Be BRAVE and TRUE

my twitter feed is getting down on ol' jrrt, which is getting my goat

i was going to argue about how tolkein-derivative doorstopper fantasy is different from tolkein's writing, so would people please fucking step off.  then i got distracted and wrote instead a sprawling ramble about tolkein's deliberate metatextuality.

one of my favorite things to imagine about tolkein's universe is working out who's writing down the stories for each book.  the silmarillion is a history made by the elves and comes along with all the elf religion.  the silm happens on an elf time scale: a gazillion years of history, from the start of time through the end of two ages. 

lotr is, i think, a mashup of histories from men and hobbits.  fotr has a lot of hobbit worldview running through it.  tom bombadil is part of the mythology of hobbits, not elves.  he doesn't work in the world because the definitive texts we read about middle earth were put down by elves, and the elves ascribe to a very specific cosmology and historical narrative.  (one that, by chance, features elves extremely prominently.) barrow wights!!! everyone should talk more about the barrow wights, who are so strikingly within the purview of men and SO TERRIFYING.  i have no idea how the silmarillion would describe a barrow wight, or if barrow wights could exist in a story told by elves, or by hobbits, or by dwarves.

the hobbit is particularly hobbit-y, and also narrated by one person instead of by a large host of sources.  bilbo tells this tale how he wants, without corroborating evidence to make it less, um, bilbo-congratulatory.  plus, without anyone to fold it into the more global mythology of middle earth, the story feels wildly disjointed from what tolkein's world is "really" like, because bilbo doesn't know shit about elf gods and wants to tell a fun story more than he wants to further the massive epic of history.  of course, the hobbit is also different from the rest of lotr and the red book because tolkein wrote it first, and for his children.  but it's more fun, to me, to play pretend about it, and in my fandom heart i believe tolkein wanted everyone to play pretend as well, and imagine that his stories had the same kind of cultural history as oral tales like beowulf.

lotr nerds want to make it clear that gandalf is actually a cool elf-angel (the maiar) and not actually an old wizard guy.  but that comes from the silmarillion, which is an elf book.  in the hobbit there's a whole bunch about other wizards, blue ones and a brown one and so on, and i don't know if it ever becomes clear how those fit in with what the silmarillion lays out.  (someone who is a bigger nerd than me probably knows, but to me it feels like different cultures have different explanations for weird secretive dudes that bumbled around their world doing radical magic junk)

maybe other people think that tolkein's just covering his ass since he wrote down a lot of stuff and never quite decided how a lot of it should go.  there was a lot of unfinished stuff in his head, and he was always building and ret-conning and getting sidetracked by deciding to construct YET ANOTHER LANGUAGE.  but i like to think about it in the context of how history in real life does those same things.  to this day stories from history contradicts themselves based on who is writing the story down.  we find out a new thing and then scramble backwards in time to re-explain things that don't make sense now, given our better understanding of the world.  and we get distracted a lot and leave a ton of things unexamined and half-done, so nobody quite knows the truth anyways, just the scraps to either side and a couple plausible ways it could have gone.

smarter and better-informed fans than me have made all these arguments, but i like them a lot so here they are in my words!



thinking about this with respect to tolkein makes me also think about it in superhero comics.  they too have mythological stories that repeat themselves and self-edit and contradict constantly.  all the different comics runs have different groups describing their own history (the x-men and the avengers have very different views on how friendly and fair the avengers are).  are superhero comics metatextually related to orally-transmitted poetic epics?  FOOD FOR THOUGHTS

ETA that the twitter disc horse was actually about how like, duh obviously you don't have to have read tolkein to be a Real SFF Fan, but like all twitter it devolved into "i haven't read tolkein because tolkein is stupid, so THERE gatekeepers" and i just.  i can't.  i can't take these fucking people any longer, why doesn't anyone have a single interesting thing to say.