fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3238 ]

All of the authors mentioned were story-first writers. Quite explicitly so in the case of Tolkien. Lovecraft's fantasy is openly surreal and isn't supposed to make objective sense.

If you're saying 'the story makes no sense because Elves' or 'the story makes no sense because Eldritch Horror' then I disagree. Those are fantasy elements inserted into worlds that *do* work.

Tolkein's worlds are basically earth worlds, with peasants and farmers and blacksmiths and cities with universities and armies and whatnot. A world he was probably very familiar with because of his studies and interest in history. The elves had magic, and magic, of course, is a made-up thing that doesn't 'work' so to speak, but the world didn't *run* on magic. Bilbo didn't use magic to keep his house clean, the Elves didn't (as far as i remember/that we can see) didn't use magic to feed themselves, they had actual food, wrapped up in leaves, they had arrows that needed fletching and knives that needed sharpening.

Lovecraft set his stories in the modern world quite often, with the 'Eldritch Horror' or whatever coming through from *some other world*. One so different it caused ruin in ours. But his world - of the university, the academic circle, etc. - were all working worlds that didn't hinge on Cthulu to work.

But the details of how the peasants get their food, where the farms are, how the armies are organized, etc in Tolkien are essentially left blank, except where it intersects with his concerns as a storyteller or his linguistic play. Where does Rivendell get its food? We don't really know. We can supply the answers, and assume they're going to be broadly comparable to the state of affairs in the societies that Tolkien was drawing from, but that's a long way from saying that Tolkien was building a world that was realistic and worked in that sense. What it means is that his world was for the most part not flagrantly unrealistic & that we're willing to fill in the lacunae.*

And I'd argue that side of things does not have any relation to the qualities that make Tolkien a worthwhile writer. Tolkien left them blank because none of them mattered; they would have mattered just as little if they had been 'unrealistic' in comparison to our world, because those were not Tolkien's concerns - Tolkien's concerns were with the story. But on the other hand I don't suppose its possible to argue against your subjective enjoyment of its perceived sensemaking.

*(this is much less true with regards to the Shire and the Hobbits, but the Hobbits are unrealistic in a much more specific sense, IE being essentially a profoundly idealized version of English rural life, so I am willing to regard them as simply an exception)

And ...I have never said anything about Tolkein being a 'worthwhile' writer. He didn't dwell on the mechanics of where Rivendell got its food from, but he was drawing (even with the Hobbits) on a world that *did* exist, and *did* work. And yes, we fill in the blanks, so to speak, on that, because it's not an important element of the story for him to give us details on.

The *important*, to me, part of it is that they *didn't* rely on magic. They didn't rely on some kind of weird trade with Elves for everything they needed. They didn't have to sneak into some other realm to get sewing needles, if you see what i'm saying. He put the perfect English village down into his world and populated it with Hobbits rather than Brits, but the framework was the same, and you can assume there was a wheelwright and a cheesemaker and a blacksmith and everything else the ideal English village would have, because that's what Tolkein was writing.

He didn't substitute regular work/abilities/talents for magic, or for mysterious elven 'machines' that magically made linen or something.

I dunno if I'm explaining my point clearly or not.

But that's my whole point! If it's not an important element of the story, then why does it matter whether those details have coherency in an our-worldly sense? They're unimportant whether they make sense or not. So why does it matter at all? What is the practical difference between details that don't work right, and details that are left unspecified so we just assume that it all works out, when it doesn't matter to the story either way?

Because if they don't work right, at least for me, it takes me right out of the story. It makes me stop and go 'man, that's stupid, that doesn't even make *sense*!' and that's just...no fun.

The story makes sense because elves and eldrich horror have been part of our literary history for thousands of years. The *world* doesn't make sense in terms of history, geography, and economics because they're largely irrelevant.

To use Tolkien for example, the story is about Fall, Mortality, and Machine (and ultimately Faith which is the rejection of Machine). So things like the Stewardship of Gondor are stable just to set up Denethor's loss of faith and flaming fall from the ramparts. The Ride of Rohan so that Theodin can be a useful contrasting character who puts his duty in front of his life. In any realistic historical analysis, regencencies usually become kingdoms in under a century, and treaties tend to be broken after a few generations in the face of a few generations.

But the economics of Middle Earth are almost entirely opaque, and the issue of how a Horde of Orcs are adequately fed in the barren plain of Mordor is treated with a handwave in the appendix, and how they're hydrated is completely left in the dark.

"they had actual food, wrapped up in leaves," is an example of missing the point because Lembas has many parallels to the Catholic sacramental Host, and that becomes significant in a couple of conflicts involving Gollum and Orcs who find the stuff. It's one of those things that doesn't make a lot of sense unless you run with the idea of the Elves of Lothlorien having something akin to divine grace.

Lovecraft's horror plays fast and loose with science and geography. Vast landmasses come rising out of the Pacific Ocean and vanish with only the narrator's lurid testimony to describe what happened, never mind that such an event would be a disaster across the entire Pacific Rim. His fantasy is almost entirely surreal, which is reasonable considering that it happens in a dream state. It doesn't spoil the story one bit that these things happen.

Like I said, the worlds don't *run on magic*. Though significant parts (the rings? the giant eagles?) are obviously not 'real'.

I have *no* clue about Lembas and the Host, am not a huge Tolkein reader and therefor cannot say one way or another what it represented in his books. And since Elves are not *human* - they may very well have something like 'divine grace', who knows. But if they do, Hobbits don't, and still have to plant crops and hoe the weeds out.

I guess I'm not explaining myself very clearly and you're very intent on making the magical/fantasy parts of these books the test for 'real' or 'not real', which in my mind isn't the point. They are the unreal elements that you work around in the story to make the fantasy, but you don't have people plowing the corn field with a dragon.

And of course Tolkein didn't go into the details of how Orcs are kept hydrated - he probably felt he didn't need to, since that wasn't what he was focusing on in the story. When he was in the trenches, fighting, it probably wasn't something he thought about much unless he was thirsty. He probably mostly thought about the death happening around him, and the horrible noise of an approaching army, and the stink of dead bodies everywhere. Cart trains to the nearest river to get barrels full of water would be a boring and irrelevant detail unless he had part of one of the armies cutting off their supply.

"but you don't have people plowing the corn field with a dragon."

But what if you're writing a story about people who tame dragons and use them as draft animals?

Like I'm gonna admit, I thought you were talking about internal logic and consistency. But now it seems like you basically have an arbitrary cut-off point between what fantastical elements are "okay" and "make sense" and which ones don't.

If you're writing a story about people who tame dragons and use them as draft animals, then you're writing a story with a *whole lot more magic* and fantastical elements as the main point of the story.

But, once again - Middle Earth does not *run* on magic. It's a special element. It *is* logical - magic is rare, and fading, and not everyday. Therefore - Bill the Pony and not magical packs that weight nothing, or a palatial tent conjured out of thin air.

If Tolkein hand written magic as everyday as a match, then the story would obviously be completely different. It would be a Harry Potter kind of story, where magic is every day.

But he wrote his story as if magic was *not* every day, and made it clear the world didn't run on magic. So a random 'dragon in the cornfield' kind of thing would jar with the rest of his world.

NA

But, see, I agree that a dragon in a cornfield would jar with the rest of his work. But I think the problem is that it is a tonal inconsistency - it does not work aesthetically with the rest of what he is trying to do. The problem is not that dragons in cornfields would revolutionize agriculture in the Shire; the problem is simply that it is not Middle-Earth and it does not make sense for the story as a story.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

tabaqui - 2015-11-16 03:43 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

(Anonymous) - 2015-11-16 03:47 (UTC) - Expand

But it isn't necessarily about it making sense in Tolkien. It's about you stating things that "don't make sense," and arguing that the fantasy worlds that have been brought up work because they contain real world elements. The question is: why does a fantasy have to follow the rules of the real world? It should have rules, sure, but why can't those rules be completely novel?

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

tabaqui - 2015-11-16 03:57 (UTC) - Expand

I guess I'm not explaining myself very clearly and you're very intent on making the magical/fantasy parts of these books the test for 'real' or 'not real', which in my mind isn't the point.

No, I think tests for "real" and "not real" are completely irrelevant. They reduce stories to little more than an accounting of trivial details, which strikes me as being even less adept a form of literary analysis than fundamentalist readings of scripture. Lord of the Rings works as a story, in which various characters confront various forms of temptation and despair in a world in which grace matters. Very little about the world of Middle Earth makes sense unless you assume that this conflict has meaning.

Fantasy isn't, and shouldn't be primarily historical. Tolkien was emulating a body of literature that was more moral than historical. So do many other authors in the field.

But why *can't* a world run on magic? As long as the magic has a logic and the logic is followed, why can't Bilbo clean his house with it? If you're going for fantasy anyway, why not explore what a place like that would be like?

You can, of course. But the point is, Middle Earth *doesn't* run on magic, and I think Tolkein made that very clear, just with the details and inclusions of various things in his writing. He makes it clear that magic is the *exception*, not the rule.

If you have a magical world, it still has *rules*. Magic can't just come from nowhere and do everything. That's not only boring for a story, but unrealistic even for fantasy. Everything comes from *somewhere*, and magic has consequences in Middle Earth, as well.

Well, first I really don't see how it could possibly be unrealistic. It is magic.

Second, I agree that if it does literally *everything* that would be boring. But I think that's very far from the case that we're talking about, which is:

1. Is it licit for a fantasy world to be unrealistic by the standards of our world, for reasons other than the use of magic?
2. Is it licit for a work to have magic that does not function by any clearly-defined rules?

And I think the answer to both those questions is that yes, it's absolutely fine. And I really don't see any literary reason it shouldn't be. Using rules is one model for how to integrate magic into a story, but there's no a priori principle that says that magic HAS to have rules or even that it HAS to be incomprehensible to the reader. And simply because you have magic that does not function by clearly-defined rules, that does not mean it inevitably is going to be used as a deus ex machina. The point, to me, is that magic is ultimately important insofar as it plays a thematic and aesthetic and rhetorical role in the story. And that doesn't have anything to do with rules. Similarly with the mechanical details of how a world operates: the matter only insofar as the matter to the story as a work of fiction, and beyond that I don't think there's any intrinsic benefit to them making sense.

And, I think it does. If nothing has any rules or guidelines, and you can just kinda make anything happen 'because magic' - a *lot* of authors would, and have, written really terrible stories. Because with no framework to hang the world on, you're just sort of randomly hopping from this to that to another thing.

To me, that's unsatisfactory and irritating, and I don't like reading a story where the author doesn't really have a grasp on how the world works, and what can and can't happen, and just tosses things in to resolve a plot issue.

Well, I mean, my point would be that those stories are shitty stories because they are shitty, poorly-written stories that use magic in a way that is inappropriate for the story. They are not bad stories because their use of magic broke the rules.

I agree that the use of rules for magic can be a useful technique for some writers to use to ensure that they're not writing stories badly in that particular way. But I don't think it's an end in itself. If someone can write a story where magic has no rules, but also doesn't make it so it's randomly hopping from this to that to the other, I don't think that story is inherently bad.

I agree that writers should have a grasp on how the world works - but I think the relevant criteria of how a world works is about the story as a tonal aesthetic whole, NOT about the internal consistency of the world, let alone its realism in terms of our world.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

tabaqui - 2015-11-16 04:45 (UTC) - Expand

No, Middle Earth doesn't run on *magic* it runs on *morality* and *story*. Which is the method he clearly stated in Beowulf: The Monster and the Critics and the opening pages of the Silmarillion. Multiple critics have pointed out that his romantic ideas about the medieval period don't make a lot of sense.

After reading through this whole thread, I think I generally agree with you.

I want fantasy worlds that are based on how the real world works, with magic as a highlight and an exception to those rules. I really dislike it when people dismiss realism by saying "But it has magic! It doesn't have to make sense!".

But that's not fantasy, that's crappy historical fiction with some fantasy elements bolted on for color.

Central to fantasy needs to be a Big Idea, and the storytelling needs to be wrapped around that. If it's Hamlet, it's entirely ahistorical concerns about the transfer of power within a monarchy, revenge, and questions of honesty. If it's Middle Earth, it's Tolkien's particular Christian moral framework. If it's Earthsea, it's Taoism (Wizard and Lathe of Heaven have roughly the same plot.) If it's Narnia, it's a fairly explicit Christian framework.

That characters travel to the edge of the world in three of those stories doesn't seem to bother anyone.

(The irony here is that I have a Muskets and Magic story that's included hundreds of hours of research, but I'm not about to bamboozle anyone into thinking that it's a story *about* the 18th century or that my insertion of that research makes that work "historically accurate." History is hard.)

Edited 2015-11-16 13:59 (UTC)

Just because a fantasy story is based around a Big Idea does not mean it cannot have the occasional nod to things like farmers farming, tradesmen doing their trades, merchants buying and selling goods, countries have trade agreements and trade routes, and things like that. That's not trying to fool people into thinking it's historical fiction, it's just giving a backdrop for the story - or as you phrase it, the "Big Idea" - to happen in front of. Preferably a backdrop that does not contradict itself.

The worlds where people travel to the edge, or the brightest star in the night sky is a guy in a boat with a very shiny jewel have become uncommon. That may be sad, from one point of view, or it may make worlds easier to believe in, from another.

Yes, but are those things necessarily historically *realistic*. Note that we don't always know the details of economics within a given historical period due to lack of evidence. The wine trade in The Hobbit makes for an adventurous escape, but it seems that Tolkien put minimal thought into what that trade actually entailed (much less the buoyancy of a dwarf-laden barrel.)

Some of that can be pinned down to the fact that Bilbo is an unreliable narrator. Demands for encyclopedic realism reduce that key part of storytelling as well.

You're still going to Tolkien for your examples here. I already know his writing skimps on how the societies in the background work. The sort of story I am thinking of is something like David Eddings' writing, where he did make some attempt to indicate that the world the main characters were traveling through on their Great Quest had a working structure to it.

If the real issue is how much detail to realism there is, then maybe I can understand. I may like the passing nods to how the world works, but too many would distract from the story.