What does it mean to Write in the Spirit of Tolkien?

[littlemanpoet]

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

I'm not sure what you mean when you say that Ellen Kushner failed.

If she was attempting to show Thomas as one a romantic (small 'r') bard who idealiz(s)ed the Fairy Queen, she messed it up by making the story about lust and craving need, whereas I think that a more effective handling of it is like Smith of Wootton Major, Gimli, Eomer, and Frodo, and others. Now, Tolkien made it clear in his Letters (and I choose to believe that he meant and understood what he said) that 'all that adolescent stuff' was something he was mature enough not to need in his Legendarium. Bowdlerized? Nah. He was not on some mission to 'clean it all up'; it just didn't have the kind of front-and-center importance to him that it seems to have for so many authors of our era.

Originally Posted by Bb

Fairy and fantasy and medieval courtly traditions are, first of all, related but not the same thing and I'm not sure we can lump them all together here under some rubric of adoration or idealisation. I am here thinking of cultural legends and mythologies, not just modern fantasy. Second, each 'genre' is replete with blood, lust, gore, passion, fright and doom.

Quite right. The fact is that in courtly love the knight's goal was adultery with the Lady. I think it would have been a mistake for Tolkien to visit the issue of sexual lust in LotR; it would have drawn far too much attention to itself and away from the powerfully important things he believed worth telling a story about. I'm not saying that Tolkien's approach is definitive. I'm saying that he was on to something though.

The language I was using -- besmirched, ravages of infidelity, deplores -- have to do with the realities of adultery in a society that holds as its rule of law Christian standards, as did the high medieval. I'm not talking in Victorian terms here, just the realities of what a Lady faced from her Lord if she had been unfaithful with one of his knights.

Originally Posted by Bb

To bring this back to the current phase of the discussion, is this view of adoration/idealisation what is going on in the current Mead Hall?

I don't know. Degas and Linduial are one example to look at, their writers being two yound ladies. The other is the case of Eodwine and Saeryn, written by a man and by a yound lady. However, the issue of the latter is not that of idealization. I don't know if the former is, or is even meant to be. What I do know is that it's not being written that way. Which may feed into my main point: female writers are generally unaware of the inner workings of the romantic currents in a romantic male character; it's about all those things you probably already think it is, PLUS a tendency toward idealization.