John D. Rateliff's Blog, page 75
June 24, 2019
Weird Tolkien (I)
Feanor's seventh son never reached Middle-earth
So, as I said in my last post, there are times reading through the late material in the last three volumes of the HISTORY OF MIDDLE-EARTH when I come across passages that surprise me because they're so much at variance with the established story as I know it from the 1977 SILMARILLION and other more familiar sources.
Take for example Tolkien's statement that only six of the Seven Sons of Feanor ever set foot on Middle-earth.
The passage in question appears in a philological essay, THE SHIBBOLETH OF FEANOR, which is obstinately about a sound-shift in Quenya that got caught up in the power-politics of the day, especially the cult of personality Feanor built up around himself, but wanders off into nomenclature (re. mother-names and father-names).
According to the SHIBBOLETH, when Feanor burned the ships upon arriving in Beleriand, he did not realize that his youngest son had decided to spend the night aboard and consequently burned to death in his sleep. Feanor, demonstrating his increasingly irrational behavior, responds not by any recognition of responsibility or expression of remorse for killing his own son but instead orders that no one ever speak of this to him again.
So we're left with two explanations of this. If this passage represents Tolkien's final thoughts on the topic, then every appearance of Amrod from this point onward in the SILMARILLION narrative shd be altered to remove any mention of Amrod's from them.*
Or, a more interesting but considerably more unsettling option, we can note that the from this point onward in the SILMARILLION narrative the twins always appear together, one never acting without the other inseparably by his side, and conclude that only Amras is actually there, Amrod always accompanying him like an imaginary friend. I like this option best because of its narrative economy, and it certainly underscores the defiance of reality that underlies the whole Noldorian war-on-Morgoth project.
Either way, it demonstrates one of Tolkien's concerns in his latter days: to infuse some of the minor characters in the legendarium with personality.**
--John R.
--current location: enroute from Boston to Rockford by way of Milwaukee and Harvard
--current reading: THE FAME OF C.S.Lewis by Stephanie L. Derrick (promising)
*here I'm using Amras to mean the sixth son and older twin and Amrod the seventh son and younger twin, as they appear in the 1977 SILMARILLION, Tolkien having gone back-and-forth in the SHIBBOLETH over which names belonged to which.
**another good example being two of Finrod's brothers, Aegnor who is given a little personality late in the development of the legedarium by the addition of a reference to his love for a mortal woman, but not Angrod who is left undefined.
So, as I said in my last post, there are times reading through the late material in the last three volumes of the HISTORY OF MIDDLE-EARTH when I come across passages that surprise me because they're so much at variance with the established story as I know it from the 1977 SILMARILLION and other more familiar sources.
Take for example Tolkien's statement that only six of the Seven Sons of Feanor ever set foot on Middle-earth.
The passage in question appears in a philological essay, THE SHIBBOLETH OF FEANOR, which is obstinately about a sound-shift in Quenya that got caught up in the power-politics of the day, especially the cult of personality Feanor built up around himself, but wanders off into nomenclature (re. mother-names and father-names).
According to the SHIBBOLETH, when Feanor burned the ships upon arriving in Beleriand, he did not realize that his youngest son had decided to spend the night aboard and consequently burned to death in his sleep. Feanor, demonstrating his increasingly irrational behavior, responds not by any recognition of responsibility or expression of remorse for killing his own son but instead orders that no one ever speak of this to him again.
So we're left with two explanations of this. If this passage represents Tolkien's final thoughts on the topic, then every appearance of Amrod from this point onward in the SILMARILLION narrative shd be altered to remove any mention of Amrod's from them.*
Or, a more interesting but considerably more unsettling option, we can note that the from this point onward in the SILMARILLION narrative the twins always appear together, one never acting without the other inseparably by his side, and conclude that only Amras is actually there, Amrod always accompanying him like an imaginary friend. I like this option best because of its narrative economy, and it certainly underscores the defiance of reality that underlies the whole Noldorian war-on-Morgoth project.
Either way, it demonstrates one of Tolkien's concerns in his latter days: to infuse some of the minor characters in the legendarium with personality.**
--John R.
--current location: enroute from Boston to Rockford by way of Milwaukee and Harvard
--current reading: THE FAME OF C.S.Lewis by Stephanie L. Derrick (promising)
*here I'm using Amras to mean the sixth son and older twin and Amrod the seventh son and younger twin, as they appear in the 1977 SILMARILLION, Tolkien having gone back-and-forth in the SHIBBOLETH over which names belonged to which.
**another good example being two of Finrod's brothers, Aegnor who is given a little personality late in the development of the legedarium by the addition of a reference to his love for a mortal woman, but not Angrod who is left undefined.
June 20, 2019
When Tolkien Gets Weird
So, I've never made a systematic study of the final three volumes of HME, though I've dipped into them a lot over the years. I find that it's when I have a project that involves specific lesser-known items among Tolkien's oeuvre I get to know those works really well.*
My current project was chosen, in part, so that in the process of researching and writing it I wd become as familiar with this late-period material as I am with BLT I & II, HME IV-V, and the LotR volumes HME VI-IX.**
And what I'm finding is that occasionally Tolkien will make a statement that strikes me as decidedly odd. In conversation with Tolk folk, I find that even the most well-versed of them might not know all of these offhand, so vast has JRRT's published writings now become. So I thought it might be interesting to devote a short series of blog posts to a run of representative examples.
Feanor's seventh son never reached Middle-earthValinor is North AmericaMelkor made the MoonMelkor Rapes the Sun
--John R.
current reading: snippets of many different things.
current location: Williamstown.
currently missing: two small black cats.
*for example, the essay I did on FALL OF ARTHUR, or the one on Tolkien's dwarves a few years before that, or heavy immersion into the earlier iterations of THE SILMARILLION for MR. BAGGINS.
**I have a different project lined up for later this year that will involve a lot of work with the Appendices drafting
My current project was chosen, in part, so that in the process of researching and writing it I wd become as familiar with this late-period material as I am with BLT I & II, HME IV-V, and the LotR volumes HME VI-IX.**
And what I'm finding is that occasionally Tolkien will make a statement that strikes me as decidedly odd. In conversation with Tolk folk, I find that even the most well-versed of them might not know all of these offhand, so vast has JRRT's published writings now become. So I thought it might be interesting to devote a short series of blog posts to a run of representative examples.
Feanor's seventh son never reached Middle-earthValinor is North AmericaMelkor made the MoonMelkor Rapes the Sun
--John R.
current reading: snippets of many different things.
current location: Williamstown.
currently missing: two small black cats.
*for example, the essay I did on FALL OF ARTHUR, or the one on Tolkien's dwarves a few years before that, or heavy immersion into the earlier iterations of THE SILMARILLION for MR. BAGGINS.
**I have a different project lined up for later this year that will involve a lot of work with the Appendices drafting
June 18, 2019
I Need a Genizah
So, for years I've been proud of the fact that I had what was, among the folks I knew, the only intact copy of BROTHERS & FRIENDS, Kilby and Mead's excellent edition of Warnie Lewis's fascinating and endlessly readable diary. Sad to say, that's no longer the case: I had to look up something in it last week and found to my dismay that the binding is now split in multiple place, meaning I have to carefully cradle it when turning pages to prevent it from disintegrating altogether.
The same fate has befallen my first-edition copy of THE ROAD TO MIDDLE-EARTH: a thirty-page section of which has come loose, with several more spots about to go where the binding is cracked and partly detached.
Even some of the HME volumes are beginning to show signs of years of hard usage.
The problem is that I can't just replace these with new copies because most of them are heavily annotated. And there's also the sentimental value: I've used these books for years and have good memories associated with them. I cd never get rid of my first copy of THE HOBBIT, or the black-cover three-volume LotR with orange, red, and purple Eye of Sauron on the cover: that's where it all began.
What to do with tattered but precious books?
And it's not just scholarly books. My copy of WATERSHIP DOWN, one of my favorite books, is falling apart -- I guess I just literally read it to pieces.
As for D&D books, my original PLAYER'S HANDBOOK, which I bought back in '80-81, is still intact, though its pages are starting to get fragile and apt to tear. Considering the hundreds if not thousands of hours I've spent pouring over this, it's been a great bargain. My original copy of the MONSTER MANUAL is also still holding up well, but the DMG came loose from its cover long ago.
It was thus a sad surprise that my copy of the current PH, which I've only had for three or four years, is beginning to split. It won't be long before the cracks in the binding break. I'm less attached to the 5th edition rules, but I need a set for our weekly Monday night game.
--John R.
location: Logan Airport.
current reading: various Old School D&D modules from NTRPGcon (bought last year, finally having a good chance to read them now).
The same fate has befallen my first-edition copy of THE ROAD TO MIDDLE-EARTH: a thirty-page section of which has come loose, with several more spots about to go where the binding is cracked and partly detached.
Even some of the HME volumes are beginning to show signs of years of hard usage.
The problem is that I can't just replace these with new copies because most of them are heavily annotated. And there's also the sentimental value: I've used these books for years and have good memories associated with them. I cd never get rid of my first copy of THE HOBBIT, or the black-cover three-volume LotR with orange, red, and purple Eye of Sauron on the cover: that's where it all began.
What to do with tattered but precious books?
And it's not just scholarly books. My copy of WATERSHIP DOWN, one of my favorite books, is falling apart -- I guess I just literally read it to pieces.
As for D&D books, my original PLAYER'S HANDBOOK, which I bought back in '80-81, is still intact, though its pages are starting to get fragile and apt to tear. Considering the hundreds if not thousands of hours I've spent pouring over this, it's been a great bargain. My original copy of the MONSTER MANUAL is also still holding up well, but the DMG came loose from its cover long ago.
It was thus a sad surprise that my copy of the current PH, which I've only had for three or four years, is beginning to split. It won't be long before the cracks in the binding break. I'm less attached to the 5th edition rules, but I need a set for our weekly Monday night game.
--John R.
location: Logan Airport.
current reading: various Old School D&D modules from NTRPGcon (bought last year, finally having a good chance to read them now).
June 11, 2019
Chu-bu and Sheemish
So, a few years back Janice created as a gift to me a little booklet, illustrated by our friend Stan!, telling the story of our cat Parker, aka The Cat Who Bit People. It was called PARKER'S CHRISTMAS ADVENTURE and might best be described as 'based on a true story'. I've wanted to return the favor, and a while back fixed on what I thought we be a good medium: a booklet that told two stories at the same time. On the left-hand side of each spread are a few paragraphs from Lord Dunsany's short story "Chu-bu & Sheemish",* illustrated in the top register of the facing right-hand page. The bottom right-hand register tells the story of Parker coping with the addition of another cat, little Rigby, to the household.
For more on Stan's work, see http://www.instagram.com/stannex
*the booklet includes the whole of Dunsany's story.
--John R.
--current reading: unfocused.
There is none but Chu-bu (there is also Sheemish)
For more on Stan's work, see http://www.instagram.com/stannex
*the booklet includes the whole of Dunsany's story.
--John R.
--current reading: unfocused.
There is none but Chu-bu (there is also Sheemish)
June 3, 2019
Apollo
So, two weeks ago today we went to the Boeing Museum of Flight to look at their APOLLO exhibit ( http://www.museumofflight.org/Exhibits/Apollo ).
It you're at all interested in the space program, and especially if you remember the Apollo moon missions from yr childhood, I highly recommend you try to get to this. Though it'll be hard: general admission tickets had already sold out and we were only able to get in by joining a museum membership. It was well worth it, and we had time beforehand to look over some of their impressive permanent exhibits, such as the one tracing Amelia Earhart's route.*
In the space program exhibit they've got everything from a cosmonaut's suit (pink) and re-entry capsule (which I mistook for an old-fashioned bathysphere) to a box they brought back moon rocks in (including one of the rocks, in a case next to a photo of it resting on the surface of the moon),** a moon-buggy astronauts used to train in, the console used by mission control (a v. familiar sight to anyone who'd seen the live footage of launches), and much more. Particularly impressive were the pieces of a Saturn V, still the biggest rocket ever built, the culmination of Van Braun and Goddard's work:*** part of it unused, having been intended to launch either Apollo XVIII or XIX, both missions having been cancelled when the space program scaled way back. The other pieces are the burned and scared remains from an actual launch, some of the huge bits that were ejected on the way up and fell off once the first stage of the launch was over, now retrieved from two and a half miles under the ocean by a Jeff Bezos funded project a few years back
Here's a picture of me next to the Apollo 11 command module, the only part to reach the moon and return (as opposed to the lunar module, which stayed behind on the surface of the moon, and the service module, which burned up in the atmosphere during landing). It's surprisingly large when you see it and yet surprisingly small when you think of fitting three men inside.
All in all a good exhibit and I'm glad we made it to it. Though to my mild disappointment they weren't selling those little paper some-assembly-required models of the Apollo 11 lunar module that they gave away at the time at Esso stations. I wonder if any of those are left out there somewhere.
--John R.
current reading: all kinds of snippets re. JRRT for the paper I'm working on (an expansion and revision of my Kalamazoo piece).
current viewing: the Pratchett/Gaiman GOOD OMENS miniseries.
*we had to pass this time on what are to me the most interesting planes staged in the most depressing area: World War I planes (which are great) mounted over a recreating of a Western Front trench (which is harrowing). Luckily, having a museum membership means we're likely to come back several times over the next year or so to poke about more.
**turns out they were v. concerned about contamination -- not that the moon rocks contained some kind of space-virus, a la THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN, but that earth's biosphere wd quickly overwhelm any trace of non-Earth life on or in the moon rock.
***they also have a reconstructed V2 , not as part of this exhibit but on permanent display.
It you're at all interested in the space program, and especially if you remember the Apollo moon missions from yr childhood, I highly recommend you try to get to this. Though it'll be hard: general admission tickets had already sold out and we were only able to get in by joining a museum membership. It was well worth it, and we had time beforehand to look over some of their impressive permanent exhibits, such as the one tracing Amelia Earhart's route.*
In the space program exhibit they've got everything from a cosmonaut's suit (pink) and re-entry capsule (which I mistook for an old-fashioned bathysphere) to a box they brought back moon rocks in (including one of the rocks, in a case next to a photo of it resting on the surface of the moon),** a moon-buggy astronauts used to train in, the console used by mission control (a v. familiar sight to anyone who'd seen the live footage of launches), and much more. Particularly impressive were the pieces of a Saturn V, still the biggest rocket ever built, the culmination of Van Braun and Goddard's work:*** part of it unused, having been intended to launch either Apollo XVIII or XIX, both missions having been cancelled when the space program scaled way back. The other pieces are the burned and scared remains from an actual launch, some of the huge bits that were ejected on the way up and fell off once the first stage of the launch was over, now retrieved from two and a half miles under the ocean by a Jeff Bezos funded project a few years back
Here's a picture of me next to the Apollo 11 command module, the only part to reach the moon and return (as opposed to the lunar module, which stayed behind on the surface of the moon, and the service module, which burned up in the atmosphere during landing). It's surprisingly large when you see it and yet surprisingly small when you think of fitting three men inside.
All in all a good exhibit and I'm glad we made it to it. Though to my mild disappointment they weren't selling those little paper some-assembly-required models of the Apollo 11 lunar module that they gave away at the time at Esso stations. I wonder if any of those are left out there somewhere.
--John R.
current reading: all kinds of snippets re. JRRT for the paper I'm working on (an expansion and revision of my Kalamazoo piece).
current viewing: the Pratchett/Gaiman GOOD OMENS miniseries.
*we had to pass this time on what are to me the most interesting planes staged in the most depressing area: World War I planes (which are great) mounted over a recreating of a Western Front trench (which is harrowing). Luckily, having a museum membership means we're likely to come back several times over the next year or so to poke about more.
**turns out they were v. concerned about contamination -- not that the moon rocks contained some kind of space-virus, a la THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN, but that earth's biosphere wd quickly overwhelm any trace of non-Earth life on or in the moon rock.
***they also have a reconstructed V2 , not as part of this exhibit but on permanent display.
June 2, 2019
SALTMARSH Revisited
So, the new D&D Adventure/Campaign from WotC is now out, and it's an interesting return to days of old. How old? So old that when the last time these adventures saw the light of day, TSR was still run by Gygax and the Blumes.
What they've done here is take one of their lesser-known classic adventure series and expanded it into a book-length campaign by the addition of several related adventures that had appeared in DUNGEON magazine over the years.
Thus the original Saltmarsh trilogy (U1. The Secret of Saltmarsh [1981], U2. Danger at Dunwater [1982], U3. The Final Enemy [1983]) appears here as Chapters II, III, and VI within a larger campaign, GHOSTS OF SALTMARSH. The additional material is Chapter I (describing the village of Saltmarsh, something conspicuously missing from the original 1981 module), Chapter IV "Salvage Operation" (DUNGEON 123 [2005]), Chapter V "Isle of the Abbey" (DUNGEON 34 [1992]), Chapter VII "Tammeraut's Fate" (DUNGEON 106 [2004]), and Chapter VIII "The Styes" (DUNGEON 121 [2005]).
I've already said what I had to say about U1-U2-U3 themselves in a previous blog post, which can be found here (spoiler alert):
http://sacnoths.blogspot.com/2016/07/an-unfinished-piece-from-wotc-days.html
And I've deliberately refrained from reading this new expanded adventure because I'm hoping our DM, who is one of the authors, will run it for us. We'll see how it goes.
--John R.
current viewing: GOOD OMENS (based on the Pratchett/Gaiman book)
current reading: TOLKIEN by Raymond Edwards (an outstanding but surprisingly neglected work).
What they've done here is take one of their lesser-known classic adventure series and expanded it into a book-length campaign by the addition of several related adventures that had appeared in DUNGEON magazine over the years.
Thus the original Saltmarsh trilogy (U1. The Secret of Saltmarsh [1981], U2. Danger at Dunwater [1982], U3. The Final Enemy [1983]) appears here as Chapters II, III, and VI within a larger campaign, GHOSTS OF SALTMARSH. The additional material is Chapter I (describing the village of Saltmarsh, something conspicuously missing from the original 1981 module), Chapter IV "Salvage Operation" (DUNGEON 123 [2005]), Chapter V "Isle of the Abbey" (DUNGEON 34 [1992]), Chapter VII "Tammeraut's Fate" (DUNGEON 106 [2004]), and Chapter VIII "The Styes" (DUNGEON 121 [2005]).
I've already said what I had to say about U1-U2-U3 themselves in a previous blog post, which can be found here (spoiler alert):
http://sacnoths.blogspot.com/2016/07/an-unfinished-piece-from-wotc-days.html
And I've deliberately refrained from reading this new expanded adventure because I'm hoping our DM, who is one of the authors, will run it for us. We'll see how it goes.
--John R.
current viewing: GOOD OMENS (based on the Pratchett/Gaiman book)
current reading: TOLKIEN by Raymond Edwards (an outstanding but surprisingly neglected work).
May 26, 2019
TSR Games Library (Lake Geneva Days)
So, recently I came across some pictures of gamers gaming that I thought I'd share. These were taken in the old Games Library in the TSR building sometime between October 1991, when I came on board, and December 1996, when I walked the plank. Since no one appears in them who came on in 1995-96, my guess is they date from '93-'94.*
If you've never worked for a game company, you may have wondered what people who write and edit rpgs all day long do on their breaks. The answer is they play games for fun between playing games for work.
The Games Library was supposed to be our reference library, containing every rpg, wargame, and boardgame TSR had ever produced (though many, esp. the rarer items, had gone missing), as well as many by other companies: many review copies for DRAGON magazine wound up here. Having worked in a library during my undergraduate days, I took it on myself to organize the Games Library and to add new TSR products as they came out. But mostly it was our dedicated gaming area, where you cd set up a complicated boardgame and still have it be there the next day, and the next, and the next, for however long it took.** It was also a good place to run short scenarios of rpgs: I remember running GANGBUSTERS and BOOT HILL at one pt when I was educating myself on old before-my-day TSR rpgs.
Here are the four photos that turned up:
Photo #1, right to left: Bruce Heard, Jon Pickens, Thomas Reid. For the obscured figure to the right, see photo #4 below. In the background between Bruce and Jon is the infamous Whiteboard.
Photo #2: Rich Baker (left) and Bill Slavisek (right).
Photo #3: Colin McComb to the left, with I think Bruce Nesbit on the right.
Photo #4, left to right: Thomas Reid, Jon Pickens, Bruce Heard, and Steve Winter. An alternate shot of #1, where this time you can see Steve at the right but not Thomas's face to the left.
I showed these to Steve Winter and Jeff Grubb, who were able to confirm my i.d.s; ironically Steve's face having been the one I cdn't identify on my own. Steve was even able to identify what boardgame they were playing.
--John R.
current reading: BOGIE TALES OF EAST ANGLIA (1891; rpt 2019)
-- the rules to MISKATONIC UNIVERSITY: THE RESTRICTED COLLECTION, which I hope to play later today.
*Bill Slavisek, who came in about a year after I did, appears, so that narrows it a bit.
**I remember one BLUE MAX game that ran for weeks.
If you've never worked for a game company, you may have wondered what people who write and edit rpgs all day long do on their breaks. The answer is they play games for fun between playing games for work.
The Games Library was supposed to be our reference library, containing every rpg, wargame, and boardgame TSR had ever produced (though many, esp. the rarer items, had gone missing), as well as many by other companies: many review copies for DRAGON magazine wound up here. Having worked in a library during my undergraduate days, I took it on myself to organize the Games Library and to add new TSR products as they came out. But mostly it was our dedicated gaming area, where you cd set up a complicated boardgame and still have it be there the next day, and the next, and the next, for however long it took.** It was also a good place to run short scenarios of rpgs: I remember running GANGBUSTERS and BOOT HILL at one pt when I was educating myself on old before-my-day TSR rpgs.
Here are the four photos that turned up:
Photo #1, right to left: Bruce Heard, Jon Pickens, Thomas Reid. For the obscured figure to the right, see photo #4 below. In the background between Bruce and Jon is the infamous Whiteboard.
Photo #2: Rich Baker (left) and Bill Slavisek (right).
Photo #3: Colin McComb to the left, with I think Bruce Nesbit on the right.
Photo #4, left to right: Thomas Reid, Jon Pickens, Bruce Heard, and Steve Winter. An alternate shot of #1, where this time you can see Steve at the right but not Thomas's face to the left.
I showed these to Steve Winter and Jeff Grubb, who were able to confirm my i.d.s; ironically Steve's face having been the one I cdn't identify on my own. Steve was even able to identify what boardgame they were playing.
--John R.
current reading: BOGIE TALES OF EAST ANGLIA (1891; rpt 2019)
-- the rules to MISKATONIC UNIVERSITY: THE RESTRICTED COLLECTION, which I hope to play later today.
*Bill Slavisek, who came in about a year after I did, appears, so that narrows it a bit.
**I remember one BLUE MAX game that ran for weeks.
May 22, 2019
The Rest of Kalamazoo XII
Then came the conference itself.
I attended all the Tolkien sessions on Thursday and Saturday (that being the grouping this year),
including the business meeting to plan out proposals for next year's sessions. We came up with some good topics though I'm not sure how the paper I hope to do wd fit in under the umbrella.
I also went to the two CSL sessions (back-to-back on Friday)* and the two for Tales After Tolkien (ibid Sunday), though I missed the latter group's business meeting, not having noticed that when they changed the time they changed the location too. I thought both seem to have expanded their target audience with good effect.
I'm happy to say the overall level of the Tolkien papers was high. There were one or two that I thought cd have done with a tighter focus, but I thought the average was as good as I've seen at Kalamazoo.
Rather than try to review each paper, I'd like to mention two that stick in my mind a week and more later: the papers by Andrew Higgins and Kristin Larsen, respectively. AH has the knack of writing about Tolkien's invented languages in a way accessible to non-linguists like myself. In this case, he looked at four character's names from THE FALL OF GONDOLIN to see what use Tolkien made of them in the later mythology: Egalmoth, Ecthelion, Glorfindel, and Legolas. Of these, Egalmoth vanished altogether. Ecthelion survived only as the name of a Steward of Gondor (in fact, Denethor's father). Glorfindel resurfaced in LotR, with the original character who had borne that name being brought back to life (literally) to reappear in the later legends (cf. the last chapter of LotR Bk I and the first of LotR Bk II). And Legolas was taken over and applied to a wholly new character, as if the original elf of Gondolin had never existed. AH concludes that Tolkien valued 'a well-crafted name' and sought to reuse them, using different strategies, when occasion offered.**
KL's piece, by contrast, was astronomical in focus, looking at Tolkien's fascination with an astronomical event that can't actually take place: the evening star appearing within the dark part of a crescent moon. She found two visual depictions of this in his early watercolors (see MacIlwaine #65 p.203) and more in descriptions such as the original 1914 Earendel poem. For someone like me who was a serious astronomy hobbyist back in my Scouting days*** this was great stuff, especially since she tied it in with the Ptolemaic system. It's been known since ancient times that the moon is nearer us than any other astronomical body, but apparently a point of contention arose between those who thought Venus and Mercury were within the orbit of the sun, like the Earth and moon, and those who thought they lay outside the sun's circle, like the outer planets Mars and Jupiter and Saturn. After several years of close scrutiny of Tolkien's astronomical bits, she's coming to the conclusion that JRRT wasn't so much concerned to get his astronomy right as to capture his inner vision, possible or not, and that some of the stars and constellations he names may be fantasy invention and not correspond to any real-world equivalents.
My own paper was the last one in the last session Saturday. I'd finished the draft just before heading out to Kalamazoo but not had a chance to give it a trial read-aloud until Friday night. To my dismay I discovered that it took me twenty-two minutes to read, whereas we only get about fifteen minutes each on a panel. So I went in and did some fairly drastic cuts, shortening it by more than a third. When I mentioned this to the session moderator at mid-day Saturday, she said that actually we had time and it'd be fine if I did the whole piece. Which I did, grateful to not have a choppy delivery the way it wd have been in the abridged version.
As for the conference as a whole, there was actually a boycott going on in which Medievalists Of Color were staying away in protest over a recent dust-up between those sympathetic to the alt-right and social justice warriors. It was hard to tell if this was having much of an effect or not. On the one hand, the Tolkien sessions were really well attended and pretty much filled the room most of the time. On the other, the dealer's room was really quiet: there didn't seem to be many people book-buying until lateish on Saturday afternoon, when things really picked up.
Courtesy of Nodens Books (thanks Doug), I was able to have two recent things I worked on available in the book room: the little chapbook CHU-BU AND SHEEMISH, and the Flieger festschrift A WILDERNESS OF DRAGONS in both hardcover and trade paperback. Hope the people who picked up one or the other enjoy them.
Myself I was extremely moderate in my book-buying this year, coming home with only four books I hadn't had when I arrived.First was a hardcover of THAT HIDEOUS NOVEL,**** and second a collection of East Anglia folktales and folklore edited by M. H. James, a cousin of the great M. R. James. Third I picked up a book on the Master himself: MEDIEVAL STUDIES AND THE GHOST STORIES OF M. R. JAMES (by Patrick J. Murphy, 2017). Finally, we made an after conf. visit to the great used bookstore in Three Rivers, a bit south of Kalamazoo itself, where I picked up the fourth, a picturebook I hope to pass along to one of my great-nieces.*****
For all the papers and panels and interesting new (and old) books, like Kalamazoos before the best of all was lots and lots of Tolkien-talk with my fellow Tolkienists.
And now to revise my Kalamazoo paper and start making notes for the follow-up piece. And turn back to CLASSICS OF FANTASY, which I had to put aside in mid-revision in order to work on my Kalamazoo paper.
--John R.
--still slogging through a dreary Seattle-based urban fantasy but looking ahead to better things, like the (MR) James and (non-MR) James books.
*organized by Joe Ricke and sponsored by the Lewis Center at Taylor College.
**this probably accounts for the slightly disconcerting presence in Gondor of some characters with Silmarillion names, like Hurin of the Keys; the name was probably no more unusual in late-Third-Age Minas Tirith than Alexander or Arthur are today.
***when I cd still see a lot more stars than is now the case, though part of that is due to light pollution in these parts.
****not a book I'm fond of, but one I occasionally need to reference and the only one of the space trilogy I hadn't had in hardback, the paperback of which is starting to wear out.
*****yes, I'm getting to that stage where my nieces have nieces.
May 21, 2019
The TOLKIEN Biopic
So, the organizers of Tolkien Day in Kalamazoo arranged for a special showing of the new TOLKIEN biopic to a room full of Tolkien scholars. We were on the whole a skeptical bunch as to whether the filmmakers cd pull it off, but willing to see how it had come out.
The first thing that struck me was the trees. Tolkien famously said you can't get much about trees into a play, one reason he considered drama inferior to fiction, but the filmmakers showed this is not necessarily the case for film. I don't know whether the director, or cinematographer, or both shd get the credit, but the long loving bits as the camera pans over trees, past trees, and esp. up trees from trunk to branches helped quietly establish a setting that felt Tolkienesque. In fact this one aspect of the film was so successful I'm sorry they didn't do it even more.
The look and feel of the movie was also a success: it had that Merchant Ivory look about it that captured the place and the time (turn-of-the-century Birmingham). Maybe it's just me, but I find it much easier to relate to shows set in the near-past (say the last century or so), with their familiar clothes, furniture, etc., than to costume drama of earlier periods, which have a certain stagey-ness for me.
Also of note was the even-handed treatment of how being poor and an orphan deeply restricts a person's options -- I was going to say, in that time and place, but the same applies equally to the modern day. And the movie scores points for not making villains out of the people who stand in Ronald and Edith's way, like Fr. Francis (lacking empathy but comes round in the end) or Mrs Faulkner (the landlady, self-centered but not malicious).
So much for the good. The not-so-good came from the problem that's bedeviled many a biopic before it: the difficulty of showing on screen an internal process, whether it be art, or music, or writing. To their credit they tried with the 'cellar door' scene showing young Ronald creating a story out of an invented name.* It's therefore odd that they avoid having any of Tolkien's real drawings and paintings appear, or to use his actual invented languages. Presumably this wd be because of failure to get permissions to do so, but why then are they able to close the film w. the actual first words of THE HOBBIT? Bit of a puzzle, that.
I also have to admit that I liked the invented (amalgam) character 'Sam' as Lt. Tolkien's batsman. But the scenes of a fever-strickened, delirious Tolkien wandering around No Man's Land at the Somme in the midst of an all-out attack, seeing hallucinations of a Balrog** et al were bizarre. Apparently they wanted to show Tolkien on the battlefield but not have him take part in the battle, but it didn't work at all for me.
The greatest shortcoming of the film, however, was simply that it was oh. so. slow. Every scene seemed to go on too long. There's not any particular bits that I'd advocated cuttiing; it's the pacing of the whole that got to me. This movie feels much, much longer than its actual running time.
Perhaps this is a result of my knowing Tolkien's life-story extremely well, so that I knew everything that was going to happen at the beginning of each scene (the only surprises were the things they made up, which thankfully were surprisingly few). I've heard from some who have seen it who knew nothing of Tolkien's life, and they found the story of the doomed group of Tolkien's friends*** deeply moving.
So, not a disaster some feared, not the travesty it cd have been, just not the success I'd hoped for.
On the whole I'll count that as a bullet dodged.
--John R.
current reading: Recently finished up a biography of Warren G. Harding by John Dean, part of the Schlesinger presidential series. Disappointing: Dean admires Harding and overdoes the rehabilitation bit.
Currently trying to force my way through Megan Lindholm's WIZARD OF THE PIGEONS, a mid-eighties urban fantasy set in Seattle that has certainly not aged well and is thoroughly unpleasant to boot (I've already gotten through the cat-mutilation scene and skipped the pages describing in extreme detail what it's like to chop off the heads of a bunch of chickens, including your special pet).
*for me this scene had echoes of one in A BEAUTIFUL MIND where the main character invents new constellations.
**unless it's meant to evoke the Sauron of the opening scene in Peter Jackson's FELLOWSHIP.
***i.e., the TCBS: John Ronald, Chris Wiseman, Rob Gilson, and Geoff Smith, to whom he paid tribute a half-century later, and one of whom I was fortunate enough to meet.
The first thing that struck me was the trees. Tolkien famously said you can't get much about trees into a play, one reason he considered drama inferior to fiction, but the filmmakers showed this is not necessarily the case for film. I don't know whether the director, or cinematographer, or both shd get the credit, but the long loving bits as the camera pans over trees, past trees, and esp. up trees from trunk to branches helped quietly establish a setting that felt Tolkienesque. In fact this one aspect of the film was so successful I'm sorry they didn't do it even more.
The look and feel of the movie was also a success: it had that Merchant Ivory look about it that captured the place and the time (turn-of-the-century Birmingham). Maybe it's just me, but I find it much easier to relate to shows set in the near-past (say the last century or so), with their familiar clothes, furniture, etc., than to costume drama of earlier periods, which have a certain stagey-ness for me.
Also of note was the even-handed treatment of how being poor and an orphan deeply restricts a person's options -- I was going to say, in that time and place, but the same applies equally to the modern day. And the movie scores points for not making villains out of the people who stand in Ronald and Edith's way, like Fr. Francis (lacking empathy but comes round in the end) or Mrs Faulkner (the landlady, self-centered but not malicious).
So much for the good. The not-so-good came from the problem that's bedeviled many a biopic before it: the difficulty of showing on screen an internal process, whether it be art, or music, or writing. To their credit they tried with the 'cellar door' scene showing young Ronald creating a story out of an invented name.* It's therefore odd that they avoid having any of Tolkien's real drawings and paintings appear, or to use his actual invented languages. Presumably this wd be because of failure to get permissions to do so, but why then are they able to close the film w. the actual first words of THE HOBBIT? Bit of a puzzle, that.
I also have to admit that I liked the invented (amalgam) character 'Sam' as Lt. Tolkien's batsman. But the scenes of a fever-strickened, delirious Tolkien wandering around No Man's Land at the Somme in the midst of an all-out attack, seeing hallucinations of a Balrog** et al were bizarre. Apparently they wanted to show Tolkien on the battlefield but not have him take part in the battle, but it didn't work at all for me.
The greatest shortcoming of the film, however, was simply that it was oh. so. slow. Every scene seemed to go on too long. There's not any particular bits that I'd advocated cuttiing; it's the pacing of the whole that got to me. This movie feels much, much longer than its actual running time.
Perhaps this is a result of my knowing Tolkien's life-story extremely well, so that I knew everything that was going to happen at the beginning of each scene (the only surprises were the things they made up, which thankfully were surprisingly few). I've heard from some who have seen it who knew nothing of Tolkien's life, and they found the story of the doomed group of Tolkien's friends*** deeply moving.
So, not a disaster some feared, not the travesty it cd have been, just not the success I'd hoped for.
On the whole I'll count that as a bullet dodged.
--John R.
current reading: Recently finished up a biography of Warren G. Harding by John Dean, part of the Schlesinger presidential series. Disappointing: Dean admires Harding and overdoes the rehabilitation bit.
Currently trying to force my way through Megan Lindholm's WIZARD OF THE PIGEONS, a mid-eighties urban fantasy set in Seattle that has certainly not aged well and is thoroughly unpleasant to boot (I've already gotten through the cat-mutilation scene and skipped the pages describing in extreme detail what it's like to chop off the heads of a bunch of chickens, including your special pet).
*for me this scene had echoes of one in A BEAUTIFUL MIND where the main character invents new constellations.
**unless it's meant to evoke the Sauron of the opening scene in Peter Jackson's FELLOWSHIP.
***i.e., the TCBS: John Ronald, Chris Wiseman, Rob Gilson, and Geoff Smith, to whom he paid tribute a half-century later, and one of whom I was fortunate enough to meet.
May 15, 2019
Back from Kalamazoo
So, after a week away I'm now back from Kalamazoo and back at work at my desk again -- much to the cats' satisfaction, as they like to be able to keep track of me.
It was a busy week -- one of those times when I'm too busy doing something to blog about it. Time to make up the arrears before memories of the details begin to fade.
First off, I took part in the Tolkien Day event, where we take advantage of so many Tolkienists gathering for the Medieval Congress, where there aren't enough slots for us all to present in, to hold what is essentially a one-day conference. I did my "Tolkien's Meteorite" piece there last year and this year teamed up with Marquette Tolkien Archivist Bill Fliss to tell folks about the manuscript reprocessing project, showing them the new organization I've been working on these last few years, whereby every draft of every chapter of the LotR manuscripts and typescripts is placed in relation to where it goes in the sequence of composition (the horizontal axis) and also in the development of that specific chapter (the vertical axis). Essentially it's like a giant flow chart. Since it has to cover some ten thousand pages, it's pretty large: the mock-up we had for show-and-tell at the presentation is a banner about twenty-four feet long, and that doesn't include the Front Matter (foreword, preface, title pages, tables of contents, ring-verse) and Appendices (which have their own separate line of development). This being a Tolkien project, in homage to the Professor we call it The Tree.
By the way, several people took pictures of us holding up the banner; if you're one of them, please send me a copy.
Tolkien Day was followed by The Film. That is, the organizers had arranged for a special showing of the new biopic on Tolkien (called, with admirable directness, TOLKIEN). More on this in a separate post tomorrow.
--John R.
It was a busy week -- one of those times when I'm too busy doing something to blog about it. Time to make up the arrears before memories of the details begin to fade.
First off, I took part in the Tolkien Day event, where we take advantage of so many Tolkienists gathering for the Medieval Congress, where there aren't enough slots for us all to present in, to hold what is essentially a one-day conference. I did my "Tolkien's Meteorite" piece there last year and this year teamed up with Marquette Tolkien Archivist Bill Fliss to tell folks about the manuscript reprocessing project, showing them the new organization I've been working on these last few years, whereby every draft of every chapter of the LotR manuscripts and typescripts is placed in relation to where it goes in the sequence of composition (the horizontal axis) and also in the development of that specific chapter (the vertical axis). Essentially it's like a giant flow chart. Since it has to cover some ten thousand pages, it's pretty large: the mock-up we had for show-and-tell at the presentation is a banner about twenty-four feet long, and that doesn't include the Front Matter (foreword, preface, title pages, tables of contents, ring-verse) and Appendices (which have their own separate line of development). This being a Tolkien project, in homage to the Professor we call it The Tree.
By the way, several people took pictures of us holding up the banner; if you're one of them, please send me a copy.
Tolkien Day was followed by The Film. That is, the organizers had arranged for a special showing of the new biopic on Tolkien (called, with admirable directness, TOLKIEN). More on this in a separate post tomorrow.
--John R.
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