John D. Rateliff's Blog, page 29

Who are the 'Tolkien Influencers'?

So, I know what a Tolkien fan is. And I know what a Tolkien scholar is. Now I've been introduced to a new term: Tolkien Influencer. As in, someone who has an online Tolkien-themed site with a following. Between twenty-five and thirty of whom were flown to London (with a day-trip to Oxford) to watch a twenty-minute clip from the forthcoming Amazon Rings of Power series.

Only a few of them were named in the article I saw,* and I'd be interested to hear who the others were --in particular how many of them are people whose name I know.

Here's the list so far:

Corey Olsen, 'the Tolkien Professor', founder of Signum University

 Shaun Gunner, chair of The Tolkien Society

Justine (last name unknown), as representative from TheOneRing.net

Kaitlyn Facista, of 'Tea with Tolkien' (new to me)

I am bemused to learn that the main purpose of the event seems to have been to reassure the gathered Influencers that Amazon series' special effects will be Peter-Jackson worthy.  That wd never have occurred to me as a major concern. In fact I don't think it'd have made a top ten list, if had a top ten list. Which just goes to show I'm not the target audience. But I remain a curious bystander. And I'm glad these folks got to enjoy a visit to Oxford while they were in the neighborhood, more or less. 

--John R.

---current reading: SKIN & BONES by Thorne Smith (1933)

NEWS OF THE DAY: just finished up the last Tolkien-themed session at Kalamazoo for the year.

* https://www.looper.com/858984/amazons...

Tolkien Day at Kalamazoo

 So, that’s one day down and the better part of a week to go.

I had trouble logging on to Zoom, and by the time Janice got me straightened out I’d missed half of Kris Larsen’s piece. Which is a pity, given how good her stuff typically is.  This one was on orphans and near-orphans in Tolk.  Then came John Holmes on sinister pointing hands in ISHNESS, Maddo, Thror’s Map, and the RK draft cover. I’d never known there was a word for these (manicula), so I learned something. Third came Joe Ricke on Tolkien's THE HOMECOMING (HBB), looking particularly at the stage directions. I had no idea there were so many versions (fourteen) of this play, with the earliest version (in rhyming verse) accounting for five drafts plus two fragments. And as always I’m glad when a presentation tells me something about Tolkien I didn’t know before.
After a seven minute break for lunch, things resumed with Vickie Holtz-Wodzak suggesting Bram Stoker as a source for several scenes in Tolkien (mostly involving three wolf-attacks).* Then came Robin Reid with an examination of the recent online flame war against the Tolkien Society. I was impressed by her demonstration that it’s possible to discuss contentious events in a measured tone. I was fading by this point and so missed the last event of the day: the latest of Eileen Moore’s “Maidens of Middle-Earth” art songs.

And now comes a break until a Tolkien & Evil panel at two o’clock (my time) this Tuesday.   
Then comes a panel on Tolkien and medieval animals (everything from bats to dragons to bestiary lore) Thursday at six a.m. (gah!), followed later that day (four pm) by a roundtable in honor of Richard West.
Friday brings the business meeting (bright and early at 8 am), followed by THE NATURE OF MIDDLE-EARTH, a roundtable focused on the new collection of Tolkien material edited by Carl Hostetter (I was supposed to be on this but had to bow out during the chaos of earlier this year).
Saturday wraps things up with a Dante and the Inklings panel, which seems to be folding previous years’ C. S. Lewis at Kalamazoo into the Tolkien at Kalamazoo group. Then things wrap up with a misc. grouping that includes pieces on ’The Dragon is not an Allegory’ (here, here), Sam as Boethian (nice to see a non-augustinian piece), and ’Tolkien, Augustinian Theodicy, and Lovecraftian Evil’ (cd be interesting to see HPL in such august company). 

And then that’d wrap things up for another year.


*She had a point, but I wd have thought S. R. Crockett Tolkien's immediate source. 

Myriad

So, while I've been working away trying to wrap up a big long-term project, all kind of Tolkien events have been announced. 

Coming up soon, there's the first Annual Tolkien Lecture at the University of Birmingham, being held Friday May 27th --just three weeks away. The speaker is Dimitra Fimi (a good choice); the topic "I HOLD THE KEY: J. R. R. Tolkien through interviews and reminiscences" (also a good choice).

Here's a short abstract posted online:

“This lecture will meander through several interviews Tolkien gave during his lifetime, as well as reminiscences of people who knew him well (family, colleagues, publishers, friends). Though this material remains uncollected and scattered in various (often obscure) publications, it often reveals fascinating facets of Tolkien's inspirations, creative process, and the construction of a "biographical legend".

I/ve long been interested in this material and so checked to see if I cd watch this remotely, and found that it's an in-person event. And so far as I cd find there aren't any plans to make it available online afterwards. Considering how valuable the material is, and how hit-and-miss peoples' use of it has been, let's hope her lecture gets published at some point down the road.

https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/events/cwg-cultural-programme/fantasy-worlds-weekend.aspx

There's another Tolkien-related event I've just recently learned about, but I'll avoid discussing it because I don't think there's been an official announcement on this one yet.

A big event now close enough to be described as looming is this year's  Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo, starting on the 9th (i.e., the beginning of next week) -- even earlier, for those attending the pre-con Tolkien event on Saturday the 7th.  The Tolkien panels at the Congress itself shd run through Saturday the 14th, so I'm hoping to see quite a few of them on Zoom.

Also there's the Flieger Silmarillion classes starting on the 15th (of May; first of four sessions).

And, a little further out, the Marquette Tolkien exhibit in August.

And after that the Watership Down conference in early September:

https://watershipdownat50.com

To sum up:  a lot of good things coming up for the Tolkienist (and fantasist in general) over the next few days, weeks, and months.

--John R. 

current reading: THE SECRET COMMONWEALTH (Pullman), & finding it so far a slog.

I may give up and switch instead to re-reading one of Thorne Smith's screwball comedies in novel form.

The Tipping Point

So, this week I've been putting in a lot of time in the ongoing project of sorting things down in the box room. Then Thursday  I made a realization. I'm pretty sure that I'm now more than half way through. There's still a lot to do, but I've gotten more done than remains to do.

Things I've got sorted and out the door include most of the miniatures, and boardgames, and card games, and anime, and manga, and non-TSR rpgs (lots of these), and D&D boxed sets and modules and rulebooks, and lots and lots and lots of books. 

This latest round has involved moving boxes that had been blocking shelves. Now I've got access for sorting my row of Judges Guild modules, plus the shelf of Mayfair Role Aids. Plus what I think are full runs of Chaosium's fiction lines (Cthulhian and Arthurian), not to mention over a hundred old TSR novels, of which I'm keeping eight. And a lot of books, some of them scholarly works on fantasy, going back all the way to my first (abandoned) dissertation topic.  

Many boxes remain, but once I've got the current stacks of books double-checked and boxed up and off that'll open up some space to work. So, progress.

--John R.

current reading: AMONGST OUR WEAPONS (the latest Rivers of London book with its Monty Python title; just finished) and  THE SECRET COMMONWEALTH (Philip Pullman's sequel to HIS DARK MATERIALS; just started).

Four thousand, two hundred, and fifty Books

So, while I had all the pieces of my reading list out and in one place, I decided to look at things from the other end, starting from the first entry and running all the way up to the present day.

 The first list, starting in August 1975, ran to book #536 when it broke off in April 1981 --not because I decided to quit but because I lost the little notebook that had the most recent entries in it, accidently leaving it on the Underground.  I restarted the list that August (1981) and have kept it going ever since. This second list now runs to 3688 books.

Finally, after I'd lost the entries that shd have made up the most recent entries of the first list, I jotted down all the books I cd remember that I read during that gap. I came up with twenty-six titles -- not all, but better than nothing.

So, while my math skills aren't what they were, I make out the total from all three lists as this:

First List: 536 books

Lacuna: 26 books

Second List: 3689 books and counting.

536 + 26 + 3689 = 4250.*

And counting.

--JDR

*or, I shd say, 4251, since I finished another book while drafting this post ---STILETTO, the latest by Daniel O'Malley, a disappointing sequel to his excellent, Classics of Fantasy worthy THE ROOK.

1000, 100, & 10

 So, here's a thought experiment.

Suppose you found out you could read another thousand books in your time remaining. What would you read? Would you do anything different in choosing which books to read, once you started to treat books as a non-renewable resource, at least so far as your individual reading goes? Would you do more re-reading of favorites? Or shift more towards works you've never read before?

If a thousand is too large a number, what about a hundred?  This is much more do-able: checking my reading list I find I've read fifty books in the last year. So it's entirely feasible that even someone who reads at about half the rate I do may hit the hundred book mark in four or five years.

Let's get really dire: what if it were ten? We're talking literary hospice here (or desert island disk if you prefer). Would you carefully choose a few favorites, a few you've always intended to get to, and one or two just at random?

For the record, The most recent book I've read is AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS by Flann O'Brien (1939) --my second reading of a book I liked much more the first time around, back in my Marquette days.  It's #II.3688 on the list. So I thought I'd look back and see where I was 1000 books ago.  II.2688 turns out to have been THE REMORSEFUL DAY by Colin Dexter, the thirteenth and last of the Inspector Morse books. I was in Oxford at the time (November 2007), on the fourth of my four solo research trips there, and it seemed appropriate while there to read a book set there.

Pressing on, a hundred books back brings us to July 2020 and #II.3588: THE PRIVATE LIFE OF THE RABBIT by R. M. Lockley.

So, it's taken me fifteen years to read a thousand books.

--John R. 

P.S. Of course some folks don't read all that much, so it's not much of a deal for them. I remember Mick Fleetwood once saying that he'd only ever read two books and liked them both, so he quit while he ahead.But for some of us reading is among the most enjoyable of our hobbies as well as at the core of our work.

A Piece of the True Cross Lost?

So, the most interesting piece of news I saw regarding the sinking of the MOSKVA was that there may have been a piece of the True Cross on board and, if so, presumably now lost in the Black Sea:

So unlikely was the loss of the ship in Moscow’s eyes that in 2020 Orthodox Christian officials said it had been designated to carry a piece of the “true cross,” a relic from the wooden cross on which Jesus Christ is said to have been crucified.

Here's the link for those wanting more context:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/202...

--John R.

--who has seen one such fragment*

* but who, when it comes to relics, wd rather have had the chance to see an angel's feather.

A Follow-up to Oldfangled

So, I'm a little late coming to it, but I did want to address Paul W's query a few weeks back in which he queried the absence of four specific authors from my Classics of Fantasy / Suggested Reading List:

I've praised them before, but I wonder that Mary Stewart, 

Susan Cooper, Lloyd Alexander, or Mary Renault didn't make your list. 

Admittedly, Renault's works might be considered historical fiction 

but they all have magic in them to one degree or another. 

Of these, I haven't read much Renault* but rate her highly based on what I have read. But, as you suggest, I think of her more as a writer of historical novels than as a fantasist. 

The same holds true for Mary Stewart. I have a high regard for her earlier Arthurian novels (THE CRYSTAL CAVE, THE HOLLOW HILLS), not so much for the later ones. In her case the fantasy element is there, but it's not what the books are about. I can see the argument for considering her a fantasy writer but somehow I can't quite make myself believe it.

With Lloyd Alexander and Susan Cooper's quintologies there's no doubt they're fantasy, and good fantasy at that. It wd have been no great injustice to have included them. It's just that I don't, in the end, think they hold up. Alexander I realized at the time I first read him wd have meant more to me if I'd read him before Tolkien rather than after. I still liked them well enough right up until I read THE MABINOGION (in Patrick Ford's transation). I've found that when it came to Welsh myth and legend the real thing spoiled just about all the adaptation for me --with the exception of Morris's THE BOOK OF THREE DRAGONS, which did make the original column.

Susan Cooper comes even closer, and mainly got left out because the series is uneven and because I find some aspects of how her 'good guys' behave appalling. 

In the end I think fantasy's defining characteristic is the present of magic. It is the literature of the impossible. And without the impossible, for me it's just not fantasy.

Hence after much debate I omitted Daniel Pinkwater's THE SNARKOUT BOYS AND THE AVOCADO OF DEATH (1982) when I started putting together my recommended reading list because in the end it seems to me that while this book comes as close as possible to the line where a book gets so weird it crosses the line to become fantasy, in the end I'd say Pinkwater stays on the not-yet-quite side of the line. 

--John R.

current reading: AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS (1939)

*with those I have mostly being from Taum Santoski's shelves, he being a big fan.

Fantasy without Tolkien

 So, here's an interesting thought experiment: what would fantasy literature look like if there had been no J . R. R. Tolkien?

To which my immediate reply wd be to paraphrase Mark Twain's response when asked what men would be like without women, to which he replied that they'd be 'mighty scarce'.

A more measured response wd note that we'd certainly still have fantasy if Tolkien had died in the Somme in 1916 (as he v. nearly did).  Morris and Dunsany and Eddison, et al. wd still have written THE WELL AT THE WORLD'S END, THE BOOK OF WONDER, THE WORM OUROBOROS, &c. But we'd have very little sense that these books belonged together in a genre called 'fantasy'. Aside from writing THE LORD OF THE RINGS, Tolkien's greatest contribution to fantasy was to create a sense that there was such a thing. In THE LORD OF THE RINGS he provided the paradigm that transformed all the rest into precursors and followers. That is not to say THE HOBBIT and THE SILMARILLION were not important. They were. But they lacked the transformative power of his masterpiece.

A second take on this wd be to assume Tolkien survives the Somme and writes all the works he did write in the real world up until circa 1930. That year he for the first and, as it wd turn out, only time in his life, had a complete draft of all the constitute parts that he intended made up the 1930 Silmarillion: the Quenta, the Annals of Valinor, and the Annals of Beleriand. What if Tolkien had devoted the years 1930-1932 to polishing, submitting, and getting published his mythology?

The result, I think, wd have been that THE SILMARILLION wd now be remembered as one of those rare, quirky works like LUD-IN-THE-MIST or THE BOOK OF THREE DRAGONS, magnificent in their isolation. We'd have no HOBBIT, no LORD OF THE RINGS, no 'Tolk-clones but also no shelves in the bookstores labelled 'fantasy/sci fi' 

Anyway, here's the link to the original publication; Thanks to Paul W. for the link.

https://phuulishfellow.wordpress.com/...

--John R.

current reading: Evageline Walton's THE CHILDREN OF LLYR (1971)

Verlyn Flieger at Politics and Prose

 So,  saw that Verlyn Flieger is offering an online class, an overview on THE SILMARILLION.

The course is scheduled to run for four classes on May 15th, May 22nd, June 5th, & June 12th. It's hosted by Politics & Prose bookstore in DC, which I don't think I've ever been to but which has a certain familiarity from back from the days when we used to get Book TV.

I suspect from the title and subject that these talks will in large part derive from INTERRUPTED MUSIC, which I consider her best book.

In any case, the chance to hear what Verlyn has to say about The Silmarillion not being something I'd want to pass up, I just registered.

https://www.politics-prose.com/class/...

--John R. 

current reading: HUNTINGTOWER by John Buchan

current music: THE TIPPING POINT: a new album by an old group (Tears for Fears).