Anghraine

Oh, and one of the things I’m really enjoying about S5 (which is definitely my favorite season) is how it’s dialing up the sci-fi elements, but without sacrificing the fantasy and magic side. My general experience of things that mix classic sci-fi and fantasy elements is that one of the sides tends to really dominate the core of the story, but this is not doing that. It’s really uncompromising on both the techy sci-fi and sparkly magical fantasy fronts.

Tagged: #if i had to pick one i'd say it's more fantasy #but there are lasers and holograms and spaceships! #and they're major plot points (and sometimes characters)

My icon has grey eyes and black hair just for Tolkien :P

So. I generally dislike Tolkien fandom's "canonicity discourse" (yes, I'm doing it anyway) and the idea of imposing a specific ranking of texts. That said, it's occurred to me that one of the reasons I feel deeply out of step with Tolkien fandom is that The Silmarillion (as in, the published book, not the in-story accounts) is on a drastically different level of canonicity for me than basically everything else with JRR Tolkien's name on it.

I don't dislike The Silmarillion or anything. I quite enjoy it! But for me, it shows its age—not in ~a man of his time~ sense, but in an editorial sense. Christopher Tolkien did an enormous amount of spectacular editorial work over the course of his life and we are deeply indebted to him. But I think he did pretty clearly get better at it over time, and particularly at presenting his father's mass of notes and documents and so on in a way that makes the texts as accessible as possible. At the same time, in later texts, he clearly differentiates between actual words JRRT wrote (whether in the main body or in notes) and his (CT's) own understanding and explanations as JRRT's confidant and literary heir. I do give a lot of credence to Christopher Tolkien's understanding of his father's work, actually, and I deeply respect (and am grateful for) CT's efforts to carefully and clearly explain things like dates of composition (and how this can be determined), direct context, how a given point relates to his father's broader work, etc, throughout these texts.

(Tangent: Facebook keeps recommending defensive Jackson stans griping about how Christopher Tolkien just didn't get his father's work like Jackson did and was so horribly ungrateful to the filmmakers and such an inferior scholar blahblah for the crime of disliking the films. FLAMES ON THE SIDE OF MY FACE!! I am not uncritical of Christopher Tolkien, and neither was Christopher Tolkien, but I think we owe an immeasurable debt of gratitude to him. Also, even to me, his response to the films seemed harsh at the time, but at this point, I think he was pretty much right, anyway, and correctly judged the films' impact and reflection of pop culture understanding of JRRT's work.)

So what is my issue with the published Silmarillion?

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An anon on Tumblr said:

First of all congrats on nearing the end of your PhD program!!! Woohoo!!!

Second of all, I’m muy late to the party here (been off tumblr for a bit) but WRT these tags ( https://www.tumblr.com/anghraine/749212904253947904/khazzman-tolkien-elendil-was-called-the ) what do you mean the pregnancies were strange lol how strange can they be…?

[The tags in question: #and that's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how distinct and peculiar númenóreans are #fandom has slept on it for decades but they are reallyyyyyy unusual #they have weird pregnancies (and few of them) and horse telepathy and can rarely even get injured much less sick #there's this part where tolkien is trying to mathematically figure out elvish aging (hilarious tbh) and pencils in 'and númenóreans' #that's not even getting into the uncanny valley of númenórean kids...]

My reply:

As for the first point: Thank you! I'm really looking forwards to being done, lol.

As for the second point: anon, I delight in your innocence.

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kungfunurse said:

Hiya! So I’m re-reading S&S (as one does) and I’ve got a couple of questions. 1) Do you think Mr. Palmer is on the autistic spectrum? The way he misses most social cues and whatnot - idk. And 2) Would it have been normal at the time for Marianne to go months without hearing from Willoughby and still not suspect that he’s lost interest, or was this another example of her being lost in fantasy? Thanks!!

I replied:

1) I honestly don’t know. I haven’t read S&S in a long time, so it’s hard to say. I’ll keep an eye out next time, though!

2) Willoughby couldn’t write openly to Marianne without raising very serious general expectations, so that’s probably how she justifies his silence to herself.

As a sidenote, this is why Darcy hand-delivers his letter to Elizabeth—it would be exceptionally awkward for her if he sent a letter. It’s also significant that the Gardiners wonder if he’s going to send a letter/note after Elizabeth when they leave Pemberley—they’re guessing that Elizabeth and Darcy’s relationship has advanced much further than it really has.

My actual, serious opinion on why Darcy thinks living 50 miles from your family is relatively close while Elizabeth thinks it's far:

Darcy is so profoundly out-of-touch due to wealth, property, influence, his families' status, etc that he truly does not comprehend the complications and expenses of travel for normal people even among the landowning classes. Like, there's all this ink spilled on his status as a gentleman/landowning commoner and what really differentiates a gentleman like Mr Bennet from one like Darcy if anything, and what that would mean in their social context, blah blah. But in pragmatic terms, Darcy's lifestyle and his interests as a landowner have far more in common with the nobility to which he is connected than the typical lifestyles of the gentry.

Darcy talking about 50 miles of good road being nothing in terms of inconvenience and blithely ignoring the costs of either owning or hiring horses, the complications of maintaining a horse if you do own it, the complications around hiring or owning the vehicle drawn by the horse(s), how much more you'd need to pay in services if you don't own the vehicle/horses, what using that vehicle for travel would entail for the workings of the estate or your trade if your family does own it, the cost of stopping along the way, what's lost by the duration of the journey, etc etc. These are things that even fairly well-off landowners like the Bennets would have to deal with in terms of the convenience of travel on "good road" (and also clues us into the prosperity of the Gardiners). These concerns do not even occur to Darcy as problems to consider. This doesn't represent a malicious, personal callousness so much as the genuine obliviousness that arises from extreme socioeconomic inequality. These kinds of problems simply melt away in Darcy's life (read: there are people who make them melt away) and as a result, he truly does not comprehend the impact of prosaic difficulties on the feasibility of something like travel for people like the Lucases or Bennets. The only calculation of convenience that seems to be happening in his head is the effect of distance and road quality on the timing of the journey.

(I think his confusion at people who have family libraries but aren't buying books at this super important literary moment reflects this as well. Books were still quite expensive at the time. He does not appear to grasp that "always buying books" like he does is literally not an option for most people, even in the gentry. He's right about the important literary moment, but "buying things costs money" is a concept that seems not to even enter his calculus.)

My much less serious opinion on why Darcy thinks living 50 miles from your family is "a very easy distance" while Elizabeth thinks it's far:

His landowning family members don't have to think about these problems any more than he does, and if I were Lady Catherine de Bourgh's nephew, I would also consider living 50 mi away from my relatives pretty damn close.

An anon said:

I keep wondering about this: How/When do you think Darcy and Wickham's friendship ended? A slow disintegration? A sudden realisation. Did it happen at school? At University? How much time did they spend together? I suspect that how audiences interpret this has a big impact on how they see their characters...

I replied:

It’s possible!

Darcy says that he was exposed to Wickham’s real character as a young man, many, many years earlier, which is vague, but gives us a general idea.

It’s worth mentioning that Darcy is also introduced as a “young man” in the present, so his idea of “many, many years” might not be as vast as it sounds. At any rate, this certainly suggests (or states, rather) that he was an adult when he realized what Wickham was, while his father didn't reach the same realization. That gives us another point on the timeline: Mr Darcy was still alive at this point, so Darcy was 23 or younger at the time (making it 5+ years earlier).

To me, it sounds like Wickham went noticeably wrong in early adulthood, not childhood (so not at school), but very early adulthood. It also sounds like they were together pretty often up to that point. Darcy says:


So Darcy and Wickham were around each other enough that Darcy considers his observation of Wickham’s true character to have been inevitable, and their estrangement seems to have followed that. My impression is that they were good friends up to around 20, hung out a lot for a time, but that Wickham soon went down a path that Darcy couldn’t follow or accept. It doesn’t sound like it happened all at once to me, to give Darcy chances to see Wickham’s unguarded moments for some unknown length of time, but it also doesn’t sound all that gradual; Darcy seems to have had a clear (and disapproving) idea of what he was seeing.

At the same time, he kept the whole thing secret from his father—perhaps because Mr Darcy was likely in poor health by then, or because he privately hoped it was a phase (even after this point, he “wished” to believe Wickham was sincere about turning his life around), or some other reason. That’s speculation, but I think we do have a rough timeline for when the estrangement happened.

The BFF and I rewatched Flash Gordon (1980) last night!

I always remember the weird art film buried in it (when Zarkov's mind is ostensibly being wiped, the villains play the highlights of his current memory on a ... TV? and along side strange images of cats etc he's revealed to be a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust who was able to escape to the USA, build a career in NASA, unjustly fell into disrepute, and his wife unrelatedly drowned). I had forgotten that one of the villains remarks that Hitler had potential (...) and that Zarkov later reveals that he preserved his mind by reciting the Talmud, the equations of Einstein, works of Shakespeare, and a Beatles song to protect the integrity of his thoughts.

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An anon asked:

Do you think Darcy's shy? I see a lot on tumblr about it but I've never been completely convinced. I don't see him as being particularly shy or embarrassed until after Elizabeth has rejected him. I'd love to know your thoughts

I replied:

I don’t think Austen’s Darcy is shy as such (though the reading goes back a long ways), but I do think he is quite genuinely uncomfortable in a broad range of social situations.

I don’t think he’s manufacturing or exaggerating his discomfort and difficulties with people when he discusses them at Rosings, say. And I think we see it pretty early on when (as one instance) he has to come up with an intermediary step to work himself up to talking to Elizabeth when he’s only just become interested in her.

And while it’s later, I think the efforts that Elizabeth goes to during their engagement to shield him from situations he finds difficult make a lot more sense (and are much more satisfying, character-wise) if there’s a real inherent discomfort she’s trying to ameliorate. IMO the dynamic there at the end is an “answer” of sorts to the discussion at Rosings, when Darcy didn’t see the need to put in any effort, and Elizabeth was completely dismissive of his difficulties; in the end, Darcy puts in effort and Elizabeth tries to help him.

That all said, discomfort is not the same as shyness—I don’t think he’s at all insecure or timid the way that some people suggest, or the way Georgiana is. He’s introverted, but he’s also straightforward and confident. He just has some people issues.

This anon said:

thanks for answering my question about faramir :) i also had a similar follow up q if you didnt mind: what do you think drove eowyn's attraction to faramir? its a common criticism that it seems like a sudden about face for her character, especially in light of her prior attraction to aragorn & how she turns from warfare to peace... but again, imo a near death experience and the loss of someone close to her is as good a cause as any

I replied:

You’re welcome!

I think it’s somewhat fair to criticize the abruptness of Éowyn’s shift in terms of how it’s presented (rather than the literal time scale, which is less important in the circumstances IMO). We see Faramir and Éowyn briefly interact, then they have these conversations we don’t see, and when we see them again, they’re friends/he’s fully in love with her. I think that if we saw more of this offscreen development of their relationship, and perhaps some grounding for the peace/healing/gardening turn beyond the symbolic, there’d be less criticism of how abrupt things are (still some, but less).

Their story is tangential to the wider narrative, in fairness, and I think it’s generally quite beautiful as written, just a little rushed structurally.

Setting that aside, though, there’s something about the shift from Éowyn/Aragorn to Éowyn/Faramir that I think gets a bit overlooked—

—and it’s that Faramir is quite a bit like Aragorn.

It’s not that he’s a second-rate replacement for Aragorn, to head that off right away. But he does possess the qualities that Éowyn genuinely finds appealing in Aragorn; he’s very tall, a great warrior, a charismatic leader, stern but capable of lightness, thoughtful, intelligent, learned, bold when necessary but self-controlled, and is both human and Elvish/wizardly in his air, beliefs, and abilities (and this list is not exhaustive!).

However, part of Éowyn’s attraction to Aragorn also springs from a mix of immaturity and misery. Tolkien remarked that the disparity between Aragorn’s actual age (80s) and appearance (only middle-aged) makes his impression on her all the more powerful. For this very reason, though, Tolkien decided the pairing didn’t work—he’s too old for Éowyn, and the impression he leaves on her leads to infatuation/idolization rather than mature romantic love.

On top of that, Éowyn’s situation in Meduseld is inexpressibly nightmarish and and in Aragorn, she sees a path out of Rohan that would lift her ‘up’ above her suffering and shame. Once there’s no chance of that, she goes seeking death—not truly because of ‘love’ for Aragorn, but because she’s been so trapped and can’t see any other way out that coheres with her ideals for her house and for herself. It’s significant that she ultimately tells Faramir that she no longer desires to be a queen—that was a significant part of Aragorn’s attraction for her.

And the thing is that the qualities that made her infatuated but not really in love with Aragorn are the things that are mostly not there with Faramir. Tolkien explicitly says that, while Faramir has a ‘high’ air, it’s not as high or remote as Aragorn’s can be. Rather, it’s more immediate and constant. Faramir isn’t old or overwhelming; he’s quietly impressive in a way she respects without being swept off her feet into infatuation. He doesn’t represent a way out; he’s not going to rule Gondor for much longer and has no idea what his future will be, yet she’s drawn to his gentleness and dignity anyway. They’re friends. They talk about things, they bond in these incredibly difficult moments when she finds herself drawing close to him. It’s not a relationship she’s built up in her head; it’s all real.

Even though this is all happening quickly in calendar time, I think it’s quite gradual in the emotional sense, as Éowyn goes from respect (and, I think, attraction) to friendship to falling in love without quite understanding what’s going on, to finally understanding what’s actually going on in her head and heart, and seeing a way to live that isn’t about escape or glory, but—living. I think that her newfound value for life and her subconscious love for Faramir have been building through all their interactions, and in the end, come naturally together in this flash of realization.

Tagged: #rambling a lot but this is def how i feel about it generally #her transition is mostly framed as war -> peace #which is certainly there #but i think it's also very much from imaginary -> real