Scientists Discover DNA Evidence of Middle-earth

Posted on December 23, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

My son texts me: “In dungeons and dragons I created hawk-eye, Hulk and Thor”

This is a major breakthrough, even better than downloading superhero mods into Minecraft because it requires his own creative mixing. His uber-Aryan is a human paladin with a demigod destiny and an epic-tier artifact hammer. For the Hulk, you start with a human warden and multi-class him to get a monk’s unarmed strike while wearing bloodweave armor. Mix enchanted arrows and a throwing shield with bow-mastery and brawler talent, and Hawkeye and Captain America are ready to go too. I think he chiseled Iron Man from living metal.

It’s my favorite thing about superhero teams, how gods and aliens and androids can join forces, all their discordant realities merged in the ultimate melting pot of action-packed fantasy. Tolkien didn’t invent the genre, but he assembled one of the first super-teams. He would take it further with Lord of the Rings, but his first team of adventurers mixed dwarves with a hobbit and a human wizard. It was 1937. The Hobbit made a case for diversity in a time of Aryan purity.

Hitler had barred Jews from the German Olympic team the summer before. The “part-Jewish” fencer Helene Mayer was Berlin’s token exception, and she medalled, along with nine other Jewish athletes from other nations. The biggest winner was Jesse Owens with four golds, including a world record set with his relay teammates. Hitler left the stadium rather than shake a non-Aryan hand. In Berlin Owens stayed in all-whites hotel, but back home, he had to use a freight elevator to attend his own banquet. FDR, afraid of losing the Southern vote, snubbed him too.

Hitler wanted to cleanse Germany of ethnic diversity, believing it would return the splendor of ancient Greece and Rome. But go further back, and evolutionary geneticist Mark Thomas calls ancient Europe a “Lord of the Rings-type world,” with multiple human races co-existing for dozens of millennia. In addition to Early Modern Humans (including the hominids formerly known as Cro-Magnon), you got your standard Neanderthals, plus their recently discovered neighbors, the Denisovans. Instead of segregating themselves on separate continents, the three hung out together in Spanish and Siberian caves.

“It is possible,” writes Carl Zimmer for the New York Times, “that there are many extinct human populations that scientists have yet to discover.”

Old school theories didn’t like the idea of Homo sapiens coming in flirting range with other groups after marching out of Africa, but analysis of a Neanderthal toe bone proves the ancient races didn’t keep to their prudish selves. If you have type 2 diabetes, you probably have a branch of Neanderthal relatives on your 50,000-year-old family tree. The gene is biggest in the Americas, so the colony of Virginia was way too late when they passed the hemisphere’s first anti-miscegenation law in 1691. Since early humans didn’t discover Neanderthal love until after they’d exited Africa, Virginia’s slave population was the genetically purest on the continent. Even Englishman Ozzy Osbourne flunked the one-drop rule. He had his DNA sequenced in hopes of finding a “plausible medical reason why I should still be alive” given “the swimming pool or booze” and drugs he’d guzzled. The answer wasn’t racial hygiene.

Denisovans are crashing family reunions too. Europeans carry some Denisovan blood, but the biggest pockets are in Australia and New Guinea, with Brazil and China claiming some of the best Neanderthal-Denisovan mix. Denisovans also share about 8% of their genome with some million-year-old species, so that’s more bad news for Racial Purity Clubs worldwide. We are all, says computational biologist Rasmus Nielsen, “connected to other species.”

Robert E. Howard agrees. The father of sword and sorcery renamed ancient Eurasia “Hyboria” and populated it with a mixed-race of arctic warriors descended from the lost continent of Thuria. The survivors of Atlantis devolved into ape-men, and the former Lemurians came westward, “overthrowing the pre-humans of the south.” This is about 20,000 years ago, after Neanderthals and Denisovans had given way to Homo sapiens. Howard published his first Conan the Cimmerian story in 1932. Conan’s people would evolve into Celts by 9500 BC and Conan into Arnold Schwarzenegger by 1982.“The origins of the other races of the modern world,” Howard writes, “may be similarly traced. In almost every case, older far than they realize, their history stretches back into the mists of the forgotten Hyborian Age…”

Howard committed suicide in June 1936, three weeks before Jesse Owens took his first Olympic gold. That left the Weird Tales realm of sword and sorcery undefended when Tolkien invaded the following year. Like any conqueror, he renamed everything, so Hyboria became Middle-earth. Both ages took place in Earth’s lost history, though Tolkien admits “it would be difficult to fit the lands and events (or ‘cultures’) into such evidence as we possess, archaeological or geological, concerning the nearer or remoter part of what is now called Europe.”

Tolkien’s reign ended with his death in 1973, and the realm was again defenseless during the Dungeons & Dragons invasion of 1974. I dabbled in a game or two with college roommates in the early 80s and now order second-hand copies of user guides and monster manuals for my son who organizes weekend adventures with fellow middle schoolers. I even found him a 2000 Marvel mini-series called Avataarz, featuring D&D versions of Captain America, the Hulk, Hawkeye and other sundry Avengers. He was disappointed it didn’t include their character sheets, but he’s good at building his own. Fantasy is in his blood.

He and my wife and I watched The Hobbit parts 1 and 2 together and have been waiting for the last installment. We skipped the Conan the Barbarian reboot, as did most of the world’s Cimmerian-descended population, but rumor has it Arnold will be returning to Hyboria soon. His last super-team included Grace Jones and Wilt Chamberlain, but I’m sure Hollywood can assemble an even more discordant melting pot of a cast. That’s what the genre is all about.

Economics in Fantasy Literature, Or, Why Nerds Really Like Stuff

Posted on May 14, 2014 by Sarah Shoker

There is no rule stating that fantasy literature must involve a pre-industrial setting, but Tolkien’s grip remains strong and the maps included at the beginning of epic fantasy novels illustrate a strong attachment to land rather than economic “development” (or degradation, as per Tolkien’s philosophy on modernity.) Pre-industrialization, by its very definition, eschews mass production and growth. Even in urban fantasy, the modes of production that sustain the magical world don’t usually involve factory processes. There are notable exceptions, of course, like Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, but I think this description is a fair representation of the genre.

The role of “stuff” in fantasy fiction remains vitally important to fantastical stories and potentially serves to discipline fantasy readers into valuing certain cultural artifacts over others. Wikipedia has a page dedicated to a sizable—and incomplete— list of fictional swords with names. Certain artifacts are imbued with symbolic qualities (eg. King Arthur’s Excalibur and Holy Grail) and some magic systems are reliant upon material things (eg. wands in Harry Potter.) Though economic systems within fantasy literature are usually underdeveloped or neglected by authors, artifacts remain fetishized, used both as a way of adding authenticity to the secondary world (the presence of swords signals to readers that they are situated within a particular genre and provides a pathway for authors to play with certain tropes), and developing the protagonist’s identity. But from where does this economic model originate and how, if at all, does this conceptualization of stuff impact present-day nerd consumerism? Because while the role of economic exchange is left ambiguous in much fantasy literature, the centrality of stuff like wands, crystal balls, amulets, and named swords are not.

J R. R. Tolkien creeps into most discussions of fantasy literature, even when intentions are bent on his exclusion. China Mieville, both highly critical and highly thankful to the man, once called Tolkien “the big Oedipal Daddy” of fantasy literature, a label with which I’m forced to concur. Tolkien was heavily influenced by his academic work as a scholar of Anglo-Saxon literature, a research interest which inevitably shapes this discussion. He began writing The Hobbit shortly after translating the epic poem Beowulf. The dragon in The Hobbit is thought to be directly influenced by the epic poem. Tolkien’s work emulates Beowulf’s vagueness surrounding the production of goods, features similar rural mileus, and focuses more on treasure than merchandise. In his book Honour, Exchange, and Violence in Beowulf, Peter Baker writes:

[T]he world of Beowulf gets along entirely without coinage. The poem mentions land as a reward for valorous deeds, but land seems to lack all practical value: if noble Danes and Greats collect rents in money, food or service, the poet considers the fact too trivial to notice…Indeed, the only category of wealth that interests the poet and his characters is treasure.

The acquisition of treasure was done primarily through looting, and Baker writes that violence in Beowulf was not seen as a sign of social disintegration but as an ‘essential element in the heroic system of exchange (sometimes called the Economy of Honour.)’ In general, the accumulation of goods in fantasy literature is linked with the successful completion of good deeds. Part of the hero’s journey may involve a quest to recover certain items, yet the acquisition of stuff in fantasy literature is not about consumerism but a reflection of the protagonist’s righteousness or destitution. In Beowulf, for example, treasure is used to secure loyalty and ensure the continuation of a just society. Further examples include the destruction of the One Ring, the destruction of the Seven Horcruxes in order to defeat Voldemort and the search for the Deathly Hallows, and The Sword in the Stone– an object which arbitrates rightful inheritance to the throne.

Though not all fantasy settings are rural—and some fantasy authors focus on urban settings as a reaction to Tolkien’s idealization of pre-industrial life. Michael Moorcock, in particular, argued that Tolkien’s fascination with pre-industrialization was nostalgic and “infantile.”

Since the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, at least, people have been yearning for an ideal rural world they believe to have vanished – yearning for a mythical state of innocence (as Morris did) as heartily as the Israelites yearned for the Garden of Eden. This refusal to face or derive any pleasure from the realities of urban industrial life, this longing to possess, again, the infant’s eye view of the countryside, is a fundamental theme in popular English literature.

Even in fantasy novels that feature urban environments, magical items are not produced through the methods of mass production. There aren’t too many wand-making factories. When large-scale manufacturing operations are displayed, they are usually situated as a site of oppression. Tolkien described the industrial period as “the robotic age,” despite early industrialization’s reliance on cheap sources of labour (women and children). The rejection of the methods of mass production is not unconscious on Tolkien’s part—Sarumon’s destruction of Fangorn Forest to pursue his own mining operation is portrayed as unabashedly evil. More recently, Brandon Sanderson’s excellent Mistborn trilogy features a covert mining operation controlled by an elite class that would like to restrict the use of magic (Sanderson’s magic system is fueled by minerals) and which is the site of class oppression and slavery.

I find the absence of economic preoccupation, which centers contemporary life but is pushed to the periphery in fantasy literature, fascinating. There’s stuff, but no theory about stuff. The acquisition of stuff is not usually related to the accumulation of wealth, but there’s no doubt that items incurred in fantasy novels are in some way special. They are unique snowflakes that arrive at key times in the plot, signaling growth in the character’s identity. (Think of Will, from Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, who grapples with moral challenges because he possesses The Subtle Knife.)

In particular, I wonder if the desire for nerds to own ‘limited edition’ consumer goods is related to the glamorization of items within fantasy worlds. Collecting limited edition ‘stuff’ has always been linked with nerd identity. Think of the cliched stereotype of the dweeb who collects mint-condition-never-removed-from-the-box-limited-edition Star Wars action figures and who can recite, in an encyclopedic fashion, their stats. These toys become a physical manifestation of one’s nerd identity. Similarly, the oohs and aahs towards those who manage to acquire ‘stuff’ from movie sets reveals a longstanding philosophy about authenticity: you got the real one. I’m not immune from the temptation of ‘rare artifacts.’ At last year’s San Diego Comic Con, I braved the Dark Horse line to purchase a limited edition (run of 1200, exclusive to Comic Con) House Stark Shield. And my views on Game of Thrones can, at the best of times, be described as ambivalent.

Of course, instead of monarchs awarding heroes with treasure, the fetishization of ‘rare’ artifacts in the primary world is mediated through private commercial entities. Limited edition consumer items are still products of capitalism–my Stark Shield was produced in a factory. (And so were the fantasy books…) Fantasy literature’s popularity is sustained by the very process it ignores or derides. ‘The capitalists’ (twirling mustache, top hat) have had no difficulty appropriating ‘items’ into the robotic age for nerds who view Comic-Con as a pilgrimage and the acquisition of special edition Lego as a quest.

But there’s anxiety within this relationship, a push-back because consumerism is just too easy. Mass production involves the masses, after all, and some fans argued that the whole-scale embrace of fantasy consumer goods is a form of appropriation rather than adoption. The former term, of course, implies an inauthentic masquerade on the part of the consumer. The latter term implies that the person is not an authentic member of the community. The perception is, perhaps, that these people are role-playing and will remove their nerd-drag once the sub-culture loses its mainstream appeal.??I cannot ignore the intersection of class and gender in this exchange. Anyone can enter a Target store and purchase a Star Wars t-shirt, but the ease of this purchase creates doubt in the wearer’s identity. Is this person really a ‘true nerd?’ Despite repeated calls for folks to quit patrolling the boundaries of nerdom, certain groups (mostly girls and women) are still required to justify their commitment to the community by, at times, being asked to respond to spontaneous pop-quizzes by self-appointed police officers of Kingdom Geek. Money functions as a good way to participate in a sub-culture that has long been defined by its rejection of irony and whole-scale enthusiasm of ‘cool stuff.’ A t-shirt from Target does not necessitate the grueling process (sarcasm—all that’s needed is more money) of purchasing a flight to a comic-con and waiting in line for several hours in hopes of acquiring limited edition whatever—the quest and the story related to the acquisition is removed, but the product is still worn as a symbol of identity, potentially allowing those with lower incomes (like young people and women) to participate in nerd sub-cultures.

Unfortunately, this participation has been met with a certain elitist attitude about what kind of labour or consumerism is good enough to qualify as being part of the community. Limited edition or not, it’s all capitalism. But to elitists, some capitalisms are better than other capitalisms. Consumerism is no longer enough because one must be a discerning consumer. And of course, testing the knowledge of other fans, often directed towards teenage girls, displays a kind of anxiety towards the opening of borders that has resulted from nerdiness’ capitalist expansion. Knowledge becomes another form of currency, the arbitrator between the high-brow collector of art and the dirty prol who can’t tell the difference between a first and second edition something-or-other.

All of which is to say that ‘fantasy economics’ has some serious real-life implications regarding inclusion, exclusion, and the powerful role of stuff/artifacts/things in identity creation. Fantasy has the potential for being highly critical of consumerism and contains the tools to imagine differently. Unfortunately, I do not think that most fantasy literature is currently engaged with these issues. Rather, pre-industrial economic practices provide convenient short-hands to indicate magic and swords—it’s a trope that some writers have confronted but most haven’t.

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Images: John William Waterhouse, “The Crystal Ball With the Skull” and “Psyche Opening the Golden Box”

About the author: Sarah Shoker is a PhD candidate in political science at McMaster University in Canada. She’s currently completing a fantasy novel that is conspicuously absent of named swords, but she’d love you to publish it anyway. You can follow her on twitter @SarahShoker.

Adventure, Small As Life

Posted on December 15, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

This appeared on Splice Today a while back.
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Old Took’s great-grand-uncle Bullroarer… was so huge (for a hobbit) that he could ride a horse. He charged the ranks of the goblins of Mount Gram in the Battle of the Green Fields, and knocked their king Golfimbul’s head clean off with a wooden club. It sailed a hundred yards through the air and went down a rabbit-hole, and in this way the battle was won and the game of Golf invented at the same moment.

That’s one of my favorite bits from The Hobbit. It’s also, perhaps, the passage that pushes most insistently against Tolkien’s reputation as it’s developed. Tolkien is generally lauded for his careful, monumental world-building—for his intricate languages and his sweeping sense of history. And yet, here he is, with deliberate whimsy, knocking (driving?) his reader out of Middle-Earth and back to just-plain-England for the sake of a silly and utterly gratuitous joke. I suppose it’s possible that the elves and dragons play golf in Middle-Earth, but whether or not, it’s an incongruous idea, which makes tends to make the milieu unravel, rather than weaving it together. Putting hobbits and golf together is the act of a storyteller who has his eye on effects other than consistency.

Those effects are, broadly, those not of epic fantasy, but of children’s literature. It can be hard to remember after reading the very serious, very dark Lord of the Rings, and even harder after watching the definitely-for-adults movies, but the fact is that The Hobbit is for kids. There is certainly a lot of danger and tension, and I’ve no doubt it’s given many a six-to-eight-year-olds some serious nightmares. But be that as it may, the fact remains that in its approach to character, and to its own world, it is in some ways much closer to something like Doctor Doolittle or Alice in Wonderland than it is to Tolkien’s more sober trilogy. For example, when Bilbo is trying to distract giant spiders and lead them away from his companions, he sings a taunting song that is essentially a children’s rhyme. After he’s done, Tolkien writes:

They made for his noise far quicker than he had expected. They were frightfully angry. Quite apart from the stones no spider has ever liked being called Attercop, and Tomnoddy of course is insulting to anybody.

Again, this isn’t world-building, or even logic, exactly. It’s silliness for the sake of silliness, where motivations and narrative are subordinated to the joyful clip-thunk of language. The monstrous Shelob that Frodo fights is a terrible monster, gross and inhuman. But the spiders Bilbo battles act like children, driven to madness by schoolyard taunts. And the pleasure of The Hobbit is, in no small part, that shuffling of kids’ perspective and adult perspective; the way the adventure shifts from larger than life to smaller than life in a blink, so that you feel that, in this universe, children (or hobbits) really can conquer the great, grand world, or, alternately, that the great, grand world really can be child-like.

I love The Lord of the Rings too, movies as well as books. But it’s too bad that critics, readers, and writers of fantasy these days are much more comfortable with the modes of the later Tolkien than with his earlier, lighter prelude. Harry Potter, for example, largely abandoned its Roald-Dahlesque nonsense impulses in favor of supposedly more sophisticated good vs. evil bombast. Twilight, The Hunger Games, Game of Thrones and His Dark Materials all might have LOTR somewhere in their heritage, but certainly none of them have The Hobbit. There are series that still hark back to fantasy’s children’s literature roots, like How To Train Your Dragon, but they don’t seem to have the same impact, or to be taken as seriously as cultural touchstones.

This is a shame in part because the children’s literature tradition is so vibrant; there simply aren’t many fantasy stories, in any mode, better than Alice in Wonderland or Peter Pan—or The Hobbit and Narnia, for that matter. But it’s also unfortunate because those children’s stories are decidedly more sophisticated than the adult epics with their grim quests and bloodshed and high seriousness. No matter how intricate the world you build, that world still isn’t the world. A story that acknowledges its own nonsense is, to that degree, more true, and more knowing, than one that doesn’t. Golf is, after all, more real than beheading goblins, no matter how grim and epic you make the latter.

Jailers Hate Escapism: Epic Fantasy as Subversive Literature

Posted on May 6, 2013 by Sarah Shoker

“Tell me one last thing,” said Harry. “Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?”

“…Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”
–Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Writing on the Game of Thrones season three premiere, a reviewer at the New York Times who confessed to being a fan of the science fiction and fantasy genre casually mentioned that upcoming discussions on slavery and women’s liberation were “heavy handed…particularly for a show set in the medieval period.” Twitter reacted swiftly, with Alyssa Rosenberg from Think Progress satirically tweeting, “may the Lord of the Light save me from people who are made uncomfortable by thinking about issues in their entertainment.”

Shunted away, at a private kiddie table and apart from allegedly serious literature, fantasy fans have been jostling for recognition and fending off accusations that their beloved genre is immature, escapist, and unrealistic. High/Epic Fantasy, in particular, has been accused of being regressive, conservative, and reactionary, intent on preserving an ideology of traditional gender scripts and maintaining a cast of lily-white characters. In western culture(s), epic fantasy is thought to describe the British medieval period, albeit with dragons and magic, but a more accurate description would be that post-1960s epic fantasy is influenced heavily by J.R.R Tolkien, whose irritation with industrialization and what he called “the robotic age” are palpable in his idealized version of rural life as represented in the Shire. In an interview with the International Socialism Journal, China Mieville states that:

You…have to remember that many works within that tradition question or undermine its more conservative aspects. However, it is true that the hold of that conservatism is strong in the genre, and it’s also true that that particular post-Tolkien stream is what most people these days mean when they talk about ‘fantasy’.

It would be unfair to point exclusively at Tolkien for his long-lasting influence on epic fantasy when the genre’s heritage has also been influenced by commercial considerations. Between 1969 and 1974, Ballantine re-issued around seventy classic fantasies in their Adult Fantasy series and published a number of significant new authors like Ursula K. Le Guin and Marion Zimmer Bradley. However, none came close to matching the commercial success of The Lord of the Rings.

In 1977, new Ballantine editors, Judy-Lynn Del Rey and Lester Del Rey, believed that fantasy fiction could become a real mainstream success if promoted properly. As an experiment, they took two new authors out of their slush pile, Terry Brooks (Sword of Shannara) and Stephen Donaldson (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever) and marketed them explicitly as books for people who liked Lord of the Rings. Both novels were immediate best sellers and set the stage for the fantasy genre’s commercial viability. The long tradition of conservatism in fantasy has partially been the result of commercial constraints—editors know what’ll sell.

Mieville goes on to list a number of traits he associates with conservative ideology, what he also calls “feudalism lite.”

…[I]f there’s a problem with the ruler of the kingdom it’s because he’s a bad king, as opposed to a king. If the peasants are visible, they’re likely to be good simple folk rather than downtrodden wretches (except if it’s a bad kingdom…). Strong men protect curvaceous women. Superheroic protagonists stamp their will on history like characters in Nietzschean wet dreams, but at the same time things are determined by fate rather than social agency. Social threats are pathological, invading from outside rather than being born from within. Morality is absolute, with characters–and often whole races–lining up to fall into pigeonholes with ‘good’ and ‘evil’ written on them.

These labels pose a challenge to engaged writers and readers of the genre who love the epic fantasy tradition but do not necessarily believe in its innate marriage to escapism, and maybe don’t even believe in conservative ideology’s innate attachment to escape either. Mieville, for his part, has all together eschewed the rural setting so prevalent in epic fantasy and has chosen to feature heavily urbanized settings in his writing.

The conservative tradition Mieville describes is, of course, not the same as American-style conservatism and refers to British high toryism (similar to Canadian red toryism), an ideology which accepts the presence of class inequalities and traditional social stratification as long as society elites provide, through charity or government legislation, assistance to the marginalized. Key words: nobless oblige. Critics of High/Red Toryism describe the ideology* as paternalistic, as its justifications for social stratification have historically relied on a mandate from God. If ever you wondered about the rampant use of prophecies in epic fantasy, then consider its link to high toryism: birth is destiny.

Questions of free will aside, these prophecies often form the basis of what Joseph Campbell calls “the hero’s journey.” Hero leaves home, finds magical helper, overcomes trials, receives rewards. (I call this description the “plot coupons” formula, where the reader can cash in these coupons for a feel-good adventure. Hero finds magic cat; Hero finds magic sex; Hero defeats magic villain etc.) Royalty often provide structure to these quests, functioning as characters that recognize the hero’s achievements, set the hero on his or her quest, or punish the villain.

In her doctoral thesis, Kings. What a Good Idea, Pamela Freeman writes that in stories in which a king is the protagonist, we’re likely to see the oft-used “Rightful Heir” or “Missing Heir” trope. See: King Arthur, Aragorn, Harry Potter, Rand from The Wheel of Time, Eragon, and most novels that involve a young boy that leaves his home to embark on an adventure. On one hand lie patriarchal inheritance laws that govern the transmission of inheritance between male blood lines, an issue of justice and fairness that is familiar to most people, despite or because of its problematic gendered connotations. On a more emotional level, there’s hunger to belong and to complete a family, that the truth about one’s blood line and birth status is worth knowing and that without the truth the person will live a suspended life fraught with emotional anxieties. Conservative or not, this plot-line directly confronts our emotional anxieties.

The question then becomes why people living in democratic countries would be interested in reading books about social stratification and monarchy. Pro-monarchists (the real-world kind) usually defend royalty on the basis that monarchs represent all of their citizens and thus provide continuity and identity to a nation, whereas elected officials can only represent their constituents. (For those who say, “but…presidents?” most pro-monarchists live in constitutional monarchies that use a parliamentary system. Prime Ministers aren’t directly elected by the people.)

Freeman states that “tyranny has been replaced with an image of pastoral care, ensuring that today will be like tomorrow, protecting us from political machinations and…extremes of any kind.” She links a distrust of elected officials and desire for continuity with epic fantasy’s focus on “rightful kings.” Writers use kings precisely because they’re traditional, and therefore meaningful. Of course, the common image of a rightful king preserving the collective peace amongst his people is a historical judo-flip unsupported by an even cursory empirical observation but, nevertheless, rightful kings prance around and disseminate compassionate justice in epic fantasies with more regularity than they ever did in history and this has led critics to deride the genre as escapist because it’s not “real.”

But labelling the epic fantasy genre as unserious also stems from the 19^th century rise of the modernist tradition that undervalues story and prioritizes style. Traditionally, epic fantasy is told conservatively and is rarely experimental, omitting surprising shifts in time or point of view. This ordered narrative prioritizes story-telling by giving readers access to familiar non-experimental style, which consequently allows them to suspend skepticism (or to even believe, as Tolkien states in his lecture On Fairy Stories) without awkward mental breaks that would shatter the belief of the secondary world. In a much quoted passage, E.M Forster articulates the modernist position on storytelling, calling its relationship to the novel as “the backbone—or may I say tapeworm, for its beginnings and end are arbitrary. It is immensely old—goes back to Neolithic times, perhaps to Paleolithic. Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge the shape of his skull.”

The fantastic’s historical link to oral folk ballads and storytelling is fairly obvious, but this modernist disdain for its oral roots reveals Forster’s elitism: if it’s not difficult to read, then it’s not worth the reader’s time. This position, while also being classicist, neglects oral storytelling’s influence on knowledge. (I wonder about Forster’s position on university lectures.) This elitism hasn’t disappeared from modern publishing. In his famous 2001 essay titled The Reader’s Manifesto, B.R. Meyers writes that fast-paced stories written in un-affected prose may be deemed “an excellent read” or a “page-turner,” but “never literature with a capital L.”

The modernist backlash comes on the heels of the Victorian period’s Arthurian resurgence, a shift created by popular writers like Walter Scott, Alfred Tennyson, and William Morris. Tolkien was especially keen on Morris’ romances, stating that “other stories have only scenery; his have geography.” We have Morris to thank (and not sarcastically!) for the creation of Tolkien’s maps, revolutionary at the time of their publication and now staples in nearly every epic fantasy novel. It bears noting that even during their lifetimes, authors like Walter Scott were accused of prettifying history and creating a market for nostalgia. Mark Twain wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court as a reaction to Scott’s writing. Twain writes:

Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote.

I hear protests in the background. “But what about Ursula K Le Guin? What about the Hugo Awards, whose organizers have been keen to diversify the fantasy genre?” That’s exactly it—there’s nothing innate about epic fantasy that requires its marriage to conservative philosophy. (And even Mieville doesn’t believe Tolkien’s influence has been totally negative.) In fact, fantasy is uniquely positioned to play with radical ideas.

Radical, of course, is not the same thing as realistic. In reaction, or perhaps in retaliation, to critics who accuse fantasy of being unrealistic, a sub-genre of fantasy called “grimdark” has emerged featuring grittier and darker storylines. Joe Abercombie, arguably the posterboy of grimdark fantasy, writes “[p]ortraying your fantasy world in a way that’s like our world? That’s only honesty.” Even fantasy that is not officially “grimdark” bears traces of the shift from shiny and clean to gritty and dirty. However, writing recently on the movie Lincoln, Aaron Bady ushers in a glorious takedown of those who equate grittiness with reality.

First and foremost, it uses a realist aesthetic to make it seem like compromising cynicism is realistic. Form becomes content: it shows us the world as it “really” is by adding in the grit and grain and grime that demonstrate that the image has not been airbrushed, cleaned up, or glossed over, and this artificial lack of artifice signifies as reality…They don’t mean “accuracy,” because that’s not something most people could judge; they mean un-glamorized, un-romanticized, dark…

But, of course, we’re not. We’re just seeing a movie whose claim to objective accuracy is no less artificial than the filters by which an instagram takes on the nostalgic glow of a past that was never as overexposed and warm as it has become in retrospect. And when we take “gritty” for “realism,” another kind of “realism” gets quietly implied and imposed: the capitalist realism by which ideals become impossible and the only way things can get done is through compromise and strategic surrender. Anti-romanticism is all the more ideological because it pretends to have no ideology, to be the “plain truth” that demonstrates the falsity of romantic visions.

Whether a story is romantic or gritty is hardly a measure of reality or progress—Game of Thrones is very conservative despite its grittiness, after all. In either case, I’m not sure when novelists started conflating “realistic” with “relevant” or “truthful.” Employing a realistic aesthetic is not something fantasy should necessarily aspire to be, nor does a realistic aesthetic make a novel meaningful. Regardless of literary tradition, most writers are dedicated to sincerely lying. Particularly useful to this discussion is Le Guin’s introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness where she argues that writers “go about it [telling the truth] in a peculiar and devious way…and telling about these fictions in detail and at length…and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That’s the truth!” Generic literary novels also play with the truth, and arguments that literary novels are “realistic,” as though they are not bound by ideological constraints and a particular worldview, are fairly humorous. Epic fantasy is a massive meaningful lie/truth.

In Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, Rosemary Jackson describes fantasy as a “literature of desire” which works to undermine cultural constraints, as a subversive manifestation of the forbidden and taboo, and as an act of imagination that undermines the world. Jackson, of course, also believes that, of all things, The Lord of the Rings is a failed fantasy because it’s sentimental and nostalgic and would rather define the book as a faery romance. However, putting aside the obsession with trying to define epic fantasy (for some academics will insist that there are differences between “high” and “epic” fantasy, while others will tell you that there’s no difference between fantasy and science fiction—drowning in a quagmire is not on my bucket list), Jackson rightfully points out the awesome potential of fantasy to play with the unacceptable.

Tolkien, for his part, argued that fantasy recognizes reality, but didn’t need to be confined by it. “For creative fantasy is founded upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun; on a recognition of fact, but not a slavery to it.” Even in conservative-minded fantasies, the opportunity to subvert expectations exists. That’s why, to return to our intrepid NYT reviewer, homogenizing the medieval period as entirely regressive and unconcerned with moral questions is unhelpful and inaccurate.

Chronology is not an indicator of progress. The term medieval is pejorative, often used as a synonym for unenlightened (for what came afterwards?) and anti-intellectual, even though the period’s philosophical contributions still affect us today. If we want to talk about “realistic” warfare, then how can we ignore Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine’s contributions to Just War Theory? Today, we see so-called history used as a slight of hand to give books a carte blanche against criticism. “That’s just how it was back then,” a period defined as anything pre-1950s if judged by fan conversations on the interwebz. Unfortunately, these excuses homogenize history and ignore its radical and not-so-radical thinkers who would protest at, say, the harshness of contemporary life. Who could forget Thomas More’s Utopia, the Renaissance book that birthed the utopian and dystopian novel, subgenres dedicated to undermining the status-quo but, according to the it’s-only-entertainment brigade, born in a period with allegedly unquestionable moral absolutes that cannot be addressed in entertainment. More’s Utopia bends, challenges, and re-imagines the realities of his day more honestly than many fictions claiming objectivity. While most wouldn’t classify Utopia as an epic fantasy work, the point still applies: many imitations of historical time periods aren’t realistic even when they claim to be, but even if they were, what does that have to do with meaning? Literature must do more than imitate.

These subversions also occur in the Arthurian canon, the prototypical conservative epic fantasy. When BBC’s Merlin hired Angel Coulby, a mixed-race actor, to play Guinevere, the fan reaction was divided by those who argued that a black Guinevere couldn’t exist in the medieval period, that her presence was anachronistic, and those who believed that the mere act of casting Coulby was revolutionary. It’s saddening that a medieval text is potentially more progressive than some modern fans who shout down calls for diverse representation. Two Moorish knights were members of the Round Table and, lest we forget, the Green Knight was actually green skinned in early versions of the tale. But here again, we have an erroneous view of the medieval period as disconnected from the rest of the world. Here again we see people use the term “reality” to claim that an idea is objective when it’s actually ideological.

Despite its conservative nature and the fact that it happened “back in the day,” the Arthurian cannon isn’t silent on gender roles either. In 1911, Silence was discovered in England, a 13th century epic poem that forms part of the Arthurian canon and was originally written in French. The main protagonist is Silence, a girl who is raised as a boy due to King Eben’s declaration that women cannot inherit property. Nature and Nurture are personified in the poem, and take turns debating whether gender is either innate or socialized. Can Silence successfully become a man? Though Silence contains a number of problematic elements, the fact that epic fantasy was discussing gender in the 13th century should be enough evidence to dispel the myth that epic fantasy is escapist and unconcerned with the human condition simply because it does not follow our world’s physical laws.

Furthermore, despite commercial tendencies to sideline characters of colour and systemic authorial failures to incorporate people of colour in their work, Gregory Rutledge, writing specifically on African-American literature but also on themes that can be extended to other minority groups, states that the fantastic tradition is perfectly situated to discussing themes of otherness. “Otherness and the otherworld phenomenon of both fantasy and futurist fiction is something with which many persons of African descent may identify. Relegated early to the position of the exotic Other, Africans and their descendants have been marked as primitive for centuries.”

He goes on to relay that while Samuel Delaney could be considered the first self-described African-American speculative fiction author (Delaney eschews the term “fantasy”—but we’re not going there), elements of fantasy nevertheless manifest themselves in African-American literature before Delaney’s debut and even make an appearance in Frederick Douglass’ autobiography. After Douglass was whipped for the first time, he received a root from a fellow slave to evoke spirits to ward off further whippings. Though Douglass unequivocally states that this act was superstitious nonsense, he also admits that no one whipped him ever again. Here we have an example of the fantastic being evoked in discussions of physical freedom, maybe ambivalently by Douglass but with certainty by the fellow slave who offered him the root. Escapist? To paraphrase Terry Prachett, jailers hate escapism.

Even the most formulaic epic fantasy novel plays with the author’s desire, and it is therefore chained by human emotion to the so-called real world–and so it becomes an acceptable target of social criticism or praise. Criticisms targeting epic fantasy’s relevance to the human condition are uncharitable and as the genre gains more traction on television networks, new and old fans are deflecting criticisms of their most entertaining shows by borrowing the old elitist line that fantasy is irrelevant and thus immune from rigorous analysis. We’ve been rather unfair to a genre that can shape reality to its will. Creators do not escape from reality, but bend it to suit a particular idea or agenda and that, for me anyway, has always been the lure of epic fantasy.

*I do not use “ideology” as an insult. Everyone operates through ideology, on both left and right.

About the Author: Sarah is still waiting for her six-figure advance. In the meantime, she acts as a guest lecturer at Chernivtsi National University (that’s in Ukraine) in Canadian Politics. She’ll soon return to Canada –where winter is ALWAYS coming— to begin her PhD at McMaster University. You can follow her on twitter @sarahshoker.

The Good Boromir

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

I’ve written a couple of posts about ways in which Peter Jackson stumbles in his treatment of Tolkien. Basically, these criticisms come down to volume; Jackson tends to want to turn it all the way up all the time. Tokien’s a pretty slow-going — or, if you’d prefer, boring — writer in a lot of ways, and the slowness and the boringness is central not just to the form and experience of the novels, but to their themes. Tokien is someone who, like the Ents, wants to sit back in some wooded glade and tell you the names of everything. He likes being slow, he likes being boring — which is to say, there’s a lot of room in his adventure novels for the appreciation of the joys of having nothing in particular happen. The way his narrative continually stalls out is central to the novels’ rejection of violence — a rejection which is ambivalent, but in many ways determinative. Jackson can understand and rejoice in Tolkien’s battle scenes (as Tolkien does himself) but not in Tolkien’s various numerous nothing scenes. The films, therefore, are garish and loud and busy all through, embracing Tokien’s flash and fire and drama, but not his long, slow, Treebeard-like pauses.

There are a couple of instances, though, where I think Jackson’s version is better than Tokien’s. One of the most noticeable of these is in the character of Boromir.

In the Fellowship of the Ring (which I’ve just about finished reading to my son), Boromir — like most characters in the novel, with the exception of Frodo and perhaps Sam and Bilbo — is not given a whole lot in the way of subtle characterization. We learn that he is very strong and proud, and also that he’s strong and not especially trusting, nor, perhaps, trustworthy. He helps the company by plowing through snow with his body when they’re trapped on the mountain. He disagrees with Gandalf and Aragorn about the path the company should take. He boasts about Minas Tirith and the strength of men. And that’s kind of it. He doesn’t become friends with any of the company. For that matter, he doesn’t become friends with the reader. He’s a mighty, proud man, off there being mighty and proud, and then he tries to take the ring from Frodo like a dickhead, and then he dies mightily and proudly in battle. And overall it’s just hard to care that much.

The film, though, is quite different. In part, this is Sean Bean’s doing; he’s an incredibly charismatic actor, and he gives Boromir a jaunty, frat-boy, devil-may-care charm for which the book offers no textual warrant at all. But the writers, who commit many an atrocity to Tokien’s text, here also surpass him. There’s a wonderful scene where Boromir is teaching Merry and Pippin and (I think) Sam to swordfight in which they all end up together laughing and rolling on the ground. And there’s also a scene after they’ve left Moria, where the Hobbits are grieving for Gandalf’s death, where Boromir begs Aragon to give them a minute to recover themselves. In the books, his questioning of the leadership is almost always based on ignorance, or stubbornness; here, instead, it’s based on sympathy and care for his companions.

There are other little moments too. The writers split up Boromir’s speech at the end of the book; part of it, where he speaks of the ring as a little thing, and wonders why it holds such power over them, is delivered on the journey. The ring has come loose, and Boromir picks it up by its chain and gazes at it and addresses it, before handing it back to Frodo, cheerfully declaring “I care not!” as he ruffles Frodo’s hair. That “I care not,” in Tolkien (uttered when Frodo won’t show him the ring) comes across as sinister; a man trying to deceive. Sean Bean’s reading, though, sounds more like a man trying to deceive himself without even knowing he’s trying to deceive himself.

The earlier moment with the ring also makes it more responsible for Boromir’s corruption; it’s almost like it’s gunning for him. And the scene where he tries to take it from Frodo…again, in the book, Boromir was never all that pleasant to begin with, so it’s just an intensification of his unpleasantness. In the film, though, Bean manages to show Boromir’s corruption as the flip side of his virtues; his boisterous courage turned into aggression; his mercurial good cheer turned into petulance. It’s a virtuoso performance of a good man doing wrong.

The script also adds a level to Boromir’s character that is almost completely absent in the book; his relationship with Aragorn. In the book, the two men are mostly in sync; Boromir wants to go to Minas Tirith to aid the city, and Aragorn (as the returned king) plans to join him (though after Gandalf falls he worries he should go with Frodo instead). In the film, though (thanks no doubt to Peter Jackson’s need for more and more drama) Aragorn is deeply mistrustful of men (including himself), and wants nothing to do with the kingship. Boromir is at first resentful of Aragorn’s position (which will displace his father’s line of stewards), and angry at Aragon’s mistrust. But as he grows to know Aragorn, he changes — and as Aragorn grows to know Boromir, he changes too, drawing faith in men and rekindling his love of Minas Tirith from Boromir’s faith and love. At Boromir’s death, Aragorn vows, for the first time, to defend Minas Tirith — and Boromir, for the first time, pledges his loyalty. “I will not let our city fail,” Aragorn says, and Boromir repeats it with a kind of desperate satisfaction. “Our city…our city!” His final words — “I would have followed you, my brother; my captain; my king” — are, then, in many ways, the conclusion of a love story — a bittersweet consummation, with Boromir finally embracing the future he will never see. The scene always makes me cry…as opposed to his final words in the novel the Two Towers (“Farewell, Aragorn! Go to Minas Tirith and save my people! I have failed.”) which pretty much just makes me shrug.

It’s interesting, perhaps, that not only is the Boromir arc one of the few things that I think Jackson unequivocally did better than Tolkien, but it’s also one of the best things in the films, period. Jackson’s twitchiness and Hollywood instincts — his need to give Boromir something to do, his need to make a star appealing — get filtered through Sean Bean’s considerable skills and end up turning a dour nonentity into a nuanced character. If for Tolkien and more complicatedly for Jackson, Boromir’s strength turns to weakness, it’s nice to see Jackson, in this instance, turn his weaknesses to strengths.

Frodo, Drama Queen

Posted on February 9, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

We’re rewatching the Peter Jackson LOTR films with my son, and I’m also reading him (much more slowly!) the novels. So I’ve been comparing and contrasting a little.

I’d say that I still quite like the films. Peter Jackson is especially good at bringing home the terror and pain of impending battle…and of course the war set pieces are also quite spectacular.

There are definitely problems in the parts that don’t involve overwhelming dread or out and out carnage, though. You can see the problems that sank Jackson in the Hobbit — those being that he basically doesn’t trust the audience to pay attention unless he’s shouting at them.

In the second half of the trilogy, Frodo, Sam, and Gollum are supposed to travel wearily across Mordor with basically not a whole lot happening except the traveling and the weariness. It’s not clear why this has to be a problem precisely; there’s plenty of fighting and mayhem and tension going on elsewhere, after all. But Jackson and his writers just freak the fuck out, turning Faramir into an unmotivated antagonist here and having Frodo become a paranoid nutcase and mistrust Sam there.

The Faramir thing is stupid, but not crippling. Making Frodo turn paranoid, though, seriously undermines the heart of Tolkien’s story. Frodo is certainly weighed down by the ring, and it is certainly a corrupting force. But in the novels, he also stands firm against it; he suffers, and is bowed, but does not break. In fact, the suffering is, I think, seen as purifying — the ring wastes Frodo, but what is left behind is, as Gandalf says, a light, not a darkness.

Frodo is supposed to be, in other words, a Christ figure. Suffering, undertaken for others, ennobles him. The journey and the burden make him, not evil and weak, but wiser and more gentle.

Jackson, though, needs conflict; and so Frodo has to turn mean and really quite, quite stupid so that he can mistrust Sam and there can be fallings outs and coming back togethers and drama, drama, drama. As a result, it’s not really clear in the film why Frodo was chosen to take the ring in the first place; surely, after all, any random ringbearer could have turned into a paranoid nutcase. And with Frodo sidelined as a moral guide, the place of suffering and sacrifice in Tolkien’s world is also largely sidelined. The quiet nobility of the meek is central for Tolkien. But it’s something Jackson doesn’t understand or care about, and so, in his version of the story, and almost as an afterthought, he left it out.

The 3-D Gave Me a Headache and Seven More Complaints about The Hobbit

Posted on January 17, 2013 by Richard Cook

1. The movie spends over half an hour introducing the dwarves, yet doesn’t give a single reason to care about any of them. It’s hard to even keep them straight. I remember the king, the fat one, the old one, and the one with the stupid hat. Beyond that, I don’t remember them and don’t care. By any standard of characterization quality, this movie compares poorly with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. At least I knew what to think of Grumpy.

2. Somewhere in this great big world, there is a movie that successfully combines musical numbers, snot gags, and rampant violence. The Hobbit is not that movie. The plot retains the cutesy qualities of a children’s adventure, but with incongruous levels of violence. Though now that I think about it, this is familiar territory for a comics blogger.

3. PG-13 violence is remarkable, and not in a good way. The movie has decapitations, eviscerations, multiple stabbings, and a body count in the hundreds, yet there is very little on-screen blood and the camera never lingers on the gruesome consequences of violence. The Hobbit is too gory to be cartoonish yet too tame to be explicit. It’s the uncanny valley of violent entertainment.

4. The action scenes are not exciting. Several reviewers have noted the video gamey quality of the action, particularly the big battle/chase sequence with the goblins. There is shot after shot of indistinguishable dwarves killing indistinguishable orcs. Noah compared it to a “body count video game,” which sounds about right. While body count video games can’t be defended as good art, they can at least provide a base level of entertainment and a pleasurable empowerment fantasy. But watching The Hobbit is like watching someone else play a video game, which is never fun.

5. Every scene is about 10 minutes longer than it needs to be. It’s bad enough that such a short book was split into a trilogy. But there’s no conceivable reason why each installment has to exceed 2 hours. Though now I can’t help but wonder what sort of scenes were cut from the theatrical release. And what will be included in the extend cut DVDs? No doubt there are many more thrilling scenes of characters sitting around tables and explaining the plot to each other.

6. The film is tragically lacking in hobbit feet close-ups. Why even make The Hobbit if you’re not going to showcase hobbit feet?

7. To harp on the 3-D again, it adds absolutely nothing to the movie experience. 3-D is just a silly gimick, so if you’re going to use 3-D you might as have some fun with the audience (for a great example, see Friday the 13th part 3, which is all rats and marijuana and eyeballs in the third dimension). The Hobbit doesn’t have any fun with the 3-D, so it feels suspiciously like an excuse for theaters to jack up the ticket price.

7.5. Speaking of ticket price, two tickets cost me $38. Thirty eight fucking dollars.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Tag Archives: J.R.R. Tolkien