The Tolkien Society had its first-ever conference in the USA from the 9th to the 11th of May. They called it “Westmoot”, which my autocorrect is grudgingly coming to accept. It was in Kansas City, Missouri, in the conference center of the World War 1 Museum. The papers from the conference have been published by the Journal of Tolkien Research. Here are my reactions to some of the talks I attended.

Tom Hillman, “Turin was dead, to begin with.”

We’ve all been wondering what Tom was going to do for an encore. This talk was pitched as an early stage of his next book, about how Turin Turambar had a happy ending in The Book of Lost Tales. I’m looking forward to hearing what Tom has to say about Turin, because I just don’t understand Turin at all. What was it about him that induced people not to kick him out the door the moment he showed up anywhere? I know that “heroes” in the classical sense aren’t necessarily people who do good things, but Turin’s a long way out the other direction. Tolkien’s idea back then was that Turin’s death is the middle of his story, not the end, and that his afterlife is just as important as his life. That will help.

Anna Smol: Into the West

Tolkien’s Mythmaking and Dreams of Eärendil was her subtitle. I’ve slacked off writing this so long that she’s published her own recap. The line I liked best was “What we know about Eärendil is all palimpsests.” (No one should ever pass up a chance to say “palimpsest”.) Verlyn Flieger gave a lecture entitled “Waiting for Earendel” in which she hypothesized that Tolkien deliberately left those stories unwritten. I’m going to have to listen to that. Anna kind of agrees and kind of doesn’t: Eärendil keeps showing up in other contexts, like The Lost Road, The Notion Club Papers, and Bilbo’s poetry, so for someone whose story was intended to remain untold, he gets a lot of telling. To which I’d add a thing that came across my Mastodon feed a while ago — Prince Hamlet of Denmark’s father was named “Horvendil”, according to Saxo Grammaticus, and that name is etymologically the same as “Eärendil”. Which sent me down a Wikipedia rabbit hole to the legend of Aurvandil , whose toe froze off so Thor threw it up into the sky where it became a star. Wikipedia says this is “difficult to interpret”, doubtless to make me feel better about my current state of understanding.

A couple of unpublished manuscripts

Jay Johnstone told us about “A Hobbit Dinner”, which was a shindig in 1958 at which J.R.R. Tolkien gave a speech, including a poem in Quenya and its English translation. He’s uncovered a recording, which he has been denied permission to publish. There was a lot of publicity around it, about ten years ago, which is kind of sad to read now. But he’s not forbidden to tell us about it. The part that struck me was Tolkien’s assertion that “The Age of Paper is ending, and the Age of the Gadget begins.” I knew not that he was a man foresighted.

Bill Fliss told us about something Christopher Tolkien described as an “Extremely Curious Dialogue” between Gandalf and Sam, in which Sam asks Gandalf whether he made the right choices in “The Choices of Master Samwise”. The most curious thing about it was that JRRT apparently wrote it simultaneously with the chapter, not when the Fellowship was loafing in Minas Tirith after the war. My opinion is that Sam did the right thing: Fate needs something to work with, and when Sam made all the choices, both to go and to stay, he was sure to give Fate what it needed at some point or other. I liked Gandalf’s observation that not all choices are between “ought” and “ought not”, or even between “better” and “best”, which is something system engineers learn fast.

Janet Brennan Croft: Woundedness and the Western Sea

We were surrounded by artifacts from World War 1, which makes it easy to connect on the one hand Frodo passing westward over the Sea to recover from his war wounds, and on the other hand, soldiers from the Western Front being loaded into hospital ships in France to sail westward to Britain. This is another case of a myth leaking out from Middle-earth to other works. In a draft of “The Fall of Arthur”, Lancelot also sails to Avalon with Arthur for healing. The Sea is a semi-permeable boundary between us and Faërie.

Nicholas Birns; Freedom from History

This was a cool little talk about “Farmer Giles of Ham”. First time I’ve heard someone talk about it at a moot, I think. The Little Kingdom, which Giles ends up ruling, is a common theme in Tolkien. Little Kingdoms are too small to be of interest to big political actors, so they can wall themselves off from History. They tend to be landlocked, because a seaport connects you too tightly to the world. Like Switzerland, or the Shire. A fun note on etymology: “Farmer Giles” is ostensibly set in pre-Anglo-Saxon Britain, so the word “England” doesn’t appear in the story. But “Giles” is a Norman name — what’s up with that?

Nick had the best idea of the conference: The Tolkien Society has been asked to set up a physical location. The obvious places, Birmingham and Oxford, are unsuitable because Birmingham is a mess and Oxford is too expensive. Nick suggests Worminghall instead.

Brennen McKensie: Schrödinger’s Author

I went into this talk with trepidation, because I agree with Stephen Hawking: “Whenever I hear ‘Schrödinger’s Cat’, I reach for my gun.” But Brennen pulled it off. His idea is that Barthes’s “Death of the Author” idea shouldn’t be taken all or nothing. Each reader can get value from deciding for themselves what superposition of living and dead author they’d like to use. Considering who the author was can give some additional impact to the text via the reader’s emotional connection with them. It’s also useful for filtering out some extreme interpretations. Contrariwise, a dead author permits a broader range of readings. (His example was queer interpretations of LotR.) That broad range helps keep a work interesting to readers as centuries pass. Tolkien’s world is a long way from ours now, so these new readings are essential. But keeping a certain level of aliveness is obviously going to be needed. As Brennen put it, “In the sciences, we have ways to filter out wackos. In literature, all we have is other people saying, ‘That doesn’t make sense.’” And referring back to Tolkien’s life and letters can be a valuable tool for that.