Smoke and Mirrors

In his Guest of Honour speech at Mythcon 35 (2004), Neil Gaiman revealed his childhood response to Lord of the Rings like this:
“I came to the conclusion that Lord of the Rings was, most probably, the best book that ever could be written, which put me in something of a quandary. I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. (That’s not true: I wanted to be a writer then.) And I wanted to write The Lord of the Rings. The problem was that it had already been written.

I gave the matter a great deal of thought, and eventually came to the conclusion that the best thing would be if, while holding a copy of The Lord of the Rings, I slipped into a parallel universe in which Professor Tolkien had not existed. And then I would get someone to retype the book — I knew that if I sent a publisher a book that had already been published, even in a parallel universe, they’d get suspicious, just as I knew my own thirteen-year old typing skills were not going to be up to the job of typing it. And once the book was published I would, in this parallel universe, be the author of Lord of the Rings, than which there can be no better thing.”
(You can find the rest of this speech here.)

This speech, delivered ten years after the publication of Gaiman’s short story ‘One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock’ in the Moorcock Anthology Tales of the White Wolf, I find fascinating for a number of reasons. First of all, because it shows Gaiman’s range, even as a young reader; devotion to Tolkien often sits unhappily with an equal addiction to Moorcock’s albino hero Elric and his soul-sucking sword. Moorcock, furthermore, is an anti-Tolkien polemicist whose essay ‘Epic Pooh’ in his Wizardry and Wild Romance attacks Tolkien (along with C. S. Lewis) for espousing middle-class values and failing to rise above suburban sentiment and Winnie-the-Pooh-style language. Coincindentally, the book was republished in the same year as Gaiman gave his speech to the Mythopoeic Society’s annual conference: 2004 (it was originally published in the 1980s). Gaiman’s tendency to read very widely and promote what he likes to others is evident in various activities in addition to his writing, including writing a wide range of introductions to fantasy novels and working on the ‘Neil Gaiman Presents’ set of audio books at Audible.com. You can of course also read his ongoing thoughts at his journal.

Second, because Gaiman’s response to Tolkien mirrors Richard’s response to Moorcock in ‘One Life’; there, too, we see played out a reader’s desire to take ownership of the story and even to take credit (and remuneration!) for its production. I have explored these ideas in detail in an earlier blog (see ‘A writer maybe. Like Michael Moorcock’ posted on March 30th 2011) and their implications for understanding fan fiction. But the fact that Gaiman returns to them as the defining aspect of his childhood experience of reading Tolkien suggests that his writing may productively be read as an extraordinarily creative and diverse set of appropriations and explorations of both past texts and modern SF and fantasy.

Even in the Smoke and Mirrors anthology, for example, we find Gaiman drawing on and playing with medieval texts in ‘Murder Mysteries’ (headed up by a quote from a medieval mystery play) as well as ‘Chivalry’ and ‘Bay Wolf’, working with fairy tale and folk tale in ‘Troll Bridge’, ‘The White Road’ and ‘Snow, Glass, Apples’ and showing his engagement with H. P. Lovecraft in two stories, ‘Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar’ and ‘Only the End of the World Again’. Into this are blended a series of experiments with different genres, in particular the detective story.

The trick in each case is to work so creatively and so apparently effortlessly with the material that one easily forgets the sources and inspirations to these stories; yet they are never hidden. After all, these are ‘short fictions and illusions’. We are merely too distracted by the detail to see them, gazing at a few trees decked out with lights while an entire orchard waits to be explored around them. This is not a criticism; these stories show us ways of focusing on aspects of medieval texts, or qualities of modern fantasy, so that we can understand them in more wide-ranging and productive ways. Gaiman’s stories function as microcosmic refractions of much older stories and ideas, and in this they help us to look, think and see more than we otherwise might.

Exhibition on romance

As if specifically catering to your needs, the Bodleian Library in Oxford currently has an exhibition on called ‘The Romance of the Middle Ages’ which will run until 13th May. The exhibition has both manuscripts and other objects from the medieval period which can help you to get a fuller grasp of the nature and range of medieval romance. It also has a Routes of Romance strand which includes images and text from Wiliam Morris, Burne Jones and Rosetti and a section on Romance and the Modern World which features Tolkien and C. S. Lewis and discusses other fantasy authors (“Susan Cooper, Diana Wynne Jones, Philip Pullman and Kevin Crossley-Holland”) as well as referring to Harry Potter.


This is an interesting resource online (find it here) but also well worth a visit – and it’s a day out that you can justify as work! Entrance appears to be free, and you could take some time to visit Exeter College in Oxford too, where Morris, Burne Jones and Tolkien all studied. Enjoy!

On Fairy Stories

Some people have asked me if they can read Tolkien’s essay online, and I promised to post a link. So here it is: On Fairy Stories. This is a .pdf file so it’s easy enough to work with.

It is perhaps worth noting too, since we didn’t get to talk about it in the plenary session, that this essay was first published in a set of essays in honour of Charles Williams, edited by C. S. Lewis. Williams died unexpectedly before the volume came out. However, the piece had begun as a lecture given in 1939 and it seems likely that Tolkien’s developing ideas about fairy stories had been an ongoing source of discussion among the Inklings. The connections between these key writers of fantasy continued to be both creative and productive in ways which then became significant far beyond their own small group.

George MacDonald

Born in 1824, George MacDonald was tremendously influential in relation to the development of fantasy writing. He wrote a wide range of fairy tales and work primarily aimed at children, but also produced novels for adults – most importantly Phantastes and Lilith – which begin the shift towards the kind of fantasy writing that we see in the twentieth century. Both of these are haunting and enchanting works, though sadly a little too long to be included in our reading given the time we have this spring. We can, however, look at ‘The Carasoyn’ as it contains many of the features which became fundamentally important in the works of later writers from Dunsany to Lewis and Tolkien. Lewis, in particular, was a great fan of George MacDonald; he famously wrote a preface for an anthology of MacDonald’s works in which he acknowledged MacDonald as his ‘master’. Tolkien acknowledged MacDonald as an influence but at times was apparently put off by MacDonald’s tendencies toward the allegorical, something which Tolkien famously disliked.


You can pick up a copy from my office early next week, but if you would prefer to start reading ‘The Carasoyn’ sooner or online, you can find an electronic version here

Group work

Several years ago, while I was teaching in Dublin, I got the opportunity to join a varied group of colleagues – historians, classicists, modern language specialists – in an Old Norse reading group. Once a week we gathered in a seminar room and worked our way haltingly through stories full of complex sentences and magical names. It was slow work but great fun; add to that the pleasure of meeting new people at the group, not to mention our tendency to head down to the College bar every week after the session was over, and there are new worlds opening up in the texts and new friends with whom to explore them.


We were by no means original in our Old Norse group; in fact, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis first got to know each other in just such a group, started by Tolkien on his return to Oxford as a professor and named the Coalbiters (Carpenter 2006, 27). Like us, the group was made up of a varied set of people with equally varied knowledge and ability in Old Norse, but all with an interest in getting direct access to Icelandic sagas and that strange, ‘Northern’ quality they contain. Tolkien and Lewis became friends as a result (and because of their many shared interests, not the least being the works of William Morris and George MacDonald), and Tolkien showed Lewis some of his work after they had been reading Old Norse together for a couple of years; it was a version of his story of Luthien and Beren (Carpenter 2006, 29). Lewis rewarded him with a very positive reaction and so heard more of Tolkien’s writing.


Their friendship continued as they developed and wrote, not just as scholars but as readers with particular tastes that were perhaps not entirely in keeping with literary fashions of the time. As Tolkien put it, ‘Lewis said to me one day: ‘Tollers, there is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to write some ourselves’ (Carpenter 2006, 65-6). Their interests were pursued as part of a ‘literary club’ of writers who met in Lewis’s rooms and also in the pub ‘The Eagle and Child’ in Oxford from the early 1930s on and who were called the ‘Inklings’. When Charles Williams, whose writing hovered somewhere between the supernatural, the spiritual and the fantastical, was relocated to Oxford on the outbreak of the Second World War, in many ways their group was complete (although Tolkien was wary of Williams’s beliefs). You can read useful summaries of his books here. Williams was well versed in things medieval and medievalist; he wrote Arthurian poetry, such as that published in Taliessin through Logres in 1938, and praised his fiancée by declaring that she had ‘a face which some pre-Raphaelite should have loved’ (Carpenter 2006, 79). The Inklings read their work to one another and commented on it, offering approval, advice and criticism.

In this, they were displaying precisely the same kind of behaviour recently described of a group of fan fiction writers and, of course, of many others in other writing groups of all sorts and persuasions. What is interesting about the Inklings is the ways in which an shared interest in reading and writing literature which is now grouped together as ‘fantasy’ was promoted and shaped through the key members of this group, even though the work they produced was very different. For Tolkien, Lewis and Williams, that work was underpinned by a sound knowledge of medieval literature and culture which continued to influence what they wrote. And, in various different configurations, these were also fans of each other. Lewis was the first to read and praise Tolkien’s work while Tolkien helped Lewis get published by recommending Out of the Silent Planet to his own publisher. Lewis wrote what was effectively a ‘fan letter’ – his first ever – to Williams about The Place of the Lion, only to discover that Williams had equally strong feelings about Lewis’s academic book (still recommended reading for medievalists) The Allegory of Love: ‘It has never before happened to me to be admiring an author of a book while he at the same time was admiring me’ wrote Williams back to Lewis (Carpenter 2006, 99). For these three writers, their relationships with the past, especially the medieval past, and each other were of primary importance; between them they produced some of the most important fantasy novels yet written, and had a huge effect on the development of fantasy as a genre.


Bibliography


Humphrey Carpenter (2006). The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Their Friends (London: Harper Collins)


For a huge range of web resources on the Inklings, see those amassed by the Journal of Inkling Studies

Middle Earth is all around you

We’ve already mentioned Burne-Jones’s connections with Birmingham, and that Tolkien grew up here. In fact, it appears that Birmingham and its surroundings contributed enormously to the landscapes of Middle Earth. For a summary of the key areas, go here. For a better look at the University in its earlier days, see here. The key buildings of the University were, of course, being built while Tolkien was growing up in Birmingham. If you’ve never thought of Old Joe as Orthanc before, it’s worth taking a moment to consider it…

‘Quite the most precious gift’

This is what Ruskin called a set of drawings by Burne-Jones, which Ruskin included in the resources he assembled for teaching at his Oxford Drawing School. This collection was incorporated into the Ashmolean in the twentieth century and you can now explore it in digitised form as The Elements of Drawing: John Ruskin’s Teaching Collection, images and catalogues including his notes and instructions.

Ruskin’s collection reveals much about his interests and priorities in relation to art, including his ongoing preoccupation with the Gothic style in architecture and the art which was influenced by it and in turn represented it further. It also reminds us that Ruskin was also very much a ‘fan’ of the Pre-Raphaelites, whose work embodied all that he most valued and admired. These drawings, in particular, show how even a classical subject – here William Morris’s retelling of the story of Cupid and Psyche from the Metamorphoses of Apuleius – could be recast in the mould of Pre-Raphaelite preoccupations with the medieval. It could also be placed within a spectrum of subjects which ranged from the biblical to the Arthurian without appearing out of place. In this example winged Cupid, though far from angelic, is very much in the mould of Burne-Jones’s numerous angels; compare this one or this. Indeed, apart from the rather revealing state of Psyche’s clothing and her sleeping form, this picture is rather reminiscent of Christian annunciation scenes, including the one that Burne-Jones himself painted. In such scenes Burne-Jones’s medieval aesthetic, reinvented and reshaped to the needs and interests of the mid to late nineteenth century, is clearly evident.

In inspiring, encouraging and then promoting the work of the Pre-Raphaelites, Ruskin helped to make clear the lines of connection between them, and between their art and the Gothic architecture which he had described so enthusiastically. Arguably, Ruskin already belonged to a wide-ranging fandom for medieval architecture, comprising those people who studied it, wrote about it, and designed and created new buildings according to its forms and printicples. With Burne-Jones and the Pre-Raphaelites in particular, already fans of such architecture, came its development into a recognisable and distinctive form of painting.

Oh, and while we’re making connections, C. S. Lewis (a great fan of William Morris) also wrote a version of the story of Cupid and Psyche. His novel, published in the 1950s, was called Till We Have Faces.