Meditations on Middle-Earth (8 page)

Which brings us to the trilogy. I can’t blame Tolkien for my present writerly state without slopping a big, gooey ladleful of the onus onto the trilogy’s platter.

I am not the first to blame things on the trilogy. Get any sizeable group of SF writers together and somewhere in it, like a hairball in a bowl of hummus, you will find one or more persons ready to tell you that Tolkien ruined it for everyone by inaugurating the Rule of Trilogies. Yes, according to some people, all post-Tolkien fantasy had to come in three volumes or forget about it. (Of course, there is the little matter of Dante’s
Divine Comedy
, which might likewise be viewed as the great-great-great-grandpappy of all fantasy trilogies, but don’t bother bringing that up; no one’s going to listen.)

THE BLACK RIDER

The Fellowship of the Ring

Chapter IV: “A Short Gut to Mushrooms”

Children, before we go on with this tale, let me remind you that all this took place in prehistoric times, before the Internet, before mega-malls, before the inexorable spread of the mammoth “chain” bookstores across the land. Why, in those days, if you wanted a cup of coffee, you could not walk to the corner Starbucks because there
was
no corner Starbucks, and all we had were woodburning corners that could only be reached uphill both ways in the snow! Dark times indeed.

Of course there
were
bookstores, just not in my neighborhood. This meant that when I wanted to get my grubby paws on the trilogy, I had no option but to check it out of the library. The trouble was, I wasn’t the only one who wanted to read it. Someone else had checked out
The Fellowship of the Ring
, leaving the other two volumes behind.

I suppose I could have waited for
The Fellowship
to be returned. A rational person would have waited. But I was a woman possessed, for whom
patience
was just the name of a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta. I checked out
The Two Towers
and started reading the trilogy from the middle outward. I admit that this left me a little bewildered to start with.
(“Who
is this guy they’re giving the Viking funeral for, and
how
did he die, and oh wow, is it just me or is that elf Legolas really
hot?”)
But then, I’d had lots of practice being bewildered by all of those “Modess . . . Because” ads, so poor old Boromir’s launch party was small potatoes as far as maximum total reader ferhoodlement went.

To make a long story short, I read the trilogy in two-three-one order, and came away from it a changed woman. The next thing I knew I was reading other fantasy novels. I no longer cared whether or not the boys found out about my shameful solitary vice. Who needs boys when you’ve got elves, man?! (Given that I was then attending an all-girls school, my chances of getting an
honest-to-Seventeen
date with a boy were about equal with the odds of being swept away to Galadriel’s grove by someone tall, dark, and pointy-eared. And since the chances of finding a nice,
Jewish
elf were about what you’d expect, this was also the first time I even vaguely considered the possibility of falling for someone Different.)

The stage was set for the final degradation.

One evening, having declined Lord Ruthven’s invitation to the ball, choosing instead to lounge about the family manor in my peignoir and bunny slippers, I turned on the television. There he was. Him.
My
him: Legolas the hottie elf. I could tell it was Legolas because he had pointy ears and, as everyone knows, all elves have pointy ears.

Previous to beholding
him
I had not realized that all elves likewise had pointy sideburns, puddingbowl hair-styles, upswept slanty eyebrows, and blue velour shirts, but I was willing to learn. By the time I finally came to comprehend that what I was watching/drooling over was not a televised version of the trilogy (William Shatner would not make a good hobbit in this or any other universe) it was too late: I’d become hooked on
Star Trek
. I was doomed.

You might think that once you are wallowing in the fantasy/science-fictional gutter there is nowhere lower for you to sink. Shows what you know, bucko.

Let us move the clock forward a tick or two, bringing us to my bright college years at Vassar. At that time, Vassar was not yet coeducational, so we are still talking about a heavy concentration of female hormones all dressed up and nowhere to go but the dorm TV room. We attended scheduled airtimes for
Star Trek
and
Dark Shadows
with a zealous regularity that left enclosed orders of Carmelite nuns looking like flibbertigibbets. But all of our merry schoolgirl crushes on emotionless Vulcans and haughty vampires did not mean we were averse to dating real men. (Though it
might
account for why so many of us went on to marry lawyers.)

I too wanted to date a real man, but wound up settling for a Yalie. He invited me to the prom; and while in lovely New Haven I discovered something that opened my eyes to a whole new world of primal, visceral, earth-shaking ecstacy: the Yale Co-op. When it comes to bookstores, size
does
matter.

It was here I bought the final nail in my coffin:
Bored of the Rings
. This was a parody of the trilogy produced by the
Harvard Lampoon that
was wonderful or sophomoric or both, according to the reader’s taste. Since I
was
a sophomore at the time, I found it to be wonderful. From reading
Bored of the Rings
I learned that it was possible to take the adored icons and sacrosanct quest-plot and stick big red squeaky clown noses on anything that didn’t get out of the way fast enough. (It’s been my opinion that a good book can take a good joke and survive. Tolkien’s work went the full ten rounds against
Bored of the Rings
and came back swinging. And even when they take a cream pie in the face, elves are
still
hot!)

I will draw a merciful veil over subsequent Tolkien-related incidents in my life, though some were educational. For example, when
everything
by Tolkien was flying off the shelves, publishers started trotting out
anything
by Tolkien, which might or might not have included his laundry lists. My apologies to Tolkien completists out there, but I never did appreciate
The Silmarillion
. Yet thus did I learn that if you become famous/profitable enough as a writer,
every last word
you ever penned in your lifetime will get trucked to market. (Note that
“you
ever penned in
your
lifetime” need not always apply, viz: V. C. Andrews.)

On the other hand, the Rankin-Bass animated production of
The Hobbit
and the Ralph Bakshi stab at Lord of the Rings were both . . . never mind. As with
Bored of the Rings
, we are in the realm of personal tastes, the ubiquitous YMMV of the Internet. Let’s sidestep the flamewar and just change the subject.

So you see that I am fully within my rights when I refuse to accept responsibility for having become a writer of (often deliberately) funny fantasy and science fiction. It
is
all Tolkien’s fault. His books were the gateway drug and yes, the first one
was
free. At his doorstep and no other must I abandon the following accusations:

1. Reading
The Hobbit
led me to read the three books of The Lord of the Rings. (And reading the books out of numerical order allowed me to understand that a good book is fully capable of standing alone even if it is one of a litter of three.)

2. Reading The Lord of the Rings led me to read other fantasy.

3. The Lord of the Rings—especially the Appendices—led me to realize that a good fantasy is one that springs from a fully realized world, and that constructing that world can be an awful lot
of fun
. When I wrote my first fantasy novel, if the characters did not all hail from one bland, uniform, all-encompassing Fairytale Culture, if they actually got a little frazzled and weary while on the road, if they remembered to pack a lunch—and other supplies—for the trip, and if they learned that even if you take down the Bad Guys, your world can never go back to being just the way it was before, all of the above was thanks to Tolkien.

I know he’s not the only one to have included those little details, but for me, he was the first.

4. The interesting characters in The Lord of the Rings (i.e. hottie elves) led me to watch
Star Trek
.

5.
Star Trek
led me to read science fiction as well as watch it.

6. Reading science fiction and fantasy led me into the James Fenimore Cooper trap. (J. F. C. was reading novels to his sick wife when he was reputed to have become fed up and exclaimed “Who
wrote
this muck? I could do better!” And he did, in his opinion, though definitely
not
in that of Mark Twain.) Yes, I became convinced that I could write no-pun-intended rings around some of the stuff that was 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.