John D. Rateliff's Blog, page 78

Larry DiTillio Dies

So, I was sorry to hear the news from the Chaosium newsletter (Ab Chaos) that gaming legend Larry DiTillio has died. I never got to meet DiTillio -- one of those legendary figures like Greg Stafford (whom I did meet) or Sandy Petersen or Tom Moldvay -- but I highly recommend his work. Among his many achievements, he wrote what I consider the best rpg adventure ever -- and not the one you're thinking of, either.

That is, DiTillio is famed as the author of the legendary MASKS OF NYARLATHOTEP, widely considered to be the best adventure ever written for CALL OF CTHULHU, one of the most widely loved and highly respected of all roleplaying games (now in its thirty-eighth year and seventh edition). But I personally think that, good as MASKS is, there are other CoC campaigns that are even better (including THE FUNGI FROM YUGGOTH and especially SHADOWS OF YOG-SOTHOTH).*

More importantly, DiTillio wrote another rpg adventure that is even better: THE GREY KNIGHT, for PENDRAGON. The first adventure for a new game is all-important to that game's success: it tells the players and DM what sort of things their characters will do in the new game.  In the case of THE GREY KNIGHT, the adventure runs the whole range of knightly activity: jousting in a tournament, courtly intrigue, flirtation, combat against fellow knights, magical trickery, and more. DiTillio's adventure deserves particular praise for not making a too-common mistake of setting the adventure around the margins of the game: Here player-character knights get to meet and interact with major characters in the setting, like Sir Gawain and Sir Tor and Morgan le Fay.  A brilliant piece of work.

Here's a tribute to DiTillio from Chaosium:

https://www.chaosium.com/bloglarry-ditillio-visionary-game-designer-and-writer-19402019?mc_cid=261d358783&mc_eid=e256d16084

--John R.

*I might modify that position if I'd ever actually played MASKS; as it is I've read it (a long time ago now) but only played a small part of it.

The Festschrift is a Finalist!

So, I was happy to learn* that A WILDERNESS OF DRAGONS is a finalist for this year's Tolkien Society Award in the Best Book category. The competition is formidable: Catherine McIlwaine's phenomenal MAKER OF MIDDLE-EARTH catalogue of the Bodleian Exhibit, which I'm on record as saying is a major contribution to Tolkien studies, and THE FALL OF GONDOLIN, Christopher Tolkien's final book, the self-announced conclusion to decades of editing and making available his father's works.  It really is an honor to have been nominated, and to stand alongside two such significant works on their shortlist.

Here's the link to the announcement. Voting is still open until Friday the 29th, so if you're a Society member don't forget to sign in and vote.

https://www.tolkiensociety.org/2019/03/vote-now-for-the-tolkien-society-awards-2019/


And here's more about the awards, including past winners: 

 https://www.tolkiensociety.org/society/awards/
--John R.
current reading: The Music of the Valar, from BLT; 'They Also Serve' (my favorite Mervyn Wall story, closely followed by 'The Hogskin Gloves'), and THE COLUMBIAD (which is both earnest and inept, a bad combination).


*thanks, Paul, for sharing the good news.

A Remedy for Nostalgia

So, one of the most interesting things to turn up in my recent round of sorting down in the Box Room is a folder containing correspondence and other material related to my first dissertation topic, the one which went down in flames.

I find that when I think of Marquette these days what I remember is the good-parts version: spending time in the Archives, my fellow grad students, courses from professors I liked, teaching continuing ed. courses (night school) on Tolkien and fantasy, my long-running D&D campaign, &c.

What I tend to forget is the down side,* and the papers in this folder are a reminder of the latter.

Well into my dissertation process, when I'd done a lot of reading and a lot of thinking and come up with a topic and thesis I thought wd make for a good dissertation ('THE EMERGENCE OF FANTASY AS A MODERN LITERARY GENRE'**),  I found myself at an impasse. Two of the people on my three-person committee (including the dissertation director) approved the topic while the third kept requesting changes, requiring me to re-write the proposal time after time for a period of months (almost a year, all told). Eventually she rejected my topic completely, calling it

"unworkable as a project, unpublishable as a book, and something that would be ripped to shreds if any of it did ever get published"
And that, pretty much, was that. I had to start over again with a new topic with a new committee, not including the person who'd given the thumbs down on my previous effort. That turned out to be my Dunsany project, which I enjoyed researching and learned a lot doing, so no regrets there, though the change in topic did set me back and delay my finishing my Ph.D. by several years. 
At the time I was bitter about it, but over time I've become more exasperated than anything else. If that one committee member didn't agree with my thesis and was determined not to approve a dissertation along those lines, as turned out to be the case, why didn't she just tell me at the start?***
It wd have saved a lot of time and bother all round.

And now, back to Tolkien.

--John R.
--current reading: A FLUTTER OF WINGS by Mervyn Wall

*I had a paragraph about the down side here but on second thought deleted it.
**which might just as well have been called The Role of Tolkien in the Emergence of Fantasy as a modern literary genre.

***she told me later she was trying to do me a favor, since I'd never get a job in academia if I kept writing about fantasy and Tolkien.

The First Review for the Festschrift

So, the first review of A WILDERNESS OF DRAGONS, by Nancy Martsch, has now appeared, in the current (March) issue of BEYOND BREE.  She covers a lot of ground in the space of a single well-packed page, briefly describing and then evaluating each piece. She devotes the most time to the collaborative essay by Hillyard, Cook, Burns, Rohlin, & Stegen on dream and enchantment, which she judges "a significant contribution" our understanding of faerian drama. She concludes with a words any contributor of this volume will be glad to hear:

"This book is a worthy tribute"

--John R.
--first day back working with the manuscripts again.

Why is Tolkien not an 'Anglo-Saxon'?

So, here I am back in Milwaukee for another research trip. But first I wanted to post about a curious passage I came across when reading THE FALL OF GONDOLIN last week (book #II.3500 on the reading list, for those who are keeping count).

The line that caught my eye was Tolkien stating, in a letter to Stanley Unwin,

Unfortunately I am not an Anglo-Saxon
The context in this 1951 letter is Tolkien's recalling the outside reader's report rejecting THE SILMARILLION fourteen years earlier, in which the reader 'allowed it a kind of Celtic beauty intolerable to Anglo-Saxons in large doses'

But why shd Tolkien preface his comments about THE SILMARILLION's refusal to be suppressed with the comment about not being Anglo-Saxon?

Is Tolkien being ironic, along the lines of 'if Anglo-Saxons don't like this kind of stuff, and I do, then I must not be one of them'? I know Tolkien in some times and moods described himself as a Hwicce, but that doesn't seem apropos in this case. Indeed I wd have thought JRRT had a better claim to calling himself an 'Anglo-Saxon' than many, being of Saxon ancestry on the Tolkien side and Anglish descent through the Suffields.

In any case, one of Tolkien's more oblique statements, I thought.

--John R.

current music: THE WHO'S TOMMY (esp. the second half)
current reading: BEREN & LUTHIEN, some Japanese light novels.

Is Jeff Bezos a Tolkien Fan?

So, it's more than a full month since our quick visit to New York to see the Tolkien Exhibit. Accordingly, this seems like now-or-never time to add a brief postscript to my posts about the event.

First off, to repeat: this exhibit is a once-in-a-lifetime event, both in its Bodleian and Morgan iterations, and no doubt in the forthcoming Parisian Exhibit as well. I'm glad I got to go purely for the access to the items on display. But there was more: getting the chance to spend time with Tolkien friends, visiting New York City (albeit briefly) for the first time, hear some interesting talks, and in general enjoy being a Tolkienist among My People.

One interesting side-event took place when during Verlyn's lecture the person sitting next to me (Carl) asked in a whisper if  I recognized the person sitting at the end of the row in front of us. When I said no, he said "that's Jeff Bezos".

As in Jeff Bezos, president of Amazon. The richest man in the world. Sitting in the audience showing every sign of enjoying the talks along with the rest of us.

Later we saw him again at the reception, standing right in front of us during Simon Tolkien's talk about his grandfather, after which Carl spoke to him very briefly (some conversational pleasantry along the lines of 'glad to see you here, Mr. Bezos') and shook his hand. *

Afterwards I did a little digging and found there was precedent in his being at an event at the Morgan:  he had chosen the Morgan as the venue where he announced the release of the Kindle 2 almost exactly ten years earlier (Feb. 9th 2009).

Bezos has Tolkien connections as well, having personally intervened to seal the deal last year when Amazon was negotiating rights to make an ongoing streaming series as a prequel+remake of LotR (also known as 'the billion dollar deal').**

Finally, there was unadvertised presence of several members of the Tolkien family: not only did Simon Tolkien speak at the reception, but I was told that Michael George (JRRT's oldest grandson) was there as well; they also had announced a little earlier in the evening that Priscilla Tolkien had wanted to come but in the end not been able to make it.

Which casts interesting light upon comments made by Douglas Kane on my previous post in which he quotes some intriguing remarks by the head of Amazon Studios, the people who'll be making the new Tolkien adaptations:


[DOUGLAS KANE said]
In a recent article in the Hollywood Reporter, Amazon Studios chief Jennifer Salke was bizarrely quoted as saying in "early February" that "The Tolkiens are coming to New York, all those estate holders. The older ladies, who are now, I think, in their 80s and 90s. His daughters and the grandchildren, they're coming to New York, and Jeff Bezos, me, Jeff Blackburn, a team of us are going and they've invited us to a dinner and see some art, some creative work that they haven't shown the world yet." Setting aside the rather astounding fact that the head of the studio that is making this secretive new TV show apparently doesn't know how many daughters Tolkien had, it immediately occurred to me that you had mentioned that Simon Tolkien was in New York on February 7 (presumably just after she made this comment in "early February"). Were any other Tolkien family members present at the reception?
All this came on the same day that Mr. Bezos announced that he was the target of attempted blackmail by the NATIONAL INQUIRER,*** and just the week before Amazon abandoned their plans to set up a major new headquarters on Long Island, so there was clearly a lot in the works, both on the Tolkien and the Bezos front, that week in February.


Leads me to suspect that Paul Allen wasn't the only billionaire to be a Tolkien fan.

--John R.


*that I didn't recognize him myself is unsurprising (that pesky face blindness thing again), but then this is me we're talking about, a person who once walked past Kareen Abdul Jabbar at an airport and didn't notice him.

**more on the forthcoming series in an upcoming post

*** https://medium.com/@jeffreypbezos/no-thank-you-mr-pecker-146e3922310f

NyQuil Days and door-dasher cats

So, having failed to head off a cold, I've spent the last three days trying to ride it out with the help of  rest, punctuated by regular doses of NyQuil. My wandering attention and tired eyes have prevented me from getting much done in the way of reading, unfortunately, though I have made my way through a bunch of anime (some good, some bad). The one good thing about this spell of sickness is the distractions coming in the form of curious inquiry by the new cats (whatcha doing? do Tarkus/Tyburns like it?) who have happily joined me on the couch or in the rocker in trying to sleep my way through it. 
In other news, we've now opened up the garage and box room to Tarkus and Tyburn, the last part of our place that'd been off-limits. They like it. They like it a lot. And luckily they're happy to come back upstairs when the time comes. That just leave two remaining hurdles: the balcony (which Tarkus has visited several times while on a leash; Tyburn after one trial thought it was much too scary) and walks outside (to teach them how to find our place again in case they ever get out by accident).

--John R.

Ubiquitous

So, casual Tolkien references continue to show up in what you might think unlikely places.
As, for instance, in the middle of a recent piece in The Guardian describing harassment tactics used online by anti-vaccine advocates against people who let it be known they support childhood vaccinations.  
Here's the quote, with the key phrase highlighted in bold:

“We are at the point where doctors are creating their own anti-vaxx social media attack response teams to help other doctors” . . .One such rapid response team is being organized by Dr Todd Wolynn and Chad Hermann, the CEO and communications director of Kids Plus Pediatrics (KPP) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.“If you’re being attacked, we’ll light the signal fires of Gondor, and you’ll have pro-science, pro-vaccine cavalry come to your aid,” Hermann said of the nascent project, called  “Shots Heard Round the World”.And here's the link to the full article it came from:https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/27/facebook-anti-vaxx-harassment-campaigns-doctors-fight-back
As with most other such references I've been coming across, this one is marked both by its appearance in a non-literary context and by the (no doubt correct) assumption that it needs no explanation, that the average reader will know what the author's talking about.*
--John R.--current reading: THE FALL OF GONDOLIN,   an old issue of LOCUS (Sept 2004)

*actually in this case that assumption applies twice, once when Wolynn & Hermann said the line and again when The Guardian quotes it.

Tolkien in New York

So, it's taken me a week, but here's my write-up of the second day of our Tolkien trip to the Morgan event in New York City.

Feeling somewhat drained by the events of the day before, we made a late morning of it on Thursday, February 7th, the second full day of our trip and the one scheduled to end with the big event: the reception.

We had lunch with Wayne and Christina, whom we hadn't seen in far too long (having missed the last two of our once-a-year gatherings), then the four of us went away from the restaurant noise and back in the Library Hotel's Reading Room, a large comfortable area on the second floor with all the comforts: lots of tea, a selection of cookies, chairs around small tables, lots of books, and a generally relaxed, welcoming air, where we caught up on things.

After a break to rest up for the big event -- I'm still trying to learn to pace myself as I get my stamina back -- it was time to head over to the Exhibit.  I didn't take my usual extensive notes but for once just relaxed and enjoyed the lectures.

First up was Richard Ovenden, head Librarian at the Bodleian, who spoke about the Bodleian's history, some recent acquisitions,* and their Tolkien holdings.  Then came Catherine McIlwaine, the Tolkien Archivist (yes, the Bodleian does have a dedicated position just to manage the Tolkien collection, given how large it is** and how frequently consulted); I think she said that 140,000 people came to see this Exhibition while it was at the Bodleian. I think she also spoke about the three central themes of the Oxford exhibit being scholarship, imagination, and family.  Third came Verlyn Flieger, who spoke with her usual eloquence, suggesting that Tolkien has become a lens through which to see the world, and related how Priscilla Tolkien had visited the exhibition when it was in Oxford and been struck by how her father was now far more than a popular writer but had grown to be an international figure. All three then took comfy chairs for a Q&A session, the general theme of which was Tolkien as an international figure, but the only lines that stay in memory were (1) the question from McIlwaine to Verlyn: why Tolkien? why not (say) Isaac Asimov? To which Verlyn responded "Tolkien is better"; i.e. a better writer. (2) McIlwaine describing how Tolkien had a gift for "inventing things we felt like we always knew". and (3) Verlyn describing "the essence of his genius: LOSS".

Then followed the Reception: where we had a clear mix of two groups. Half the people who were there, the conspicuously well-dressed ones, had come because it was an event at the Morgan.*** The other half were there for the Tolkien: they'd come to see the paintings and maps and manuscripts and memorabilia. Myself, I seized this opportunity for a last quick run through to look at a few favorites one more time: comparison between the LotR and Silm maps confirmed the location of Belegost and absence of Nogrod; the presence of Himling as an Iceland-like island and beyond it the Vinland-like TOL FUIN, clearly the surviving remnant of Taur-na-Fuin, the original Mirkwood. And I enjoyed one last glimpse of the 1915 & 1928 Ishnessses and mythological paintings, with their bright vivid colors so unlike his later style and palette. Had they been published in the 1960s they wd no doubt have become favorite black-light posters. I know I wd like to have had them on my walls.

One of the nice things about the occasion is that even though we were far from home there were a number of familiar faces, despite the face blindness, both at the lecture and the reception. Some I see mostly at Kalamazoo: John Holmes (a contributor to the Flieger festschrift), Eric Mueller,**** Yvette Kisor; others at Mythopoeic events like Janet Brennon Croft, and some at both, like John Houghton (with whom I worked as one of the editors on the Shippey festschrift). It was nice to have a little more time with Verlyn and Carl. I got to meet Catherine McIwaithe and congratulate her again both on the exhibit itself and the equally impressive catalogue (which ought to win all kinds of Awards). She told me that one of the criteria when selection a page of manuscript for the display was legibility: it being frustrating for a visitor not to be able to make out what the author had written. That wd explain the inclusion of a lot of examples of his most beautiful calligraphy rather than textually significant scrawls. She also said they'd picked someone who wasn't well-versed in Tolkien to do the initial sort-out of Tolkien's newspaper doodles, so they got visually appealing pieces for display that didn't rely on prior knowledge to appreciate. I looked around for Cathleen Blackburn to thank for her patient replies to many requests for permissions to quote from various Tolkien manuscripts over the years  but I think she had already left.

One really interesting surprise at the end of the evening was a talk by Simon Tolkien, JRRT's grandson, which I enjoyed v. much but cannot now recall any specifics therefrom.

Finally we wrapped up with dinner with Carl Hostetter, Marquette Tolkien Archivist Bill Fliss and his wife Kristin, and the two of us. A nice way to wind down from an eventful and pleasurable evening.

Then it was back to the room for packing up to speed our way to the airport early (v. early) the next morning. Where we in fact arrived so very early that Janice got us re-booked onto an earlier flight, which meant we got back to Seattle early, just as the heavy snow was beginning to fall, and were able to collect the cats from where they'd been boarding and convinced TARKUS and LADY TYBURN we hadn't abandoned them forever after all.

So, a quick trip, but oh so worth it, both for the chance to see these original manuscripts and maps and paintings again and for time with fellow Tolkien scholars. If you get the chance to see this exhibit don't pass it up.

--John R.


--current reading: Brand's new book on Clay, Calhoun, and Webster (a bit disappointing) and Berg's biography of Lindbergh (a book about twice the length needed about a brave and multi-talented man who was a failure as a human being). As far as read-aloud books go I've finished up SPOON RIVER, begun and finished SONGS OF INNOCENCE and SONGS OF EXPERIENCE (been too long since I read some Blake) and am now hesitating between THE FUNGI FROM YUGGOTH and Browning (some of the dramatis personae).

*for example, they recently received Robert Bridges' archive, a century past's poet laureate about whom few wd nowadays be interested, did it not contain within it the papers of his friend Gerard Manley Hopkins, which Bridges had taken into safekeeping upon his friend's untimely death.

**I believe she said it took up two hundred boxes, not to mention three hundred books from Tolkien's library. Impressive, esp. when taken together with her reminder that Tolkien was never a full-time writer.

***my wife had a conversation with two well-dressed ladies who said that having seen the exhibit they were now going to read the book.

****hope I got his name right; he's the one behind the Tolkien Art Index project, which he demonstrated at Kalamazoo either last year or the year before and which, besides being nothing short of brilliant, finally realizes one of Dr. Blackwelder's old projects.

A Day at the Morgan

So, having got the missing suitcase thing worked out, we had a late breakfast and walked down to the Morgan, where I spent the next two and a half hours looking through the Tolkien Exhibit we'd come so far to see (again). The venue is less crowded and the room brighter at the Bodleian, where I suspect the lighting was kept muted to preserve the artifacts (I once saw a William Blake display in what cd only be discribed as a dark room). There were fewer items on display --a t a guess, maybe about half as many. And yet that still left a mort of treasure, as I suspected. I had time to spend with each item, and to linger and look long and hard at some pieces, such as the art and maps, without feeling I was being rude or blocking others from seeing things.

The item that moved me most was the elegant and confident title page for the 1930 Silmarillion, the only complete and finished version of the book, which shows how clear and detailed was Tolkien's vision for the book.

I also loved the early mythological art (circa 1915) and the Ishnesses from about a decade later. For the former I was impressed first by how small they are -- the famous world-ship drawing is about the size of my hand -- and how packed with significant but elusive detail, such as the painting of Kor framed by the Two Trees but the fact that the frame is the trees doesn't come out until you've taken the piece in for a while, or at least that was my experience.

As for the Ishnesses, even though I'd seen these just months before I was struck anew by the brightness and vibrance of the colors (or colours). It felt odd to see Tolkien abandon his usual color palette of green and blue for vivid red and orange. And their inclusion of a tree-drawing Tolkien made when he was twelve established how talented me was, and from an early age.

And of course there were many small details I'd not noticed before, esp in the maps (like one map of Middle-earth that included not just the island west of Lindon formed from the Hill of Himling but had another larger island further to the west (West?): Tol Fuin.  I learned for the first time the location of Belegost but cd not find Nogrod.  And it was nice to see the two pieces of the Moria gate pastel reunited again.

In addition to the items on display, we ran into John Holmes, contributor to the Flieger festscrift (green great/great green) and a regular attendee at Kalamazoo, and learned a lot about his current project, which sounds interesting. Later we had dinner with Verlyn herself, and Tolkien philologist Carl, and got to meet another festschrift contributor, Thomas Hillyard.

Oh, and we got to poke around inside the New York Public Library, which is not only a grand building full of fine art* but also, it turns out, has my book (nice to know). And, later, Grand Central Station, seen no doubt in any number of old movies** but hitherto never brought into focus.


Looking forward to more meetings, and more time with the exhibit, and the panel and afterwards.

--John R.


*one piece that caught my eye was a portrait of the Astor who died on the Titanic, whom I've always showed admirable dignity in the face of disaster.

*as well as the occasional anime: I think BACCANO ends here.