Meditations on Middle-Earth by Karen Haber Page B
Authors: Karen Haber
Tags: General, Fantasy fiction, english, Literary Criticism, European, Science Fiction & Fantasy, American, History and Criticism, Middle Earth (Imaginary place), Scottish, irish, Books & Reading, Fantasy Literature, Welsh
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actually getting published.
Thus began the long, hard apprenticeship of the pen (read: Hell) that brought me to my present low estate.
7. Reading Tolkien allowed me to understand what was so downright hilarious about Bored of the Rings , which in turn opened my eyes to the wide-open land of opportunity for writing funny fantasy and science fiction.
8. Writing per se led me to try writing with the avowed intention of getting money for it. This meant I would have to learn how to get money from editors , and if you think this is an easy task you are either armed with a crowbar, you are someone named Big Rocko, or you are armed with someone named Big Rocko. My first professional fiction sale was, in fact, a funny science-fiction story with a strong fantasy element (“The Stuff of Heroes,” which appeared in the March 1983 issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine) , and that was it, the end of the road. I was lost beyond all hope of heaven to redeem.
But I got paid for it! And, having once tasted the fruits of victory (after I cashed the check and went out and bought some fruits, that is), I went back and did it again. And again. And again, and again, and again , and—!
So here I am and here I stay. Call me an ink-stained wretch or a pixel-packin’ mama, but the underlying definition’s the same: I am a writer, irrevocably seduced into the lush, steamy, torrid jungle of speculative fiction where even now I dwell, captive and content to be so. And whose fault is that, might I ask?
Tolkien’s. None other. The culpability rests solely with him.
Well, him and those elves. Mm- mmh !
THE RING
AND I
HARRY TURTLEDOVE
I discovered The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in summer 1966. I was seventeen; I had just graduated from high school, and was about to head off to the California Institute of Technology. I liked The Hobbit pretty well: well enough, at any rate, that I bought the trilogy to see what else J. R. R. Tolkien had written.
With The Lord of the Rings I was utterly entranced, and have been from that day to this. What struck me most about the trilogy was the astonishing depth of Tolkien’s creation. He had not simply imagined the fictional present in which his characters were living, but also a history thousands of years deep, as well as not one but several fictional languages. And what had happened in the dim and distant past of this created world kept bubbling up and remaining intensely relevant to the fictional present, in much the same way as Arminius the German’s defeat of the Roman legions at the Teutoberg Wald in 9 A.D. remains intensely relevant to the history of Europe during the century.
I read The Hobbit and the trilogy obsessively. In the year after finding them, I must have gone through them, appendices and all, six or eight times. This was, of course, my freshman year at an academically demanding institution. Falling head over heels in love with The Lord of the Rings isn’t the only reason I flunked out of Caltech. It isn’t even the most important reason. But the time I spent with Frodo and Sam and Merry and Pippin was time I didn’t spend—and should have spent—with physics and calculus and chemistry.
Nor was I the only one at Caltech caught up in Tolkien’s spell. There were about ten of us, three or four, as luck would have it, in my residence house. We would get together when we could to try to stump one another with obscure quotations, to seek to work out the meanings of elvish words, and to argue about things as abstruse and unprovable as how well a Roman legion suddenly transported to the universe of The Lord of the Rings might fare: of this last, more anon.
We searched through the books for hints about how the unwritten history of the Fourth Age might go as diligently as fifth-century theologians went over the New Testament for clues as to the nature or natures of Christ. I came to the conclusion that the chief evil power of the Fourth Age would be the Lord of the
Thus began the long, hard apprenticeship of the pen (read: Hell) that brought me to my present low estate.
7. Reading Tolkien allowed me to understand what was so downright hilarious about Bored of the Rings , which in turn opened my eyes to the wide-open land of opportunity for writing funny fantasy and science fiction.
8. Writing per se led me to try writing with the avowed intention of getting money for it. This meant I would have to learn how to get money from editors , and if you think this is an easy task you are either armed with a crowbar, you are someone named Big Rocko, or you are armed with someone named Big Rocko. My first professional fiction sale was, in fact, a funny science-fiction story with a strong fantasy element (“The Stuff of Heroes,” which appeared in the March 1983 issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine) , and that was it, the end of the road. I was lost beyond all hope of heaven to redeem.
But I got paid for it! And, having once tasted the fruits of victory (after I cashed the check and went out and bought some fruits, that is), I went back and did it again. And again. And again, and again, and again , and—!
So here I am and here I stay. Call me an ink-stained wretch or a pixel-packin’ mama, but the underlying definition’s the same: I am a writer, irrevocably seduced into the lush, steamy, torrid jungle of speculative fiction where even now I dwell, captive and content to be so. And whose fault is that, might I ask?
Tolkien’s. None other. The culpability rests solely with him.
Well, him and those elves. Mm- mmh !
THE RING
AND I
HARRY TURTLEDOVE
I discovered The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in summer 1966. I was seventeen; I had just graduated from high school, and was about to head off to the California Institute of Technology. I liked The Hobbit pretty well: well enough, at any rate, that I bought the trilogy to see what else J. R. R. Tolkien had written.
With The Lord of the Rings I was utterly entranced, and have been from that day to this. What struck me most about the trilogy was the astonishing depth of Tolkien’s creation. He had not simply imagined the fictional present in which his characters were living, but also a history thousands of years deep, as well as not one but several fictional languages. And what had happened in the dim and distant past of this created world kept bubbling up and remaining intensely relevant to the fictional present, in much the same way as Arminius the German’s defeat of the Roman legions at the Teutoberg Wald in 9 A.D. remains intensely relevant to the history of Europe during the century.
I read The Hobbit and the trilogy obsessively. In the year after finding them, I must have gone through them, appendices and all, six or eight times. This was, of course, my freshman year at an academically demanding institution. Falling head over heels in love with The Lord of the Rings isn’t the only reason I flunked out of Caltech. It isn’t even the most important reason. But the time I spent with Frodo and Sam and Merry and Pippin was time I didn’t spend—and should have spent—with physics and calculus and chemistry.
Nor was I the only one at Caltech caught up in Tolkien’s spell. There were about ten of us, three or four, as luck would have it, in my residence house. We would get together when we could to try to stump one another with obscure quotations, to seek to work out the meanings of elvish words, and to argue about things as abstruse and unprovable as how well a Roman legion suddenly transported to the universe of The Lord of the Rings might fare: of this last, more anon.
We searched through the books for hints about how the unwritten history of the Fourth Age might go as diligently as fifth-century theologians went over the New Testament for clues as to the nature or natures of Christ. I came to the conclusion that the chief evil power of the Fourth Age would be the Lord of the
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