained about Dickens' handling of the character of Jingle in the Pickwick Papers: it is okay, he said, to ask the audience to laugh at a comedy rotter; but to show the baddie facing the real-world consequences of his actions is not playing fair with the reader. I have found this a problem in "serious" situation comedies like Rev. or even Friends: the more real characters become, the harder it is to laugh at their comic antics.

If you like fantasy, you have to accept that it is not real. You make a tacit agreement to put certain hard questions on hold for the duration of the story. I think this is as true for meticulously constructed worlds like Middle-earth as it is for more whimsical constructs like the Discworld. Why does Gandalf, an immortal Maiar sent into the world to defeat Sauron, wear a pointy hat? Because he's a wizard. Why don't the Fellowship fly to Mordor on the back of an eagle? Because it's a story. (That was Tolkien's exact answer. The eagles are part of the machinery: what we would be more likely to call a plot device.) Why are Orcs evil? Because that's what Orc means. 

One of the things we like about High Fantasy -- and superhero comics, and cowboy stories -- is that the differences between good and evil are exaggerated. Black hats are crueller and more callous than any actual cattle rustler is like to have been; white hats are kinder and less corruptible than we can really expect from our police officers. This doesn't necessarily imply a simplistic morality: High Noon is quite a sophisticated little morality play exactly because Gary Cooper is so perfect and and Lee Van Cleef so nasty. Fantasy takes it a lot further: a Black Hat on a Black Hatstand in the Land of Mordor where the shadows are leads an infinitely large posse of ugly deformed Uruk again armies of immortal, beautiful, incorruptible cavalry with the light that existed before the sun and the moon literally shining out of their arseholes.

People who don't really do fantasy very naturally see this as a vile colonial metaphor. And vile colonialists certainly sometimes interpret fantasy in that way. "We, the light shiny people have the right to kill you, the dark ugly people, because we are light and shiny and you are dark and ugly." But if you do like fantasy, you will probably understand that the elves represent us but that the orcs represent us as well. Elves are what we aspire to be and Orcs are what we are afraid of being. The eternal war between Light and Dark (which light wins but at great cost) represents an inner conflict which is happening in the head of all human being at all times. It was the people who mindlessly vandalised trees that Tolkien was inclined to call Orcs.   

Okay, most people who read fantasy probably wouldn't say that at all. They would be more likely to say "Life is messy and complicated but the Lord of the Rings is fun. In real life there aren't Light Shiny People and Ugly Horrid People -- there are just people. But one of the nice things about Lord of the Rings is that it is simpler than real life." Tolkien had no objection to people who called his books Escapist.

It is not okay for the Dark Lord's Minions to have feathers in their headdresses. It is not okay for them to have slitty eyes, hooked noses or for their bankers to have a Star of David mosaic on their floor. There has been lots and lots and lots of High Fantasy over the years and maybe we don't need any more of it. Realism has something to be said for it. Circe and Joffrey were arguably more hateful villains just because they were humans as opposed to shoggoth. The people who say that Dungeons & Dragons can't possibly have a racist subtext because African Americans don't really have yellow scaly skin, 1D4 hit points and treasure type A are insufferable twits. The Star Wars mythos was rather improved when the Sand People stopped being "injuns" and became an indigenous nation with their own culture and language.


Some people say that stories about Chosen Ones -- swords in stones and empty thrones awaiting sons of Adam and daughters of Eve and boys with funny marks on their foreheads -- are irredeemably aristocratic. Some people are born to rule, and some people, you and me, are born to chant "All Hail The Long Lost True King of the Northlands" in silly naarthen accents. And you can read the stories that way. And the fact that they can be read that way may make them dangerous stories. But wasn't Joseph Campbell on kind of the right track when he said that the point of Star Wars and the Sword in the Stone and Harry Potter is that we are all the Chosen Ones -- that the journey of the hero is a way of thinking about everyone's trajectory through life. 

We are all Anakin and Mordred and Tom Riddle unless we make a positive effort to be Luke or the Wart or Harry.

Richard Bach wrote a silly book called Confessions of a Reluctant Messiah; a sequel to the even sillier Jonathan Livingstone Seagull. At the the time, I thought it was saying "You, Andrew Rilstone, might turn out to be the second coming of Jesus. Wouldn't that be wild?" I now, of course, understand that it was saying "Everyone is the second coming of Jesus; terms like son of God and Messiah are just ways of understanding what it is to be human." Which is very poor theology but quite good psychology.


Science fiction and fantasy are ways of reading, not ways of writing. If you speak the language of the night, you look at the Lord of the Rings and see a vast tapestry of symbols. If you speak the language of the day then you see a not very coherent or believable collection of facts. If you read the Lord of the Rings and ask "I am sure this poor Orc as its own feelings and point of view -- as it would have if it existed in the real world" then you probably find that Lord of the Rings doesn't work for you. If you read the Lord of the Rings and say "In this world there are the forces of good and there are the force of evil and that's cool" you are probably on Tolkien's wavelength. (If you read it and think "There are good white people and it is natural they should rule nasty dark people and that's true in the real world as well as in Tolkien's" then lots of people on Twitter agree with you.) But if you are uncomfortable with the whole idea of evil races, maybe you aren't the person to be developing a prequel to Lord of the Rings?

Science Fiction is when you write about Evil Races because you believe that some Races are really evil. Fantasy is when you write about Evil Races because you don't. Discuss. 

Hi,

I'm Andrew.

I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.

If enjoyed this essay please consider backing me on Patreon (pledging £1 each time I publish an article.) 

 Please do not feed the troll. 

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