Read Online Meditations on Middle-Earth by Karen Haber - Free Book Online Page A
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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this was mutual, sometimes not, which is also par for the course. Once, when it was, I got married. That lasted a little more than three and a half years. Not too long after my first wife and I broke up, I met the lady to whom I’m married now. In short, I grew up, or started to.
After I got my doctorate in Byzantine history, I taught for two years at UCLA while the professor under whom I’d studied had a guest appointment at the University of Athens. I had kept writing, and I began to sell an occasional piece: a science-fiction novelette to a magazine that expired before the piece saw print; a fantasy novel that owed nothing to Tolkien except, of course, a debt of gratitude for vastly broadening the market for fantasy novels of all sorts.
In the autumn of 1979, I was engaged to the woman now my wife, and unemployed—a combination always especially endearing to a prospective father-in-law—and hoping to find a job, any sort of job, before my savings ran out, and I faced the ultimate indignity of my generation: having to move back into the house where I’d grown up. Being unemployed, I had time on my hands. I decided I would go to work on another fantasy novel. If all went extremely well, that would even help me pay my bills.
In pondering what to write, I remembered that novel I’d worked on in an earlier time of crisis, the one that dropped Romans from Caesar’s legions into Fourth Age Gondor. By the time I reached thirty, I was smart enough to figure out that using someone else’s universe—especially without his permission—was not the right way to go about things. I’d also spent all that time and effort acquiring specialized knowledge of my own. This time, I dropped the legionaries into a world of my own creation, rather than Tolkien’s. I should have done that in the first place, but better late, I hoped, than never.
The world I built was modeled on the Byzantine Empire in the late eleventh century, at the time of the crucial battle of Manzikert, except that magic worked. Into it I brought my Romans—and one obstreperous Celt. The broad outlines of the plot of what became The Videssos Cycle are the same as those of my earlier act of unauthorized literary appropriation. This is why The Misplaced Legion , the first book of The Videssos Cycle, is dedicated to my wife, to the professor under whom I learned Byzantine history, to L. Sprague De Camp (whose Lest Darkness Fall first interested me in Byzantium) . . . and to J. R. R. Tolkien. My own cast of mind and my work usually resemble De Camp’s far more than Tolkien’s, but I felt I needed to note all the origins of the series. Attention must be paid.
Stretching and cutting the plot to fit the new situation wasn’t that hard. I had envisioned Gondor in the Fourth Age as being in a situation the Byzantines would have understood: ancient; proud; diminished in territory from earlier days; in constant conflict with neighboring peoples, some of them nomads off the plains. (To this day, that seems reasonable to me. Tolkien himself, in letter 131 of the Carpenter collection, writes, “In the south Gondor rises to a peak of power, almost reflecting Númenór, and then fades slowly to decayed Middle Age, a kind of proud, venerable, but increasingly impotent Byzantium.” The analogy was in his mind, too. The difference is, it had a right to be in his, but not in mine, not in his universe.)
One problem I had with The Videssos Cycle was the nature of my villain. The Lord of the Nazgûl was, as I mentioned, the chief evil power in my imagined Fourth Age. When he appeared among men, he necessarily went veiled and masked, as he had no face he could present to the world. I incorporated this feature of his appearance into the new world I was building: incorporated it without first asking myself, Why are you doing this?
By the time I did think to ask myself that question, my masked and veiled villain had become an integral part of the world I’d created. That meant I
After I got my doctorate in Byzantine history, I taught for two years at UCLA while the professor under whom I’d studied had a guest appointment at the University of Athens. I had kept writing, and I began to sell an occasional piece: a science-fiction novelette to a magazine that expired before the piece saw print; a fantasy novel that owed nothing to Tolkien except, of course, a debt of gratitude for vastly broadening the market for fantasy novels of all sorts.
In the autumn of 1979, I was engaged to the woman now my wife, and unemployed—a combination always especially endearing to a prospective father-in-law—and hoping to find a job, any sort of job, before my savings ran out, and I faced the ultimate indignity of my generation: having to move back into the house where I’d grown up. Being unemployed, I had time on my hands. I decided I would go to work on another fantasy novel. If all went extremely well, that would even help me pay my bills.
In pondering what to write, I remembered that novel I’d worked on in an earlier time of crisis, the one that dropped Romans from Caesar’s legions into Fourth Age Gondor. By the time I reached thirty, I was smart enough to figure out that using someone else’s universe—especially without his permission—was not the right way to go about things. I’d also spent all that time and effort acquiring specialized knowledge of my own. This time, I dropped the legionaries into a world of my own creation, rather than Tolkien’s. I should have done that in the first place, but better late, I hoped, than never.
The world I built was modeled on the Byzantine Empire in the late eleventh century, at the time of the crucial battle of Manzikert, except that magic worked. Into it I brought my Romans—and one obstreperous Celt. The broad outlines of the plot of what became The Videssos Cycle are the same as those of my earlier act of unauthorized literary appropriation. This is why The Misplaced Legion , the first book of The Videssos Cycle, is dedicated to my wife, to the professor under whom I learned Byzantine history, to L. Sprague De Camp (whose Lest Darkness Fall first interested me in Byzantium) . . . and to J. R. R. Tolkien. My own cast of mind and my work usually resemble De Camp’s far more than Tolkien’s, but I felt I needed to note all the origins of the series. Attention must be paid.
Stretching and cutting the plot to fit the new situation wasn’t that hard. I had envisioned Gondor in the Fourth Age as being in a situation the Byzantines would have understood: ancient; proud; diminished in territory from earlier days; in constant conflict with neighboring peoples, some of them nomads off the plains. (To this day, that seems reasonable to me. Tolkien himself, in letter 131 of the Carpenter collection, writes, “In the south Gondor rises to a peak of power, almost reflecting Númenór, and then fades slowly to decayed Middle Age, a kind of proud, venerable, but increasingly impotent Byzantium.” The analogy was in his mind, too. The difference is, it had a right to be in his, but not in mine, not in his universe.)
One problem I had with The Videssos Cycle was the nature of my villain. The Lord of the Nazgûl was, as I mentioned, the chief evil power in my imagined Fourth Age. When he appeared among men, he necessarily went veiled and masked, as he had no face he could present to the world. I incorporated this feature of his appearance into the new world I was building: incorporated it without first asking myself, Why are you doing this?
By the time I did think to ask myself that question, my masked and veiled villain had become an integral part of the world I’d created. That meant I
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