For still they speak not, men that I meet

Tolkien and sundry. header image credit: Sumeria

[thearrogantemu]

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The Untamed

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Maedhros and/or Fingon

Celebrimbor

Index Posts on Fic

Tolkien Fic Snippets and Ideas

These Gifts That You Have Given Me

In Full Measure I Return to You

[fisheatingowntail]

Mutilation of the arm or hand in Tolkien. turin and eowyn are both mutilated in the process of killing a thing that cant be touched. beren and frodo are both mutilated because their hand contains a valued object, and the object is bitten off of them. sauron and frodo both lose a ring finger. maedhros and beren both lose a hand at or nearabouts the gates of thangorodrim. maedhros and frodo are both saved in the mutilation.

[thesiltverses]

One upon a time, a long long time ago, I went to a university professor I respected a great deal during office hours excited to hear his thoughts on my critical theory approach to analyzing the text we were reading at the time, and he said, that as writers our primary role & objective should be to write good stories. He quoted some intellectual I don’t remember to emphasize his point — that we should seek first & foremost to write *good stories*, instead of lecture at the audience about Leftist principles, or plan for the moral of the story to be X then try to reverse engineer a coherent narrative from that end. We had a longer conversation about it that I can’t quite recall, but his gist was — the stories that last & influence people are *good stories*, not stories borne out of good intentions or correct ideology. Good Nazi stories will outlive weak Marxist stories every time.

I find your work hits too many leftist beats for it to be coincidental. And I’d like to ask how you approach ideology in your creative process, bc I recall you said once that as creatives we should think about the sort of story we create in today’s broadly awful, fascist, imperialist, late stage capitalist world.

Do you ever think like, oh there’s another oil spill in the Gulf, I should want to touch on ecological harms in my upcoming episodes & the tension between environmental preservation vs economic industrialization? Do you go about it deliberately thinking about the message you ultimately want to convey; do you sometimes end up changing details or editing elements bc you are cognizant they may dilute or harm the ideological message, so to speak?

Or do you just focus on writing a *good story*, and the ideology surfaces organically simply bc of the principles you hold as an individual?

(On further reflection I’m not so sure what my professor was trying to communicate — perhaps he felt I was a hair’s breadth away from writing straight propagandistic fables, and wanted to set me back towards more humanistic writing…)

(Bonus question: of all the characters you’ve written which was most ideologically opposed to yourself? Did you struggle with humanizing them? Do you feel hate for any of the characters you’ve birthed, basically?)

Hi! What an interesting question, thank you for asking it.

Your college professor sounds cool and as you say, it seems as if he was trying to give you writing advice in the context of a specific conversation.

I think my approach towards ideology in fiction is quite strongly opposed to the advice he gave you, though:

Seek first and foremost to write good stories.

Definitely, but this doesn't mean that good stories are necessarily "apolitical", non-explicitly political, or political as a tertiary concern, which I think is the subtext lurking in the margins of that statement.

The Dispossessed is a damn good story and also firmly, explicitly and fundamentally about its author's politics.

We should always be aware of the very real risk of lecturing or hectoring the audience until they lose all patience, or letting our ideology flatten the reality of the narrative and characters, or being so caught up in communicating our beliefs that we fail to apply craft. But we can also remember that these are subjective judgement calls and they're affected by personal preference, prejudice, and political environment.

There are audience members who might see any trans character as an act of jarring political intrusion and the author's hand forcing an ideology down upon their story, but would view a positive portrayal of the US Air Force funded by the US Air Force as pure rip-roaring apolitical entertainment. There can be no winning by dialling back your ideology sufficiently to satisfy theirs.

There are listeners who by the first or second episode of The Silt Verses were confidently stating that we were just repeating ourselves tediously now, we'd already fully covered the topic of 'capitalism bad' from I Am In Eskew at the level that they wanted to experience it (and fair play to them). There are people who got to the end of both shows and still weren't sure what our politics were!

Trying to edit our politics out of a story to ensure the most broadly favourable audience response can only benefit the politics that is insidious and entrenched enough to walk unseen.

Don't plan for the moral to be X and then work to that conclusion.

Up to a point, sure. But let's distinguish between morals, premises and themes, because again I think the subtext is 'don't begin a story already in possession of a confident political opinion or intent', which to me is very wrong.

Again, take The Dispossessed, one of the great works of science fiction. If we reduce that story to its end statements - capitalism will inevitably steal, exploit and corrupt the most utopian scientific ideals, for example - it could easily be characterised as clunking didacticism given its author's politics.

Put it this way, I do not think LeGuin surprised herself mid-edit by coming to that conclusion.

But the story is much more than its outcome. It's a dissection of the thinker's role and treatment in two very different kinds of societies, it's an exploration of Shevek's character and essential loneliness, how he chafes against the unyielding rules of the anarchist society he believes in and how he's tempted by the comforting aspects of the capitalist society he rejects.

I agree that you should keep yourself open as a writer to anything, and that you should take care to ensure a character is never solely a mouthpiece for the 'right' answer you've already figured out in your head. But that's about good characters more than an excess of politics. Characters should never have all the right answers, because neither do people. People struggle with things.

Me, I firmly believe that we're inhabiting an unsustainable nightmare that insists upon itself as normality and which must somehow be confronted. That's an explicit political throughline in all our works so far, it's a message I set out from the very beginning to convey, and I'm happy not to spend time considering the alternative view that actually, everything is fine and should remain how it is.

But that's the premise rather than the moral, it's the story's first thought and not the last thought. We want to take that premise onwards and explore the human beings who have to live with it.

"Good Nazi stories will outlive weak Marxist stories every time."

OK, but what constitutes a good Nazi story, and what storytelling lessons should we earnestly hope to learn from it?

Far-right fiction doesn't find popular success by focusing on good, hearty, nutritious narrative elements that are foolishly eschewed by shrill leftists. It finds success because it works to stimulate the very worst parts of humanity.

The Nazis' Jew Suss adaptation was very much a case of ideology taking precedence over storytelling, to the extent of editing out reaction shots that weren't sufficiently anti-semitic. Why, other than institutional stage-managing and the historical moment itself, did it find such a wide and receptive audience in Germany? Its central narrative elements (fear that outsiders have infiltrated our society for their own malignant purposes while also lusting after our helpless women; the righteous thrill of violent justice being exacted upon evildoers) are the exact same ones you'll find in other far-right popular successes like Birth of A Nation and, uh, Luc Besson's Taken.

For me the work is not about aiming to compete with these stories on their own terms, but dissecting and challenging the aspects of humanity that make it possible for these stories to succeed. If that approach risks a smaller audience share or longevity, it's necessary work nonetheless.

Do you ever think like, oh there’s another oil spill in the Gulf, I should want to touch on ecological harms in my upcoming episodes & the tension between environmental preservation vs economic industrialization?

I don't think it's about trying to provide a complete ideological statement or cover every pressing political issue with a single work; I don't think that's possible or something to strive towards. Let every fiction come with missing pieces and flaws and authorial blind spots; let us seek out other fictions by other human beings that can bring their own perspective to bear. It's infinitely better to have a library than a single holy text.

So no is the short answer, unless the oil spill sparks a good idea that contributes to the story!

Do you sometimes end up changing details or editing elements bc you are cognizant they may dilute or harm the ideological message, so to speak?

No and yes. I think that wayward or challenging elements are a crucial part of delivering something that's not just an ideological diatribe, and it's always fun and rewarding to explore them, so long as you have courage.

It's sometimes hard to have courage, particularly when you're writing for a very reactive and accessible online audience and you don't really have an expectation of continued livelihood beyond their collective support.

I've definitely sometimes strayed away from material because I wasn't confident in how it would be received, but usually I end up quietly regretting that cowardice. An element which you might think is unhelpful or harmful is often something very important which is just in need of thoughtful handling.

I think I've mentioned this before, because it still weighs on me somewhat; during the S1 Silt Verses Q&A, we had one question sent in by a listener who asked us very forcefully why our only queer characters had all died, and wanted us to commit publicly to not killing any more of them.

Was I beset by the fear that we'd accidentally written a manifesto of murderous prejudice? Was I tempted to react in a panic by introducing Derek, The Fulfilled And Contented Queer Dude Who Is Functionally Immune To The Story He Inhabits And Will Never Die Or Suffer? Definitely. Cowardice.

We didn't do that, obviously, but I tried to stop and consider where the question was coming from in good faith, which in turn made me reflect on the genuine consequence and potential harm that had come with keeping our protagonists' identities implicit up to that point while being more explicit about minor characters, and so we worked to move past that (while continuing to kill, basically, everyone).

Which character are you most ideologically opposed to / do you feel hate for any of the characters you've birthed?

Only in the sense of hate for myself. I think it's genuinely hard to write even a one-dimensional character which isn't in some way expressing an unwanted part of yourself or a longed-for aspect that's missing from yourself. And so it's not really about ideological opposition so much as staring at your own worst reflection and trying to make sense of it.

I hate David Ward's neuroticism and self-absorption, because it's my own. I hate Faulkner's obsessive desire to frame himself as the hero of the story, because that's an impulse I've struggled with. Even Carson, to an extent, is an expression of my time as a middle-manager during the Covid lockdown, jollying employees along with a rictus grin so that the everyday work can continue as the world burns.

The yearning for an ideology that's simple and reassuring and gives us a clear-cut identity in an otherwise shapeless existence. Terror of the other. Terror of change. The desire to mould our children into continuations of ourselves. Endless adaptability and selective ignorance in the face of unacceptable horrors. All the worst stuff is in me, not outside of me, and that's where I'm trying to explore it from.

If anyone somehow gets to the end of this, I am experiencing feelings of deep regret because I should have spent this time working on the show but the question was too interesting. Fuck.

[thearrogantemu]

...so I just went on Ao3 and to my ASTONISHMENT no one has written the ten-years-later fic of E. Nesbit's The Railway Children in which our three protagonists encounter World War I.

[sandersstudies]

My Shakespeare students (they are 12) wanted to summarize the lessons they learned this semester. If. Um. Anybody would like to see.

[sandersstudies]

I cannot emphasize enough that they made these with very little input from me.

Henry the Fifth

- ALWAYS encourage others to do their best.

- NEVER talk about people behind their back.

Antony and Cleopatra

- ALWAYS check your produce for pests. [They liked this one so much made a rap about it.]

- NEVER count your chickens before they hatch.

Hamlet

- ALWAYS act decisively

- NEVER tell your girlfriend to go to a convent and become a nun [Oh boy they REALLY liked this one]

Romeo and Juliet

- ALWAYS collect all the important information before making an important decision

- NEVER bite your thumb at us, sir. [They enacted this scene in the original language a lot, except they swapped every “sir” for “bro.”]

The Merchant of Venice

- ALWAYS pay your debts.

- NEVER judge based on appearances, because “all that glisters is not gold.”

The Tempest

- ALWAYS try to forgive others.

- NEVER be a colonizer. [Yes, a middle schooler said this]

Midsummer Night’s Dream

- ALWAYS stay on forest trails

- NEVER fall in love with an ass. [They were excited about this one for obvious reasons.]

Twelfth Night

- ALWAYS stay in touch with those important to us

- NEVER read other people’s mail

Macbeth

- ALWAYS wash your hands. [One of the girls performed Lady Macbeth’s entire Out Damn Spot monologue at the end of the semester]

- NEVER succumb to peer pressure.

[sandersstudies]

Yeah, I was re-reading the Tempest like “hmmm will they even understand the subtle themes here… this might be a cut-and-dry magic story to them.”

Kid 1 (known intellectual): Wait, Prospero is like… a colonizer to the magical creatures. He showed up on their island and enslaved them.

Kid 2: Enslaving people is bad! Is Prospero a bad guy?

Kid 3: But Caliban is bad! He wanted to kidnap Miranda.

Me: Yeah, it’s kind of hard, isn’t it? Just like how in real life most people are a mix of good and bad.

Kid 4: …is this why Shakespeare is supposed to be, like, really good?

[sagevalleymusings]

An Overly In-depth Analysis of Spinning Silver Many Years Late

`When I first started writing this in 2022, I had recently finished reading Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver for the first time. I wanted to remember a particular quote in the book, and stumbled upon some reviews from 2019, when the paperback was released.

The quote I was looking for: You will never be a Staryk Queen until you make a hundred winters in one day, seal the crack in the mountain, and make the white tree bloom.

The reviews: 

…read Temeraire and Uprooted at least ten times, but couldn’t reread this. The relationships between the two main men and two main women are abusive. Certainly, there’s trauma involved, but it’s not a woman’s job to heal men’s trauma through sacrificing themselves…

…I adored Uprooted (had some issues, but still loved it completely), however Spinning Silver just felt off – not as magical, terrible “romances”, too many POVs, etc. All in all, it just wasn’t as gripping. I liked Miryem’s character, but the other two protagonists were very bland “strong female characters…”

I hate this. I hate this so much. I hate this enough that I’m going to write an excessively long post defending Spinning Silver for three years. For everyone that doesn’t want to read a masters-student dissertation of an essay or who hasn’t read the book yet and wants to go into this spoiler free, here’s the TL:DR version. There are no romances in this book. The two reviewers above are trying to apply the enemies to lovers tropes they loved so much in Uprooted to a grimm fairy tale about politics, feminism, and Jewish persecution. There are no romances in this book. This is hard to grasp, because two of the main characters are married, and that marriage is a major part of the plot, but no one in those marriages including the men wanted the marriage in the first place. To call it “abusive” is to read modern expectations onto a historical political marriage that, while not inaccurate, fundamentally misunderstands the point and the context in which the story takes place. 

Also, I would recommend the audio book, if you have trouble with multiple points of view. They are all in first person, and although it starts out with just two, we add more and more POV until there’s 5 or 6 total. The reader Lisa Flanagan does an excellent job distinguishing POVs which will make this aspect of it easier. Read the book, particularly the audiobook. But if you are reading this book looking for romance, you’re going to be disappointed. It’s still one of the best if not the best re-imagined fairy tale I’ve ever read. Here’s an excessively long post about why.

The Introduction

The very first thing we’re introduced to is Miryem as our narrator explaining that stories aren’t about “how they tell it” but getting out of paying your debts. So how do “they” tell it? The introductory story is about a girl having sex out of wedlock who is left in the lurch because the “lord, prince, rich man’s son” has a duty. 

It’s about saving yourself for marriage. Even in how “they” tell it, who the man is doesn’t matter and no one is in love. Your duty to your family comes first. 

This story is not about romance. The story this story is subverting is not about romance. Even in how “they” tell it, romance isn’t a good thing. 

In actual fairy tales, not Disney princess stories, romance often has nothing to do with it. These are stories for little children to get them to obey their parents. Rumpelstilskin is about ingenuity and perseverance. Even in a story like Cinderella, the romance is entirely incidental - the story is about hard work, strength through adversity, and moral superiority. The marriage itself isn’t romantic in the sense that the two main characters fall in love. These stories are older than the modern concept of love. For authors with a strong sense of familial duty and nationalism, writing about something as subversive as romantic love would go against their goals.

This is the setting that Spinning Silver takes place in. It’s a modern fairy tale set in a regency era. The fairy tale Miryem tells in our introduction paints romance as a bad thing. You marry out of duty. 

But Miryem from the start tells us that filial duty isn’t what the stories are really about. They’re really about paying your debts. Within the first 2 minutes of this book, it’s already told us three times that this story isn’t about romance. Once in the setting of a fairy tale about filial duty, once in the denial of how they tell it, and once in the revelation of the real interpretation.

The Power of Threes

The power of repetition and specifically of threes comes up over and over again in the book. In many cultures across the world, three has special significance. From the fairy tale side of it, Rumpelstilskin itself contains layers of threes within threes. Rumpelstilskin makes a bargain for the miller’s daughter on the third night. The queen has three days to guess Rumpelstilskin’s name, and guesses three names each day.

It’s likely that these repetitions of threes in fairy tales come from the Christian backdrop they were written in, which at times focuses on the third path in the middle of two binaries, or the significance of building power, though it’s difficult to make any sweeping, central claims about why three is significant because fairy tales are so widespread across countries, time, and religion. But it’s important that Novik is writing this from a Lithuanian Jewish perspective, so there’s a subtle shift in the interpretation and meaning of the rule of threes. I’m not Jewish, so what specifically this is as grounded in Novik’s ancestry is something I can’t be clear on.

During my research, one explanation that seems to resonate with the symbolism of this book is a Chabad interpretation. From chabad.org: The number three symbolizes a harmony that includes and synthesizes two opposites. The unity symbolized by the number three isn’t accomplished by getting rid of number two, the entity that caused the discord, and reverting to the unity symbolized by number one. Rather, three merges the two to create a new entity, one that harmoniously includes both opposites. 

Lithuanian Judaism is majority non-Hasidic, so this is just one tangentially-related explanation of the importance of threes. I’m sure there’s other interpretations I’m missing because I can’t possibly begin to know where to look. But I like this explanation for grounding the story because I think it fits well with the symmetry of our protagonists and their husbands (or lack thereof), and the way the story is building to their creating something new.

So when the very first thing we are shown within the first two minutes of the book is a thrice denial of romance, we need to take Naomi Novik seriously when she says that the book is about getting out of paying your debts. Or, at the very least, this is what Miryem thinks the book is about. The way in which the characters grow and change does reveal some of the original cynicism in this thesis, but ultimately this is a story about what we owe each other, and how that debt comes for us if we don’t pay it. And on top of that, Miryem describes the love interest of the miller’s daughter as “lord, prince, rich man’s son” (3 possibilities). Who this love interest is doesn’t matter in the slightest.

All this to say that within the first two minutes of the book, if you are still reading this expecting a romance, you aren’t listening to the author.

Jewish Heritage

Also within the first few minutes of the book, we learn that Miryem is a Jewish moneylender in a fantasy version of Russian-occupied Lithuania some time in the Middle Ages. I’m not going to get too deep into this. I am, as I said, not Jewish, and these characterisations edge very close, on purpose, to deeply anti-Semitic tropes. But understanding what Novik is saying about her heritage and her family’s persecution is critically important to understanding the book. 

Naomi Novik is a second-generation American. She’s Lithuanian Jewish on her father’s side, and Polish Catholic on her mother’s side. In many ways, Spinning Silver has been treated as a spiritual successor to Uprooted. Uprooted is set in a fantasy version of Poland, Spinning Silver is set in a fantasy version of Lithuania. Both stories are about Novik’s heritage, and the stories from her ancestors. Spinning Silver is a lot more obvious about this, but there’s a non-zero amount of Catholicism in the way the Dragon structures his magic, and in the older folk magic that lives in the trees.

Spinning Silver is much more explicit, and Novik has said as much, that Miryem’s family is supposed to reflect her father’s family and his experience as a Lithuanian Jew.

Our book takes place in a fantasy version of Lithuania in 1816. That’s a very specific date I’ve picked out for a book that otherwise appears to be ‘the ambiguous past.’ How did I come to that conclusion?

I did a little bit of research to try and determine when and this is what I came up with: Lithuania didn’t exist until the 13th century. Lithuania didn’t have a tsar on the throne until Russian imperialism in the late 1700s. Restrictions on Jews’ ability to work in craft or trade began around 1100 in Europe, and began to wane around 1850. In Lithuania, this fluctuated depending on the specific time period, so we can a little further narrow the timing down to after the mid 1600s but before the 1850s, probably during early Russian imperialism. Leadership is religious, either Eastern Orthodox or Catholic, who at the time believed that charging interest was sinful, so employed members of other religions, specifically Jews, to do their money lending for them. Because of the association with sinful, dirty work, and previous oppression as a religious minority, this led to a significant rise in anti-Semitism, coming to a head with a series of Jewish pogroms in Russia from (officially) 1821-1906, leading millions to flee and thousands of deaths. So we can narrow our estimation down to about 80 years, between 1820-1900.

Then my historian partner started reading it with me and exclaimed, "is that a reference to the Year Without A Summer" so actually 1816, but you can also see how easy it is to narrow that date down even as an amateur just by examining the exact flavor of anti-Semitism in the text. Which is why, even after I learned about the year Without A Summer, I left my aimless searching in.

Most audience members probably don’t know this much detail about history, but Spinning Silver is very clearly written with an audience understanding of this history in mind. We’re supposed to see the rise in anti-Semitism throughout the book which adds a layer of tension because at any moment, the politics in the wider world and rising anti-Semitism might catch up to our protaginists, and Miryem and her entire family could be killed. 

That’s it, book over. Anti-Semitism sweeps through, destroys everything it touches, and none of the clever problem-solving of any of our heroines matters. It’s over.

This dark possibility looms over the story like a storm cloud the entire time. The most explicit reference is when Miryem uses the tunnel her grandfather dug.

“I pulled it up easily, and there was a ladder there waiting for me to climb down. Waiting for many people to climb down, here close to the synagogue, in case one day men came through the wall of the quarter with torches and axes, the way they had in the west where my grandfather’s grandmother had been a girl.”

The fear of persecution isn’t just something of the past. It is something that people in this community are actively thinking about and planning contingencies for.

We’re five pages in and I’ve barely gotten through the first five minutes of the book. I could do this for literally the rest of the book if I wanted to - five minutes later, Miryem as narrator starts talking about a festival at the turn of the seasons between Autumn and Winter, which she calls “their festival” and resents the townspeople for it because they’re spending money they borrowed from Panov Mandelstam on it. Meanwhile, Panov Mandelstam is lighting a candle for the third day of their own festival, when a cold wind sweeps in and blows the candles out. Her father tells them it’s a sign for bed time instead of relighting them, because they’re almost out of oil. Panov Mandelstam is reduced to whittling candles out of wood because, “there isn’t going to be any miracle of light in our house.” I didn’t catch this the first time around, because I’m an ignorant goyim I wasn’t thinking about this book as an explicitly Jewish fairytale. But Novik is obviously making a reference to Channukkah, and the fact that Panov Mandeltam doesn’t relight the candles for Channukkah is powerfully unsettling. And then on the eigth day, Miryem takes up her father’s work and collects the money he’s been neglecting, and there is light in their house for Channukkah after all, but the miracle is hard work, not magic. The entire book is like that, layers upon layers of meaning with every sentence. Subtle clues before the curtain is pulled back. I want to teach a seminar using only this book on the definition of “show, don’t tell.”

Good and Evil

But at some point I’m going to have to move on, and so let’s talk about trauma, poverty, and morals.

Novik introduces the townsfolk as Miryem sees them, but not all the townsfolk. Each person introduced by name winds up coming back later, enacting some kind of harm. But it seems to me that this harm is foreshadowed in each instance.

First, we’re introduced to Oleg. Oleg’s wife is described as being Oleg’s “squirrelly, nervous wife.” This isn’t the only time it occurs to me to wonder if Oleg beats his wife, but I think the description is intentional. Oleg eventually tries to murder Miryem, for explicitly anti-Semetic reasons, but I think this violence is foreshadowed in the way we see him interact, in brief flashes, with his wife and son, and how they’re always described as being a little withdrawn, a little afraid of Oleg, and not very sad that he’s gone, except in the part where this is going to be a financial burden on the family.

Next introduced is Kajus. Kajus who had borrowed two gold pieces to establish himself as a krupnik brewer (the krupnik he brews would lead to Da’s alcoholism). His solution to Miryem banging on their doors is to offer her a drink. Clearly getting people hooked and indebted to him is a tactic he’s used to success more than once. 

The last person introduced in this sequence is Lyudmila. Again, we are given a set of three. Lyudmila is different. Lyudmila never borrowed money. She doesn’t have a direct reason for despising the Mandelstams. Or at least, she shouldn’t. And yet, her distain jumps off the page. Lyudmila is the quiet, insidious voice spreading lies and rumors about the Jewish family in town. Her violence is not explicit. But it is the same.

The last person we’re introduced to, given an entire separate section to his own, is Gorek.

Good and Evil part 2 - is Wanda’s Da an evil character?

Gorek, who’s better known for the rest of the book as Wanda’s Da, is also introduced to us first as a borrower trying to get out of paying his debts. Gorek is a violent drunk. This is established repeatedly. Gorek is not a good man.

But is he evil? Certainly he seems to be the antagonist of Wanda’s story, and there’s no love lost when he dies. But I think it’s interesting that even Gorek, in many respects, is sympathetic. He’s not very different from any of the other men in this town. Oleg is violent. Kajus profits off the many people in the town that drink their troubles away. Gorek is not uniquely awful even if he is particularly awful. And even for Gorek, the text takes pains to remind us that he buried his wife and five children. His life is hard. Their plot of land is sat next to a tree where nothing will grow. How much rye did they waste before they learned that lesson? And when Mama was alive, they had enough to eat in the winter, but only because she was very, very careful to divide everything up. On his own, Gorek couldn’t make that math add up, even before he started drinking his troubles away. Gorek is facing a life where unless something drastic changes, he and his children will slowly starve to death, and there’s nothing he can do about it.

So he sells his daughter for one jug of krupnik a week. Gorek has made his bed; he doesn’t want to keep living. He’s drinking himself into the grave he dug for his wife. But in the meantime he does still need to take care of his children.

I don’t say this to forgive his actions; I do think Gorek’s actions are unforgivable. Some people cannot be redeemed, they can only be defeated, and Gorek is one of those people. But at the end of the book, Wanda and Sergei and Stepon still bury him when they go back to Pavys, next to the rest of their deceased family.

Gorek is a product of his environment, and that environment is cruel and cold. The people it produces are by and large cruel and cold. No one in the town bothers to bury Gorek. No one stops him from hitting his wife and children. There’s nothing at all strange, according to the rest of the town, about his selling his daughter for drink.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Gorek is not evil, but I also think that this book is taking pains to present with sympathy the kind of environment which creates people like Gorek. Like our Staryk king, who was entirely prepared to force himself onto Miryem even though neither one of them wanted it. Like Mirnatius, who did not himself commit any acts of violence, but who was perfectly willing to benefit from the violence being committed with his face. The world is cold and cruel, and it is very, very easy to become cold and cruel from it.

The Power of Threes revisited: Miryem’s magic

Even Miryem says that she’s had to be cold and cruel to be their family’s moneylender. We don’t see very much of this. But she does after all agree to have someone work in her house for essentially no pay. We don’t necessarily realize it, because it comes at our own turning point, but Miryem has to learn empathy just as much as her Staryk king does. When she agrees to allow Flek and Tsop and Shofer to help her with her trials.

I read Novik’s new anthology Buried Deep and Other Stories and in that collection she says it’s a line from the Staryk king about Miryem’s magic that made her want to expand what was originally a short story into a full book. “A power claimed and challenged and thrice carried out is true; the proving makes it so.”

Fairy tales are about hard work. This line from the Staryk king isn’t just a way of constructing magic, it’s just literally true. If I get a job as an accountant, despite not knowing anything about accounting, and I don’t fail, then by the end I will be an accountant. I love this, that the magic in Spinning Silver is just hard work.

Miryem’s magic is another rule of threes. The Staryk king challenges her to turn silver into gold three times, to make the magic true, and she does it – with mundane means, through ordinary hard work, but it’s done. She barters freedom for a day by turning three storehouses to gold, and she does that too – with wit and hard work, but it’s done. The Staryk king challenges her that she’ll never be a Staryk queen, unless she can do three feats of high magic, and she does each one. Or rather, each one gets done, and Miryem has a hand in it. But the first feat of high magic requires the assistance of one other person. The second – the assistance of three. Much like each trial before it grew in magnitude – first 6 coins, then 60, then 600 – so too do all three stories grow in magnitude. It would stand to reason then that the third test of magic would require at least three upon three people. But Miryem is not the only protagonist in this story.

Circling back to Romance: Arranged Marriage is Bad That’s Obviously The Point

In addition to the rule of threes woven repeatedly in Miryem’s story, the entire story itself is a Triptych. One story is the story of the girl who could turn silver into gold. One story is the story of the children who find themselves lost in the woods and stumble onto a witch’s house full of rich food. One story is the story of the duke’s misfit daughter who marries a prince. They are all of them different fairy tales. And at the end of the story, they all come crashing into each other. The white tree belongs to Wanda’s story, bought with six lives.

Three sets of three people in each story

There are many, many examples of threes woven throughout this story, but it was only three years into writing this essay that I realized that the marriages themselves are a set of three as well. After all, only Irina and Miryem get married, right?

But Wanda is offered a marriage proposal. In a story with less magic, Wanda would have married Lukas, and been yet another generation of poor, miserable women that died in childbirth. But Wanda says no, a thing entirely unheard of in this era. Women didn’t say no to marriages arranged by their fathers.

And at the end of the story, Wanda is still unwed, with absolutely no indication that this will ever change. Wanda’s agency, this rejection of marriage, is treated with the same weight as the marriages themselves. Saying no is just as valuable as Irina’s political marriage, or courting for a year and a day and marrying for love, as Miryem eventually does.

And Miryem does marry for love. She originally has no choice in the matter, but that contract is rendered void when the Staryk king is forced to let her go. We don’t see the year’s worth of courting because it’s not relevant to the story because this is not a romance but I really don’t want to lose this point because I think Wanda’s story sometimes gets forgotten precisely because it doesn’t have a marriage. But Novik is explicit about this through Wanda’s story. Irina had no choice, not really. So it never occurred to her to say yes or no. She kills the man who sought to marry her – Chernobog wanted to marry Irina, not Mirnatius. Irina murders her would-be husband, Miryem divorces hers, and Wanda says no. Yes, the arranged marriages in this book are abusive – Novik knows that and tears them down one by one and rebuilds them into something with far more agency, that our women protagonists chose.

The Story

So we’ve come all this way and learned that Spinning Silver is not a romance, not really. The married couples in the story do come to love each other, after a fashion. But that love blooming was not the point. The point was…

Well it was about getting out of paying your debts, wasn’t it? Novik told us very explicitly that it was about getting out of paying your debts right on the first page. It’s not how they told it. But she knew.

Miryem spends the entire book making her fortune from nothing. Wanda takes over the work from her. Stepon takes over after Wanda. The debt that the town owed to Josef was a major thread over and over again throughout the whole story. Oleg tries to kill Miryem over it. The Staryk king seeks Miryem’s hand because of it. Raquel had been sick because their dowry had been spent. Wanda comes to their house to pay off the debt. Nearly everything in the book can be traced back to the debt against Josef Mandelstam.

And then, in Chapter 25, Josef sends Wanda with many letters to the people of the town forgiving all the remaining debt that was owed. The people of Pavys get out of paying their debt.

But… how do they get out of it? Not through any trickery of their own, not really. There is a stated implication that fear was a big part of it. Sending Wanda with letters of forgiveness would mean that they would not be harried or harmed while they were wrapping up affairs in the town. But Josef also doesn’t need the money. They have a home of their own, many hands to make light the work, blessings from the Sunlit Tsar to establish their place in the world, and blessings from the Staryk king that will ensure their safety even through a hard winter. They want for nothing, so they do not seek to reclaim what is theirs.

And in a way they got all those blessings through paying their debts, but in a way they did not. The Staryk way of paying their debts teaches us something very important about what a debt really is. The Staryks don’t keep debts. They make fair trade. And if they can’t make fair trade, there is no deal. Or at least, they say they make fair trade. They didn’t trade for the gold they steal from the Sunlit world, though I suspect they would argue that the pain that is caused to the people of that world is trade for their putting a monster on the throne. And Miryem rightly points out that they had been raiding for gold and raping the people of Lithvas long before Chernobog sat on the throne. They make fair trade. But only with those they view as their equals.

But the Sunlit world is even worse. The Tsar doesn’t make fair trade. He spends magic like water and steals the lives of people that didn’t bargain with him to pay for it. In the Sunlit world, people take as much as they can with as little return as they can get away with. Not everyone, of course. But it is of particular note here that in this story, Jews are vilified particularly because they ask for fair trade in return. And the people they loan money to don’t want to give it to them.

But fair trade can only go so far. The Staryk king is trying to make a road back to his kingdom, and he can’t, because there is nothing of winter that they can find in the warm summer day. And he cannot take Stepon’s white tree seed, because it was bought with six lives, and given to Stepon alone, and there is nothing that the Staryk king can barter with that would measure against a mother’s love. But Stepon wants to see the white tree grown, so they find a way to plant it. Irina digs hard soil in apology, and the Mandelstams sing a hymn to encourage growth, and although none of this was done for the Staryk king, he still uses the work to create his road.

Sometimes, fair trade isn’t enough, and one must trust that it is to the benefit of all to aid each other.

The truest way of getting out of paying your debts… is to abolish the concept of debt.

That’s right, motherfuckers, eat your kings and burn the banks to the ground, love is the anti-capitalist manifesto we made along the way!

This section was going to be a little bit of a joke, but the more I think about it, the more it really isn’t. Miryem’s magic makes wealth meaningless in its magnitude. Wanda’s magic is having food and shelter to spare. And Irina’s magic is having just leadership that rules for the people, not for power. Novik’s fairytale ending is collectivism. She tells us three times, through three stories of hardship. And it isn’t even about becoming a princess, because Wanda marries no one, and lives in a magical house that seems to always have everything they need. So long as they do what they can to take care of it.

The real magic is community. Doing for yourself what you can, and reaching your hand to another when you can spare, so that they might do the same. And so long as we all do that together, the darkness cannot come in to feast.

[mephistopheles]

midsummer: if the feudal strictness of your home kingdom can’t give you what you want, try going on an adventure guided by magical supernatural beings

macbeth: but not like that

hamlet: if you’re in a duplicitous violent world, your king and your peers and your girlfriend may lie to you, so only follow the advice of your steadfast best friend

othello: but not like that

as you like it: if you undergo a misfortune that causes you to hate your life in your city, give yourself a makeover and run away to the woods

timon of athens: but not like that

two gents: if you’re in love in italy, you can quickly and easily communicate important information via the verona postal service

romeo and juliet: but not like that

[thearrogantemu]

Russian translation of "And What Happened After"!

There's a new Russian translation of And What Happened After, thanks to the skills of @adelacatcher! I'm deeply honored (and to anyone out there reading this fic in Russian, hello and best wishes from the author!)

[alabasterapricot]

Most recent bookbinding project - the devastating These Gifts That You Have Given Me, written by @thearrogantemu .

Front endpaper artwork is 'Ost-in-Edhil' by Felix Sotomayor, back endpaper by the splendid @fickleartdump .

(the embossing was an experiment, turned out a little messy, but I hope to think that Celebrimbor would approve)

[the-domestic-mammoth]

EVERYTHING'S FINE :) By W.B. Yeats

Tracing a neat straight line, adept and sure, The falcon heeds the calling falconer; Things hang together, and the center holds; Mere symmetry is ordering the world, The sea-bright tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence proceeds; The best have strong convictions, while the worst Are full of resignation and are sad.

Surely no revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming's far away. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When an indifference borne of stable comfort Leaves my sight clear: somewhere in sands of the desert A lion with lion body and the head of a lion, A gaze calm and leonine, as is usual, Is moving its slow thighs, while all around it Reel shadows of the normal desert birds. What a nice lion, right? And now I know That twenty centuries have gone along And things were bad sometimes, and things were good, And if a lion slouches toward Bethlehem, That's 'cause it's native to the Levant.

[thearrogantemu]

Ever heard "Losing My Religion" transposed into major? That's sort of the auditory equivalent of this.

[thearrogantemu]

Hello! I'd like to express my admiration for your amazing story "And What Happened After." You've done an enormous amount of work, and the story gives a feeling of healing and hope. It's really heartwarming! I've heard that for many fans in the English fandom, it's become a tradition to read it after watching the movies or reading the books. Maybe it would become a tradition in a Russian fandom too, I hope so!

Would you please give me your permission to translate this wonderful work into Russian and publish it (with you clearly credited as the author and with a link to the original) on the Russian fanfiction platform? I would be delighted to take on this translation, if no one has done it before.

Thank you for this beautiful work, and I hope to hear back from you!

Hi @adelacatcher! Thanks so much for your kind words. I'd be honored if you wanted to translate "And What Happened After" - you have my full permission and my best wishes for the endeavor! (I'd love to see a link if/when it gets posted, not that I can read Russian, but I can still express my appreciation!)

[yourspecialeyes]

Reddit user has cracked the code on how to read fanfic and study at the same time

(image via twitter)

[televisionenjoyer]

original reddit post

[jjapplepie]

[thearrogantemu]

Galileo Galilei is that you?!

[fickleartdump]

guilt by complicity

[elucubrare]

Dad just mentioned “Racine’s Saruman“ and oh my god I want it

[elucubrare]

Gríma Wormtongue as the Obligatory Confidant Gandalf as the Conflict Aragorn as the Noble Monarch Who Is Totally Not Louis XIV Sauron as the Deus Ex Machina

[elucubrare]

Act I, Scene i: the ruins of Orthanc 

Saruman: 

Stop, Gríma, and speak with me a while.  My eyes have ne'er seen a disaster so great: My armies are scatter’d, my men are all slain And Elessar the King is return’d to my door.  Shall I speak with the proud Maia who rides in his train and what of the small folk who brought my tower low?  Alas, what ruin has come to Isengard!  O glories past, O hate, O my fallen pride! 

[elucubrare]

@sigaloenta

[sigaloenta]

SARUMAN Restez, Grima. Bien que Fortune me ruine je trouve encore besoin de vos conseils si dignes. De mes armées énormes, nul homme reste vivant et sur les plaines d’Orthanque triomphe l’arbre argent. Or, dois je voir le roi, le puissant Elissar? Et l’arrogant Maia, qui suit partout son char? Ces qui m’ont renversé, les créatures petites? (Cette tour de telle hauteur, ont ils aux sol réduite.) Verront-ils Saruman en guise de suppliance? Entendront-ils mes mots serviles d’obéissance? Hélas, mon Isengard — quelle chute as tu passée! O gloires toutes tombées! Tombée ma fierté!

[chongoblog]

*gathers all of the people in the world who write the number 7 with a little dash in the center of it so I can study them like little critters and find out what makes them do that*

[audpaints]

There’s actually a lot of history regarding the development writing systems and why there are different visual representations of numerals, but the short answer is: it’s regional, and you probably picked up how to make your numbers look based on your parents or your primary school teachers

[ruusverd]

I do it out of spite because in grade school a kids detective story identified the culprit by saying NO American wrote their sevens with a line and I thought that was super flimsy evidence and it made me so mad I started putting a line through my sevens so the fictional detective would be wrong and then kept doing it for several decades since.

[mikkeneko]

I do feel one can’t underestimate the “elementary school child taught themselves how to do this Out Of Spite” crowd

[thearrogantemu]

What reconciliation Of two proud men? what peace can be found To grow between the hammer and the anvil? Tell us, Are the old disputes at an end, is the wall of pride cast down That divided them? Is it peace or war?

It's the ten year anniversary of finishing These Gifts That You Have Given Me, still one of the things I'm proudest of having created. In many ways it really does feel like ten years - I've gone through at least a decade's worth of transformation in my life - but my terrible OTP is just as terrible, and just as compelling to me, as the day I texted @sumeriasmith "I'd forgotten just what a nasty end Celebrimbor came to"

One of the most gratifying things about having offered this to the world has been seeing subsequent epic works that mention it as an influence - Prackspoor's Equinox, Chthonion's Anastasis, Cherepashka's For Nothing Less Than Thee. The wells of imagination, knowledge, talent, and passion are very deep in Silmarillion fandom, and it's been an honor to be - I feel I've lost hold of the metaphor here. Am I another drop of water in those wells or am I helping dig them deeper or am I just drinking from them? Or, as Bilbo said, all of them at once?

[cherepashkadrabbles]

Chapters: 4/6 Fandom: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien, TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms Rating: Mature Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Celebrimbor | Telperinquar/Sauron | Mairon, Annatar/Celebrimbor | Telperinquar Characters: Celebrimbor | Telperinquar, Annatar (Tolkien), Ereinion Gil-galad, Galadriel | Artanis, Elrond Peredhel, Narvi (Tolkien), Original Characters Additional Tags: Second Age (Tolkien), Eregion, Ost-in-Edhil, Gwaith-i-Mírdain, Time Travel Fix-It, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, References to Torture, How many math and science concepts can be co-opted into relationship metaphors? An experiment, Ever so many footnotes Summary:

At the end of the Third Age, Sauron falls. Partway through the Second Age, Annatar and Celebrimbor awake, with memories of a future that hasn’t happened yet. Each believing himself to be the only one to have traveled in time, they set out to change one another’s choices. Much else changes before they are done.

New chapter up. @solmarillion, your gift has not been abandoned! Thank you for your patience.