There's a long-running debate going on about myth on and off of Andrea Harris' blog. I have said what I have to say, so I won't repeat but will just suggest that you scroll down for that discussion, but I wanted to add a clarification: My contention is that there is no such thing as a 'genuine' myth. There are simply stories, some of them older than others. Every one of these stories was made up by a human being. The difference between a "myth" and any other old story simply seems to be that a myth has circulated widely through a culture over a long period of time, with many "singers" or "poets" adding value at each iteration. That transmission process may be the explanation for why "myths" appear to be so aesthetically effective, since there's a rigorous selection process at work for many generations, but that does not mean, as someone keeps asserting without argument or evidence, that "myths" are fundamentally different than any other story.

Stop the Insanity!

Ok, a little attention was nice. A lot is, well, creepy. Don't believe me? Read the thread here on Slashdot.

I've temporarily removed my further comments regarding any potential future work with Tolkien since I found my words being copied, edited and moefied, without my permission , in various media.

Media Focus

It's a little strange how things just spread through the media. Out of nowhere on Thurs I got a call from the London Sunday Times and did an interview with them about the Tolkien stuff. Then all of a sudden the floodgates burst open and I've been getting calls from Australia (!) and England and doing radio interviews, etc.

UPDATE: I've temporarily removed my further comments regarding any potential future work with Tolkien since I found my words being copied, edited and modfied, without my permission , in various media.

Hard Drive Crash

Of course just as people are becoming interested in Beowulf and the Critics and sending me tons of email, my hard drive crashes. I'm working from a backup now, but if you emailed recently, I've now lost your email address and the email itself, so please email me again and I will try to get back to you.

And if anyone has a recommendation for data recovery, I'd appreciate knowing about it. Norton won't find anything on the disk even though I've been using File Saver. I'm hoping that Wheaton's IT guys (who are amazing) can help me on Thurs, but we'll see. Will be blogging more about JRRT stuff and the various newspaper / radio stories later.

How Not to Influence People (even Intellectuals)
This is so unfortunate, because the author is actually not a moron; he's a deservedly well-respected historian. Other bloggers have already pointed out the manifest inaccuracies and distortions in the article, so I want to try to figure out why an obviously intelligent person (ok, not from the article, but if you read his other work) would write something so stupid.

This is an important question, since self-described intellectuals really need to ask themselves "why do they hate us?" of, well, just about everybody. I think the scorn and contempt directed at intellectuals in general is a bad thing, but it's been partially earned by articles like this and by the behavior and statements of the most high profile intellectuals in the arts and humanities over the past many years. Scholars do have useful things to contribute (at least I think I do) to a better understanding and fuller enjoying of, say, The Lord of the Rings, but foolish categorical statements and the petty bashing of fandom makes it very hard for people to give scholars a chance to convince anyone outside their immediate cocoons.

The dumbest thing in Fernandez-Arnesto's article is this:"But unreconstructed myths are usually better. They spring from collective effort, from folk memory and from a shared subconscious. Reading them gives you satisfactions no fantasy can supply: contact with other cultures, insights into the past. They enhance your life by stimulating your understanding, for the arts of every civilisation are rooted in its myths."

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. There is no evidence whatsoever that myths "spring from collective effort." Every study of South Slavic guslari, every analysis of Beowulf or the works of Snorri shows exactly the opposite: epics are created by different individuals each adding a bit to the story. Different singers bring different geniuses to their songs. All myths are invented by inventors. Therefore the idea that some myths can give us actual "insights" into the past or "contact" with other cultures but fantasy cannot is a logical contradiction. It's all made up, and so the only thing separating fantasy from myth is time and popularity. In fact, some "genuine" epic literature is far more tedious than The Lord of the Rings could ever be accused of being. I love Njal's Saga, but 85% of the chapters begin "There was a man X. He was the son of Y who was the son of Z..." out to the fifth or sixth generation." I'm a crusty medievalist and like wading through such stuff, but it's hard to make an argument that by stripping away such material, Tolkien didn't make his material more palatable to the audience in the same way that a Homeric bard or a guslar would have adjusted his song to a particular audience's reactions.

Also, no one should print a line like "For the intellectuals in the audience, the only pleasure lies in observing a world created by cannibalising exotic cultures and eluding rational limitations." and expect not to be hated. I don't have quite as many degrees, honorary and otherwise, as Prof. F-A, but if I can't be also considered an "intellectual," then it's a very, very exclusive club indeed. So simply by my taking pleasure in the film (though not nearly as much as I take in the books), I have disproved his paragraph and called into question his general reliablity. In English we tell students "avoid sweeping generalizations: they're too easy to prove wrong." Maybe historians could learn from us.



Finally, I want to refer to a few of the comments on Andrea Harris' post. First, it doesn't matter, for the purpose of judging his fantasy literature, that Tolkien was a major scholar of Old Norse (he knew ON forward and backwards, but he published very little on it, btw). Either he created great art, or he didn't: his scholarly credentials can be used to argue for a disputed reading of a medieval text; they cannot justify his own art. Second, the idea that people reading fantasy literature is some kind of problem is absurd, but it springs from a reasonable premise: that we have not world enough and time to read everything good, so that every moment spent on fantasy is one not spent on Dante or Plato. True enough. But, as an economist would point out, the person who wants to argue this point needs to prove that fantasy is substituting itself for Plato rather than substituting itself for some other pleasure. Impossible to do. In my experience as a teacher of fantasy and of medieval literature, students who read fantasy can be drawn to other literatures and traditions, and they can expand their reading horizons (and fantasy is actually in and of itself good, anyway), thus being more likely to read Plato than if they had never encountered fantasy (I've lured quite a few students into Plato by mentioning the Ring of Gyges...)

Andrea Harris, whose blog I read daily, has an interesting discussion of this exercise in missing the point by David Brin. Andrea has already done a thorough job of taking the argument apart piece by piece. I just wanted to add something about the "nostalgia" in LotR.

There is indeed something "backward looking" about LotR, but it's not anti-technology (what are the Elven Rings, after all, but good technology that allows for Lorien and Rivendell?) or wholly pro-monarchy. It is rather a completely and characteristically human longing for the good things in the past (I mean here the personal past), projected by Tolkien into a deep, bittersweet sadness about inevitable loss. You might say it's what someone would feel in 1918 looking back at the summers of 1913 or 1914 (but that's another posting).

I have an amazing two-year-old daughter, and I love watching her grow up, but every once in a while you get an incredible pang of sadness at what will never happen again: she'll never fall asleep on my chest like she did when she was a tiny baby; she'll never wear certain things again, or like certain toys. The past is gone forever. Tolkien's genius was to capture that emotion and give it a shape and form, so that Frodo at the Grey Havens is immediately understandable to readers in a deeply personal way. People, like Brin, who want to claim that this feeling is politically retrograde or base or wrong are simply missing out on a great deal of human emotion. We don't have to live in the past, and in the character of Denethor Tolkien shows how destructive such living could be. But it is not merely acceptable but actually good to remember, long for, and even grieve for those things that were great and beautiful but which are now, as a price paid for our free will and open future, gone forever.

In regard to this idiotic screed that the Lord of the Rings is racist, I recommend this MISTing by Vegard Valberg. He does a lovely job proving that the writer for the Guardian is, well, a fool. I particularly like his noting that the Southrons are not inherently evil, but simply deluded by Sauron and are in fact valiant fighters.

Let me just add a few bits. First, Tolkien in the 1930's made it very clear that absolutely hated the German race laws and wanted nothing to do with them. He said that Hitler was guilty of "ruining" and "perverting" the noble Northern spirit with his "Nordic nonsense." He also stated publicly that he hated apartheid in 1959.

The "good is white / black is evil" thing may be traditional, but it's not really completely true in the Lord of the Rings. The livery of Gondor is black (they are good guys, you know). Saruman is "the white" and his symbol is the white hand (duh!).

Finally, the evilness of orcs does not come from "genetic engineering," Mr. Guardian writer doofus, but from their original torture and enslavement by Morgoth (and anyway, the origins of orcs was a vexed question for Tolkien). Saruman may or may not have crossed orcs with humans to allow the Uruk-hai to travel in daylight (which is not the point that our genius film critic was making), but the evil in the orcs is inherent; it's one of the rules of the world.

"Strip away the archaic turns of phrase and you find a set of basic assumptions that are frankly unacceptable in 21st-century Britain." What kind of pompous ass could even live with himself after writing a sentence like that? Someone who shouldn't try to review work that is so far beyond his crabbed, simplistic, self-righteous understanding.

I've now been a real live author for a day or so, and it's pretty nice. But the weird thing is that the book has been finished for so long (the real writing was done in October 1999) that mentally I guess I'd moved past it. Now I'm much more excited about the possibility of How Tradition Works being accepted for publication (one favorable reader's report down, one -- hopefully -- to go)

But now all of a sudden everyone wants to talk about Beowulf and the Critics and there's this weird mental gear-shifting that goes on. Anyway, here's what I know: when my author copies shipped from the bindery (probably Mon. morning), the rest of the print run should have shipped to the publisher (MRTS) and I assume immediately from there to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc. So this link, which says "not yet published" should soon say "published" and the book should ship to all of you who ordered it. I will keep you posted.

And more importantly, thanks for all the supportive emails in the past few days. It's good to know that some people are interested in what was an immense amount of work (and also a whole lot of fun; I'm not complaining at all).

The Two Towers

That Two Towers review... I actually don't want to do a real review, since that might spoil the movie for some, but I'll give a few tidbits. This movie is very consistent in style with Fellowship. If you liked Fellowship, you'll like this movie. If you hated what Jackson did with Fellowship, you'll probably hate this movie even more. There is the majestic setting, the amazing combat scenes, the grandeur of the epic, etc. Someone did their research on Anglo-Saxon art and architecture, so Rohan is technically correct. There were, it seemed to me, fewer wince-inducing moments. But there are many plots changes, both great and small. Some I could understand as helping to shoehorn Tolkien's opus into a Hollywood format. Others just seemed stupid to me, and the worst part was that they combined to make Middle-earth seem small both in terms of absolute scale (people zip from Lorien to Helm's Deep in a day or two) but also in terms of everyone knowing everything and everybody. I'm not sure how much of that was necessary, but, well, nobody is going to give me 300 million dollars to make a movie, either.

There were some very well done bits; I think Eowyn is very good, and I liked the look (but not the speaking or the characters) of the Ents. The Gollum cgi is just amazing; I wish I could say the same for his dialogue. The battle scenes have to be the best ever filmed, and I wonder how they are going to top Helm's Deep in The Return of the King.
More later, perhaps, when I digest the 3 hour movie.

Ok, it's been months, and my Tolkien book was finally published today, so I should update my blog. And I saw the Two Towers, so if I still have any readers besides family members, you might want to know about that, too.

First, the Tolkien Book. It's called Beowulf and the Critics, and was written by Tolkien in the 1930's. From it he drew his celebrated British Academy lecture, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics." The book I edited was donated to the Bodleian Library by Christopher Tolkien. The Tolkien Estate gave me permission to edit it a number of years ago, and after publication delays, etc., it is finally out. I think it will be of interest to almost anyone who is interested in Tolkien's overall life's work, of which his scholarship was a very important part. You will need to read Beowulf first, to understand what is going on. Seamus Heaney's translation is famous, and a great poem, but it's really a modern poem based on Beowulf rather than a straight translation. Roy Liuzza's edition is closer to the original (and very nicely done). Or you could just learn Old English from my on-line Grammar Book and then read the poem for yourself.