Fiction Friction: Fantasy Counterpart Cultures, Part 1

[Gary Oswald]

Discuss this article by @Thande here

 

[Thande]

Kind of wish I'd read the second Dandelion Dynasty book faster, as there's lots more fantasy technology in the last part I could've included in my previous article in this series.

 

[Hendryk]

Most Númenóreans turned to evil in their quest to live forever, culminating in the last king Ar-Pharazôn being seduced by Sauron into worshipping Morgoth and attacking the Valar. This resulted in the world being changed from flat to round, the lands of the Valar disappearing from it forever, and Númenor falling beneath the waves.

Something tells me that Tolkien's worldbuilding would have been improved by a better grasp of astrophysics. As in, being aware that planets are generally not flat.

As usual, one can compare and contrast with Pratchett, who totally owns the silliness of the Discworld's cosmogony.

 

[Alex Richards]

Something tells me that Tolkien's worldbuilding would have been improved by a better grasp of astrophysics. As in, being aware that planets are generally not flat.

As usual, one can compare and contrast with Pratchett, who totally owns the silliness of the Discworld's cosmogony.

I mean:

1). It's literally a pseudo-mythic history, so replete with things that objectively don't seem to make sense like that, much as actual myth and folklore are.

2). Tolkien actually did try reworking the mythology late in life so that the world had always been round and to remove the whole bit about the sun and moon being a fruit and flower of the Trees of Valinor and generally make things more cosmologically accurate, and while this period is interesting from a literary history point of view, it's also objectively a weaker set of stories.

 

[Hendryk]

I mean:

1). It's literally a pseudo-mythic history, so replete with things that objectively don't seem to make sense like that, much as actual myth and folklore are.

2). Tolkien actually did try reworking the mythology late in life so that the world had always been round and to remove the whole bit about the sun and moon being a fruit and flower of the Trees of Valinor and generally make things more cosmologically accurate, and while this period is interesting from a literary history point of view, it's also objectively a weaker set of stories.

The second point seems to imply that even Tolkien didn't think the first one holds up to scrutiny.

 

[Alex Richards]

The second point seems to imply that even Tolkien didn't think the first one holds up to scrutiny.

Well no, it's more that later in life he started trying to make everything fit more solidly with Catholic doctrine, sometimes for good reasons (deciding that he wasn't comfortable with some of his earlier ideas about the nature of Orcs and whether they had souls or not), and sometimes for reasons which didn't actually need altering.

EDIT: But also it's a pretty facile argument on any grounds because, at the end of the day, so what if the world is described as round or flat that's basically got nothing to do with how you develop or depict the cultures on it.

 

[Hendryk]

But also it's a pretty facile argument on any grounds because, at the end of the day, so what if the world is described as round or flat that's basically got nothing to do with how you develop or depict the cultures on it.

Which is why it wasn't very smart of him to paint himself into a corner by gratuitously going into detail about the cosmogony of Middle Earth, only to do retcons later.

This isn't something that can be said about a lot of literary works, but altering them to fit Catholic doctrine may well have been, in this case, a good decision.

 

[Alex Richards]

Which is why it wasn't very smart of him to paint himself into a corner by gratuitously going into detail about the cosmogony of Middle Earth, only to do retcons later.

This isn't something that can be said about a lot of literary works, but altering them to fit Catholic doctrine may well have been, in this case, a good decision.

No, not really. He got so worked up on how to try and fit the story ideas he still liked with the new cosmological framework that it ended up distracting from actually telling the narrative.

This was also entirely after LOTR had already been published so has no bearing on that work either.

 

[FriendlyGhost]

I've always enjoyed playing the 'match the fantasy nation/people to a real historical location/group' game, but I also enjoy it when the trope is subverted - a 'Roman Empire' which is confined to just a small area, to take one very basic example.

Blatant self-promotion follows...
I had some fun playing with the subverting the concept of the races of Middle-earth being representative of nations/groups/cultures (which they actually aren't really, as noted in Thande's article) in my entry for the 36th vignette contest, The Unseen Ring when I switched them all around to be from an absurdly nationalistic Japanese perspective. I included the Rohirrim (without their horses, yes, really) being made to represent Korea, the Nazgûl being Mongols and Orcs being Europeans, which I explicitly noted as shocking for western viewers.
I think I'd like to read something using similar you-know-who-they-represent-and-it's-not-what-you're-comfortable-with - but written by someone with some actual writing skill.

 

[Charles EP M.]

When it comes to the comedy fantasy-counterpart with Jingo, one of my favourite is the triple bluff with the Klatchian agents who deliberately dump a load of sand and Klatchian coins and other Exotic Foreign Signs around their Ankh-Morpork base, so anyone not bluntly racist will go "some idiot actually thought I'd fall for this racist hoax" & stop thinking there might be some Klatchians up to something. 71-Hour Achmed's point of "let us have the dignity of being scheming bastards too".

 

[Hendryk]

I included the Rohirrim (without their horses, yes, really) being made to represent Korea, the Nazgûl being Mongols and Orcs being Europeans, which I explicitly noted as shocking for western viewers.

I'm reminded of a passage in Journey to a War by W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, about British and American seamen playing football in front of a Chinese audience:

Hairy, meat-pink men with powerful buttocks, they must have seemed ferocious, uncouth giants to the slender, wasp-waisted Cantonese spectators, with their drooping, flowerlike stance and shy brilliant smiles.

 

[heraclius]

As I've said previously, I latched onto the 'Gondor is Middle-Earth's equivalent to Byzantium' idea when I first read LOTR at the age of eleven or so, and found the 'sub-text' of the book about the cultures that the hobbits (representing the ordinary Englishmen) travelled through if anything more fascinating than the main story. I read 'The Silmarillion' when it first came out, which explained more about the equally fascinating 'Atlantis' back-story of the people of Gondor and Arnor on the island of Numenor plus the First and Second Ages. Until then, the info in the Appendixes to LOTR had seemed tantalisingly short on specifics on early Middle-Earth. But the whole story of the 'earthly paradise ruled by the gods' in the far West and its removal from the physical sphere at the end of the First Age, plus the idea of a 'flat' world turning into a 'round' one, just seemed so far removed from any 'real' and scientifically possible scenario that I found it odd and unfulfilling - though it was presumably meant as a mythological / theological concept not a practical one. The idea of fitting in a Catholic element of the 'theology' in JRRT's more detailed later writings seemed as out of place to me in creating a 'real' world as the Catholic imagery in C S Lewis' Narnia- where I much preferred the 'straight' adventures with less symbolism, such as Prince Caspian and The Horse And His Boy, to the Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. It was well-written and clever - but too determinist and 'preachy' to me as a young reader. The less obscure symbolism, the better. But then I've always taken the attitude of a 'historian' with fantasy as a sideline , looking for a plausible alternative world, in my preferred imaginary worlds rather than taking to less realistic and/or 'symbolic' fantasy and theology, especially 'doctrinal correctness' (be it Catholic or Marxist) is fascinating but problematic given how much violence it's led to in the real world!

Tolkien's 'Mark of Rohan' terminology probably came from the original Anglo-Saxon linguistic meaning of the area of England where he grew up, the former AS kingdom of 'Mercia' - which meant 'The Mark' or 'The March' ie 'The Frontier'. The legendary or semi-real ancestor of their ruling dynasty, the 'Icelingas' (the 'people of Icel', the latter being an ancestor of their dynasty who supposedly came to England from NW Germany and ruled in the Midlands in the C6th AD), is cited in their genealogies as 'Eomer' - the name of a leading Rohan royal character and eventual king of Rohan in LOTR. The name 'Theoden', ie Eomer's uncle and predecessor as king, is the ancient AS term for 'king' or 'leader of royal blood', and the Rohirrim's term for themselves as 'the Eorlingas' , ie people of their first king Eorl, clearly comes from the real Mercian dynastic term 'Icelingas'. There's also the question of real English countryside creeping into the story - the Otmoor marshes near JRRT's Oxford as 'Midgewater marshes near Bree' which the hobbits and Aragorn cross en route to Weathertop plus the Berkshire downs' ancient stone monument 'Waylands' Smithy' as the 'Barrow-Downs'. As with my book which I'm writing on the 'real physical background hunt' for locations used in UK children's fiction, eg Enid Blyton and Arthur Ransome, you can see quite a bit of real landscapes behind JRRT's Eriador - and Rivendell is supposed to come from his 1911 holiday as a student in Switzerland, which also appears in his Misty Mountains trek in 'The Hobbit' (see his published letters). The 'Ents' seem to come from Welsh mythology.

I also found it a bit frustrating that some elements of the LOTR story were never 'tidied up' in the course of the narrative, such as the question of the 'giants' or 'walking trees' seen by hobbits in the Shire according to the gossip in the Bywater inn in the first chapters - were they the missing Entwives or not? And like others I found that the Jackson film trilogy left far too much out , with Two Towers too action-fixated and the whole journey to Rivendell in the first film cut back too drastically with many of the episodes left out.

 

[ShortsBelfast]

Modern fantasy is starting to incorporate technological change which is, I think, healthy in that earlier fantasy often happened in a fairly static unchanging world. In the mundane world, a lot of political, military and economic history arises from the arrival of new technologies and the ensuing disruption effects. Be it agriculture, stirrups, the horse collar, gunpowder, printing, the internal combustion engine...
What Hitler/his generals achieved in 1940 just would not have been possible (assuming equivalent French levels of military competence to those in 1940, obviously Bismarck and von Moltke did achieve similar in 1870 for other reasons) in 1840, 1904 or (actually tested) 1914. The level of armoured vehicle or military aircraft technology just wasn't there.
In a magical world it is reasonably rational to assume that some technologies would never get off the ground as magic would do the job a lot more easily and quickly ( gas or electrical lighting for instance), but it is also reasonably likely that metallurgy (for instance) would be well beyond 14th century sorts of levels as wizards could use magic to replicate the functions of (say) an electrical arc furnace. As soon as a guild of blacksmiths had enough money or an interesting enough problem to engage a wizard or a blacksmith had a wizard son/daughter...Likewise mundane medicine if magic could be used to see or sense the workings of the human and domestic animal interior at least as well as an MRI scanner.
And there would be parallel disruption waves every time a new class or category of magic or type of spell was discovered.

 

[Hendryk]

Not keen on allegory, Tolkien never used strict fantasy counterpart cultures

Except, as previously mentioned, when it comes to the Hobbits, who are absolutely the fantasy counterpart of English gentlemen-farmers.