These are my notes from the third panel session from MidMoot 3.

Nicholas Palazzo and Marie Prosser: Lessons learned from the SilmFilm Project

Stanley Kubrick called The Lord of the Rings “unfilmable”. What would he have said about the Silmarillion?  Nick and Marie are the scriptwriters for this TV series that will never be produced. They’ve made hours of video, including this talk, available on Youtube.  They started off with the obvious question: Why are we engaging in such an “Epic Waste of Time”?   Nick thinks we should expect one day a Silmarillion on theater marquees, despite the fact that lawyers, guns, and money will make sure it’s never going to happen.

The most interesting parts of this project to me are when they deviate from the written text.  For example, Aragorn’s mother Gilraen is an important character in their frame narrative.  She’s bound to disagree with Elrond fairly often about the proper rearing of the future King — how do you make her fight with Elrond all the time and still remain a sympathetic character?

I’m going to exercise blogger’s privilege here, and say something about the Silmfilm project. It’s too big!  They don’t make a movie out of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, they make a movie out of “Jason and the Argonauts”. I admire Corey, Dave, Trish, and their éored for even trying to do it end to end, but if any book was ever made for cherry-picking theatrical moments, The Silmarillion is it.

Arthur Harrow: Poetry in The Hobbit: Fluff or Exposition?

Like any honorable doctor should, Arthur began with a disclosure of his interests: He has no affiliation with any Ring manufacturers; He works with Gothmog’s personal-injury firm (injuring persons since the First Age).

This talk had a nice, simple thesis: The songs in The Hobbit are there to break us out of any pre-conceived notions we might have about elves, dwarves, goblins, and what not. Thorin & Co. sing their songs, and we know that they’re neither Disney characters nor Norse-saga characters. They love their works, they carry a grudge indefinitely, and they’re careful with the crockery.  The elves of Rivendell know what’s going on, and they don’t care.  The forest elves are hard workers who know about the outside world.  The goblins are “part of the military-industrial complex”. Their short words and onomatopoeia prepare us for their brutal, slave-driving ways. The Lake-men have an almost messianic hope for the future.

Monsters don’t have songs.  (I never noticed their absence until now.) This is a big difference between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.  We’ve never heard of hobbits before, so Bilbo doesn’t sing a song until the very end.

The new generation of Tolkien fans are probably going to the books from the movies.  They’re going to have a completely new set of incorrect preconceptions.  This role for the songs, therefore, is only going to grow in importance.

Graham McAleer: Contrasting LotR and Game of Thrones

Graham’s a philosopher.  He began by telling us about his latest idea for a monograph in the form of a website.  The subject is irrelevant to the conference, but it looks interesting anyway. (I’ve read a few chapters; for the subject matter, HTML is an excellent choice over print.)

He handed out the syllabus from a class he taught. Students had to read The Prince, Francesco De Vitoria On Homicide, Ferguson (XIXth Scotland) An essay on the subject of civil society [what is a “Knight”], and Karl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political. Our job was to tell us what we thought about that class.  We discussed:

• Capital punishment.  Game of Thrones is full of it. It’s clearly part of the law in Rohan. Faramir and Gandalf are dubious of its merit.
• Trials. They’re prominent in GoT. Aragorn tries Beregond, and Faramir tries Gollum, but none of the ludic elements of modern British or American trials are present in those cases.
• Knighthood. Merry and Pippin learn to become knights, in part, like Arya Stark.  Nobody in LotR is born to knighthood, like the Hound in GoT.

No great problems of philosophy were resolved.

Simon Cook: The language of the palantiri

Tom Hillman read the paper for Simon Cook. What can the palantiri do, exactly? They’re for far-seeing, which is emphasized by the fact that they were originally placed in towers, which are also tools for seeing a long way.  Gandalf implies that all the stones can see Valinor. They’re a link between the real world and Faërie.  They help you look from mind to mind like Galadriel can. (She’s from Valinor, too. The palantiri are stronger.)  The palantiri are associated with temptation. There’s a compulsion to them, that doesn’t come entirely from Sauron.

The last palantir is Elendil’s stone in Emyn Beriad, taken back across the Sea at the end. It’s replaced by the Red Book in the Tower Hills at Westmarch. This lines up neatly with the way myth stops being a part of the environment and passes into history during the Fourth Age.

Q: Galadriel’s hair inspired the Silmarils – could her mirror-trick have inspired the palantiri? A: Wooo! What a cool idea.

Q: is Galadriel’s mirror Faërian Drama? Prof. Flieger responds: The palantiri and the Mirror are all about temptation. Mortals are deluded by them, but it’s not clear whether the fairies are doing that on purpose. This made me wonder: temptation comes before using the palantiri, but it comes while looking into the Mirror.  Is that an important difference?

Laura Berkholtz: The origins of Nienna

This paper was read by Ed Powell.

A few properties of Nienna. Her realm is in shadow. Pity is in her heart, and weeping comes to her. She was the spouse of Mandos, but then became the sister of Manwe. By the time he wrote the things that went into the published Silmarillion, she’s the sister of Mandos. She does passive compassion, not active healing. She turns sorrow to wisdom.

Laura makes a comparison to two figures from older mythology.  One is Mary, Mother of Sorrows. Mary seems to be able to affect events on the earth. The other comparison is to Kuan-yin. She’s a bodhisattva who hears the complaints of the world. She also can affect the real world. (It’s not obvious how much Buddhism affected JRRT.)  Nienna, by contrast, doesn’t directly affect the world. The closest she comes is through instructing Gandalf before he comes to Middle Earth.

There’s a longer discussion in “Perilous and Fair“, by Janet Brennan Croft and Leslie A. Donovan.

Arthur points out that weaving the sound of mourning into the world doesn’t sound like a good thing. But all the acts that have really long-lasting effects are acts of pity. Note the Greek myth of Demeter, weeping for her daughter every winter. Necessary for the cycle of the earth.

Mike Therway: Color in the Silmarillion

This may be the most quantitative talk of the conference. He counted references to each color of the spectrum, and then a few others.

Orange doesn’t appear in the Silmarillion. It’s not an old word in English; we got it fairly recently from Arabic.  (I bet the Dwarves and the Orcs have words for orange!) There’s no purple or indigo, either.  Why not? Sharon hypothesized that “purple” is an ugly word and Tolkien didn’t like the sound of it.  Curiously, there’s a Sindarin word for “red-blue”.  I think Sharon wins this one.

Black is mentioned 84 times. (Is that all?) White has 106 mentions. Grey is ambivalent – usually good, but it’s the last color-word in the Silmarillion, and it’s sad.

Professor Verlyn Flieger was a guest of honor at MidMoot 3.  She didn’t give a formal lecture. Rather, she engaged us in a conversation about editing.  Her stories were fascinating insights into a world about which I know nothing.  Except for what Christopher Tolkien puts into the History of Middle Earth series, but of course he’s a unique case.

She consults with Christopher Tolkien frequently. Her general rule is to write down what’s on the page; let the reader decide what JRRT meant. But you can’t do that when what’s on the page is meaningless.  For instance, what if JRRT numbered the paragraphs of a lecture, but then presented them out of numerical order?

Tolkien’s legendarily bad handwriting is famous.  To me it’s an amusing anecdote.  To Prof. Flieger, it’s an endless challenge.  Many other things I thought I knew about J.R.R. Tolkien turn out to come from scribbled marginal notes.  If there are several versions, and only one of them has such a note, and it’s not the most recent version, do you include it?  What if the note is an IOU the author wrote to himself, to fix something later.  Do you fix it?

One thing I found amusing is that if you write a book that’s good enough to be translated into other languages, those are opportunities to fix things you missed. She called out the Dutch translator in particular for catching things that are inconsistent among editions. (Sometimes Dutch scholars scare me.)

We spent some time discussing “Faërien drama”. It’s a phrase from “On Fairy-Stories”. Nobody really knows what JRRT meant by that concept. (perhaps It’s a Wonderful Life?) It came up a few other times in our discussions.

Verlyn Flieger’s next project is editing Tolkien’s “Lay of Aotrou and Itroun“. It was published in a journal that promptly went belly-up, so it’s been hard to find for the last 70 years.  That has one big advantage: JRRT wrote it out legibly. Apparently it will be printed in facsimile, which will be interesting.

Second of my posts about MidMoot 3.

Jason Ray Carney: The real business of Bilbo, the dreams of Conan, and the Rhetoric of the Ordinary

Ten points for originality here – who would have thought to compare Bilbo Baggins to Conan the Cimmerian?

The take-away is that The Hobbit has clear dividing lines between the ordinary world and the fantastical world, but Conan stories don’t. Bilbo steps across physical thresholds. He’s startled by the differences he finds in Wilderland. For Conan, though, swordfights with fantastic monsters are portrayed as “all in a day’s work”.

The other thing Bilbo and Conan have in common is drinking parties. The Unexpected Party is all about defining individuals through their different appetites. When Conan is drinking in a tavern, no characters are identified. They’re all left in an undifferentiated blur to convey hostility and suspicion.

Corey pointed out that the distinction arises because Conan himself is the fantastical adventurer, walking around in a normal world. Bilbo is the only normal guy, surrounded by adventurers.

Kevin Hensler: Soteriology of Non-human Rational Beings in Lewis and Tolkien

I learned a new word – “soteriology” is the branch of theology dealing with salvation. If you’re not human, do you need salvation from anything? C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien both addressed this question after their fashion, and came to different answers. (no surprise there.)

Lewis ran through lots of possibilities for non-humans, and didn’t much like any of them. Narnians need salvation, or Aslan wouldn’t have been sacrificed. Perelandrans don’t need salvation because they’re prelapsarian.

Tolkien’s elves go to Mandos, but they don’t outlive the world. Kevin says they require salvation from death. Are they to be saved by humans, at the very end, as humans bring about the restoration of Arda? Interesting concept. Cascading salvation, as Jesus saves humanity, then humanity saves everyone else.

I’m not sure I understood that (isn’t damnation what people need to be saved from?), but I know even less about theology than I know about Linear A, so I won’t presume to challenge Kevin on it. In any case, it won’t astonish anyone to find out that JRRT was much more conservative than CSL on the question.

Laura Lee Smith: Evil Incarnate in Perelandra and Charles Williams’s “The Noises that Weren’t There”

Charles Williams only wrote a few parts of the novel he planned to call Clarissa. The parts he did write were published in Mythlore as “The Noises that Weren’t There”.  C.S. Lewis wrote Perelandra just before Williams started his project.

Both works involve an evil spirit taking human shape.  When Lee uses the phrase “evil incarnate”, she’s speaking literally.  There are a lot of parallels in how Lewis and Williams portrayed the concept: unnatural smiles; the eyes give the evil away; the bodies are like puppets with an amateur puppeteer in charge, gradually learning the tricks of moving like a human.

(Irrelevant thing I thought at this point: that’s like zombies. Zombies are no good at controlling human bodies, but vampires are better at it than we are.)

Williams never got to finish his murder mystery, but the setup gave us a lot of things to discuss about Lewis.  I loved the part of Perelandra where Ransom slowly comes to realize that he doesn’t have some rational, modern task before him. His job is just to beat the snot out of the Un-Man.  Literally to fight evil.  Lee points out that this is exactly what got asked of the Inklings’ generation in the World Wars: sure you’re an academic literary critic or a philologist or whatever, but what we need is for you to go fight the Kaiser with guns and bayonets in the mud.

My abstract has been accepted for the Mythgard Midatlantic Speculative Fiction Symposium 2016.  What am I going to talk about?  It’s not really done yet, but half-baked ideas are the soul of this blog, so here goes.

Applying geography to LotR worked pretty well. How do I extend this to other books?  Since Tolkien, it’s almost required for fantasy novels to have maps in them. Fantasy novels that include maps invite geographic analysis, but it’s rare to find an author who spends the effort to build the understory of a world to the extent that JRRT did.

In a nutshell:  Speculative fiction begins with world-building, so it ought to be the easiest genre to which science-based criticism could be applied. However, scientific approaches were invented for the real world, which is much larger than any one sub-creator’s imagination. How do I constrain the breadth of the analysis to a scope that is consistent with the author’s intent?

So my talk will show three examples of where geographical analysis gets you.  I’ll start with re-using parts of this summer’s project for The Lord of the Rings, in which geography illuminates implicit references in the text.  Then I’ll review Lyman Stone’s analysis of A Song of Ice and Fire, which runs aground because George R.R. Martin didn’t use geography for anything — Stone’s analysis exceeded the bounds of the requirements of the story.  My third example will be Tigana, by Guy Gavriel Kay.  Kay has lots of maps in that book, but doesn’t use geography for the story per se.  I think he’s using it like a website theme:  there are countless details about his world that don’t interest him; his maps and the references to them in the text give the reader permission to fill in any gaps with Renaissance Italy, and it will be fine.  There’s a tangible virtue to that – Kay’s story is the only one of the three that fits into a single volume.