Meditations on Middle-Earth Page 6
I wrote it. I finished it: something close to 100,000 words, far and away the longest project I’d ever undertaken up till then. Even had all the inspiration come from my own mind, I couldn’t have sold it. Neither the style nor the characterization—such as that was—measures up to anything anyone else would ever want to read. To this day, though, I can say the plot was not disastrously bad. I had a tolerable story, but I didn’t yet know how to tell it or where to set it.
AMON HEN, THE SEAT OF SEEING
The Fellowship of the Ring
Chapter X: “The Breaking of the Fellowship”
A dozen years passed. I did a lot of the things most people do going from eighteen to thirty. I found something that interested me and pursued it. (In my case, it happened to be the history of the Byzantine Empire, which I admit is not a subject reckoned universally fascinating.) I fell in love several times. Sometimes this was mutual, sometimes not, which is also par for the course. Once, when it was, I got married. That lasted a little more than three and a half years. Not too long after my first wife and I broke up, I met the lady to whom I’m married now. In short, I grew up, or started to.
After I got my doctorate in Byzantine history, I taught for two years at UCLA while the professor under whom I’d studied had a guest appointment at the University of Athens. I had kept writing, and I began to sell an occasional piece: a science-fiction novelette to a magazine that expired before the piece saw print; a fantasy novel that owed nothing to Tolkien except, of course, a debt of gratitude for vastly broadening the market for fantasy novels of all sorts.
In the autumn of 1979, I was engaged to the woman now my wife, and unemployed—a combination always especially endearing to a prospective father-in-law—and hoping to find a job, any sort of job, before my savings ran out, and I faced the ultimate indignity of my generation: having to move back into the house where I’d grown up. Being unemployed, I had time on my hands. I decided I would go to work on another fantasy novel. If all went extremely well, that would even help me pay my bills.
In pondering what to write, I remembered that novel I’d worked on in an earlier time of crisis, the one that dropped Romans from Caesar’s legions into Fourth Age Gondor. By the time I reached thirty, I was smart enough to figure out that using someone else’s universe—especially without his permission—was not the right way to go about things. I’d also spent all that time and effort acquiring specialized knowledge of my own. This time, I dropped the legionaries into a world of my own creation, rather than Tolkien’s. I should have done that in the first place, but better late, I hoped, than never.
The world I built was modeled on the Byzantine Empire in the late eleventh century, at the time of the crucial battle of Manzikert, except that magic worked. Into it I brought my Romans—and one obstreperous Celt. The broad outlines of the plot of what became The Videssos Cycle are the same as those of my earlier act of unauthorized literary appropriation. This is why The Misplaced Legion, the first book of The Videssos Cycle, is dedicated to my wife, to the professor under whom I learned Byzantine history, to L. Sprague De Camp (whose Lest Darkness Fall first interested me in Byzantium) . . . and to J. R. R. Tolkien. My own cast of mind and my work usually resemble De Camp’s far more than Tolkien’s, but I felt I needed to note all the origins of the series. Attention must be paid.
Stretching and cutting the plot to fit the new situation wasn’t that hard. I had envisioned Gondor in the Fourth Age as being in a situation the Byzantines would have understood: ancient; proud; diminished in territory from earlier days; in constant conflict with neighboring peoples, some of them nomads off the plains. (To this day, that seems reasonable to me. Tolkien himself, in letter 131 of the Carpenter collection, writes, “In the south Gondor rises to a peak of power, almost reflecting Númenór, and then fades slowly to decayed Middle Age, a kind of proud, venerable, but increasingly impotent Byzantium.” The analogy was in his mind, too. The difference is, it had a right to be in his, but not in mine, not in his universe.)
One problem I had with The Videssos Cycle was the nature of my villain. The Lord of the Nazgûl was, as I mentioned, the chief evil power in my imagined Fourth Age. When he appeared among men, he necessarily went veiled and masked, as he had no face he could present to the world. I incorporated this feature of his appearance into the new world I was building: incorporated it without first asking myself, Why are you doing this?
By the time I did think to ask myself that question, my masked and veiled villain had become an integral part of the world I’d created. That meant I had to devise some reason for his concealing himself, and one that needed to be far removed from the reason the Nazgûl never showed themselves. I hope I succeeded in this. Had I not transposed quite so thoroughly from the Tolkien-based world to the one I was creating myself, the difficulty never would have arisen. And, indeed, it shouldn’t have.
Aside from strip-mining my unpublishable homage to The Lord of the Rings to help form work I might legitimately show the world, I’ve used Tolkienesque motifs only once that springs to mind, in a short story called “After the Last Elf Is Dead.” There, the borrowing was intentional and, I believe, necessary. Tolkien and many of his lesser imitators depict the struggle of Good and Evil, with Good triumphant, at some cost, in the end.
This is, of course, how we want the world to work. The question I looked at in “After the Last Elf Is Dead” is, what happens if it doesn’t work that way? What does the world look like if Evil defeats Good? Turning common tropes on their ear is often one of the most enjoyable and thought-provoking things a writer can do.
One of the more profitable things a writer can do, however, is to repeat those tropes. Tolkien’s influence on fantasy since the publication and enormous success of The Lord of the Rings has not been altogether beneficial. This is not his fault, I hasten to add. But he has had many imitators, and imitators of imitators, and imitators of imitators of imitators, until some heroic-quest fantasies resemble nothing so much as blurry sixth-generation photocopies of his great work, borrowing not only structure but bits of background such as noble, immortal elves, and wicked, bestial ores as if they sprang from lore long in the public domain rather than from the imagination of a writer not yet thirty years dead!
One very successful imitator—at least in financial terms—stated quite openly in an interview that his method was to emulate all the elements of adventure in The Lord of the Rings and to suppress the mythological, theological, and linguistic themes: every bit of the lore and scholarship and depth that informed the original. I read his words in astonished disbelief and dismay. And yet, he proved a shrewd judge of what a substantial part of the reading public wanted, or was willing to settle for. His books outsell those of all but a handful of other writers in the field.
The essential difference, I think, is that Tolkien created his world for himself first, and for others only afterward. He began building the lays and legends of Middle-earth more than twenty years before even The Hobbit saw print. Almost twenty years more passed before The Lord of the Rings appeared. Everything in these books is a product of long reflection, long refinement. It shows. How could it help but show?
Because of that, it is unique, and is likely to remain so. Most books come into being far more quickly, and with at least one eye toward the market. It has always been so, ever since the earliest days of the printing press. Several of Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, were first published as what we now call Bad Quartos—hasty, pirated editions designed to make a printer a fast buck. If we had only the Bad Quarto of Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark’s immortal soliloquy would read:
To be, or not to be. Ay, there’s the point,
To die, to sleep, is that all? Ay, all:
No, to sleep, to dream, ay marry there it goes,
For in that dream of death, when we awake,
And borne before an everlasting Judge,
From whence no passenger ever return’d,
The undiscovered country, at whose sight
The happy smile, and the accursed damn’d.
But for this, the joyful hope of this,
Who’d bear the scorns and flatteries of the world,
Scorned by the right rich, the rich cursed of the
poor?
The difference between that sorry text—probably set in type relying on the shaky memory of one of the actors in the play—and what Shakespeare actually wrote is the same sort of gulf that lies between those who would imitate Tolkien and the man himself. It is the difference between haste and care, between commerce and love. (I don’t mean to suggest that Tolkien was immune to concerns about commerce; any examination of his letters proves otherwise. But he had built his world long before commerce became a concern. It is not often, and cannot often be, thus.)
As I’ve noted before, perhaps the greatest debt of gratitude fantasists of all stripes—emphatically not just the imitators—owe to J. R. R. Tolkien is what his success did for the genre as a whole. A couple of generations ago, speaking in broad terms, fantasy was something writers occasionally turned out in between novels full of spaceships. Science fiction normally outsold it by a considerable margin.
It isn’t like that any more. Fantasy novels, these days, appear on bestseller lists far more regularly than their counterparts from science fiction. And a rising tide lifts all boats. Fantasies that could not have hoped to find a home in the 1950s or 1960s now have a better chance of seeing print, because—in no small measure due too Tolkien’s work—fantasy has become a recognized category of its own. It is no accident that the professional organization for those who produce speculative fiction recently changed its name from the Science Fiction Writers of America to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
The next question to ask is, why has this happened? What has made Tolkien so enduringly popular? What has made fantasy in general so popular, besides Tolkien’s example? Part of the answer, I think, lies in the ongoing, ever more rapid, changes in American life—indeed, in life throughout the industrialized world—during the course of the twentieth century, and especially after the end of World War II. We are all travelers nowadays. When we look back to our childhoods, we remember a world quite different from the one in which we live today.
Take me as an example. I am, as I write these words, fifty-one. Things we take for granted nowadays that either did not exist or were in their infancy when I was born include television; vaccines for polio, mumps, measles, and chicken pox (I had all but the first, though I didn’t come down with chicken pox till the age of forty-three); frozen foods; jet airliners; no-fault divorce; most, though not all, antibiotics; audio- and videotapes; space travel and most of what we know of astronomy (in the 1950s, the canals of Mars and oceans of Venus were legitimate topics for hard science fiction); birth-control pills; microwave ovens; the civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, and environmental movements; freeways and the interstate highway system; rock ‘n’ roll; lasers; CDs; mass in the vernacular rather than Latin; computers; legal pornography; e-mail; the hydrogen bomb; organ transplants; and the World Wide Web. The list is brief, and far from comprehensive.
No wonder, then, that every so often we are tempted to stop and wonder, What the hell am I doing here? Throughout almost the entire course of human history, people lived in much the same world at the end of their lives as at the beginning. Change did happen, but incrementally, even glacially. Medieval artists dressed the Roman soldiers around the crucified Jesus in the armor of their own day, and saw nothing incongruous in doing so. That styles and techniques in such things had altered through time was beyond their mental horizon.
Only in the past couple of hundred years has change become rapid enough to grow visible in the course of a single human life. It is no accident that historical fiction—fiction emphasizing the differences between past and present—came into being at about the same time as the Industrial Revolution took flight. The smooth continuum between past and present was broken; the past became a separate country, and interesting specifically because of that.
I also think it no accident that fantasy has become so popular in an age of unprecedented change. It offers the reader a glimpse of a world where the verities underlying society endure, where moral values are strong (and, returning directly to Tolkien here, those who neglect the moral underpinnings of his work blind themselves to a large part of the world he built), where choices between Good and Evil are simpler than in the real world, and where Good may reasonably be expected to triumph in the end. It’s an anchor on a wildly tossing sea. Sometimes, it can be a crutch.
Few of us, I think—I hope!—would care to live permanently in such a world. But, especially when presented as magnificently as Tolkien does, it is a wonderful place to visit. We can enjoy the intricate adventure for its own sake, and for the respite it gives us from the complications and frustrations of mundane life. And, perhaps, even after we set the books aside, we find ourselves a little more ready to face with good heart the world in which we do live. What more could one possibly ask of a work of the imagination?
CULT
CLASSIC
TERRY PRATCHETT
The Lord of the Rings is a cult classic. I know that’s true, because I read it in the newspapers, saw it on the TV, heard it on the radio.
We know what “cult” means. It’s a put-down word. It means “inexplicably popular but unworthy.” It’s a word used by the guardians of the one true flame to dismiss anything that is liked by the wrong kind of people. It also means “small, hermetic, impenetrable to outsiders.” It has associations with cool drinks in Jonestown.
The Lord of the Rings has well over one hundred million readers. How big will it have to be to emerge from cult status? Or, once having been a cult—that is to say, once having borne the mark of Gain—is it actually possible that anything can ever be allowed to become a full-fledged Classic?
But democracy has been in action over the past few years. A British bookshop chain held a vote to find the country’s favorite book. It was The Lord of the Rings. Another one not long afterward, held this time to find the favorite author, came up with J. R. R. Tolkien.
The critics carped, which was expected but nevertheless strange. After all, the bookshops were merely using the word “favorite.” That’s a very personal word. No one ever said it was a synonym for “best.” But a critic’s chorus hailed the results as a terrible indictment on the taste of the British public, who’d been given the precious gift of democracy and were wasting it on quite unsuitable choices. There were hints of a conspiracy amongst the furry-footed fans. But there was another message, too. It ran: “Look, we’ve been trying to tell you for bears which books are good! And you just don’t listen! You’re not listening now! You’re just going out there and buying this damn book! And the worst part is that we can’t stop you! We can tell you it’s rubbish, it’s not relevant, it’s the worst kind of escapism, it was written by an author who never came to our parties and didn’t care what we thought, but unfortunately the law allows you to go on not listening! You are stupid, stupid, stupid!”
And, once again, no one listened. Instead, a couple of years later, a national newspaper’s Millennium Masterworks poll produced five works of what could loosely be called “narrative fiction” among the top fifty “masterworks” of the last thousand years, and, yes, there was The Lord of the Rings again.
The Mona Lisa was also in the top fifty masterworks. And I admit to suspecting that she was included by many of the voters out of a sheer cultural knee-jerk reaction, mildly dishonest but well meant. Quick, quick, name of the greatest works of art of the last thousand years! Er . . . er . . . well, the Mona Lisa, obviously. Fine, fine, and have you seen the Mona Lisa? Did you stand in front of her? Did the smile entrance you, did the eyes follow you around the room and back to your hotel? Er . . . no, not as such . . . but, uh, well, it’s the Mona Lisa, okay? You’ve got to include the Mona Lisa. And that guy with the fig leaf, yeah. And that woman with no arms.
T
hat’s honesty, of a sort. It’s a vote for the good taste of your fellow citizens and your ancestors as well. Joe Average knows that a vote for a picture of dogs playing poker is probably not, when considered against the background of one thousand years, a very sensible thing to cast.
But The Lord of the Rings, I suspect, got included when people stopped voting on behalf of their culture and quietly voted for what they liked. We can’t all stand in front of one picture and feel it open up new pathways in our brain, but we can—most of us—read a mass-market book.
I can’t remember where I was when JFK was shot, but I can remember exactly where and when I was when I first read J. R. R. Tolkien. It was New Year’s Eve, 1961. I was babysitting for friends of my parents while they all went out to a party. I didn’t mind. I’d got this three-volume yacht anchor of a book from the library that day. Boys at school had told me about it. It had maps in it, they said. This struck me at the time as a pretty good indicator of quality.
I’d waited quite a long time for this moment. I was that kind of kid, even then.
What can I remember? I can remember the vision of beech woods in the Shire; I was a country boy, and the hobbits were walking through a landscape which, give or take the odd housing development, was pretty much the one I’d grown up in. I remember it like a movie. There I was, sitting on this rather chilly sixties-style couch in this rather bare room; but at the edges of the carpet, the forest began. I remember the light as green, coming through trees. I have never since then so truly had the experience of being inside the story.
I can remember the click of the central heating going off and the room growing colder, but these things were happening on the horizon of my senses and weren’t relevant. I can’t remember going home with my parents, but I do remember sitting up in bed until 3:00 A.M., still reading. I don’t recall going to sleep. I do remember waking up with the book open on my chest, and finding my place, and going on reading. It took me, oh, about twenty-three hours to get to the end.