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My talk from the New York Tolkien Conference 2016, revised and improved by the comments of the audience, is now available for anyone to read.
Updated in 2022: I discovered Tom Shippey has already noticed the basic idea, because of course he has, so I included a citation.
I have just finished listening to the Episode 14, the last of the Mythgard Academy classes on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. They wound up with a discussion of how Dracula evolved over the twentieth century, from the novel to Dracula 2000. Corey and Tom both expressed some surprise that the “Christian spiritual elements” of the films had gotten more pronounced over time, even though society became more secular.
This trend does not surprise me at all. I think they were misled by the word “spiritual”. I would, instead, describe the Christian elements in Dracula as “ritual”. From this point of view, in the novel, an ancient, supernatural being threatens modern secular society. To defend itself, our quintet of heroes (a cross-section of society) calls on Professor Van Helsing to drag out of the dustbin of history the rituals developed by an older society to defend itself. An exact analogy is the discovery of digitalis among old folk remedies, which was refined to treat cardiac disease in modern hospitals.
The religious ritual elements in the movies have been getting stronger because over the last half-century, Christian ritual elements are becoming much more prominent in American society. It makes good business sense that they should be played up more in the movies. (And of course, that is the only sense that matters to movie producers.) One example: Donald Trump, who has based his entire campaign on breaking rules, felt obliged to pretend to be Christian to win the nomination (the famous “two Corinthians” episode). Public obeisance to religion is one rule he dared not break. Another: After every mass shooting, every elected official sends out a communiqué about how their “prayers are with the families of the victims”. It seems clear that “pray” in this context means “do nothing”.
I suggest that anyone who is surprised by the growing importance of Christian ritual in Dracula movies over time has been misled because they are thinking of Christianity in terms of its moral or ethical teachings. If they think of it instead in terms of the inch-deep religiosity that dominates current American politics and culture, along with Hollywood’s natural attraction for superficiality, they will see two trends marching in lock-step.
P.S. Bram Stoker looks like a feminist (not proven, though few feminists would find any problems in Dracula) because we naturally compare him with the blatant sexism of twentieth-century Hollywood. Yeah, I’m kinda down on movies these days.
It is done. Fertig. Au fait. About 10 people came to my talk, which was one of three in that time slot, so I got my fair share. The audience seemed to like it. The level of glassy-eyed stares in the audience was gratifyingly low. Maybe I’ve learned something about talking to non-scientists since I last taught intro physics.
There was a sardonic remark during the opening plenary session about scientists who stick their noses into areas where they have no expertise. (She meant Fred Hoyle.) Thanks, whoever you were, for setting the bar low for me. Low bar = no pressure. (Trust me, that kind of thing has physicists rolling in the aisles with laughter).
I have a bad habit. Over the years, I’ve drifted into a presentation mode of putting graphs up on the screen and improvising the interpretation based on reactions from the audience. That doesn’t work well in a context where (a) they’re expecting me to read from a carefully-written paper, and (b) they’re not waiting to pounce on the slightest error in my Ansatz. Consequently, I said “um” a lot more than I should have. Next time, I’m just going to read the paper and see what happens.
In the question period, we had a pleasant discussion. Almost everyone had something to contribute. Kara Samborsky [1] pointed out that, while I’d been treating the parochialism of hobbits as a running joke through my talk, the Brexit vote seems to indicate that staying where you came from is a serious characteristic of the English. Her observation jibes awesomely well with James Cheshire’s results — the West Midlands (i.e., the trustworthy hobbits) had the highest percentage of “Leave” votes of any region in England. I thought I was giving a science/literature talk, not a current-events/literature talk!
One more “thank you” to everyone who came. Based on their responses, I need to make some tweaks to the paper before I publish it. The good thing about that is that I can give another presentation of the revised version. (In conformance with Arrow’s Other Theorem.)
[1] The blog takes no responsibility for misspellings of Slavic names in the Latin alphabet.
Now that I’ve recovered from my trip to the Big Apple, and the bottle of Pellegrino is half empty at my elbow, I have a chance to write down what I saw and heard at the NY Tolkien Conference 2016. I got to meet a lot of interesting people, and hear a lot of interesting ideas. Mission accomplished! The conference was held at Baruch College (part of the City University of New York), and the obvious joke was already made for me: When I registered, they handed me a rubber wristband reading “Baruch Khazâd”. Let the record show that I did in fact pass a short man with a long white beard on 24th Street as I entered the building.
Here are my notes on the talks I was able to attend. Bronwen put a bunch of videos online — Hurrah!
The Inklings were no scientists, but they were members of a generation that could take for granted a substantial familiarity with science among their audience. C. S. Lewis used current developments in astronomy to build credibility for his work, even when it led to some odd juxtapositions. My favorite is the fact that Narnia, which is geometrically flat in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, has correct stellar evolution above it in The Last Battle. Kris informed us that the stellar evolution part was brand-new science, just publicized by Fred Hoyle. Lewis used it despite his slight regard for Hoyle.
This is the second academic discipline in which I’ve been present for a Hoyle-bashing session. The thing about Hoyle is that his ideas were wrong as often as they were right, but proving him wrong is worth the effort even today. I learned as much physics detesting Hoyle as I learned admiring Einstein. (BTW, Kris, we certainly can blame Uncle Al for nuclear bombs. But I was of draft age during the Reagan Administration, so I’m more likely to say “credit” than “blame”.)
There was an entertaining discussion of lunar phases, too. They are correct in LotR, totally screwed up in the Hobbit. Lots of writers work astronomy into their stories; Kris pointed out that there are very few built around the theory of evolution. (Would Pokémon count, I wonder?)
Conclusion: The interplay between science and the arts is what we need to encourage. Kris has an acronym: “STEAM” studies instead of “STEM”. JRRT and CSL might approve. Since I’m working in an engineering job with a liberal-arts degree, I concur.
Diana Glyer calls the preface-writer a “resonator”. Resonance is a good physics word — it means that oscillatory energy introduced into a system at certain frequencies doesn’t dissipate. It feeds back into the system, so it persists for a long time. If energy is supplied at a constant rate, the oscillation of the system can become very large in amplitude. In particle physics, it can even lead to the creation of new things. This talk gave some explicit examples of JRRT resonating, and the new things that emerged.
Janet didn’t audibly structure her talk this way, but all four relationships between forewords and texts were there:
| relationship | Example |
|---|---|
| Text -> Foreword | JRRT is frequently an unacknowledged editor of a work, not just the writer of the introduction. |
| Text -> Text | JRRT wrote an introduction to Dialect of the Huddersfield District , which dialect later found its way into hobbit mouths. |
| Foreword -> Text | “Smith of Wootton Major” began as an introduction to MacDonald’s The Golden Key. JRRT wasn’t fond of the moral allegory, so he found his introduction turning negative in tone. That wouldn’t suit the purpose at all, so it became a stand-alone story. |
| Foreword -> Foreword |
The Red Book of Westmarch first appeared as a meta-fictional frame in the preface to the 1957 edition of The Hobbit. It later formed the backbone of the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings second edition |
The question session was a free-for-all, with the audience tossing out lots of other things Tolkien wrote that count as paratextual material. Janet is going to have to give another talk on this in the future, twice as long.
My auto-criticism is in a separate post.
Prof. Lobdell is the author of A Tolkien Compass, which I read in a previous century, and lots of other books which I have not. He talks about the Inklings in a friend-of-a-friend kind of way that made the whole room envious.
This talk was mostly about a collaboration between JRRT & CSL on a book called Language and Human Nature that was never written. I have to admit, I was kind of lost by his delivery. He seemed to be talking to the lectern, not the people in the room. But it was worth it for the zingers he slipped in. “Tolkien used words so precisely as to make them a pun,” was one of his own. One he took from the Inklings themselves: “Conversations with [Charles] Williams make me understand how the Inquisitors could have burned people. Some students are eminently kickable; Williams is eminently combustible.”
Becky is a student in the Ph.D. program at Waterloo, and it shows. She slings impenetrable academic jargon around like a master sushi chef wields knives. I wish her the best of luck getting her thesis approved quickly, so she doesn’t have to say things like “iconophobia” or “transmedial” any more.
She addressed her topic via the MMORPG Lord of the Rings Online. In particular, she looked at how it tries to scare you, even when you’re playing as one of the Orcs. For the “good guys”, fright comes from animal characteristics (fangs, scales, etc.) grafted onto a human form. When you’re an Orc, it comes in the form of verbal abuse from your superior officers. (You always have a superior officer.)
There was a long discussion following about how the corporate structure of the content owner (I hate business jargon, but it’s inescapable here) affects the structure of an adaptation of a story to a new medium. There’s something extremely interesting in there, especially since I’ve worried so long about how American intellectual-property laws seem to be strangling the arts.
Another question: does the cultural embedding of Tolkien count as an adaptation? I’m referring to the image macros, the YouTube mashups, the fan-fiction, the wisecracks in business meetings, and the hundreds of other references to LotR that you can find. Is there such a thing as crowd-sourced subcreation?
Genealogies are to characters what etymology is to language. This topic was the closest to what I was talking about. (Kaleena actually referred to my talk, a couple of hours before. Thanks, Kaleena!) Laurel and Kaleena’s presentation was a review of something Tolkien thought was tremendously important, even though it shows up only peripherally in the text. (Diana Glyer mentions that the biggest revisions in LotR were hobbit genealogies. !) It was half lecture (Laurel’s word) and half audience-participation trivia game.
The original Call for Papers wanted group presentations, not just people reading papers. Kaleena and Laurel are the only ones who gave the organizers what they asked for. The presentation was kind of weak on the “so what?” question, but everybody was having a great time so who cares?
This was my first shot at contributing to a conference in any role other than wisecracks. I could see that most of the other speakers were citing each other’s previous work. I did what I could, but this is going to take a lot more reading. Next year’s theme is the 80th anniversary of The Hobbit. Less science, more fiction. Looking forward to it already!
Brenton’s at it again. He has made a manageable list of canonical works, “for those who are inclined to soak in this great tradition.” I’m all for that. Let a hundred Harolds bloom. But it seems like missing the point of (a) lists of canonical works and (b) the World-Wide Web, if you make one without making a way to keep score.
Click the appropriate button for whether you’ve read the work (1 point), read part of it (half a point), or haven’t read it at all (no points). I scored 12.5. I resisted the temptation to give bonus points for reading things in their original languages.
I’ve mentioned my qualms about bringing science to bear on the world-building of a fantasy author. The Web provides a brilliant example of what I’m talking about. Lyman Stone knows about demographics and geography, and tries to apply them to Westeros, from A Song of Ice and Fire. It doesn’t go well for George R.R. Martin (a.k.a. “Railroad”, many years ago).
Martin is interested in the contention between noble houses, and contorts the world around the aristocrats as necessary to set up the scenes he has in mind. He hasn’t made any effort to ensure that there are sufficient agricultural populations to support the cities, or that the ethnic diversity of the population matches the speed of transportation and communications.
And that’s OK. The book he’s writing doesn’t need all that. But you have to be careful — you can’t increase your appreciation for a book by walking around the backdrops and looking at the hastily-nailed lumber and spilled paint. You have to stay on stage. Or, as C. S. Lewis put it in Meditations in a Toolshed, you have to look along the story, not at it.
Elegantly put, Mr. Lewis. Now, how do we define a coordinate system so I can place scientific disciplines on the proper axes with respect to a work of fiction?
P.S. Some ASoIaF fans who don’t read very closely laid into Mr. Stone’s analysis, and were duly smacked down in a follow-up post.
Writing from his perch above the Ice Bay of Forochel, Brenton has a proposal for ordinary people to sponsor humanities scholars, with expenditures beginning at zero dollars. As a good blog post should, it provoked a swift series of associations in my mind.
We’ve built things like the National Endowment for the Humanities here in the U.S. of A., but they’re chronically under-funded. The checkbook is under the control of people who want the agency to be as small as they can make it. But that point connected me to something else I think a lot about.
Depressing though it is these days, I stay abreast of macroeconomics. Since the financial crisis of 2008, the fundamental problem in the developed world has been that all the rich people want to sit on their money. The economy is sluggish because the demand for money is so high that the demand for everything else is too low, so people don’t have work. The interest rates that would re-launch economic growth (according to most models) are less than zero. But that’s not generally possible, so holding cash is better than investing it.
Now here’s where things get weird: in conditions like this, the way to fix the problem of too much demand for money is to print more money. And then you give it away to people. In some people’s imaginations, you just drop cash out of helicopters, but perhaps we can think of something less contusive. With a lot more money sloshing around the economy, that will generate some inflation, which is exactly what we need. The rich people (which includes sovereign wealth funds from oil-producing countries) will see their bank accounts losing value, so they’ll look for things to spend it on before it diminishes. That will re-launch demand, and put everyone back to work.
We’ve even gotten to the point that the old idea of the Universal Basic Income is coming to life again. It differs from helicopter money only because it’s a fiscal program initiated by the legislature, not a monetary program run from the Central Bank.
What does this have to do with patronage? (Oh yes, patronage. This post was about patronage, wasn’t it?) Universal Basic Income is probably a bridge too far in our current north-atlantic superculture. I’d propose instead a Universal Research Fellowship program. A grant of (I don’t know; I’ll pull a number from Brenton’s post) $25,000 per annum for anyone who wants to conduct research. Recipients would have to submit a prospectus that’s good enough to pass electronic review (which only checks for plagiarism), and produce an annual paper in the public domain.
Benefits: relaunching the economy; removing a bunch of people from jobs they hate; employing rafts of detectives to track the free-for-all in identity fraud; new golden age of the humanities.
Disadvantages: Brenton’s call to action has the advantage that it’s something that an individual can do, so it’ll probably happen much sooner than my idea. But once the robots take all the manufacturing jobs, collective action will be the only solution big enough to match the problem.
Several people were live-tweeting the proceedings at the C.S. Lewis & Friends Colloquium, and from them I learned that Sørina Higgins had described Lewis’s poetry as “metrically competent”. Sick burns from faint praise, all in a spirit of good fellowship. Well, I know a double dactyl when I see one, which led to this.
Higgledy piggledy
Metrically competent
C.S. “Jack” Lewis sat
Down with his pen.“Time to get on with it,”
Polysyllabically
Counting on fingers, he’s
Writing again
Brenton Dickieson recently discovered an unpublished preface to The Screwtape Letters that shows C.S. Lewis originally thought of them as part of the Space Trilogy (and incidentally making him the intellectual forefather of Douglas Adams). He gave a talk about it at the Lewis & Friends Colloquium, and has posted links to a recording of the talk and his presentation materials on his blog. It’s excellent; 30 minutes well spent.
There are three ways that talk is relevant to my project here.
The last one is really obvious, but there’s a reason the penny hadn’t dropped. This is a way of reading books that I turned away from, decades ago. Lots of books can’t stand the scrutiny. Even when I was a child, I had to stop myself from throwing a book across the room when I read a line like, “slow the ship down, we need to be in a lower orbit.” After I’d spent a couple of decades of school, it got worse. I was catching even authors who brag about their mathematical prowess (looking at you, Robert Heinlein) in physics mistakes. If I’d stayed picky, I wouldn’t have had anything to read! The trick to making it work here will be first to discern what parts of the primary world the author was using to convey meaning, and confine my attention there.
If I still had any doubts about how much we can rely on the persistence of family names, Matt Yglesias just fixed them. The article reports the results of a study of wealthy people in Florence, Italy in 1427 and 2011. The richest people today have the same family names as the richest people in the fifteenth century.
The original paper is by Barone & Mocetti of the Bank of Italy. More information is in a column from the Center for Economics and Policy Research.
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