Arnorion's Adventures in Arda

A total newb's scholarly and creative exploration of Tolkien's created world

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A summary of my work to date, about half of it co-developed with my frequent collaborator, and a preview of one project still early in development. 

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Things I’ve Realized - Aragorn’s claim is preposterous

Aragorn’s lineage includes forty (that’s four, zero) generations to get back to Elendil: “many fathers”, indeed. That is a staggering number which requires a bit of context to fully appreciate the magnitude of it.

Compare that to the situation of Alfred the Great, the self-styled “King of the Anglo Saxons”, who stands atop the list of monarchs of the UK. He was the 36th generational ancestor of the current king (according to britroyals.com) and reigned in the late ninth century. Can you imagine a guy claiming to be the long lost descendent of Alfred walking into Windsor Castle and expecting to receive the Crown Jewels from Charles the Third?

Now imagine an alternate history where the original house of Wessex had been dispossessed in the south, and had ruled over Scotland which had been subsequently destroyed by Vikings, and the lord protectors had been ruling in the place of the southern royal line since the time of Oliver Cromwell. It’s downright preposterous. (And that’s only 36 generations, not the 40 between Elendil and Aragorn inclusive.)

Boromir’s incredulity is not only understandable and forgivable, it’s the only reasonable reaction to such an incredible and frankly unverifiable claim.

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Well it’s been about a year and a half since the last update, but the fan-scholarship has not stopped. I’ve given four more presentations and begun the work to turn some of them into formal academic essays with the goal of submitting them to a journal for peer review. Look out for updates on those. In the meantime I’ll start by posting interesting slide snippets from some of the recent talks.

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Belated Update

The Imaginative Framing paper went well. The crowd at Mythmoot XI was pretty receptive to our ideas about how characters looking at the events of their lives as a story can give a hopeful perspective that leads to resilience. I was able to compare the story-based perspectives of Faramir and Boromir to see why their outcomes were so very different when tempted by the ring and the divergent ways they responded to the dramatic changes at the end of the third age. More on that later.

We’ve also had the opportunity to get involved in some of the regional moots since June. I presented a paper on Tertiary Characters in the Lord of the Rings with a focus on Beregond of Gondor. Just determining which names counted as characters was a chore, much less sorting them into the categories of primary, secondary, and tertiary.

Shortly after that we prepared a joint talk on Wicked Wisdom, an exploration of the kinds of knowledge deemed taboo and the reasons why some forms of knowledge might wisely be forbidden. My part of the paper followed the one mention of evil knowledge through sorcery to uncover the wickedness sought out by the waning Gondorians and the Numenoreans before them.

I look forward to posting a bit more about each of these presentations in the coming weeks. And I can’t wait to see what the next Mythmoot prompt has in store when it drops in December.

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A New Idea

I was very excited to hear that my abstract has been accepted for Mythmoot. My co-author and I will be presenting a talk on the resilience inspired by the imaginative frameworks constructed by characters within several of our favorite stories, but more on that later. For now I wanted to jot down an idea I had while hiking with my family.

Our kids were having a pretend, playing characters exploring a landscape on a quest into an enchanted forest while we were on our hike through some marshy woods near the Charles River. I was thinking about our Mythmoot concept (the power of creating a narrative to explain the events of our lives) when it occurred to me that our kids were doing something similar. But rather than real people creating imagined but really-believed stories to give or understand the meaning behind events, they were creating a deliberately fantastical story and layering it on top of their experience of the primary world - a kind of augmented reality.

It struck me that they were having an experience of fantasy similar to what Tolkien described in On Fairy Stories; but rather than fantasy being a kind of harbor away from the primary world their fantasy was a layer on top of it. Their play was amazing to watch and their collaborative, spontaneously constructed meta-narrative really gave them much joy. I think this kind of fantasy-pretend game might have some kind of corollary to Tolkien's triumvirate of Recovery, Escape, and Consolation. Something like enhancement, engagement, and enchantment. Because rather than drawing them out of the sensible world into a fantastical imaginary land, their play brought the wonder of fantasy into the world as they were imaginatively experiencing it.

I think there is something here worth exploring further.

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Scoping this talk was hard. There are so many fantastic leaders in the books, shows, and movies I love. I knew from previous experience that I needed to keep the focus narrow to avoid the inevitable sprawl that ultimately results in unfinished works or hectic deletions at the end to fit within allocated time limits. It was a bit easier because I went into this one planning to write a series of talks on leadership, with this one just being the first instance. 

I went with Rogers, Aragorn, and Picard because they are the heroes I grew up with and after whose example I patterned my own leadership style. They come from different story genres (superheroes, fantasy, and science fiction) told in disparate formats (comics, novel, television) which allows us to look at leadership from a few different perspectives. They are skilled leaders and fascinating characters in their own right. I’m not saying my three are the best fictional leaders, just that they resonate deeply with me. 

I realize that they are not a demographically diverse set. This isn’t a problem in itself, but I wanted to acknowledge that reality. Pictured on the left are just a few of the leaders I hope to study in future installments. 

The Marvel comics and movies are replete with leaders of diverse styles and descriptions but so is Fullmetal Alchemist, both manga and anime (Brotherhood). Voltron not only features a female leader, Princess Allura is successfully reimagined as a fascinating character in the 2016 reboot of the now nearly-unwachable 1984 original, but as a bonus it affords us a look at team- and coalition-building, a topic my wife and I looked at in our first joint Mythmoot presentation back in 2020. Galadriel’s career has long interested me, especially with the alternative and mutually-exclusive versions described in the History of Middle-earth series. I have not yet seen the Rings of Power series so I’m curious to see which elements they incorporated into her character for their adaptation.

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It’s always hard to tell how a presentation is being received in the room when presenting via Zoom but judging by the discussion in the following Q&A portion it seemed like it went over well. The crowd really seemed to respond both to the selected examples (Rogers, Aragorn, and Picard) and to the idea of looking at leaders in the light of their failure moments. This was really a result of my rejecting the notion of a “fatal flaw”. Whether they are historical or fictional, realistic characters seem to me to be more nuanced than that, but everyone experiences failure so I thought that would be a more relatable approach to the prompt. 

Some interesting questions were raised by the audience about an apparent period of dormancy between failure and recovery. I didn’t think of it in the moment, but this actually resonates with one of the ideas in an earlier paper on Disappointing Dualism which Kerra and I presented in our first moot back in 2020 where was observed that recovering heroes seemed to move through a period of solitude and reflection between a fall from grace and a return to active goodness. This question has me thinking and may spawn a future line of research. 

There was also a discussion later on about whether self-sacrifice was an essential trait for a heroic leader. I can think of a few examples where my three leaders put their lives on the line for others, but it seemed to me that a good leader needed to have vision to see the greater plan and understand the greater good as well as discernment to comprehend which of the many competing needs was the one to sacrifice for and when was the right time to do it. Again, this is a line of thought that merits more investigation. 

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Sunshine Moot 2023; “A successful leader often combines courage, resolve, intelligence, intuition, persuasion, and physical ability. Often these qualities are accompanied by pride, entitlement, impetuousness, and a “fatal flaw” — yet a leader is also called to demonstrate humility, self-sacrifice, and regard for others. It’s a tall order. How are these qualities brought forward and balanced in the leaders of fantasy and science fiction, and what lessons can be taken from their stories?” (Signum University Regional Moot Page)

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Failed Mythical Leaders

It has been said that good leaders are a force multiplier and that truly great leaders embody the highest virtues, bringing out the best in their people. But no one is perfect, and that is equally true of leaders, whether historical or imagined. Many heroes of myth are described as having a fatal flaw alongside their more admirable qualities, a not-so-hidden vice which holds them back or even leads to their tragic downfall. 

But real people (whether historical or invented) are less cartoonish than that. Real heroes like real people have a variety of strengths and weaknesses, and at times they fall short of the mark. They might even experience failures so significant that their peers and followers (or even they themselves) might question their fitness to command.

This talk will explore how great leaders in speculative fiction stories react to failure and how they recover afterwards. We will explore the leadership qualities of Jean Luc Picard, Steve Rogers, and Aragorn son of Arathorn, fit their behavior to modern leadership models, and discover if we can learn anything from their response to failure which might enhance our own personal resilience. It may be that they, and even we, might be stronger for the experience.

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This is the abstract for the talk I’ll be giving at Sunshine Moot this weekend. It is subtitled "A Cross-Genre Sampling of Success, Failure, and What Comes After”. I spent a lot of time on this one, in part because I’m not used to researching Star Trek or Marvel so the mechanics also took some time to figure out. Also, I had a lot to say, because these guys are my heroes. I ended up having to cut a lot to fit within my allocated 20-minute time slot, but as this is going to be the first installment in a series of papers on fantastical leadership, I hope to come back to some of those thoughts in the coming years.

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We presented an exploration of fate and prophecy at the first Buckeye Moot back in July of 2022, where the topic was Circles of the World: conversations on fate, life after death, and terra incognita. It synthesized some of the ideas we had been developing over the course of the previous two Mythmoots. We drew on material from our talks “Laid Paths” (2021) and “Retelling by Pretelling” (2022), putting key concepts in dialogue with each other and expanding into some new areas.  

We started by considering fate as an immutable force driving the events of a person’s life with the outcome are supernaturally predetermined. The latin origin refers to ‘that which has been spoken’, further reinforcing the concept of fate as an omnipotent spiritual arbiter meting out a judgment for some perceived crime.

We liked the idea of a supernatural force aiding the good guys, guaranteeing a happy ending eventually, but we were uncomfortable with a dictated outcome which might rob their efforts of meaning, reducing freedom to an illusion. We went on to explore fate from a few different perspectives, looking at the interplay of fate and freewill.

Results varied across stories, but we found that in some examples prophecy actually made the story better, not spoiling the ending but psychologically priming the audience, making stories more engaging. Rather than didactically decreeing the future, prophets put the characters on their path, and in doing so gave them hope. We ultimately found a less deterministic view of fate, one that inspires hope - no longer dictating an ultimatum, but offering characters an opportunity, inviting their freewill response.

This view conceives of fate engaging human freewill, allowing heroines and heroes to collaborate with fate to forge a new future. This new perspective resolves the apparent opposition between fate and freedom, but leaves open further questions about how we can find our way toward the ultimate end to which all are headed. But that is a topic for another paper.

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And here’s the diagram meant to pull together the primary societies, conferences, and journals for Tolkien-related materials.

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Mythmoot Experience

I attended Mythmoot 9 almost four months ago and I am long overdue to post some reflections on the event. In short, it was a very positive experience, and I don’t just mean the inspiring panelists or thought-provoking academic presentations, which were in themselves excellent. This is the first year that I interacted in a more sustained way with other moot participants: at table, in the meal line, and at social events. It is still difficult as a deep introvert, all this human interaction, but I really feel like I’ve finally, actually found my tribe.

And more than that, I am no longer plagued (at least not so intensely) with impostor syndrome. While I still haven’t yet arrived at the level of mastery in Arda-scholarship that I aspire to, I no longer have the acute sense that I don’t belong here. I genuinely enjoy being surrounded by people who are interested in the things that matter to me, and among whom I can grow in domain knowledge and academic rigor. I am not yet operating at the level I want to be, but I am on the path that will lead me there, to the point where I can make some contributions and actually content with that. It’s a good feeling.

But back to the conference. It was a well-attended affair, with ethereal participants outnumbering corporeal attendees by perhaps two to one, or at least that was my impression. The keynote addresses by Faith Acker, Jeff LaSalla, Michael Drout, and Tom Shippey were both delightful and thought provoking, in line with the conference theme: Remaking Myth. Moreover, the paper presentations I attended were a source of significant notetaking which unsurprisingly added to my personal reading list. I was delighted to hear the formal public announcement of the Signum Press and intrigued by their plans for non-traditional publishing including fiction and emerging scholarship as well as non-text media. I would be pleased to read Signum graduate theses for the planned release of the audio-format versions.

I also had the great fortune of meeting the showrunners for the Silmarillion Film Project. They were very patient and welcomed my interest in the project even offering me some work to do, which I enthusiastically jumped on. I also have other ideas to contribute and hope to make myself indispensable to the core team architecting the show into the Second Age and beyond. Snagging the narrator role for the live reading of the script for episode one of season six was merely the icing on the cake.

Our talk on Saturday went pretty well, but I’ll save specific thoughts on that for a separate post. My wife and I also got to host one of the new birds-of-a-feather sessions which allowed us to engage mostly with the ethereal participants on the subject of redemption themes in modern media. The session was very engaging and sparked ideas for a group of papers, perhaps an entire panel talk next year. Speaking of which, the theme for next year’s moot was announced at the end of the weekend: it is to be “the homeward journey”. I already have thoughts about what this could be but again, I’ll save that for a subsequent post.

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Scholarship Resources - Conferences

In addition to the question of where to publish completed articles (a matter of purely intellectual curiosity for me, since at this point I’m miles away from doing anything that intellectually rigorous), there is the question of where to go to present Tolkien-themed talks, or more realistically, where to see such talks presented. What follows is a list of regularly recurring events where Tolkien’s work and related topics are discussed throughout the academic year, or at least as near as I can figure out. Feedback and corrections are welcome.

Conferences

Medieval Academy of America (MAA) to hold Annual Meeting at Washington DC on 23-26 Feb 23

University of Vermont (UVM) to hold Tolkien in Vermont 2023 at Burlington on 1 Apr 23

Popular Culture Association (PCA/ACA) to hold National Conference at San Antonio (this year) on 5-8 Apr 23; areas of interest include Tolkien Studies Area, Medievalism in Pop Culture, and potentially others

Center for Fantasy and the Fantastic (CFF) to hold GIFCon (Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations) at University of Glasgow (online only this year) on 10-12 May 23

International Congress on Medieval Studies (ICMS) to hold 58th Congress at Kalamazoo on 11-13 May 23

Signum University to hold MythMoot-10 at Leesburg on 22-25 Jun 23 (projected); expect details in Dec 22

International Medieval Congress (IMC) to hold IMC-2023 at Leeds on 3-6 Jul 23

The Mythopoeic Society (MythSoc) to hold 53rd MythCon on 29-31 Jul 23 (projected); host city TBD

The Tolkien Society (TTS) to hold 50th OxonMoot online and in Oxford on 1-4 Sep 23

German Tolkien Society (DTG-Deutsche Tolkien Gesellschaft) to hold 19th Tolkien Seminar at Jena University (near Leipzig) on 27-29 Oct 23 (projected)

It is worth noting that this list does not include emerging events that are not yet well established or those with dates that fluctuate from year to year (the Mythopoeic Society and Signum University have a variety of such events, very valuable but not particularly regular). Also excluded are major Tolkien events conducted in languages other than English, which are not accessible to me as a monoglot.

I was greatly aided in my search by referencing curated CFP lists (call-for-papers) provided online by more experienced (and very gracious) scholars including Kris Swank (forums.signumuniversity.org), Anna Smol (annasmol.net), Becky Dillon (International Tolkien Fellowship on Facebook), Robin Reid (tolkien-on-the-web.dreamwidth.org), Tom Bolton (Green Book of the White Downs on Blogspot), and Eric Mueller-Harder (tolkienists.org). I recommend their work as being more significantly more informed than my own. Their lists often include CFPs for journals, monographs, and other non-event forums which exceed the scope of what this list is intended to be.

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Scholarship Resources - Journals

One of the aspects that has most confounded me as I’ve tried to break into the academically intimidating world of Tolkien scholarship is the array of venues and forums through which an aspiring writer could submit their work for review. After much hemming and hawing I finally consolidated a short list of the primary Tolkien-themed journals and conferences, understanding that the lines around such interacting communities are at best blurry.

Mythlore, the journal of the Mythopoeic Society (MythSoc), was founded in 1969 as a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal focused on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and the genres of myth and fantasy to promote the study, discussion, and enjoyment of fantastic and mythic literature; all 140 issues are available online through https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/

Mallorn, the journal of The Tolkien Society (TTS), was founded in 1970 as a peer-reviewed journal publishing articles, research notes, reviews, and artwork on subjects related to the works of J.R.R. Tolkien; full texts of all articles (excepting issues published within the past two years, only available to Tolkien Society members) are accessible online at https://journals.tolkiensociety.org/mallorn/issue/archive

Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review (TS) was founded in 2004 as a high-quality journal meant to present the growing body of critical commentary and scholarship on both J.R.R. Tolkien’s voluminous fiction and his academic work; published annually by West Virginia University Press with founding renowned editors Douglas Anderson, Michael Drout, and Verlyn Flieger; all 19 issues are available on Project MUSE (https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/299) and in paperback at $60 each

Journal of Tolkien Research (JTR) was founded in 2014 as a peer-reviewed, open access, electronic journal meant to provide high-quality research and scholarship based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, as well as both transformative and derivative texts based on his work, to a wide and diverse audience, to include gaming, media, adaptations, fan productions, and audience reception; articles from all 25 issues are available online at https://scholar.valpo.edu/journaloftolkienresearch 

At MythMoot-9. University President Cory Olsen announced the imminent launch of the Signum University Press (SUP) which is intended to provide both classic visual texts (primarily electronic but also potentially print on demand) as well as modern multi-media presentations as well: audio recordings of academic papers, video recordings, and possibly content in more esoteric formats. It is likely that SUP will form a fifth major forum for Tolkien-themed scholarship, both established and emergent.  

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Retelling by Pre-telling

Prophecy is pervasive throughout fantastic stories both ancient and modern. From the earliest tales we hear miraculous accounts of fate breaking into the story through divine revelations and prophetic dreams, mystical guidance indicating to the characters what shall (or at least should) happen.

   - From the North shall he come, need shall drive him: he shall pass the Door to the Paths of the Dead. -Malbeth

   - You are doomed. You and all your kind. Parasites, thieves! In the end you are nothing but dust. -Aughra

Prophecy is utterly anomalous to our lived experience, and yet as readers we accept it readily. How many of us would be convinced that the demented ravings of someone like Malbeth or Aughra foretell a predestined mission? And yet, we repeatedly encounter and accept the proclamations of seemingly unhinged prophets as an important thread in the tapestry of story.  

This paper will consider several selected examples of prophecy in speculative literature and examine how they function within their stories. We will explore the reasons why prophecies are such a prominent element and why readers are so willing to accept them. It may be that prophecy gives the events of the story meaning, connecting the characters to each other and to a greater purpose. Though prophecy is alien to our world, a desire for connection, meaning, and encouragement is only natural as we seek to compose the events of our passing days into the cohesive story of our lives.

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This is the abstract for the talk we’ll be giving at Mythmoot this weekend. (So excited!) The full title of the talk is "Retelling by Pre-telling: An Exploration of the Recurring Role of Prophecy in Speculative Fiction”. 

We didn’t find quite what we expected but that’s the best part of explorations of this kind. In fact, we tapped into such a rich vein with this topic that we had to leave many ideas behind and narrow down to just a handful of examples. Hopefully someone during the Q&A will bring up some of the other interesting prophecies we didn’t get a chance to cover like Willow or Foundation. 

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This is the graphic which depicts our central concept from the Laid Paths presentation: the motive trichotemy. It seemed to us that the best stories allowed the future to be shaped by three interrelated factors: fate, fortune, and freedom. 

It also occurred to us that/chance each pair of factors shared a common attribute which was opposed to the remaining factor (e.g. human freedom and fortune/chance are both natural while fate is supernatural, coming form outside the normal world). 

The concept was ours but the graphic was created by independent design consultant, Brian Troutman. 

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This is a compressed summary of what we found in the conversations and discussions which resulted in the Laid Paths talk at Mythmoot IIX. 

<click the image above for a larger (i.e. readable) version>