fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3238 ]

[ SECRET POST #3238 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3238 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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.

And to me, it's because it's a dragon in a cornfield, when there is nothing else remotely *like* a dragon in a cornfield anywhere else.

So, however we arrive at it, we both arrive at the same conclusion. Dragons in Bilbo's cornfield (which, i know, he didn't have) do not work.

:)

Well, but the reason it doesn't work is important when it comes to judging other instances of things.

For instance, take a knight in armor swimming through a river. To me, that's only wrong if it doesn't make sense tonally for the story - so if, making up an example completely hypothetically, you were writing some kind of heroic fairy-tale-esque romance drawing on things like the chansons and chivalric fable, perhaps that makes sense tonally. So that's where there is a difference.

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?

They can be, but if the work itself has already established certain rules - Muggles can't do magic - suddenly having one special muggle who *can* doesn't make sense. The story has it's own framework, and to just randomly toss stuff in that doesn't fit that framework just...doesn't work for me.

The story has to follow it's own rules, which is what I'm talking about and apparently not getting across. Any random fantasy novel can have as much or as little magic as it wants, but to arbitrarily break those rules 'just 'cause' makes the story not make sense, and makes me, personally, irritated and unsatisfied with the story.

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ SECRET POST #3238 ]

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