Babel Clash

Every writer begins as a reader, so it makes sense to start this conversation about writing by talking about our influences.

My first brush with fantasy (like that of lots of people) came with Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings was a big book on campuses at the time and some of my parents’ hip young friends had given them a copies to get them up to speed. I don’t know if they ever read it, but I was fascinated by the weird covers and the alien runes decorating the splash pages.

Reynolds, cover for "Fellowship of the Ring"

Everyone in the world seemed to have given it a good review, including people I’d never heard of like C.S. Lewis and W.H. Auden. So I read it and instantly became obsessed with it. I took all-too-seriously Tolkien’s gravely flip remark that “the book is too short” and, after I ‘d read LotR and The Hobbit a couple times, I launched on my own multi-volume fantasy epic. This one was going to be five volumes long–I didn’t want to repeat the one mistake Tolkien himself admitted making. I wasn’t very far into it before I gave up, but I did, of course make a map. I don’t remember much about it, but there was a mountain range that ran west-to-east and it had a dangerous pass through it called the “Kirach Kung”. There was a scary Mirkwoody sort of forest in it, but I’m not sure if I was already calling it Tychar (the winterwood, at whose verge readers first encountered Morlock a few years ago in “Turn Up This Crooked Way”).

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It was years before I tried writing another fantasy novel (and decades before I succeeded) but Tolkien’s influence only increased over time. But every time I reread him, there were some things that made me bristle at him a little. I never liked how the dark-skinned people seemed to be naturally subject to Sauron, for instance. And every time I read the books, I got madder and madder about the elves.

Elves. Those damn elves. In The Hobbit, for instance, they grab our friends, the dwarves and throw them in the slammer. They don’t let the rest of the group know they’ve already captured Thorin, or vice versa. No Miranda warning–no Fourth Amendment–nothing! (”I thought we were an autonomous collective!”) And they don’t even pretend it’s a matter of principle: the Elf-King suspects that the dwarves are after some treasure and he wants a slice of it.

All of this would actually be okay, if Tolkien weren’t going out of his way to get us to like elves. “Elves they were, and remain, and that is Good People,” he says. Even at my first reading, this abuse of authorial authority rankled me. It seemed like I should be able to tell who “the Good People” were without a scorecard supplied by the writer. Maybe I’d already begun to suspect that people didn’t come conveniently packaged as all-good and all-bad. In fact, if there’s a message to LotR, that seems to be it, so I was bummed that Tolkien was bending his own ideas for these characters, who seemed to have done little to deserve it. The elves who rose to the level of individual characters, like Galadriel, I didn’t mind, but what increasingly bugged me (and still bugs me) were the walk-on elves who we were supposed to like just because they were elvish. The term “Mary Sue” hadn’t been invented yet, but that was sort of what I was thinking.

Jones, cover for "Swords Against Death"

When I started getting serious about writing fantasy, I decided to banish elves from my imaginary world. For one thing, they seemed to belong to high fantasy and by then I was more interested in pursuing something darker and grittier, along the lines of Fritz Leiber and Jack Vance. But it was also a prophylactic measure against infection by MarySuery or MartyStuism. I did not want sad-faced beautiful elves showing up in the middle of my swordfights and screwing everything up by singing a sad song about western seas.

Now I’m not sure that was so obviously the right choice. You, Matt, have done interesting things with elvish characters, and I’d be interested to know what influences you were working under. But I think, even if mine wasn’t a good decision, it’s a good example of how a writer has to deal with influences. We have to fight our influences sometimes, if only to establish that this is our world and our dream, not theirs.

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