Commentary on some talks I heard at Mythmoot V. They were recorded; when the recordings are posted I’ll add a link here.

Lee Smith – Getting sick of it

Lee looks at sickness in two sagas: Egils Saga Skallagrímssonar and Laxdæla Saga, and there is no way I could have spelled those correctly without looking it up in her abstract.

Illness is housekeeping, as she puts it. It’s a way to get characters off stage, if the author is denying them death in battle. The only three ways to die are battle, sickness, and old age. This is something I’d never noticed before: no accidents? Nobody gets kicked by a horse, or gets caught in an avalanche? Maybe vikings thought those were comedy, not fit for a saga. 3 characters who die of illness pair certainty that their illness will be fatal with noting they’ve never been sick before. People in real life do this, too, but these days they’re frequently wrong. These guys want to establish houses, and keep watch over them after they die. They’re aiming for “post-mortem agency” (another gem from Lee’s unique idiom), an naturally their descendants go mad from the haunting.

This was a funny talk about illness and death, which I think is probably the right attitude to take when reading sagas.

Jennifer Ewing – The bitter watches of the night

Jennifer’s point is that there are a lot of parallels between Anne Elliot in Jane Austen’s Persuasion to Éowyn of Rohan in The Lord of the Rings.

To begin with, both women are stuck in similar environments. Home is where tradition and memory are kept. Going out to work makes you forgetful. What Aragorn says about Éowyn in the Houses of Healing lines up nicely. Both women feel walls closing in. Both women are neglected by the men around them. It’s not Éomer who takes Éowyn’s side, it’s Gandalf and Háma. Anne is isolated by her family and others, and spends her time taking care of an aging uncle. Sounds familiar. Éowyn leaves her people to live in Ithilien, in the same way Anne wants a mariner husband who will take her far away. Captain Wentworth’s letter is parallel with Faramir’s speech in the Houses. The two do disagree about duty. Éowyn sees it as a cage; Anne sees it as a source of strength.

Jennifer’s conclusion is that JRRT can write as good a female character as writers of mainstream fiction.

Well, that started a lively discussion! John Garth noted that Jennifer carefully avoided claiming that Anne Elliot was an influence on Tolkien’s character, but the idea ought to be pursued. The context of 19th century society informed JRRT, who actually mentioned William Morris’s The Roots of the Mountains as an influence. That book contains the transitional character of a woman who goes to war. Jennifer replied that women actually were going to war by 1944, and dressing in men’s clothes while they did that.

Kay Ben-Avraham wasn’t having that last conclusion. She says you can’t put JRRT on a level with Austen, without addressing the Smurfette Principle. Jennifer’s reply was that most of the male characters in LotR are just cannon-fodder; only a few are fleshed out as fully as Éowyn. She’s better drawn than Éomer, for example.

Alicia Fox-Lenz says the centrality of the female characters is what makes the legendarium separate. The true sign of a hero in LotR is that a character can heal, and sing, and cook, and garden. Not masculine attributes. Kate Neville backed her up, pointing out that the entire concept of hobbits is a sort of feminine embodiment.

Then John Garth made a brilliant observation: LotR is a story about men going to war, not a story about women. But there’s Éowyn in the middle of it, a female hero in a men’s story exactly the way Dernhelm is concealed among the host of the Rohirrim. Applause.

Jennifer said her talk was drastically abridged from its original form. The audience clamored for her to publish the whole thing.

Tom Hillman – Lame Sovereignty in Melkor and Man in The Children of Hurin

This paper is already on line (yes, of course starting with Plutarch) so I’ll talk about the Q&A. The first question was that lameness doesn’t mean the same thing to us as it meant to the ancients, where “ancient” means “before antibiotics, X-rays, and other effective medical care”. In the ancient world, everybody knew someone who was lame. Does that affect the meanings of how these stories should be read? (I was wondering this myself.) The answer is best found in textual history – which character gets lamed by the author? The first one to appear in the development of the story, or is the lame character a foil for someone else?

Kate asked another good question – who would want to be compared to Turin? The story of Turin is the only story about Men that Elves tell each other. Alan Sisto followed up on that by pointing out that Elves can’t escape fate, and they kind of envy Men their apparent ability to change the course of the world. Turin is interesting to them because he’s more like them; he doesn’t have the human talent for wriggling out of fate. Tom wrapped it up by saying that it was a nice complement to our human fascination with Elvish immortality.

Alyssa House-Thomas – Planet of Exile and the Frontiers of the Human

Planet of Exile is the novel that begins Ursula K. LeGuin’s Hainish cycle. She was trying out new concepts, and we can see themes partially developed here that will appear in their full form in the later novels in the series. Here, there is a conflict between a humanoid race and some marooned Earthlings, which has to be set aside as an invading force comes into view. This sets up a Romeo-and-Juliet situation. The two humanoid races can’t interbreed, which is only the most biological level of the exploration of the boundaries of what is human. There’s a development of touching, at the physical level. The top level is etiquette. Alyssa worked from the taboo on looking another person straight in the eye for a big chunk of her talk.

What interested me was the way Alyssa called out the use of light. The skins of the two humanoid races are different colors, and the light-dark contrast is a launching point for LeGuin’s Taoist inspiration in the book. As Alyssa put it, “light means building connections”. That’s definitely a way to get an old physicist to prick up his ears. Exchanging light signals is the core of special relativity. The Hainish cycle will lead us to the physicist Shevek in The Dispossessed, who overthrows Einstein’s relativity in favor of simultaneity. And touching is an electromagnetic interaction, accomplished by the exchange of virtual photons between two extended bodies. Could this have been intentional? Like Alyssa, I’m inclined to doubt it, but the commonality of language is intriguing.

Sørina Higgins ran a photo contest for pictures of her book The Inklings and King Arthur at Mythmoot.  I almost won.  Apparently visual interest and well-thought-out composition count more towards photographic artistry than bad puns.  Congratulations, Tom!

Sørina is collecting not-even-slightly-staged photos of The Inklings & King Arthur in a Pinterest gallery. I am honored to be included. Go visit – it’s changing daily.

Over on Twitter, Sørina requests suggestions for material about “how to give conference presentations”, which made me realize that I never wrote the round-up post from my initial forays into this world.

First, there are several things I learned the hard way from my physics career that apply just as well to literature:

1. Don’t talk about the research. Talk about why you were drawn to this question, and why the answer is so interesting to you. Enthusiasm is contagious. Sørina herself is really good at this.
2. Nobody ever walked out of a talk disgusted because it was too easy to understand.  The reaction you want from the audience is, “I knew all of that stuff — what a great talk!”
3. The parts of your research that took the most work are the most boring to listen to.  Polish them to a high gloss before you present them.  Make it look easy. As Castiglione said, “Practise in everything a certain nonchalance that shall conceal design and show that what is done and said is done without effort and almost without thought.”  [1] Michael Drout is awesome at this.

I’ve added since then a few more things to my list of reminders. They’re due more to the change of century than the change of discipline.

1. Find good talks and imitate their style.  When I was getting started, this one by Brenton Dickieson was an excellent model.
2. Don’t look at lectures by Olds.  I love lectures by venerable, distinguished scholars, but I mustn’t do that myself.  They earned the right to give those entertaining, discursive, highly-opinionated disquisitions with decades in the trenches. I’m still in the trenches. In literature, as in science, people will tell you when you’ve reached the heights from which a talk like that is welcome.  (The word “keynote” is frequently involved.)
3. “So what?” is the most important question. Make sure you know the answer to that question before you start writing. However, you are under no obligation to give the same answer when you’re done writing.

[1]  Yes, I tried to quote Baldessaro Castiglione to nuclear physicists. I didn’t end up as an Idiosopher by accident.