Babel Clash

Influences certainly seem a good place to start. I read all of Lord of the Rings during a long dull summer in college. (It seems like college is the time to read the thing.) I remember finding it somewhat ponderous and vaguely annoying; it was good, but I wished Tolkien would get to the damn point already. If there was one thing I felt like I had to “correct” in my own fantasy series, it was the seeming inability of high-fantasy authors to get to the damn point already. (Robert Jordan, I’m lookin’ at you, pal. I’ve really enjoyed the Wheel of Time books, but if I have to read one more description of a woman’s bodice in these last books, there will be a reckoning.)

Despite all that annoyed me about Tolkien, I was still mightily attracted to the stunningly realized world that he’d created. You just knew that any question at all you might have about Middle Earth, Tolkien would have an answer for it. Who was the Elf-King eleventy-six years ago? Not only did Tolkien know, but he probably had eighty pages of notes on the guy. Just in case.

That said, I was already a high-fantasy addict, and Tolkien was required reading. Don’t get me wrong; I enjoyed him, but it wasn’t then and never has been my favorite fantasy series. And by “high fantasy” I simply mean Tolkienesque fantasy replete with swords and wizards, dripping with moss and a sense of the ancient, larger than life conflicts, etc.; I play fast and loose with such labels.

This is the cover image for the editon I had as a kid.

The series that actually hooked me into high fantasy was Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea trilogy (which is now like a quintology or pentology, or whatever you call five books). Looking back, LeGuin owes an enormous debt to Tolkien, as does anyone who today writes in that vein, but I didn’t know that when I was twelve years old, and the World of Earthsea was plenty complete for my tastes. It had maps and everything! In comparing the two series in my mind, it feels like LeGuin got just as much actual story in those three books as Tolkien got in his, without the digressions of what Tom Bombadil had for breakfast, or the pages upon pages of Elvish poetry (in my memory, LoTR is about sixty percent Elvish poetry).

A few readers of my novel Midwinter complained that for high fantasy it was pretty scant on the small details, and while I can understand the objection, that was very much on purpose. Not being quite as talented at LeGuin, I did my best to cut out the chaff of that book and stick to the point, while at the same time trying to get the feel of high fantasy. And yet, and yet, Tolkien was lurking in the back of my mind; there’s a passing reference to a place called “Beleriand,” which was a name I thought I’d come up with my own, though Tolkien mavens will recognize it as a place in Middle Earth, a fact which, sadly, was pointed out to me only after the novel was published. Some insidious desire remained in me, the subtle need to add breadth and depth to this world, even while I was trying to avoid getting bogged down in it. There’s a balance there, and it’s one that I’m trying to address in Midwinter’s sequel, The Office of Shadow. We’ll see how that one goes.

Now, about the elves.

In my writing, I more or less chose the direct opposite tack of Mr. Enge and went full-elf with my debut novel, though, oddly, for similar reasons as those that compelled him to eschew them. My complaint about the elves in LoTR was that they had no personality whatsoever. They were, with the notable exception of Arwyn, interchangeable (though Wikipedia informs me that she’s only half-elf, which, there you go). I think Tolkien’s deference to them may have been an unconscious knee-jerk response of an Englishman to nobility, even while his portrayal of them seems somehow underscored with a kind of contempt. He calls them “good” but, as James has pointed out, they’re really kind of stuck up and bristly and show a surprising lack of concern about the plight of Middle Earth. Maybe they simply thought of Middle Earth as a rental car, and just couldn’t be bothered, since they were about to return it.

Anyway, there were things about the elves (both in Tolkien and elsewhere) that deeply affected me regardless. Their beauty and grace, their deep sense of history, the sheer wondrousness of them. I wanted to know more about these people, and so when I wrote Midwinter, I set it in Faerie, and made everyone there an elf. But I set out to immediately undermine the preconception of what an Elf was. The very first character we meet in the novel is described as “huge and crazy,” “with ugly teeth.” Another early character is described as “barrel chested,” and isn’t particularly bright. My hope is that the reader will unconsciously think, “My, these elves are nothing like other elves I’ve read about. I must know more about them!” (My readers are all Victorian gentlemen, apparently.)

There’s a scene in The Fountainhead where the architect Howard Roark is talking about influences. He opines that the works of those that have come before you are building blocks, and that our proper approach to them is to build things out of them. To speak of an original fantasy story is almost a contradiction in terms. Fantasy is almost always a repurposing of elements from folklore and mythology. The elves are there; we should use them, celebrate them even, but always with an eye to saying something new, using them as a platform upon which we can build to give our own perspective on what is and what might be.

Interestingly, James, we’ve both written about Tolkien not just as an influence, but also as a counter-influence; a template for how we didn’t want to do things. Interesting, no? I wonder if our distastes are as important (if not more so) than our tastes?

Related posts:

• Enge v. Elves
  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...
• Next guests & IO9 Book Club
  Our next guests at Babel Clash are Matthew Sturges and James Enge. Matthew is the author of the novel Midwinter and is also the writer for comic and graphic novel series House of Mystery and co-writer of Jack of Fables. James is the author of Blood of Ambrose, and its...
• Influences and categories
  James and Matt, For aspiring fantasy writers out there, would you recommend that they first read broadly within the fantasy category to become an expert, or would you recommend reading the best writers from a diverse mix of genres? ...
• A Healthy Dose of Reality
  Pyr Books editor Lou Anders pointed out to me that one thing James and I have in common is our tendency to ground our fantasy worlds in the real world through a series of “nebulous connections.” I think that’s a fair assessment, certainly for me, and definitely in Midwinter. Something...
• Engefluenza!
  Hey, Matt, I was fascinated by Earthsea, too. Still am, in fact. The original trilogy, especially the first two books, still rank among my all-time favorite fantasy novels: I love Ged’s confrontation with the gebbeth, and the conjuring scene, and the conversation with the dragon, and the final resolution of...