Read Online Meditations on Middle-Earth by Karen Haber - Free Book Online Page B

had to devise some reason for his concealing himself, and one that needed to be far removed from the reason the Nazgûl never showed themselves. I hope I succeeded in this. Had I not transposed quite so thoroughly from the Tolkien-based world to the one I was creating myself, the difficulty never would have arisen. And, indeed, it shouldn’t have.
    Aside from strip-mining my unpublishable homage to The Lord of the Rings to help form work I might legitimately show the world, I’ve used Tolkienesque motifs only once that springs to mind, in a short story called “After the Last Elf Is Dead.” There, the borrowing was intentional and, I believe, necessary. Tolkien and many of his lesser imitators depict the struggle of Good and Evil, with Good triumphant, at some cost, in the end.
    This is, of course, how we want the world to work. The question I looked at in “After the Last Elf Is Dead” is, what happens if it doesn’t work that way? What does the world look like if Evil defeats Good? Turning common tropes on their ear is often one of the most enjoyable and thought-provoking things a writer can do.
    One of the more profitable things a writer can do, however, is to repeat those tropes. Tolkien’s influence on fantasy since the publication and enormous success of The Lord of the Rings has not been altogether beneficial. This is not his fault, I hasten to add. But he has had many imitators, and imitators of imitators, and imitators of imitators of imitators, until some heroic-quest fantasies resemble nothing so much as blurry sixth-generation photocopies of his great work, borrowing not only structure but bits of background such as noble, immortal elves, and wicked, bestial ores as if they sprang from lore long in the public domain rather than from the imagination of a writer not yet thirty years dead!
    One very successful imitator—at least in financial terms—stated quite openly in an interview that his method was to emulate all the elements of adventure in The Lord of the Rings and to suppress the mythological, theological, and linguistic themes: every bit of the lore and scholarship and depth that informed the original. I read his words in astonished disbelief and dismay. And yet, he proved a shrewd judge of what a substantial part of the reading public wanted, or was willing to settle for. His books outsell those of all but a handful of other writers in the field.
    The essential difference, I think, is that Tolkien created his world for himself first, and for others only afterward. He began building the lays and legends of Middle-earth more than twenty years before even The Hobbit saw print. Almost twenty years more passed before The Lord of the Rings appeared. Everything in these books is a product of long reflection, long refinement. It shows. How could it help but show?
    Because of that, it is unique, and is likely to remain so. Most books come into being far more quickly, and with at least one eye toward the market. It has always been so, ever since the earliest days of the printing press. Several of Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, were first published as what we now call Bad Quartos—hasty, pirated editions designed to make a printer a fast buck. If we had only the Bad Quarto of Hamlet , the Prince of Denmark’s immortal soliloquy would read:
To be, or not to be. Ay, there’s the point,
To die, to sleep, is that all? Ay, all:
No, to sleep, to dream, ay marry there it goes,
For in that dream of death, when we awake,
And borne before an everlasting Judge,
From whence no passenger ever return’d,
The undiscovered country, at whose sight
The happy smile, and the accursed damn’d.
But for this, the joyful hope of this,
Who’d bear the scorns and flatteries of the world,
Scorned by the right rich, the rich cursed of the
     poor?
     
    The difference between that sorry text—probably set in type relying on the shaky memory of one of the actors in the play—and what Shakespeare actually wrote is the