The Problem of Susan (2)

Last week, or possibly the week before last, the Twittersphere became concerned about a scene in the 1964 Doctor Who story The Dalek Invasion of Earth which is alluded to in Peter Capaldi's 2017 swan song, Twice Upon a Time. 

In the old, black and white story, the First Doctor becomes exasperated with his teenaged granddaughter Susan. She's recklessly climbed on a derelict wall, causing a bridge to collapse and cutting our heroes off from the TARDIS. He tells her that she's "far too curious" and "always rushing about" and when she protests that there's "no real harm done" and that she "didn't pull down the bridge on purpose" he stomps off, adding, preposterously, "What you need is a jolly good smacked bottom." There is a general consensus that William Hartnell ad libbed the line, or at any rate suggested it during rehearsals. Nothing analogous appears in either the Peter Cushing movie or the Terrence Dicks novelisation.

If we are treating the Dalek Invasion of Earth as an old, 1960s television programme, the scene requires no explanation. Terry Nation was born in 1930, William Hartnell in 1908: naturally the script contains out-dated and old-fashioned attitudes. The Doctor is an elderly man, maybe 70 years old, with the attitudes of someone born towards the end of the reign of Queen Victoria. Susan is a sixteen or seventeen year old girl who he has been bringing up since she was a child. He is making an inappropriate and embarrassing threat, but it's the kind of embarrassing threat that any old-fashioned father might have made in 1964. It may be that the Doctor -- who is definitely absent-minded and possibly senile -- has temporarily forgotten Susan's age and is talking to her as he might have done when she was eight. This is the man who forgets his companions' names and confuses drugs with gloves. More likely, he is genuinely cross, but at the same time, consciously making a joke against himself. He's not saying "I would seriously like to hit you"; it's more like "I am as cross with you as I would have been when you were a naughty toddler." It's pretty much the same joke that Jackie Tyler made when she told the adult Rose that she was not too big for a slap. At the end of the story, the Doctor starts to scold Susan as if she were a little girl; and it is entirely clear that he doesn't mean it at all. 

"You little monkey. You know, since you've been away from that school, you seem to have got yourself thoroughly disorganised, haven't you? Yes, you need taking in hand."

If this were a comic book; that would pretty much be the end of the conversation. If Sue Richards had threatened to spank Franklin in an 1960s Fantastic Four story (which I don't think she would have done) we would be happy to say that she was saying what any 1960s Mum might have said to a 1960s child. Insofar as the story was still canon, the floating time line would have overwritten the bad word, and we would "deem" that she had threatened to take away the lad's IPad or ground him on movie night.

But there is no floating time-line in Doctor Who. It's a revealed text. If the Doctor said it, the Doctor said it.  

People sometimes say "You can't judge the past by the standards of the present." To which I reply "In fact, you can only judge the past by the standards of the present, because you live in the present and standards are what you judge things by." (People also sometimes say "I saw it with my own eyes" which always makes me wonder who else's eyes they suppose I thought they might have seen it with.) But it is probably true to say that you shouldn't judge the popular culture of the past entirely by the standards of the popular culture of the present. 

By the standards of 2023, the Doctor's attitude to Susan is, at best, sexist and patronising, and at worst, border-line abusive. By the standards of 1964, it is an innocuous piece of father-daughter banter. We don't imagine that the Doctor actually beats Susan: but we have to assume that he thought that smacking was perfectly normal and the kind of thing it was okay to make lighthearted remarks about. And everyone agreed with him. Ian would be a very unusual chemistry teacher if he has never sent a pupil to the headmaster for corporal punishment. As late as 1972, Doctor Who was preceded on BBC 1 by a sit-com about a boy's boarding school entitled Whacko! 

But for us to maintain a Watsonian faith in Doctor Who as a revealed text we have to find a way to convince ourselves that this patronising, sexist, borderline abusive old man is the same person as the good looking young guy in the Fez who can't bear to see children crying and respects the lifestyle choices of transgender horses.

And this is merely the tip of the iceberg. At the end of the same story the Doctor sees that Susan is in love with the rebel leader, David Cameron, and -- believing that she'll be happier marrying her boyfriend than spending eternity in a blue box with Grandpa -- locks her out and leaves. It is a scene I like very much. It's moving and in-character and a little bit funny and leads into one of the all time great lines in Who history.

"One day, I shall come back. Yes, I shall come back. Until then, there must be no regrets, no tears, no anxieties. Just go forward in all your beliefs, and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine."

He never did come back.

It would be fair to say that you wouldn't write a scene like that today. It's going a little over the top to talk in terms of forced marriage. I am not even quite sure I would describe it as "fridging" (the phenomenon when the death, or in this case departure, of a female character matters only in terms of how it makes the male character feel.) But it is another incredibly sexist and patronising scene. 

Four years later (in a story called Fury From The Deep) the Doctor's belief in personal freedom is said to be a core part of who he is. His incumbent companion Victoria is obviously completely unsuited to the adventurous life; but the Doctor gives her as much time as she needs to decide whether to stay on the TARDIS or to make a new life with some nice humans in a conflict-free period of Earth history. Victoria specifically says that the Doctor thinks it's important for people to make their own minds up; the Doctor himself later tells Jamie not to be sad because leaving was Victoria's own decision. How is this the same person who denied Susan agency -- kicking her out and double locking the TARDIS doors? Does regeneration change your core values to that extent? If so, does it mean anything to say that the First and the Second Doctors are the same person? And if they aren't, is there even a character called the Doctor to be having this conversation about?

And we can't really say that the Doctor is behaving like an elderly man from the 1960s because that's how elderly men from the 1960s behaved. Because the Doctor is not an elderly man; and Susan is not a teenager. We are told from the outset that they are aliens, or, possibly, human beings from Earth's very remote future. Maybe we are supposed to take it for granted that dotty old scientists from the 49th century had the same mannerisms and social attitudes as dotty old scientists from the 19th. But that's a pretty problematic assumption in itself. Cavemen and Crusaders and Aztecs all sound like white middle class English people from the 1950s because God is an Englishman and the Universe is English. 

In 1966 it was REVEALED that the Doctor could change his physical appearance, and in 1967 it was REVEALED that the Doctor was actually four hundred and fifty years old and in 1969 it was REVEALED that he was a member of a godlike species called the (checks notes) Time Lords and in 1974 it was REVEALED that his planet is called (checks notes again) Gallifrey and in 1979 it was REVEALED that Time Lords can swap bodies like clothes and in 2018 it was REVEALED that they can change gender during the regeneration process in in 2020 it was REVEALED...I don't think I want to talk about what was revealed in 2020. 

But all these things have always been true. It was a 450 year old gender-swapping Time Lord from Gallifrey who abandoned Susan on earth with her nice but dim human boyfriend. 

It has never been definitively REVEALED who Susan was. For years I adhered to a piece of fanfic by Jeremy Bentham which identified her as a human foundling adopted by the Doctor. This seemed to admirably save the appearances: it allowed Susan to be Susan but eliminated the need for a Mrs Who. I never took to Eric Saward's story (published in the Radio Times) which identified her with Lady Larn, a descendent of Rassilon and the opponent of a corrupt Time Lord regime, who happened to be hiding in the same TARDIS that the Doctor stole. The Cartmell Masterplan would have REVEALED that she was cloned from The Other. (If you don't know who The Other is you don't particularly need to.) But the Fan Consensus remains that she was simply a Time Lady, the Doctor's literal grand-daughter. Post-reboot, we are less squeamish about the idea of the Doctor having done sex than we used to be.

In 1964, it was just about possible to defend the end of Dalek Invasion of Earth. Susan has directly said that she is in love with David; she has told him that she wants to belong in one place and have an identity of her own; and wants to help rebuild the Dalek ravaged earth. But she feels a responsibility to her grandfather. The Doctor isn't forcing his preferred outcome on her, but facilitating the choice she's already made. Back in Unearthly Child, she begged to be allowed to stay on 20th century earth, even if it meant leaving the TARDIS; which the Doctor dismissed as foolish sentimentality. If anything, he has become more respectful of her own choices. 

In 2023, that doesn't work: there is no way that the Doctor leaving Susan with David can be a valid decision. One immortal Time Lord is marooning another immortal Time Lord on a primitive planet, knowing full well that her mortal lover will expire like a mayfly. Terrence Dicks' novelisation of the Five Doctors showed us a glimpse of a relatively content Susan living on the reconstructed post-Dalek earth; but his original Eight Doctors novel showed David being relieved to die first because Susan has told him that she will live forever and he will get old. I** L*****'s objection to Jodie Whitaker depended on this point: the Doctor would not have left Susan with David knowing that she might someday regenerate into a boy; ergo, trans-gender regeneration is non-canonical, ergo, hashtag not my Doctor and I always liked Babylon 5 better in any case.

In the 2017 story Twice Upon a Time, the Twelfth Doctor's companion Bill uses the words "bloody" and "arse" in front of the third First Doctor (now played by David Bradley) and the third First Doctor responds using the same threat he made to Susan some half century ago. This closes off the possibility that the remark about smacking was an innocuous joke. And it makes it impossible to pretend that the Doctor never said it. The First Doctor apparently goes around making wildly inappropriate remarks to anyone and everyone. A Victorian grandpa would distinctly not have said the b-t-m word in front of a lady (particularly one he had just told off for using a stronger word for derrière). Are we supposed to think that the old boy has gone completely doolally and regards all human beings as naughty toddlers? Or is he perfectly well aware that he is making a sexual remark (which is how Bill takes it) in which case we have to reframe the First Doctor as a Benny Hill level dirty old man, with no filter at all.

I can think of one possible solution: it may be the one Moffat is nudging us towards. The Doctor is hyper-correcting. He hasn't been away from Gallifrey that long: he doesn't understand these funny human creatures very well, although he rather likes some of them. He's an alien trying to fit in, and he sometimes says inappropriate things because he doesn't fully understand the culture he has appropriated. Susan herself does a very good job of pretending to be a 1960s student, although her slang is a bit self-conscious. ("Aren't they fabulous?") But if Susan thinks that England went over to decimal currency in 1962, then the Doctor might well misunderstand the nuances of what Captain Kirk once called "this human custom called spanking". He's in a similar boat to that alien who wanted a very common human first name and inadvertently adopted the name of a very common car as his alias. 

And this is probably the only Watsonian way of reading Doctor Who. Every jelly baby, every crumpet, every game of cricket -- every moral principle -- is a bit of play-acting, an ineffable being doing the kinds of things he thinks humans do, not always very well. The Doctor plays with yo-yos, not because he is an overgrown schoolboy who thinks playing with yo-yos is fun but because that's what he thinks is expected of humans. It's a kind of reverse cargo cult: he once saw a human being doing this strange thing called cricket and has decided that doing cricket will make him seem human. The more cricket he does, the more human he will seem. Which saves the appearances and allows us to believe that there is some continuity of identity between Jon Pertwee and Jodie Whitaker. But it rather spoils Doctor Who.

It's a fact that there are old Doctor Who stories in which Asian characters are played by white actors with silly yellow make up. The pure Watsonian has to argue that Doctor Who takes place in an alternate reality where that is what Chinese people really look like. Or perhaps that Greel hired a white henchmen and asked him to pretend to be Chinese, providing him with only a pile of Penny Dreadfuls as research material. But in that case why why didn't Litefoot or someone say "Hang on you bally blighter I've been to the Far East and the native johnnies don't look a bit like you?" So maybe they are on an alien planet where the telepathic natives have somehow morphed into simulacra of Victorian stereotypes? Captain Kirk was always finding himself on planets where everyone thought they were in a James Cagney gangster movie, or a Kirk Douglas Roman epic or a John Wayne cowboy movie. 

Maybe it is simpler to just expunge this material from the Canon. Cancel culture, I think they call it. Today we tell New Fans to skip Talons of Weng Chiang because it is Racist; tomorrow we will tell them to fast forward through William Hartnell's cheeky ad lib because it is Sexist; next week we will tell them that the entirety of Old Who is not worth bothering with. That's one way through the thicket. The stories we like are Revealed. The ones we don't are just stories. It's common enough for liberal clergymen to say that the bits of the Bible which agree with their politics are the literal true facts about the Historical Jesus, but that the parts of the Bible they don't agree with were daubed in after the event by some evil Roman emperor or American evangelist.

This is where Watsonianism leads us. We want to believe that Holmes and Watson are real, so we pretend that the Holmes stories were really written by Dr Watson. But to iron out the inconsistencies, we have to say that this paragraph isn't true (because Watson misunderstood what was going on) and that paragraph isn't true (because Watson lied to make Holmes look good) and that whole story isn't true (because Watson was being discrete) and that other whole story isn't true (because it was inserted into the canon by Moriarty to test our faith.) We end up saying that none of it is true: Watson created a fictional character called Sherlock Holmes as a cover for his own amateur sleuthing. Or maybe Watson was mad and made up stories about an impossibly clever imaginary friend. 

Treating fiction as if it was true ends up making it less true. Next time you are at a fashionable wine and cheese party and someone asks you what is meant by Deconstruction, you can have that. 

So. Susan Foreman is a Time Lady. Of course she is. She used to wear funny raised collars and cardinal's skullcaps and participate in arcane ceremonies in the Panopticon. She backed her Grandpa up when he moaned to the Council about minoscopes. She knew multiple Doctors before he regenerated into the one we erroneous call the First: she watched that dashing young chap with the beret and the moustache renew himself into the crotchety old man. Perhaps when they first left Gallifrey she was still a boy. Perhaps she went into the TARDIS wardrobe and tried on new bodies, settling on a cool earth teenager. When no humans are around, she and the Doctor compare notes about how well their deception is playing out. 

Your mileage may vary. Doctor Who survives as a text; but Dalek Invasion Earth is sucked dry and we are left with a narrative husk.

There is no solution to the problem of Susan. There is a fundamental hole in Doctor Who, and there always was. Doctor Who is an Englishman who likes cricket and tea-cakes and an alien Time Lord, and he blatantly can't be both. Doctor Who is a set of stories made up by writers reflecting the attitudes of their times, and it is a single text about a singular character called the Doctor, and it blatantly can't be both. Like Christian theology, it makes most sense when it is allowed to be most nonsensical. The central conceit is a box which is bigger on the inside than the outside. Which is a nonsensical combination of words that doesn't really mean anything at all.

When Russel T Davies revived the series in 2005, he eschewed reboots. The Doctor who saved Rose from the Autons was the same Doctor who was rude to Ian in I.M Foreman's junkyard and the same Doctor who Grace kissed in Los Angeles on New Years Day, 2000. But he hung a huge lampshade on the problem. 

Dalek Invasion of Earth is a fun dark slow moving dated classic black and white story. I laughed at the silly old Doctor's silly old remarks in the spirit in which they were intended. I wiped away a tear at the noble old Doctor's awkward kind well meaning cruel farewell to his semi-grand-daughter in the spirit they were intended. 

If you're a Time Lord, how can you also be a crotchety old man with sexist attitudes? 

Lots of planets have a north.

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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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The Problem Of Susan

In 1963, the other kids at Midtown High took the mickey out of Peter Parker because he didn't know the difference between a fashionable cha-cha and an old-fashioned waltz.

In 1969, his friend, Flash Thompson was off fighting in Viet Nam.

In 2001, he sits with Captain America and looks at the wreckage of the World Trade Center.

Peter Parker can't have been younger than 16 in in 1963. He could have been as old as 22 in 1969 (he didn't graduate college until 1978) but he clearly wasn't 56 in 2001. And he definitely isn't 80 right now. He's usually represented as in his early 20s, which means he wasn't even born at the time of the September 11th attacks. Even if he was 15 in 2001 he'd now be well in sight of his 40th birthday.

Dragons last for ever, but not so little boys. In the 1970s, when Roy Thomas was Stan Lee's representative on earth, they used to talk about something called Marvel Time. Spider-Man was 20, and always had been. He had become a superhero when he was 15, and always had done. So the Origin of Spider-Man was always 5 years ago. The story about the spider, the burglar, and the uncle was first told in 1962: but in 1980, you had to imagine it having happened in 1975. "Wouldn't know a cha-cha from a waltz" gets overwritten as "Wouldn't know...er....YMCA...from a waltz". I suppose from the 2023 perspective they said "Doesn't know Kanya West from the cha-cha."

The stories in which Flash Thompson is drafted to Viet Nam still kind of happened, but he was actually fighting in Iran. Did I say Iran? I meant Afghanistan. In fact, I meant "an unspecified US war." (I don't know what they did with his very specifically and not at all stereotypically Vietnamese girlfriend.) Roy Thomas actually inserted new text into reprint editions warning us that when Mr Fantastic talks about helping the French resistance in World War II, he was actually talking about helping the French resistance in Korea.

This has the great advantage of broadly reflecting how everyone has always read stories, particularly comic strips. Charlie Brown is every kid's contemporary; but he was also their Dad's and very probably their Grandpa's contemporary. Lucy pulled the football away from him at the beginning of forty consecutive football seasons. Charlie may have aged slightly since 1948, but he sure wasn't 60 in 2001: but equally, the ball gag never happens for the first time. Batman has foiled the Joker before; Batman has foiled the Joker many times before, but Batman has not foiled the Joker on a thousand previous occasions.

William Brown (usually known as just William) pointedly remained eleven years old for half a century, doing his bit against Hitler in the 30s, playing at moon rockets in the 50s and trying to become a pop star in the 60s. His mother mutates from a 1920s village lady with a small staff to a 1960s house wife with a washing machine. This fits in with the ethos of the stories: when you are 11, summer holidays really do seem to last for half a century. That sense of time having stopped may have suggested the idea of William the Antichrist to Pratchett and Gaiman, although that idea became rather submerged in the over-egged Good Omens pudding. One of the reasons Bill Waterson terminated Calvin and Hobbes seems to have been that he found the idea of Calvin remaining permanently six years old and the idea of Calvin growing up equally unpalatable.

Jake Dudley's justly forgotten Daily Mirror comic strip The Larks did show characters aging more or less in real time during its thirty year run. 80s yuppie Alex is now late middle-aged with a grown up son.

The floating time line and the eternally extended adolescence works well for characters like Calvin and Orphan Annie: for a more realistic figure like Peter Parker it doesn't make sense. A kid who was born to Jewish immigrants in 1945, grew up in the fifties and hit college when the sixties were in full swing can't possibly be the same character who was born to an American couple in 2003 and grew up with the internet.

The best solution to the problem is to just ignore it. They are only comic book characters, after all. If you want to pretend that the Spider-Man who visited that cancer patient in 1984 is the same guy who is working for Norman Osborn in 2023 you are quite free to do so. If you come across an old comic book in which the Beatles are a bit new-fangled and Peter Sellers is still making movies, you are welcome to ignore it. The same applies to cars, hemlines, haircuts and, in particular, black people.

"They are only comic book characters, after all." It all comes down to whether you are a Doylist or a Watsonian. (*) Everything always comes down to whether you are a Doylist or a Watsonian. How many of the great questions in literary criticism, art theory, philosophy, Biblical scholarship and nuclear physics could be solved if everyone would just figure out what side of the line they stand on?

The question becomes more and more pressing as time passes. The popular culture of the past used to be inaccessible. Peanuts didn't exist beyond the back pages of the Daily Express. Once you'd read it, you put it in the dustbin, or on the end of a piece of string in the outside privy. Yes, there were paperback reprints with panels printed horizontally down the page, but they were this year's paperback reprints, unless you frequented second hand shops and jumble sales. Stan Lee used to pretend that everyone kept their Marvel Comics in a neat pile and could refer back to them; but very few of us had complete runs and there was no reliable source of back issues. Popular culture existed in the present; and in our collective memories.

Star Trek, admittedly, existed on an endless cycle of reruns. But most Doctor Who fans had never seen most of Doctor Who. Soon after I encountered the One With The Old Yellow Car and The One With The Long Scarf I became aware of the existence of the Crotchety Old One and the One Who Looked Like A Hobo. (I didn't know what a hobo was: we don't use that word in this country.) But I had never actually seen any of the characters. This was a big part of the mystique. Tomb of the Masterplan and the Daleks Toymaker weren't just stories you hadn't seen, they were stories you could never possibly see. When the BBC showed a very weak black and white Second Doctor story called the Krotons as part of a retrospective, an unimaginably old fan of twenty something said in a fanzine that it was strange to think that younger viewers were seeing, for the first time, Doctors and companions that they had only read about. It was stranger to me that there still existed in this present world people who had seen them; who preserved the memory of a time when Patrick Troughton was just someone wot came on the telly on a Saturday night.

But the wheels spun round and along came Betamax and VHS and DVD and Netfux and Britbox. Fans got older and didn't grow out of being fans. Branches of Forbidden Planet popped up in ordinary shopping malls and big huge books called The Complete Judge Dredd and the Complete Peanuts and The Complete Golden Age of Superman appeared on the shelves. In the 2016 Marvel movie Civil War, a 15 year old Peter Parker describes the Empire Strikes Back as "a really old movie". But that's not how it works. Errol Flynn's Robin Hood and Groucho Marx's Night at the Opera are very old movies. The Star Wars trilogy are just movies.

I wonder if this is why fandom became toxic? It lost its original purpose as the repository of a tradition, and become focussed on dissecting presently available texts. Its function was nostalgia, and nostalgia is, really and truly, not as good as it used to be.

That is part of the fear and the promise of CGI and deepfake. If we can summons a young Mark Hamill and a young Harrison Ford from Lucasfilms vaults, there is no reason not to carry on making New Star Wars films, with simulacra of the original cast, even though the original cast are old or dead or bored. Never mind guest appearances by Luke Skywalker in the Disney+ TV shows: the time is not remote when Young Luke, Young Han, and Still Alive Princess Leia might change out of their medal ceremony uniforms, hop into the Millennium Falcon and embark on magical adventures more wonderful than any George Lucas told us about. Which is not, truthfully, that much different from endless Star Wars comics and endless Star Wars cartoons filling the interstices between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Big Finish have been creating pastiche First Doctor stories with sound-a-like actors for decades: there is no reason why William Hartnell and Carol Anne Ford might not soon be starring in brand new 1960s black and white stories filmed in colour.

Old people have always thought that the popular culture of their youth will go on and on forever. Our generation is the generation for which that might turn out to be true. The summer of 1977 is a story which will go on and on forever, and every chapter will be exactly the same as the last.

As everyone knows, in the 1960s and 1970s, the Superman of the 1940s and 1950s was shunted off into an alternate reality called Earth-2, which was then abolished, reconstituted, merged with Earth-1, abolished again, reconstituted again, and finally rediscovered in the Lost Property office at Paddington Station. Marvel Comics asks us to believe that the gung-ho biff-the-bosh Captain America stories of the 1940s were in-universe propaganda strips, not accounts of what "really" happened to the "real" Capt & Bucky. (The gung smash the commies Captain America stories of the 1950s stories really happened, but not to the real Captain America. It's complicated.) 

Doctor Who fans have never played these metatextual games. You can't rewrite history: not one single line. What happened, happened.

We aren't bonkers. We don't think Doctor Who is true. A lot of us are very interested in the ins and outs of how it got made, which script editor rowed with which producer over which story and what Michael Grade said to Mary Whitehouse and precisely which brand of sticky-back plastic the Emperor Dalek was constructed from. But that's not how we watch it. Yes, we know that in 1965 William Hartnell was too poorly and too annoying to carry on starring in a TV show, and Sydney Newman and Kit Pedlar between them came up with a silly plot device that meant that -- instead of just recasting the actor -- the Doctor could turn into a completely different character, who was still exactly the same character, which made no sense, but was true, because they said so. But we also say that in 1965 it was revealed that the Doctor could change his physical form, and always had been able to. Once it was revealed; it became true retrospectively.

Things are always being Revealed in Doctor Who. The Doctor is REVEALED to be a Time Lord in a 1969 story; but the name of the Time Lord's planet is not REVEALED until 1973. The Daleks are introduced in the 1960s, but their true origin and the name of their creator is not REVEALED until 1974.

It's an interesting word. Christians and especially Muslims think of Scripture as not having been composed by human writers, but Revealed to prophets and holy men by God. The last book of the Christian Bible is called the Apocalypse, which literally means thing-which-has-been-revealed:  Revelation. The opposite of Apocalypse is "Aprocrypha" which means "thing which has been concealed." Over the years, "Apocryphal" has come to be synonymous with "non-canonical".

....continues

(*) The original Sherlock Holmes stories are presented as memoirs of Holmes' boyfriend Dr Watson. Some Sherlock Holmes fans play a game of pretending that the stories really are Watson's accounts of the adventures of a person he knew. As long as you are playing the game, inconsistencies can be explained as errors or misrepresentations by Watson -- who is conveniently, not very bright -- but not as plot devices or errors on the part of a writer of fiction. When Tolkien made it a plot-point that Bilbo had lied about his encounter with Gollum or when serious scholars invent previous husbands or miscarriages for Lady Macbeth, they are more-or-less playing a Watsonian game. 

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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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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