Authorial Control and World Building - The Barrow-Downs Discussion Forum

Bêthberry · 06-05-2016, 04:26 AM

This thread's title comes from a blog by Dr. Dimitra Fimi, a well-regarded scholar of Tolkien and fantasy. Her thoughts in the blog struck me as interesting for our discussions here, where we often quote Tolkien's letters as the definitive take on a topic or idea. Yet as Dr. Fimi suggests, there are different ways of reading, different pleasures. And, those pleasures may depend on the type or mode of fantasy an author uses.

Is this a helpful distinction, between readers who read for immersion in alternate worlds and readers who enjoy simply the possibility of alternate worlds without the saturation? I've always been bemused by Tolkien's defense of "applicability" and the freedom of the reader with his attempts in his letters to explain how his Legendarium ought to be read.

Her blog entry is easy to read: Authorial Control and World Building

Inziladun · 06-05-2016, 07:33 AM

I don't know that there need be a hard distinction between "saturation" and "possible" readers.

It seems that in my own experience, my (fiction) reading is highly dependent on my mood at the time; whatever I might be going through personally influences what I want to read, and, subsequently, what I want to do with the story.

There are times when I desire to "escape" from RL as entirely as possible for a brief while, to recharge spiritual and emotional batteries. At those times I seem to also look for encouraging ideas from the book. At those times I go for "immersion", with Tolkien being a common choice. Rowling is another example of this. For this to be effective, the story-world must be substantially different from RL.

The other side of the coin is the "possible", in which I might want something closer to reality, maybe to more imagine myself in the situations on the story.
For this I have the original Ian Fleming James Bond novels, and the complete Sherlock Holmes collection. I guess what I want there is a measure of escape, tinged with the faint hope that some qualities I admire in the book's characters might grow in me.

Or maybe all this is just the coffee talking.

Zigûr · 06-05-2016, 08:01 AM

In Reading The Lord of the Rings Michael Drout makes comparable statements, suggesting caution when it comes to methods of reading which can "turn Tolkien into his own leading critic".

I like to think of the letters, essays and so on as part of a "corpus" with the main narratives, at least when they're adding to and/or offering commentary on those narratives. Thus I aim to read the letters and so on as part of a broader textual complex. Oddly enough, when I googled the phrase "textual complex" just then to see if it was a term I could meaningfully use, the sixth entry to come up was Drout's J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment.

On the other hand I think there is also plenty of merit to reading the texts individually and in a certain degree of isolation. Both approaches can be enlightening.

Morthoron · 06-05-2016, 11:08 AM

I consider the contextual and intertextual discourse provided by Tolkien to be profoundly important when considering reading the actual story. The layers of addenda Tolkien provided both increases the understanding of the text, expands the mythos, and certainly aligns one in the direction the author wished for one to read his work. This, in my estimation, is not a bad thing.

One only has to go back to the 2nd-edition forward of LoTR, where Tolkien (in his usual curmudgeonly manner) dismisses the attempts by some critics and readers to apply the modern modus operandi of nuclear war to the tale and comparing characters in the book to infamous figures of WWII. Readers will find a host of implications not pertinent to the text - it is the foundational tenet of fan-fiction writing.

Of course, as Zigûr referenced, one must be cautious when delving, because one might unearth a sleeping Balrog (with wings). Tolkien can be deceptively vague, meandering, hypocritical, annoyingly duplicitous and even forgetful, but given the hours upon hours of stimulating reading provided by the external commentary, and particularly C. Tolkien's posthumous distillation of his father's papers and unpublished works in The Silmarillion and the HoMe series, I think, for myself, it only adds to the immersive process.

Gothmog, LoB · 06-05-2016, 05:44 PM

Tolkien can, at times, cause some problems reinterpreting himself. I mean, does anybody really see the topic of 'the Machine' in connection to the LotR the same way as he does?

I've actually difficulty understanding what 'the Machine' means there, nor do I consider the Ring a really good metaphor or symbol for technology. It is way to mystical/magical for that. In my opinion, Tolkien's depiction of magic completely failed to convey the meanings he attributes to magic in some of his letters or in other writings. The magia-goeteia difference doesn't even show up in any of his writings and only causes more confusion.

The tidbit of self-interpretation of Gandalf truly living Eä and being called to Ilúvater after his death is something that isn't really in the text because, you know, Tolkien didn't really include Eru Ilúvater as a character into the book. If Tolkien wanted his readers to figure this out by themselves then he should have actually written about that in his book.

Another thing would be the symbolic meaning/importance of the two unions between Elves and Men - Lúthien getting mortal in the process, and Tuor getting immortal. That is expressed very clearly in the Waldman letter but was not exactly executed all that well in the written work. Perhaps in part because he never got around to rewrite the Tuor story later in his life.

Insofar as we are concerned with the secondary world his comments in the letters are very much appreciated and on that level they are, in a sense, the voice of god. But you don't have to take him too seriously when you see him interpreting his own work or commenting on the meaning he intended to convey.

And of course one should always keep in mind that a letter is part of a private conversation usually not destined to be collected and published in a book; anybody writing letters or emails him-/herself knows that the intention thereby is to actually have a conversation of sorts. And you usually want to present yourself in a good light.

Bêthberry · 06-05-2016, 08:24 PM

Inzil, I've been off coffee for something like eight years so I don't have your excuse.

The original Bond books are an interesting suggestion. They, like conspiracy and detective fiction, play out supposedly in the primary world. Yet some of the best conspiracy fiction, to my mind the George Smiley books by John Le Carre (not his later fiction) are full of tantalizing detail, but also surprisingly silent on some important ones. I wonder if someone with deep personal experience of the Cold War machinations might have a very different response to Le Carre's work.

One issue about clamouring for details of course depends on when one reads the extraneous information. For instance, I don't think people usually read an author's biography or letters before first starting on his or her fiction. So if we go in "blind" on that first read, all we have is the ur-text to guide us. So, what kind of book makes us want to read the secondary sources?

I take things Tolkien says with a grain--or several--of salt, not that I dismiss him. As Fimi points out, he is incorrect about the presence of very Victorian fey creatures in his early work, which he clearly worked to eliminate from later works. And I would suggest that the farther a letter is away from the original writing (or completion of writing), the greater possibility of memory lapses. Authors are tricksome, sometimes with themselves as well as with their readers. After all, Tolkien at one point said that the attraction was seeing something in the distance, but that the closer one got, the less strong the attraction becomes. So he tantalizingly put bit and pieces of his Legendarium into TH and LotR, with the intent of suggesting more and distant events, he didn't want a full explanation. I suppose I should toddle off and find that source.

Zigûr · 06-05-2016, 09:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gothmog, LoB

I mean, does anybody really see the topic of 'the Machine' in connection to the LotR the same way as he does?

I've actually difficulty understanding what 'the Machine' means there, nor do I consider the Ring a really good metaphor or symbol for technology. It is way to mystical/magical for that.

Professor Tolkien says in Letter 131 that "magic" and "machines" are essentially the same thing:

Quote:

[the 'fallen' sub-creator] will rebel against the laws of the Creator – especially against mortality. Both of these (alone or together) will lead to the desire for Power, for making the will more quickly effective, – and so to the Machine (or Magic). By the last I intend all use of external plans or devices (apparatus) instead of development of the inherent inner powers or talents — or even the use of these talents with the corrupted motive of dominating: bulldozing the real world, or coercing other wills. The Machine is our more obvious modern form though more closely related to Magic than is usually recognised.

Of course in this case he is referring to this being a theme in "all this stuff", ie not just The Lord of the Rings but the entire legendarium.

I think the fact that this is unclear in The Lord of the Rings is because a substantial account of Sauron's activities in Eregion and his collaboration with the Gwaith-i-Mírdain never really occurs in that text. According to The Treason of Isengard it was drafted for the Council of Elrond, but that section was already far too long so it ended up constituting part of "Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age" - a text for which I dearly wish the unedited draft had been published in some form, as I personally can find no hard information about what was Professor Tolkien's own composition and what was editorial invention.

That being said, I would argue that the theme of "the Machine" is prominent in The Lord of the Rings through the character of Saruman. Nonetheless I am not sure it is as prominent as the other themes Professor Tolkien attributes to his own work, Fall and Mortality. Furthermore, I would argue that there are other themes in the text that Professor Tolkien himself does not identify: "the tale is not really about Power and Dominion: that only sets the wheels going". I find this statement a touch disingenuous, for instance, but that should simply provide us with fruit for discussion rather than an authoritative instruction of what we should or should not focus on as readers.

Nerwen · 06-07-2016, 07:25 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

This thread's title comes from a blog by Dr. Dimitra Fimi, a well-regarded scholar of Tolkien and fantasy. Her thoughts in the blog struck me as interesting for our discussions here, where we often quote Tolkien's letters as the definitive take on a topic or idea. Yet as Dr. Fimi suggests, there are different ways of reading, different pleasures. And, those pleasures may depend on the type or mode of fantasy an author uses.

Is this a helpful distinction, between readers who read for immersion in alternate worlds and readers who enjoy simply the possibility of alternate worlds without the saturation? I've always been bemused by Tolkien's defense of "applicability" and the freedom of the reader with his attempts in his letters to explain how his Legendarium ought to be read.

Her blog entry is easy to read: Authorial Control and World Building

Thanks for linking this- and yes, I think it is a helpful distinction, and no doubt explains why readers of certain works of fantasy are much more likely to engage in passionate debates over "canonicity", or obsess over background characters, or worry about minor inconsistancies... you know, what we do here, basically.

Fimi's thoughts on "intentional fallacy" vs "fallacy of anonymity" as "equally perilous paths" are also interesting, given that we quite often treat this as a very black-and-white issue, a simple matter of choosing one or the other approach.

Faramir Jones · 06-07-2016, 08:34 AM

Sir Arthur C. Clarke (as he later became) said that he and friend Val Cleaver had a meeting in Oxford with C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. He mentioned this in an essay, 'Memoirs of an Amateur Astronaut (Retired)', published in the 1960s, in which he spoke about his involvement in the British Interplanetary Society (BIS) from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s.

Some background was given to understand why the meeting took place. In the 1930s, before the Second World War, the BIS and its activities were not taken seriously. Clarke said that the organisation’s Journal attracted ‘a surprising amount of attention and a not surprising amount of amusement’.

That doyen of scientific publications, the good, grey Nature condescended to notice our existence, but concluded its review with the unkind cut: ‘While the ratio of theorizing to practical experimentation is so high, little attention will be paid to the activities of the British Interplanetary Society.’

Clarke conceded this, but pointed out that the Society had the equivalent of $2.50 in the till. (Arthur C. Clarke, Voices from the Sky, (London: Mayflower Paperbacks, 1969, p. 144.))

After the Second World War, he said that the BIS was taken more seriously, due to the German V2 rocket. In speaking of those who supported and opposed the Society’s aims, he referred to a couple of familiar names, and detailed a meeting with them both:

Less sympathetic to our aims was Dr. C. S. Lewis, author of two of the very few works of space fiction that can be classed as literature, Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. Both of these fine books contained attacks on scientists in general, and astronauts in particular, which aroused my ire. I was especially incensed by a passage in Perelandra referring to ‘little rocket societies’ that hoped to spread the crimes of mankind to other planets. And at the words: ‘The destruction or enslavement of other species in the universe, if such there are, is to these minds a welcome corollary,’ I really saw red. An extensive correspondence with Dr. Lewis led to a meeting in a famous Oxford pub, the Eastgate. Seconding me was my friend, Val Cleaver, a space buff from way back (and now chief engineer of the Rolls-Royce Rocket Division). Supporting Lewis was Professor J. R. E. Tolkien [sic], whose trilogy The Lord of the Ring [sic] created a considerable stir a few years ago. Needless to say, neither side converted the other, and we refused to abandon our diabolical schemes of interplanetary conquest. But a fine time was had by all, and when, some hours later, we emerged a little unsteadily from the Eastgate, Dr. Lewis’ parting words were ‘I’m sure you’re very wicked people – but how dull it would be if everyone was good.’ (Voices from the Sky, p. 148.)

In another account, quoted in a biography of him, Clarke gave more details of this meeting:

Val and I stayed at the Mitre, which is a wonderful non-Euclidean building with no right angles to it, no two rooms the same. We met Lewis at the Eastgate, and this little man, whose name I didn’t catch, was in the background. Then I found out that his name was Tolkien. (Neil McAleer, Odyssey: The authorised biography of Arthur C. Clarke, (London: Victor Gonzalez Ltd., 1992, p. 69.))

06-05-2016, 04:26 AM	#1
Bêthberry Cryptic Aura Join Date: May 2002 Posts: 6,170	Authorial Control and World Building This thread's title comes from a blog by Dr. Dimitra Fimi, a well-regarded scholar of Tolkien and fantasy. Her thoughts in the blog struck me as interesting for our discussions here, where we often quote Tolkien's letters as the definitive take on a topic or idea. Yet as Dr. Fimi suggests, there are different ways of reading, different pleasures. And, those pleasures may depend on the type or mode of fantasy an author uses. Is this a helpful distinction, between readers who read for immersion in alternate worlds and readers who enjoy simply the possibility of alternate worlds without the saturation? I've always been bemused by Tolkien's defense of "applicability" and the freedom of the reader with his attempts in his letters to explain how his Legendarium ought to be read. Her blog entry is easy to read: Authorial Control and World Building __________________ I’ll sing his roots off. I’ll sing a wind up and blow leaf and branch away.

06-05-2016, 07:33 AM	#2
Inziladun Gruesome Spectre Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: Heaven's doorstep Posts: 8,058	I don't know that there need be a hard distinction between "saturation" and "possible" readers. It seems that in my own experience, my (fiction) reading is highly dependent on my mood at the time; whatever I might be going through personally influences what I want to read, and, subsequently, what I want to do with the story. There are times when I desire to "escape" from RL as entirely as possible for a brief while, to recharge spiritual and emotional batteries. At those times I seem to also look for encouraging ideas from the book. At those times I go for "immersion", with Tolkien being a common choice. Rowling is another example of this. For this to be effective, the story-world must be substantially different from RL. The other side of the coin is the "possible", in which I might want something closer to reality, maybe to more imagine myself in the situations on the story. For this I have the original Ian Fleming James Bond novels, and the complete Sherlock Holmes collection. I guess what I want there is a measure of escape, tinged with the faint hope that some qualities I admire in the book's characters might grow in me. Or maybe all this is just the coffee talking. __________________ Music alone proves the existence of God.

06-05-2016, 08:01 AM	#3
Zigûr Ghost Prince of Cardolan Join Date: Aug 2012 Posts: 785	In Reading The Lord of the Rings Michael Drout makes comparable statements, suggesting caution when it comes to methods of reading which can "turn Tolkien into his own leading critic". I like to think of the letters, essays and so on as part of a "corpus" with the main narratives, at least when they're adding to and/or offering commentary on those narratives. Thus I aim to read the letters and so on as part of a broader textual complex. Oddly enough, when I googled the phrase "textual complex" just then to see if it was a term I could meaningfully use, the sixth entry to come up was Drout's J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment. On the other hand I think there is also plenty of merit to reading the texts individually and in a certain degree of isolation. Both approaches can be enlightening. __________________ "Since the evening of that day we have journeyed from the shadow of Tol Brandir." "On foot?" cried Éomer.

06-05-2016, 11:08 AM	#4
Morthoron Curmudgeonly Wordwraith Join Date: Jun 2007 Location: Ensconced in curmudgeonly pursuits Posts: 2,528	I consider the contextual and intertextual discourse provided by Tolkien to be profoundly important when considering reading the actual story. The layers of addenda Tolkien provided both increases the understanding of the text, expands the mythos, and certainly aligns one in the direction the author wished for one to read his work. This, in my estimation, is not a bad thing. One only has to go back to the 2nd-edition forward of LoTR, where Tolkien (in his usual curmudgeonly manner) dismisses the attempts by some critics and readers to apply the modern modus operandi of nuclear war to the tale and comparing characters in the book to infamous figures of WWII. Readers will find a host of implications not pertinent to the text - it is the foundational tenet of fan-fiction writing. Of course, as Zigûr referenced, one must be cautious when delving, because one might unearth a sleeping Balrog (with wings). Tolkien can be deceptively vague, meandering, hypocritical, annoyingly duplicitous and even forgetful, but given the hours upon hours of stimulating reading provided by the external commentary, and particularly C. Tolkien's posthumous distillation of his father's papers and unpublished works in The Silmarillion and the HoMe series, I think, for myself, it only adds to the immersive process. __________________ And your little sister's immaculate virginity wings away on the bony shoulders of a young horse named George who stole surreptitiously into her geography revision.

06-05-2016, 08:24 PM	#6
Bêthberry Cryptic Aura Join Date: May 2002 Posts: 6,170	Inzil, I've been off coffee for something like eight years so I don't have your excuse. The original Bond books are an interesting suggestion. They, like conspiracy and detective fiction, play out supposedly in the primary world. Yet some of the best conspiracy fiction, to my mind the George Smiley books by John Le Carre (not his later fiction) are full of tantalizing detail, but also surprisingly silent on some important ones. I wonder if someone with deep personal experience of the Cold War machinations might have a very different response to Le Carre's work. One issue about clamouring for details of course depends on when one reads the extraneous information. For instance, I don't think people usually read an author's biography or letters before first starting on his or her fiction. So if we go in "blind" on that first read, all we have is the ur-text to guide us. So, what kind of book makes us want to read the secondary sources? I take things Tolkien says with a grain--or several--of salt, not that I dismiss him. As Fimi points out, he is incorrect about the presence of very Victorian fey creatures in his early work, which he clearly worked to eliminate from later works. And I would suggest that the farther a letter is away from the original writing (or completion of writing), the greater possibility of memory lapses. Authors are tricksome, sometimes with themselves as well as with their readers. After all, Tolkien at one point said that the attraction was seeing something in the distance, but that the closer one got, the less strong the attraction becomes. So he tantalizingly put bit and pieces of his Legendarium into TH and LotR, with the intent of suggesting more and distant events, he didn't want a full explanation. I suppose I should toddle off and find that source. __________________ I’ll sing his roots off. I’ll sing a wind up and blow leaf and branch away.

06-05-2016, 05:44 PM	#5
Gothmog, LoB Animated Skeleton Join Date: May 2016 Posts: 38	Tolkien can, at times, cause some problems reinterpreting himself. I mean, does anybody really see the topic of 'the Machine' in connection to the LotR the same way as he does? I've actually difficulty understanding what 'the Machine' means there, nor do I consider the Ring a really good metaphor or symbol for technology. It is way to mystical/magical for that. In my opinion, Tolkien's depiction of magic completely failed to convey the meanings he attributes to magic in some of his letters or in other writings. The magia-goeteia difference doesn't even show up in any of his writings and only causes more confusion. The tidbit of self-interpretation of Gandalf truly living Eä and being called to Ilúvater after his death is something that isn't really in the text because, you know, Tolkien didn't really include Eru Ilúvater as a character into the book. If Tolkien wanted his readers to figure this out by themselves then he should have actually written about that in his book. Another thing would be the symbolic meaning/importance of the two unions between Elves and Men - Lúthien getting mortal in the process, and Tuor getting immortal. That is expressed very clearly in the Waldman letter but was not exactly executed all that well in the written work. Perhaps in part because he never got around to rewrite the Tuor story later in his life. Insofar as we are concerned with the secondary world his comments in the letters are very much appreciated and on that level they are, in a sense, the voice of god. But you don't have to take him too seriously when you see him interpreting his own work or commenting on the meaning he intended to convey. And of course one should always keep in mind that a letter is part of a private conversation usually not destined to be collected and published in a book; anybody writing letters or emails him-/herself knows that the intention thereby is to actually have a conversation of sorts. And you usually want to present yourself in a good light.

06-07-2016, 08:34 AM	#9
Faramir Jones Ghost Prince of Cardolan Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: Lonely Isle Posts: 706	A meeting of Arthur C. Clarke and Val Cleaver with C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien Sir Arthur C. Clarke (as he later became) said that he and friend Val Cleaver had a meeting in Oxford with C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. He mentioned this in an essay, 'Memoirs of an Amateur Astronaut (Retired)', published in the 1960s, in which he spoke about his involvement in the British Interplanetary Society (BIS) from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s. Some background was given to understand why the meeting took place. In the 1930s, before the Second World War, the BIS and its activities were not taken seriously. Clarke said that the organisation’s Journal attracted ‘a surprising amount of attention and a not surprising amount of amusement’. That doyen of scientific publications, the good, grey Nature condescended to notice our existence, but concluded its review with the unkind cut: ‘While the ratio of theorizing to practical experimentation is so high, little attention will be paid to the activities of the British Interplanetary Society.’ Clarke conceded this, but pointed out that the Society had the equivalent of $2.50 in the till. (Arthur C. Clarke, Voices from the Sky, (London: Mayflower Paperbacks, 1969, p. 144.)) After the Second World War, he said that the BIS was taken more seriously, due to the German V2 rocket. In speaking of those who supported and opposed the Society’s aims, he referred to a couple of familiar names, and detailed a meeting with them both: Less sympathetic to our aims was Dr. C. S. Lewis, author of two of the very few works of space fiction that can be classed as literature, Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. Both of these fine books contained attacks on scientists in general, and astronauts in particular, which aroused my ire. I was especially incensed by a passage in Perelandra referring to ‘little rocket societies’ that hoped to spread the crimes of mankind to other planets. And at the words: ‘The destruction or enslavement of other species in the universe, if such there are, is to these minds a welcome corollary,’ I really saw red. An extensive correspondence with Dr. Lewis led to a meeting in a famous Oxford pub, the Eastgate. Seconding me was my friend, Val Cleaver, a space buff from way back (and now chief engineer of the Rolls-Royce Rocket Division). Supporting Lewis was Professor J. R. E. Tolkien [sic], whose trilogy The Lord of the Ring [sic] created a considerable stir a few years ago. Needless to say, neither side converted the other, and we refused to abandon our diabolical schemes of interplanetary conquest. But a fine time was had by all, and when, some hours later, we emerged a little unsteadily from the Eastgate, Dr. Lewis’ parting words were ‘I’m sure you’re very wicked people – but how dull it would be if everyone was good.’ (Voices from the Sky, p. 148.) In another account, quoted in a biography of him, Clarke gave more details of this meeting: Val and I stayed at the Mitre, which is a wonderful non-Euclidean building with no right angles to it, no two rooms the same. We met Lewis at the Eastgate, and this little man, whose name I didn’t catch, was in the background. Then I found out that his name was Tolkien. (Neil McAleer, Odyssey: The authorised biography of Arthur C. Clarke, (London: Victor Gonzalez Ltd., 1992, p. 69.))