In the last contest of my mega-summer giveaway, I asked the all-important question that eight-year-olds have been wondering since the world was young: who would win a deathmatch smackdown, Obi-Wan Kenobi or Gandalf?

The number of entries was pretty pathetic, which makes me feel rather pathetic. I’ve been neglecting this blog terribly over the past few months, and Google Analytics reflects it.

But that doesn’t make me any less enthusiastic about awarding the final prize to loyal reader Josh Vogt. Josh writes:

I’m assuming we’re talking about the “old” Obi-wan, since it’d be great to see two hoary-haired mentor figures going head to head. Now, after they both got all frowny and had a bushy-browed staring contest, Gandalf would win the ultimate showdown (bridge locale optional). Why? Because Obi-wan has a suicidal death wish. Just stick any young Jedi-wannabe within ten feet of the old guy, and the moment anyone takes a swing at his head, whether with a staff or light saber, the dude’s going to get a mystical smile on his face, cue a little emotional background music, and let himself get decapitated into a pile of dirty laundry. Because he’s just that enigmatic. He wouldn’t dare sacrifice all that mystique for the sake of winning any kind of fight. Gandalf is much more pragmatic and at least provides substantial opposition, making sure his enemy is down for the count (preferably cast down upon the mountainside) before even letting himself take a breather.

Congratulations, Josh, you’ve won the David Louis Edelman prize pack, which includes:

• One signed copy of the Solaris mass market of Infoquake
• One signed copy of the Pyr trade paperback of MultiReal
• One signed copy of The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume Two (containing my story “Mathralon”)
• One signed copy of the new Overlook Press edition of Mervyn Peake’s Titus Alone (containing my introduction)

The only other entry of note came from Derek Johnson, who writes:

This is easy: Gandalf wins hands down.  He defeated the Balrog, and traversed the belly of Middle Earth in the process.  All Obi-Wan ever did was turn into a ghost.  Obi-Wan couldn’t even stop the chosen one from turning to the dark side of the Force.

The “how” is even easier.  Because magic in Tolkien is something of a technology, he could sap Obi-Wan of his midichlorians, which are the key elements in accessing the Force.

The topic also came up in the comments for the last contest of what would happen if you added Morpheus, Albus Dumbledore, and Duncan Idaho to the mix. Personally, I think Morpheus would kick all of their asses — because you know that the powers of all the others are simply delusions forcefed down their neural cortexes by the Matrix.

While I’m doling out unflattering reviews, here’s another unflattering review of Infoquake from Sam of the Whatta Fiasco blog. This one’s short enough to cite in its entirety:

There were parts of this book that had me excited and intrigued, but then things would wander off into emotional dead ends. The tech and some of the social ideas were cool and nifty, but the business model stuff just never made it for me. And a glossary in the back? That’s just never a good sign. There are plenty of interesting bits in there and lots of promise, but the book as a whole just never gelled for me.

Most of the review I can just kind of shrug and say, “Well, if it ain’t your cup of tea, it ain’t your cup of tea.” But I’m a little puzzled by the comment about the glossary. Glossary = bad?

It’s not the first time I’ve heard this sentiment. A few other reviewers of Infoquake have stated that the book had a strike against it from the outset just by including a glossary and appendices. For another example, here’s what Paul Kincaid had to say in his (generally quite positive) review of Infoquake for The New York Review of Science Fiction last year:

Occasionally we have become used to extraneous material being introduced, a list of characters in a sprawling Russian novel or a map in a second-rate fantasy, but generally the more an author feels the need for this material the more justified we are in feeling that the author has failed in the primary task of telling it all in the story. David Louis Edelman has devoted the last 40 pages of his novel to no fewer than six addenda, including a glossary, a timeline, a history of the Surina family, a (cod) explanation of the (cod) science in the book and so on. There is nothing in any of these addenda that should not have been crystal clear through the story alone.

I don’t understand this sentiment, and I’m wondering how widespread it is. I mean, The Lord of the Rings, Dune, A Clockwork Orange, 1984, and The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant all have glossaries, to name a few off the top of my head. Do they have strikes against them too?

I can’t speak for why Mssrs. Tolkien, Herbert, Burgess, Blair, and Donaldson included appendix material in their books. For Tolkien, the humbug-scholarship aspect of Middle Earth was clearly central to his work. (See my post about Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales for more on this.) Herbert’s seem like something of an afterthought.

For me, the appendices were a way of compromising with the reader. Personally, I tend to enjoy the long-winded infodumps in stories. My favorite chapter in The Lord of the Rings? “The Council of Elrond.” My favorite part of The Matrix? Morpheus’ explanation to Neo about the world of the machines (followed by that near-incomprehensible speech by The Architect in The Matrix: Reloaded).

If I had written Infoquake solely for my own benefit, I would have filled it with chapter after chapter of people lounging around talking about the ethical implications of multi technology over dinner. But given that I’m writing stories for other people to enjoy, I realized that it would help move the story along if I excised some of these narratives from the story proper. Moving them into appendices seemed like a nice way to keep the rising tension while still satisfying the irrepressibly curious.

(As for the glossary? The world of Jump 225 is quite complex and filled with invented buzzwords, I’ll admit. That part of the story is entirely intentional, and meant to both reflect on and satirize our own society. Imagine how many footnotes you’d need to explain to a resident of 1965 how you used your Blackberry’s GPS to track down the closest Mickey D’s from an address you got on Google.)

It might sound like I’m starting to get defensive here, but I’m really not. I don’t get mad at people who have problems with my books, I get curious. So. The sentiment that glossaries and appendices are to be avoided. What to make of it?

My initial temptation was to write it off as the opinion of someone who doesn’t want to read anything they have to think about too hard. (Honestly, the reader who picks up Infoquake at the airport just because they want to stay awake on the plane isn’t a reader I care too much about.) But that’s clearly unfair to the two reviewers cited above. The NY Review reviewer clearly engaged with the material, even if he had some problems with it. And from what I can tell by browsing through his blog, the Whatta Fiasco guy seems to be well-read, engages with the material, and has generally good taste.

But after giving it some more careful thought, here are what seem to me to be plausible reasons an intelligent and engaged reader would object to seeing lengthy glossaries and appendices in the back of a book:

1. It’s a sign that the author is taking him- or herself too seriously.

2. It’s a sign that the author is really in dire need of a good editor.

3. It’s a sign that the author is falling prey to the (perceived) genre shortcoming of unnecessary complexity.

4. It’s a sign that the author is too lazy to introduce these terms organically into the body of the story.

5. It’s a sign that either the author, the editor, or the publisher don’t trust the reader’s intelligence enough to remember the important terms in the story.

Any that I’m missing? Any thoughts from glossary-lovers or -haters out there?

You may have heard that E. Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons & Dragons, lost his final saving throw with the great dungeon master in the sky this morning.

Perhaps I should have called this post “Dungeons & Dragons: An Appreciation,” since I really didn’t know Gary Gygax from Elric of Melniboné. I don’t think I ever heard the guy speak or saw his picture until this afternoon. I may have read an interview or two with him over the years, but they certainly didn’t make any lasting impression.

But to me, Gary Gygax was not primarily the inventor of a popular role-playing game; he was an unparalleled author of fantasy. Gary Gygax wrote three volumes that were highly influential to me as a kid. I speak of the Players Handbook, the Dungeon Masters Guide, and the Monster Manual. I present them below in the editions that will forever be branded in my memory:

My experiences as a player of Dungeons & Dragons have generally been pretty miserable. I played my first game at perhaps the age of eight, with my brother as dungeon master and my older sister serving as co-adventurer. I’m guessing this was 1979, because the module we were playing, In Search of the Unknown, was published that year. I believe we were playing the Basic rules, using the set pictured below. (Gawd, do these pictures bring back memories…)

We made an awful team. My sister and I spent a couple of hours building our characters — I was a dwarf, if I remember correctly — and got into a horrific argument about how we should order our party for the inevitable foray into the dungeon. Tears and screaming ensued. (Hey, I was eight.) Finally, we decided to just put aside our differences in the interest of pursuing adventure, but the adventure proved to be short-lived. We found ourselves shooting arrows at a band of ravenous giant centipedes, which we pictured as these enormous Dune-sized worms with enormous jaws and enormous sharp teeth. Then my brother cheerfully informed us that these giant centipedes were only about a foot long, at which point the game dissolved into a fit of giggles and never resumed.

Over the next half-dozen years, I was determined to find a good game of Dungeons & Dragons and become one of those legendary dungeon masters you read about in Dungeon Masters Guide. But despite fervent evangelism to my elementary school friends, the most that ever materialized was a rather pathetic playthrough of The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh. I served as dungeon master to my then-friends, who wandered disinterestedly through a haunted house killing everything that moved, without ever realizing that the place was just a ruse set up by pirates to scare the locals away from their smuggling operation.

When I finally found a group of guys who were serious AD&D players, we were all heading into the dungeon of puberty. We had weekly sleepovers where eight or nine of us would earnestly head off for adventure, and then quickly drift off into Giggling & Gossip after an hour or two. This continued for a couple of years until my friend Geoff and I brought the entire role-playing phase of the group to a close by creating a game called Chutes & Dungeons & Ladders & Dragons. The raucous game, played only once, went something like this:

ME: You turn the corner and you see a giant ladder.

PLAYER: I’ll climb the ladder.

ME: You get to the top of the ladder, and you see Matt’s dad yelling at you to take out the trash. He summons Cthulu, who zaps you with a lightning bolt that costs you four million hit points.

PLAYER: I’m rolling a saving throw… it’s a 3! That means the lightning bolt bounces off me and kills Matt’s dad instead. [throws Cheetos]

And that, in a nutshell, is my history with fantasy role-playing.

Despite the fact that I never had a satisfactory Dungeons & Dragons gaming experience, I spent years poring over those books you see above. I read them cover to cover multiple times. I studied the artwork. I sketched out a million dungeons and was never far from a pad of graph paper and a felt bag full of 20-sided dice. I would daydream about the world of Greyhawk and psionic powers and what would happen if I gathered a group of a hundred adventures and we all screamed “Hastur!” at the top of our lungs. (Readers of Deities & Demigods get the joke.)

Through those books you see above (along with others like The Fiend Folio, Deities & Demigods, The Monster Manual II, and Oriental Adventures), Gary Gygax opened my eyes. He introduced me to Norse mythology, Michael Moorcock, Robert E. Howard, and H.P. Lovecraft. He gave me a hard-on for imagination that’s been with me ever since. (And if you’ve ever spent any time poring through those books, you can imagine that they produced hard-ons of a more literal variety too. Let’s just say that in the ’70s, topless large-breasted she-demons were about as hard core as it got for a preadolescent kid in Orange County, California.)

What was so fabulous about Gary Gygax’s Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks?

I think it was a combination of Gygax’s boundless enthusiasm, his slightly cornball sense of humor, and his ability to gleefully cannibalize any piece of film or literature in the service of adventure. It wasn’t armor classes and spell requirements that I was learning by reading those books. I was learning how to turn life into an adventure that would never end no matter how good you got at it. I was learning how to size up the world around me with a rigid set of rules and statistics and dice rolls. I was learning a handy set of moral rules in the alignment chart, which taught me more about human nature than eight years of Hebrew school ever did.

Detractors of D&D often stereotype RPG fans (as well as SF fans) as people with poor social skills. (And I suppose one must admit that there does seem to be some kind of correlation.) But to me, the hallmark of the D&D player is the tendency, on unfolding a map of Greyhawk, to look at those peculiar countries on the edge, the ones with the strange names about which the accompanying booklet simply says “not much is known about this land,” and instantly want to be there, to yearn beyond all else to jump into that map and be the first one to trek through it and map it out and provide a complete description of its history, customs, and politics for the world’s edification.

E. Gary Gygax unlocked that tendency in me in the late ’70s. And the fact that he’s gone now makes the world that much poorer. Damn it, how come there’s never a 25th-level Cleric with a Wish spell around when you need one?

Before I start, yes, there will be spoilers here. Don’t read on unless you’ve either finished, aren’t planning to read the book, or are a reasonable human being who understands that plot is only one element to a novel, and not the most important one either.

***

So the Harry Potter series is over, and I was pretty much right. (Read my entry What Will Happen in the Final Harry Potter?)

I predicted that Harry, Ron, and Hermione would all live to the end of the series, though J.K. would keep us in suspense until the last minute. Bing! I predicted that Snape would reveal that he had killed Dumbledore and turned Death Eater on Dumbledore’s orders. Bing! I predicted that Harry would triumph over Voldemort at the expense of lots of secondary characters. Bing! I predicted that Harry would find some way to contact Sirius Black again from beyond the grave. Well, no bing! there, but I’d suggest that I deserve a partial bing! since Harry does manage to contact another dead mentor (Dumbledore) from beyond the grave.

Of course, you can chalk this up less to my amazing powers of prognostication than to the fact that J.K. Rowling made a lot of this fairly obvious. I think many of us knew that Dumbledore was going to die from the second or third book in. I mean, didn’t Obi-Wan Kenobi die on Luke Skywalker? Didn’t Gandalf die on Frodo? That’s simply the way these stories go: Our Hero receives instruction from a Wise Mentor, who later dies and leaves the hero to confront the Big Bad Villain alone.

I’ve heard a lot of people complain that the Harry Potter novels are “too derivative.” To which I say, Yes! J.K. Rowling is derivative! And that’s the entire point. One of the things that makes these books so terrific is the fact that the author is very consciously following traditional patterns. She’s taken something old and familiar, dusted it off, and made it seem fresh and new again. It’s harder to do than you think.

So how does Deathly Hallows rank? How good was the book? I’d say Deathly Hallows is the third best in the series, behind Order of the Phoenix and Prisoner of Azkaban.

I admit I was very worried about this book. L. Frank Baum got lazy a few books in to his Oz series and wrote a real stinker called The Road to Oz, which basically consists of Dorothy meeting up with all her pals and going to the Emerald City for a big party. (Baum even pulls in characters from his other books in a crass effort to draw attention to them and boost lagging sales.) Then in the sixth book, The Emerald City of Oz, Baum tried to wrap the whole thing up by making Oz invisible. C.S. Lewis had similar issues drawing Narnia to a close in The Last Battle. I dreaded the prospect of Deathly Hallows becoming a Road to Oz-type wrap-up with endless cameos by secondary characters.

So imagine my surprise that Rowling didn’t fall into this trap at all. There’s very little of that last-time-around nostalgia kick going on in Deathly Hallows. No last ride on the Hogwarts Express, no last trip to Hagrid’s shack, no last game of Quidditch. Hell, they don’t even make it to Hogwarts until the last hundred pages or so. About three-quarters of the book is focused exclusively on Harry, Ron, and Hermione, and there are quite a number of new characters here to sink your teeth into. Characters like Dobby, Neville, and Hagrid (the last of whom seemed in danger of staging a Fonzie-like takeover of the series two or three books in) only show up for short bits here and there.

That’s not to say that the book is perfect. Rowling does still indulge a number of her less-than-admirable habits in this book too. She makes too much of the plot revolve around obscure details and marginalia from several books back that we can’t be expected to keep track of. Remember how frustrating it was when Sherlock Holmes would bend to the ground at the scene of a crime, take notice of something that our narrator Watson couldn’t see, and then produce this insignificant thing at the conclusion as the final damning piece of evidence against the villain? Rowling’s got that affliction too.

Why didn’t Harry die when Voldemort cast the Avada Kedavra curse on him at the end? Why did the spell rebound on the Evil Dude? There were a couple of long convoluted explanations about switched wands that I couldn’t really follow, nor did I think it really mattered that much. Ditto with the overly complicated back story for Albus Dumbledore. What mattered was that Voldy’s selfishness, arrogance, and shortsightedness did him in in the end, and Alby’s faith, patience, and trust in Harry won the day.

(And has anybody else noticed Rowling’s little joke here, that “Avada Kedavra” sounds a heck of a lot like “abracadabra”? Well, maybe it’s not so much of a joke, as Wikipedia explains.)

The other questionable tactic Rowling uses is her excessive killing off of characters. About a dozen characters bite it in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but it almost seems like the author chose them at random by writing their names on note cards and tossing them up in the air. I mean, really, Tonks? Crabbe? Anybody wonder what logic there was in some of these choices? (And anybody else find it peculiar that Mad-Eye Moody’s body was never found?)

So now that we’ve seen the whole Harry Potter saga from start to (presumed) finish, what can we say about it? Will the Harry Potter novels endure?

I say yes, but not necessarily because of the clever plotting and suspense. The primary virtue of these books is that they provide such an incredibly convincing portrait of a boy’s coming of age. So many other authors who write about children either gloss over the turmoiled adolescence or yank their characters from childhood to adulthood in one fell swoop. Harry starts the series as a cute kid who discovers a magical world, and undergoes a very gradual transformation through the seven books to a responsible adult. It’s an impressive achievement, made all the more impressive by the fact that Rowling is a woman. (Although once future generations finally shake off this irritating Puritanical streak that runs through our culture, people will start to wonder why Harry is the only teenaged boy in history to grow up without a sex drive.)

So if you’re one of those people feeling incredibly sad that Harry’s adventures are over, don’t worry — I’m sure J.K. Rowling will return to Hogwarts at some point. Even though we know what happens to Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Ginny nineteen years down the line, there’s still plenty left to show. I’m betting that the lure of the four hundred zillion dollars the publishers throw at her will prove irresistible.

I’m betting on a collection of Potter-related short stories sometime in the middle of the next decade, and/or one or two novelties like Quidditch Through the Ages and Fantastical Beasts and Where to Find Them done for charitable purposes.

***

A side note: Perhaps I missed this in earlier books — but did anyone else notice that the death date on James and Lily Potter’s graves was 1981? Which would make the present day of Deathly Hallows 1997-98, not 2007-08. Rowling eschews the use of topical references and specific dates through most of the series, and this is the first time I noticed when the series was supposed to take place. It’s an insignificant thing, really, but I’m curious if there’s any reasoning behind it. Remember how in Superman Returns, if you looked at the dates closely, the Man of Steel turned out to have gone off on his little five-year hiatus right before 9/11?

Vizzini: So. It has come down to the final Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Let me put it this way. Have you ever heard of Tolkien, Le Guin, Moorcock? Morons!

Man in Black: Really! In that case, I challenge you to a battle of wits.

Vizzini: I accept!

Man in Black: All right. Will Harry Potter die or will Voldemort die? The battle of wits has begun! It ends when J.K. Rowling decides, and we all read, and find out who is right — and who is dead.

Vizzini: But it’s so simple! All we need to do is divine from what we know of J.K. Rowling: is she the sort of woman who would kill off her protagonist, or her villain? Now, a clever author would kill off her protagonist, because she would know that only a great fool would assume that the beloved protagonist of a popular series of novels is safe. We are not great fools, so we can clearly not bet on Harry Potter to die. But J.K. Rowling must have known we were not great fools; she would have counted on it! So we can clearly not bet on Voldemort to die.

Man in Black: You’ve made your decision then?

Vizzini: Not remotely! Because while J.K. Rowling pretends to be a novelist with a dark and sinister side, she’s really a sentimental crowd pleaser at heart. And she knows that killing off her protagonist would be very distressing to much of her young audience. So clearly, though she’s going to string us along, she won’t do something so dark as to have Harry Potter die in the end. She’ll go for the cheery, crowd-pleasing ending of having Voldemort die and Harry Potter triumph.

Man in Black: But she’s already killed off beloved characters before, like Sirius Black and Dumbledore.

Vizzini: And I think there’s a good chance she’s going to bring Sirius back before the end of Deathly Hallows too. Either that or she’s going to hint somehow that he’s still alive, or Harry can still communicate with him through the grave, or something like that.

Man in Black: Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.

Vizzini: Wait ’til I get going! Where was I?

Man in Black: Dumbledore.

Vizzini: Yes! Dumbledore! As for Dumbledore — you realize that he expected to die, and even planned for it? In fact, if you carefully re-read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, you realize that all the time Dumbledore is begging Snape to keep his vow and do what he promised, he’s actually begging Snape to kill him when the time comes. Snape has been acting so mopey throughout the series because he doesn’t want to go through with it and pretend to join Voldemort’s side, even though he promised Dumbledore he would.

Man in Black: So who will die then? Rowling’s already claimed several characters will die.

Vizzini: Not Ron or Hermione, that’s for sure. They’re going to get together by the end of the book, Rowling’s been hinting at that for ages. I doubt Ginny Weasley will die either, because Rowling’s set Ginny up to be Harry’s love interest — though I wouldn’t rule out Ginny being another tragic loss Harry has to endure before the end. I’m guessing that Snape will die in the act of saving Harry and thus become your classic tragically misunderstood martyr character. I would have bet on Neville too if I hadn’t heard that they cut out the parts about Neville and the prophecy from the Order of the Phoenix movie. Now I’m convinced that all along he was just a red herring. Draco Malfoy might bite it too, although Malfoy strikes me as a likely candidate for either sudden repentance at a last, crucial moment, or as the bad guy who’s going to stick around and endure the punishment at the end of the book.

Man in Black: What makes you so sure that Harry won’t be the one to die?

Vizzini: Because the whole series is set up as a coming of age story for Harry. With a few exceptions, just about every chapter in all six books has been set from Harry’s point of view. The series begins when he’s eleven — just entering his teenage years — and ends when he’s eighteen — a symbolic age for the passage to adulthood. Rowling’s not writing a martyrdom story here or a parable about Jesus; she’s writing the classic passage-to-adulthood story. And we all know how this story goes: the protagonist begins young and naive, he faces great challenges, and eventually he vanquishes his enemy, but not without great sacrifice along the way. He emerges from the story older and wiser, triumphant but having learned that life requires hard work and sacrifice. Harry can’t very well learn that lesson if he’s dead, can he?

Man in Black: But Rowling has hinted several times that Harry might not be safe.

Vizzini: Marketing hokum! J.K. Rowling is terrific at it. Plus she loves red herrings. Remember that scene in Order of the Phoenix where she made us believe, for just a moment, that Mr. Weasley had died? Why put that in the book? Because she got a nice little thrill from telling everyone that a major character was going to die in that book, and it’s just so much fun to play around with readers’ expectations.

Man in Black: You’re really so sure that Harry’s not going to die then.

Vizzini: Well, I’m sure that having Harry live is what she should do. But keep in mind that making predictions about the outcome of the series is nothing more than a guessing game. Like any good novelist, Rowling’s stuck omens and portents in the books that could lead to any number of possible outcomes. There’s evidence to support just about any conclusion you might draw. It’s all a question of what kind of person Rowling is, and what kind of endcap she feels like putting on her series. I suspect she’ll leave Harry alive, but she’ll kill one or two tertiary characters simply because she has to to keep up the suspense. But she’ll also leave enough openings and a few juicy unresolved mysteries just in case she decides to write sequels.

Man in Black: What else is going to happen in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows?

Vizzini: I don’t have high hopes for the book, because I suspect that every character from the past six books is going to pop in for a farewell cameo. It could prove to be very messy. That’s what happens when you get such phenomenal success so early — it affects what you write. J.K. Rowling’s probably gotten a thousand letters from children all over the world begging to hear what happens to every minor, insignificant character in the series, and I’m afraid she’s going to try to oblige them all.

Man in Black: So will Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows sell less than 20 million copies?

Vizzini: That would be totally, and in all other ways, inconceivable.

J.R.R. Tolkien did not write The Lord of the Rings or any of the related Middle Earth materials. Honestly.

No, the good Oxford don was merely a translator and annotator of an ancient work of literature known as the Red Book of Westmarch. In addition to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, which are presumed to have been written by Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, the Red Book also contained a large collection of ancient folklore known as Translations from the Elvish. It’s from this section of the Red Book that The Silmarillion, The Children of Húrin, and Unfinished Tales are presumed to have originated.

To me, this is one of the truly fascinating things about Tolkien’s world that sets it on a higher pedestal than just about any other work of fantasy. Middle Earth extends beyond the printed page. Like the actor who stays in character between performances, Tolkien pretended in his letters and private writings that he really was just a quaint British scholar dusting off old books of lore.

Tolkien was an early example of the kind of complete, obsessive immersion you find today in devotees of Second Life or World of Warcraft. I can only imagine what the stuffier dons at Oxford must have thought of this elderly chap whiling away the hours alone pretending to be a scholar of an invented world, writing philosophical treatises about it, mapping it out, trying to smooth out its inconsistencies. Certainly Tolkien’s pal C.S. Lewis never went to such extremes with his Narnia fantasies. Jorge Luis Borges wrote a story about someone creating such a detailed, fantastic world — called “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” — but even that was speculative fiction.

And so there’s something both satisfying and frustrating about this posthumous collection of stories. Unfinished Tales is really just a big hunk of Tolkien fetishism. You get JRRT at his most didactic, listing chronologies of imaginary kingships as if he were tracing the lineage of Jesus. You get Christopher Tolkien at his most pompous, pointing out all of the petty differences between versions of his father’s stories in lots of dry footnotes.

All this for what? Well, for stories. Fiction. And fiction about Elves, Dwarves, and Orcs, no less. Sometimes I would finish some of the drier chapters of Unfinished Tales — say, the listings of the kings and queens of Númenor, or an account of the battles fought in the margins of LOTR by the Rohirrim — and really have to struggle to remember that this was all just part of a made-up story.

Because in the final analysis, what Tolkien’s doing with these stories isn’t scholarship or historical research. It’s pure fiction, just the same as the Flight to the Ford or the Council of Elrond or the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. It might feel like scholarship, but it isn’t really. Tolkien’s a storyteller at heart; he just tells them in a different way than anyone before him.

That leads me to the frustrating aspect of Unfinished Tales. There are lots of these seemingly endless endnotes where Christopher Tolkien talks about the different versions of the story at hand. Did his father really intend for Ar-Adûnakhôr to be the nineteenth or twentieth king of Númenor? In the appendices of Return of the King he says one thing, in draft A he says another, in draft B he says a third thing, in a letter to a fan he wrote a fourth thing, and furthermore if you compare the dates of the drafts you find that… zzzzzz.

I mean, really, who cares? We don’t give an urn of warm troll spit about Ar-Adûnakhôr. He’s just one of the thousands of names in the margins. I felt like smacking Christopher across the face and saying, “You’re the frickin’ editor now, dude. None of this is really germane to the story your Dad was trying to tell. Nineteenth or twentieth, doesn’t matter — just pick one.”

For another example, take “The Quest of Erebor,” a behind-the-scenes look at how Gandalf came about getting involved with Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit. Christopher Tolkien presents multiple drafts and fragments that his father wrote on the subject, with plenty of editorial commentary and endnotes in between. The drafts really don’t differ all that much. Any half-decent editor could have stitched together a 90% complete and cohesive narrative of “The Quest of Erebor” without adding a single word of their own.

As for the last 10% — why didn’t Christopher just take a co-author credit and flesh it out? We already know that Christopher found enough in the Túrin saga to put together a relatively complete Children of Húrin. Guy Gavriel Kay helped him finish The Silmarillion. Most of the tales in Unfinished Tales end with a long summary by Christopher Tolkien of how the rest of the story was supposed to go. It’s not like he was transcribing the words of Moses here — why couldn’t he just finish the ones that were close to being finished?

On further reflection, though, I can think of two words that summarize why you shouldn’t flesh out your father’s notes and outlines, and those words are “Brian Herbert.” (Read my take on the first three Dune prequels.) Besides which, Christopher had a very good justification for treating the material with the reverence of a historian: his Dad wanted it that way.

Tolkien wanted his mythology to be fragmentary and occasionally contradictory; he wanted these histories to read like summarizations of retellings of half-remembered legends. As if JRRT himself was only the latest in a long line of scholars attempting to construct a complete history of Middle Earth without access to the original source materials. I think he would be tickled to discover that his writings were being treated with the same scholarly fussiness that he himself employed.

Tolkien himself recognized the absurdity of all this, as son Christopher quotes him in the introduction to Unfinished Tales:

I am not now at all sure that the tendency to treat the whole thing as a kind of vast game is really good — certainly not for me who find that kind of thing only too fatally attractive. It is, I suppose, a tribute to the curious effect a story has, when based on very elaborate and detailed workings, of geography, chronology, and language, that so many should clamour for sheer “information,” or “lore.”

If you want to see how far Tolkien’s self-awareness goes, look at the story of “Aldarion and Erendis,” which I couldn’t help reading as autobiographical. The tale concerns a prince of Númenor who strives to reconcile his love for a woman with his obsessive love of the sea. He spends years denying one or the other — either staying home and tending to his marriage, or voyaging afar on the sea and neglecting his wife. The resulting bitterness makes a sham of his marriage and sows evil in the Númenoreans that will eventually lead to their downfall hundreds of years later. It’s one of the best chapters in the book.

Now I don’t know much about J.R.R.’s wife Edith and what their marriage was like. But I’m sure there must have been many a tense night when J.R.R. secluded himself in his study with his funny little maps and philological note cards, leaving Edith to wonder if she should have married William the tax attorney instead. I’m sure a lot of women reading this story nod their heads, thinking about their husbands who like to seclude themselves in the attic and obsess over their online gaming/model trains/fantasy baseball/Civil War recreationism/whatever. (I don’t want to be sexist or exclusionary — but isn’t this kind of fetishism generally a male thing?)

“Aldarion and Erendis” stops somewhere in the middle, and J.R.R. left only scattered notes about where he intended to take the story, but it’s clear that things were headed for a bad turn. Aldarion’s desire for the sea and Erendis’ stubborn resentment cannot be reconciled. Tolkien always works in dichotomies — good vs. evil, Frodo vs. Gollum, fealty vs. treachery, etc. — and one could argue that the main “theme” of his work is how we make our way through the world by steering between these moral pylons. I wonder if Tolkien found this particular story too painful to finish.

Aside from “Aldarion and Erendis,” the Túrin fragments, and “The Quest for Erebor,” the other major treats of Unfinished Tales include:

• “Of Tuor and His Coming to Gondolin,” which contains a breathtaking scene of Ulmo, the lord of waters, appearing before a mortal Man (see the third book cover on this page), as well as a fantastic description of the hidden city of Gondolin
• “The Drúedain,” an essay about those jungle pygmy dudes that help Théoden’s army get to Minas Tirith in Return of the King, and including a short story, “The Faithful Stone”
• “The Istari,” an essay on the Order of Wizards that included Gandalf and Saruman, including some tantalizing information about Alatar and Pallando, the two “Blue Wizards”
• “The History of Galadriel and Celeborn,” which offers many of Tolkien’s musings on the First Couple of Lórien, including much speculation about Galadriel’s ban from returning into the West

If you haven’t gone much beyond Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films — if you couldn’t get through The Silmarillion — if you didn’t look longingly at the maps of Middle Earth in those volumes and hunger to know what was in those blank spaces — then don’t bother with Unfinished Tales. You’re the kind of person who’s probably never bought the Special Extended Limited Edition DVD version of a film specifically so you can listen to the Visual Effects Supervisor’s commentary, which wasn’t on the original DVD, which you also own. And this is okay. You’re what we call “normal.”

But if you think you just might have a touch of the obsessive fanboy in you, give Unfinished Tales a whirl. I think Unfinished Tales is about as geeky-obsessive as I get. I have no desire to slog through all twelve volumes of Christopher Tolkien’s “History of Middle Earth” series. Though I might just breeze through The Tolkien Reader if I feel up to it. And maybe Roverandom. And maybe Smith of Wooton Major…

“A darkness lies behind us, and out of it few tales have come,” says one character early in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Children of Húrin. “…It may be that we fled from the fear of the Dark, only to find it here before us, and nowhere else to fly to but the Sea.”

Sador is speaking here about the race of Men, and his statement may sum up Tolkien’s recently published novel as good as any. Children of Húrin is a tale about fear and Man’s futile attempts to wrest honor and courage from the jaws of certain doom. It’s a major new work, though incomplete, and one of the clearest distillations of Tolkien’s thought since the publication of The Silmarillion in the late ’70s.

Those who have already read The Silmarillion will find a lot that’s familiar here. (For those who haven’t, be warned that there will be spoilers here.) The Children of Húrin is just an expanded version of the tale of Túrin Turambar, the longest (and best) chapter from that book. Having just recently read The Silmarillion myself, honestly this tale doesn’t seem all that different from the previously published version; fragments of the story also appeared in Unfinished Tales.

Technically, The Children of Hurin can be read as a stand-alone tale. It has a beginning and an ending, for the most part. But I imagine that readers who had trouble getting through The Silmarillion will have a difficult time understanding the context of what’s happening here. Who is this Morgoth, exactly? What’s all this about Fëanor and his sons? Christopher Tolkien does a rather poor job in the Introduction at summarizing the larger context of the story. We’re left with passages like this:

The second son of Finwë was Fingolfin (the half brother of Fëanor), who was held the overlord of all the Noldor; and he with his son Fingon ruled Hithlum, which lay to the north and west of the great chain of Ered Wethrin, the Mountains of Shadow. Fingolfin dwelt in Mithrim, by the great lake of that name, while Fingon held Dor-lómin in the south of Hithlum. Their chief fortress was Barad Eithel (the Tower of the Well)….

Or, more concisely stated, Yawwwwwwwwwwn.

So here’s basically what you need to know. Once upon a time the Valar (the gods) invited the immortal Elves to the land of Valinor in the West. There Fëanor, the smartest Elf in the pack, made three one-of-a-kind jewels called the Silmarils. But the evil god Morgoth stole them and took off to the land of Beleriand. Fëanor and many of his people went after him, rebelling against the Valar and taking an oath never to rest until the Silmarils had been recovered. The Elves established a bunch of kingdoms in Beleriand and have been fighting Morgoth for a few hundred years now (with the help of the Edain, the good Men).

But the tale of the Elves is really not as crucial in The Children of Húrin as that of Men. The main character of the book, Túrin son of Húrin, is a Man, after all. And the book revolves around this character’s noble, yet futile, attempts to rise to greatness.

It’s said in The Silmarillion that Elves are bound to the Earth. The Elves are immortal, and even when they die their souls sit in the halls of Mandos (a Hades of sorts) until they’re eventually resurrected. But Men have been granted the gift of death by Eru the One, their Creator. This means that Men’s souls leave the circles of the world when they die and go someplace that nobody, not even the Valar, know where.

Fine. Except when Men first wake up after their creation, it’s Morgoth they stumble into first. Without the Valar around, Morgoth pretends to befriend the first Men and turns death — originally intended as a gift from Eru — into something to dread and fear.

Fear, as I mentioned before, is the predominant theme of Children of Húrin. And it seems to be the primary Achilles’ heel of Men in Tolkien’s world, one we see arise again and again throughout the book. Dorlas shrinks from facing the dragon Glaurung from fear; Brodda the Easterling conquers Dor-lómin but is afraid to harm Húrin’s wife Morwen; Mîm the Dwarf ultimately betrays Túrin’s hideout from fear of the Orcs who have kidnapped his son; and so on.

But the house of Húrin is a race apart. “This land might pass into [Morgoth’s] dominion,” Húrin tells his wife. “But if things do go ill, I will not say to you: Do not be afraid! For you fear what should be feared, and that only; and fear does not dismay you.”

The faithful household retainer Sador tells Túrin that “a man that flies from his fear may find that he has only taken a short cut to meet it.” And so Túrin takes up arms against his foes even though others counsel him to hide and preserve his strength. Niënor stands in front of the dragon Glaurung and tells him to his face “The children of Húrin at least are not craven. We fear you not.” Húrin defies the will of Morgoth himself under torture in Angband, and brings down the curse of Morgoth upon him:

But upon all whom you love my thought shall weigh as a cloud of Doom, and it shall bring them down into darkness and despair. Wherever they go, evil shall arise. Whenever they speak, their words shall bring ill counsel. Whatsoever they do shall turn against them. They shall die without hope, cursing both life and death.

Húrin, undaunted, replies:

Such things you spoke long ago to our fathers; but we escaped from your shadow. And now we have knowledge of you, for we have looked on the faces that have seen the Light, and heard the voices that have spoken with [king of the Valar] Manwë. Before Arda you were, but others also; and you did not make it.

If this confrontation sounds familiar, it should. It’s essentially a reworking of the Book of Job in the Old Testament. God allows the Devil to throw calamity after calamity on the hapless Job in an effort to test his faith; here Morgoth puts Húrin on a chair and bids him to watch how his children Túrin and Niënor fare against his onslaught of evil.

But here’s the interesting thing: Tolkien’s sympathies are with Túrin Turambar, much as they were with Fëanor in The Silmarillion. There’s a nobility in the character that overarches everything he does, even though it leads to ruin in the end.

It’s very interesting that throughout the history of Middle Earth — in all of Tolkien’s major works — the constant reaction of the Elves and the Valar, the “good guys,” is to run and hide. Confronted with Morgoth’s betrayal and Fëanor’s rebellion, the Valar wall off their sacred realm of Valinor and stay there. Thingol and Melian retreat behind the enchanted Girdle around the forest of Doriath. Turgon and Finrod make themselves scarce inside their secret realms of Gondolin and Nargothrond. And in The Lord of the Rings, three of the remaining Elvish lords — Elrond, Galadriel, and Thranduil — stay entrenched in their protected havens, while the fourth, Círdan, is basically just hanging out in Middle Earth to help hustle anyone who will go back to Valinor.

And the race of Men? Well, we’re the weak ones, the fickle ones, the Lesser Children of Eru. But while the sons of Fëanor bitch and moan about their stolen Silmarils for hundreds of years, it’s the Man Beren who actually dares to go to Angband and do something about it. When Sauron grows strong in Middle Earth during the Second Age, the Elves sit back and let it happen while the men of Númenor go forth and kick some ass. Even in the Third Age, the Men of Rohan and Gondor are the ones who are putting their butts on the line to challenge Sauron. Remember that in Tolkien’s Two Towers, there was no brave cadre of Elvish archers coming to the rescue at Helm’s Deep like in Peter Jackson’s film.

Nobody embodies this boldness and nobility so much as Túrin. Círdan sends a message to Nargothrond telling them, “Shut the doors of the fortress, and go not abroad. Cast the stones of your pride into the loud river, that the creeping evil may not find the gate.” But Túrin refuses to be a hostage to his fate and to huddle in a cave. He calls Círdan’s messenger “a runagate from war,” and says “it will still seem better in our case to muster our strength, and go boldly to meet our foes, ere they come too nigh.” The Elves run from the dragon Glaurung; Túrin insists on going forth to challenge him.

Unfortunately, the greatest attribute of Men is also what leads to their downfall. Remember Gimli saying in The Return of the King that “With its own weapons was [Mordor] worsted”? So it is with Men. If the impulse to rebel against fear and darkness is what inspires us to great deeds, it also leads to the pride that’s our undoing in the end.

Notice all the examples of handicap, decay, and degeneration in The Children of Húrin. There’s Sador Labadal, who accidentally sliced off part of his foot due to his carelessness with an ax (very symbolic, that). There’s Brandir, the clubfooted leader of the men of Brethil. There’s Gwindor, the Elf of Nargothrond who only escapes the dungeons of Angband after losing a hand. And then there’s Mîm, last of a dying breed of Petty-Dwarves devolved from greatness due to their pettiness and greed.

What happens to Túrin in the end? Túrin can’t rise above his circumstances. He seeks to ennoble the race of Men and restore his house to greatness; instead, time and again his pride blinds him to the better advice of those around him. Pitting himself against Glaurung the dragon is one thing; but to defy Morgoth? Remember that this is the dude that literally invented evil. He was the one who sought to mar Eru’s divine plan during the very act of creation itself.

So Túrin is doomed to slay his friends through many a case of mistaken identity. He leads the great Elvish fortress of Nargothrond to ruin, he unknowingly marries and impregnates his own sister, and he in general hastens the collapse of all Beleriand under the armies of Morgoth.

In the end (as Tolkien tells in The Silmarillion), it’s not force of arms that conquers Morgoth. It’s the selfless mission of mercy to Valinor undertaken by Eärendil that causes the Valar to finally step out from their refuge and call on the help of Eru. Just the same, it’s not Aragorn’s army that ultimately wins the victory over Sauron in The Lord of the Rings; it’s Frodo’s pity in not slaying Gollum (and Bilbo’s, and Sam’s, and everyone else’s).

So are we to admire Túrin or pity him? Is he a character to look up to or a character to revile?

Perhaps, as I noted in my discussion of The Return of the King, one side of Túrin Turambar can’t exist without the other. In The Children of Húrin, it seems to me, Tolkien’s moral determinism strikes again. Túrin’s story isn’t so much a cautionary tale as it is an observation. Tolkien is saying: This is how Men are. This is how Eru created the world. This is the symphony the great Composer in the Sky has composed for us.

***

(One small side note: The book is filled with glossy full-color paintings from Alan Lee, which was an unexpected treat. Most of these paintings are quite phenomenal. But am I wrong to feel gypped that, in a book that spends so much time dealing with a dragon, there isn’t a single clear illustration of a dragon here? I admit dragons are a somewhat predictable topic for cover art on a fantasy novel. But I’m surprised that Houghton Mifflin would publish such a major commercial book with such a subdued and unassuming cover. You think the Tolkien estate twisted HM’s arms?)

***

(Another note: Why would Christopher Tolkien choose to omit the further material about Húrin’s death, which appeared both in The Silmarillion and The War of the Jewels? The fragment that appears in the book’s last pages feels jarringly incomplete. At the very least, I would have liked to see the scene where that little fucker Mîm the Petty-Dwarf gets what’s coming to him. Oh well.)

The Return of the King is probably the volume of J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy that I remembered the least.

It’s also the book that differs the most from Peter Jackson’s film treatment. But Return of the King has always been my least favorite of the three movies, and many of the wonderful moments in that film — the lighting of the beacons, Faramir’s charge on Osgiliath, the catapult battle, Pippin and Gandalf’s discussion about the afterlife — are scenes that Jackson either invented or wildly embellished. (Unfortunately, PJ also invented Sam and Frodo’s falling out over some missing lembas wafers. Ugh.)

So there were all kinds of gems awaiting me on my re-reading of ROTK. I had completely forgotten about Beregond, Guard of the Citadel, and the heroic role he plays in saving Faramir from death at the hands of Denethor. I had only a faint recollection of Ghân-buri-Ghân and the Wild Men. I didn’t recall that our heroes have a run-in with Saruman before the Hobbits return to the Shire. I had forgotten that the only reason Merry was able to wound the Lord of the Nazgûl was because of his sword, picked up at the Barrow-downs in the early chapters of Fellowship.

The first half of the book (book 5 of the Lord of the Rings proper) has simply masterful pacing. The way the tension builds throughout the siege of Gondor… and then Gandalf confronts the Lord of the Nazgûl… and then suddenly the horns of the Rohirrim blow… and then we backtrack to see the ride of the Rohirrim… oh man, is that good. It’s the big build-up that was sorely lacking before the battle of Helm’s Deep in Two Towers.

A single theme kept running through my head as I read Return of the King. It’s the way evil acts continually redound to the greater good in the end. Think of how Merry found his sword. The Hobbits’ capture by the wights in the Barrow-downs certainly seemed like a bad turn when it happened; but this serendipitous encounter enables Merry to critically wound the Nazgûl at just the right time, thus possibly saving the entire battle from going sour and changing the fate of all Middle Earth.

But nothing’s that cut and dried in Return of the King. There’s an unsettling kind of moral determinism lurking behind the scenes here, and indeed throughout the entire trilogy. Perhaps “moral determinism” is the wrong thing to call it, but I can’t think of a better phrase to use. It’s this pervasive sense that not only does the darkness exist, but it’s actually necessary and an integral component to the light.

Why do I think that? Because it seems like Tolkien is constantly giving us matched pairs of characters, one of whom turns to the path of light and one of whom follows the path of darkness.

Take for example the characters of Denethor and Théoden, the Steward of Gondor and the King of Rohan. Clearly Tolkien means to draw very strong parallels between the two. Notice the similarities:

• Both are rulers of their respective lands (Gondor and Rohan)
• Both have recently lost firstborn sons in battle (Boromir and Théodred)
• Both have ambivalent feelings about their remaining heirs (Faramir and Éomer)
• Both are confronted with a devastating siege (Minas Tirith and Helm’s Deep)
• Both have been striving against an insidious higher power (Sauron and Saruman)
• Both take on a Hobbit squire (Pippin and Merry)
• Both men had fathers for whom Aragorn fought in his youth (Ecthelion and Thengel)
• Both are initially mistrustful of Gandalf
• Both eventually grant Gandalf favors early in the saga (access to the Gondorian archives and the loan of Shadowfax)
• Both die in The Return of the King

But obviously there’s a crucial difference between the two; one selflessly redeems himself and dies in battle, while the other stews in his bitterness until he finally commits suicide.

Denethor is constantly boasting about his uncanny foresight into the events that are shaping the War of the Ring. But Théoden clearly has a touch of it too; he knows that he won’t be returning from Minas Tirith, and tells Éomer as much. “If the war is lost, what good will be my hiding in the hills?” he responds to Éomer’s suggestion that he sit out the battle at Minas Tirith. “And if it is won, what grief will it be, even if I fall, spending my last strength?” Contrast this with how Denethor reacts to Gandalf’s suggestion that he ride out to battle: “Battle is vain. Why should we wish to live longer? Why should we not go to death side by side?”

The symbolism in the manner of their deaths is telling. Théoden is crushed under the weight of his slain horse Snowmane, rallying his troops to battle to save someone else’s country; with his dying eyes, he sees “[a] grim morn, and a glad day, and a golden sunset.” Denethor, meanwhile, perishes in a bier of fire, which is about as close as Tolkien ever comes to suggesting the existence of a Hell.

It’s not just Denethor and Théoden that get the duality treatment. There are other similarly matched pairs in The Lord of the Rings: Frodo and Gollum. Gandalf and Saruman. Faramir and Boromir. Aragorn raises an entire company of shadow warriors whose ancient faithlessness and treachery stand in stark contrast to his company of long-suffering and loyal Dúnedain.

But the two characters whose duality I find the most interesting are Sauron and Galadriel.

Galadriel has held the realm of Lothlórien in a state of suspended animation for hundreds or thousands of years, clinging to the golden age of the Elves as long as possible. She rebelled against the Valar and left the Blessed Realm to follow Fëanor, as The Silmarillion tells — but despite her best efforts, the day of reckoning must come. Time moves on, and Galadriel will have to return to Valinor and face her judgment.

But isn’t Sauron really just the mirror image of Galadriel? (Frodo even sees his Eye in Galadriel’s mirror.) Sauron too is a rebel against the Valar, trying to forestall judgment and recapture a long-lost golden age. But for Sauron it’s not Valinor he seeks to emulate but Thangorodrim, the fortress of his master Morgoth in the First Age. And what would Sauron do if he got a hold of the Ring? He’d bring the world into subservience, he’d eradicate the line of Númenor and chase the last remaining Elves away, he’d set up an eternal and changeless kingdom of darkness that would last “unto the ending of the world.”

Interesting that neither Sauron nor Galadriel are capable of making anything new. Sauron’s orcs and trolls are but crass imitations of Elves and ents, and his Mordor is just a recreation of Morgoth’s Thangorodrim. Likewise Galadriel’s Lothlórien is little more than a pale imitation of the glory of Valinor beyond the sea. (”[T]hey attempted nothing new, living in memory of the past,” says Tolkien in the appendices, writing about the keepers of the Three Elven Rings.)

It’s no accident that the destruction of the One Ring also leads to the destruction of Galadriel’s Ring too, and the end to her idyllic land of Lórien. Sauron’s puppet Saruman even gloats about it when Galadriel and company encounter him in Dunland:

‘I did not spend long study on these matters for naught. You have doomed yourselves, and you know it. And it will afford me some comfort as I wander to think that you pulled down your own house when you destroyed mine. And now, what ship will bear you back across so wide a sea?… It will be a grey ship, and full of ghosts.’

The crucial difference between Sauron and Galadriel is that Galadriel has the chance to take control of the One Ring. Frodo offers it to her, in Fellowship, giving her a possibility of extending her exile from Valinor indefinitely. But she turns him down, thus earning the likely forgiveness of the Valar. Sauron and Saruman aren’t so lucky; on their deaths, their spirits are both blown away. Saruman’s shade specifically yearns for Valinor and forgiveness: “For a moment it wavered, looking to the West; but out of the West came a cold wind, and it bent away, and with a sigh dissolved into nothing.”

So we have several pairs of characters, one of whom takes the light path and one of whom takes the dark path. Sometimes it feels like everyone in Middle Earth has an ideological counterpart floating around, and that every good deed is being canceled out by an evil deed somewhere else.

In the end, of course, good and evil don’t entirely cancel each other out in Tolkien’s universe. The pity of Bilbo and Frodo saves Middle Earth and has long-lasting consequences. If either had given in to their impulses and slain Gollum when they had the chance, Frodo would have never made it to Mount Doom — and he would have never tossed the Ring in the fire if he did.

But what I find interesting is that the evil acts were necessary to the success of the quest as well. Frodo’s pity would have come to nothing in the end if not for Gollum’s savage greed and the seductive evil of the One Ring. It’s that very power that drew Gollum out of the Misty Mountains to search for Bilbo in the first place. And it’s only because of that unceasing lust that Gollum is hanging around Mount Doom waiting to seize the Ring in the end.

Similarly, Merry wouldn’t have gotten a hold of a magic sword of Westernesse if he hadn’t been captured by the wights of the Barrow-downs. Aragorn wouldn’t have had an army from the Paths of the Dead to command if the Shadow Host hadn’t broken their oaths to Isildur long ago. Treebeard wouldn’t have roused the ents to war if Merry and Pippin hadn’t been hauled to Fangorn by the orcs.

“Strange and wonderful I thought it that the designs of Mordor should be overthrown by such wraiths of fear and darkness,” says Gimli, referring to the Shadow Host. “With its own weapons was it worsted!”

So good and evil are striving in Middle Earth, testing each other, canceling each other out, and all getting tied up in a neat little package at the end of The Return of the King. It all hearkens back to the Music of the Ainur in the opening chapter of The Silmarillion, the Genesis of Tolkien’s cosmology. You’ll remember that during that act of creation, Melkor attempts to overwhelm the theme of Eru (God) with ideas of his own. As Tolkien writes, Melkor’s competitive theme is loud and repetitive, almost a mockery of the original music.

But Melkor, too, is a creation of the mind of Eru. In other words: evil was clearly a part of Eru’s design from the beginning. And so there’s nothing Melkor can do that doesn’t ultimately reflect on the glory of the whole symphony. Because in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, darkness is the opposite of light, but also its enabler.

All the works of the enemy — and the Valar — ultimately reflect the glory of Eru the One. As Frodo says when he sees Arwen arriving at Minas Tirith like a star shining in the evening: “Now not day only shall be beloved, but night too shall be beautiful and blessed and all its fear pass away!”

The grand symphony in Tolkien’s universe is Eru’s, and both the day and the night are His design. But why He chose to write it this way is unknown, and maybe unknowable.

Many people who read The Lord of the Rings falter somewhere in The Two Towers, and that’s perfectly understandable. According to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Foreword to the Second Edition of LOTR, he actually faltered in the writing of it, putting the book down for two years before picking up again in book 4. (”Foresight had failed and I had no time for thought,” says J.R.R.)

It’s a difficult book. Frodo and Sam, the characters we’re most invested in, disappear for a couple hundred pages; Gandalf is presumably dead in the book’s opening chapters; Boromir’s definitely dead; and Aragorn is still something of a distant figure. Gimli is interesting enough but hardly crucial to the plot, and it’s difficult to give two figs about Legolas.

Then we have the problem of the Rohirrim. As far as I’m concerned, Tolkien doesn’t do a very good job getting the audience to buy in to the kingdom of Rohan. I was shocked to discover that Éowyn is given less than a page in Two Towers, barely enough time for her to show up and cast eyes lovingly at Aragorn. Erkenbrand, Háma, and Gamling are just tertiary characters, nobody we particularly care about. The only person who really grabs your attention in these opening chapters about the Riddermark is Éomer. Before we’ve formed any emotional attachment to Rohan, Théoden’s off to Helm’s Deep.

As for Théoden? Théoden becomes more likable as the book goes on, and he really comes into his own when he rejects Saruman’s offer of peace at Orthanc. But when we first see him, the king of Rohan is just a cranky old man under the sway of bad counsel. Then Gandalf shows up, speaks a few strong words, casts Wormtongue down on his belly — and Théoden has a baffling change of heart. In my LOTR omnibus edition, we first meet Théoden on page 501; Gandalf casts Wormtongue down on page 503; on page 507, the king’s already mustering the troops. Too quick.

Now Gandalf is supposed to be a Maiar of old, and it’s said somewhere that his “magic” is to inspire the people of Middle Earth. To restore them to their youth and vigor, to rekindle the divine spark within. So that could certainly explain Théoden’s sudden shift. But then why didn’t Gandalf accomplish the same thing the last time he saw the king? Okay, there’s a convenient excuse — Gandalf was in a big hurry. But Gandalf’s obviously been in and out of this place many times, and Saruman’s poisoning took years.

So Théoden’s conversion is somewhat puzzling and the Rohirrim are still strangers. Therefore I wasn’t particularly invested in the battle of Helm’s Deep. The battle itself is the first extended battle sequence Tolkien had written since the Battle of Five Armies in The Hobbit, and it’s considerably better done than that. But Peter Jackson’s instincts were correct in trying to build up this battle with every scrap of back story he could find. I struggled hard to care about anyone here but Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli.

But I want to come back to Théoden’s choice to cast aside Gríma Wormtongue and follow the advice of Gandalf, because such choices are what this book is made of. Everyone gets their moment of choice in Two Towers.

Sam and Frodo stand on the brink of Mordor and decide to press on, even if nobody is left alive to know about it. Saruman is given a clear choice by Gandalf to come down from Orthanc and walk the long, hard road towards forgiveness, or to rot in his tower. Treebeard and the ents must decide whether to confront Saruman or to sit back and await “the withering of all woods.” Even Gollum has a moment standing over the sleeping bodies of Sam and Frodo on the stairs of Cirith Ungol where he briefly reconsiders his evil plot to lead the hobbits to Shelob.

So what are our characters choosing between? For Tolkien, the choice is not complex: there’s light, and then there’s darkness.

White light is the purest representation of the holiness of the Valar –the White Tree of Gondor, the white light of the Silmarils, the white light of Galadriel’s phial, Gandalf’s reincarnation as the White Wizard. Meanwhile, black is the symbolic color of Sauron and evil. Black is darkness, black is the skin color of the “cruel Haradrim,” black is the color of the Nazgûl, the Black Riders. (About the racial aspect of Tolkien’s writing, see my post on The Silmarillion.)

And in Tolkien’s world, the bad guys are always trying to muddy the distinction between black and white, thereby muddying the distinction between the moral decisions the characters must make. Remember how Saruman rejects the designation of white, as Gandalf recounts during the Council of Elrond in Fellowship of the Ring:

‘I looked then and saw that his robes, which had seemed white, were not so, but were woven of all colours, and if he moved they shimmered and changed hue so that the eye was bewildered.

‘ “I liked white better,” I said.

‘ “White!” he sneered. “It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.”

‘ “In which case it is no longer white,” said I. “And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”

So The Two Towers is a book where all of the players must figure out what’s the right path and what’s the wrong path and what’s simply the convenient path. For Frodo and Sam, choosing the right path is a very literal thing. They spend most of the book teetering on the brink between Mordor and Gondor, and until the Stairs of Cirith Ungol, the path westward to Gondor is always the closer and easier route. Likewise, Rohan could have accepted Saruman’s offers of alliance; the ents could have sat the war out and left it to the Elves and Men; Frodo could have had Faramir’s men kill Gollum at the Forbidden Pool.

(In light of these tough moral choices that fill The Two Towers, the character of Faramir is quite frustrating, and I can completely understand why Peter Jackson decided to give him a makeover in the films. Faramir manages to completely resist the lure of the Ring where even Galadriel could not. “Not even if I found it on the highway would I take it,” he says, bizarrely.)

(As a result, without any real choice to confront, Faramir’s really not much of a character. His purpose in The Two Towers is really to act as a moral foil for Frodo, giving him the opportunity to do away with Gollum, and get an armed escort back to Minas Tirith, if he wants. Faramir also provides a convenient bit of foreshadowing for the confrontation with Shelob. But beyond that, he’s just another one of Tolkien’s pleasant, wise, faceless heroes that just seem to be wandering around Middle Earth, like Gildor, like Glorfindel, like Haldir.)

So every character is confronted with their moral choice. How to choose among them? For Tolkien, it’s really not a complicated issue. Chase down those moral grays for long enough, and they all eventually resolve into black or white. As Éomer asks Aragorn at one point, “How shall a man judge what to do in such times?” Tolkien’s mouthpiece Aragorn replies:

‘As he ever has judged… Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.’

Many have criticized Tolkien over the years for this simplistic black-and-white approach. They call his villains one-dimensional, they decry his treatment of the orcs as an evil race beyond any possibility of redemption. Sauron is just a faceless cipher.

But such critics are missing the point, I think. The real villains in The Lord of the Rings aren’t the orcs, or the Nazûl, or even Sauron. The real villains are the temptations within. Despair, greed, pride, anger, fear. Sauron and his minions are just the external manifestation of these things.

And this is part of the genius of Tolkien, and one of the things that makes these books so much more interesting than the simplistic good-vs-evil battle they’re often made out to be. There really are no evil characters in The Lord of the Rings. Sauron? The Witch-King of Angmar? The Balrog? These aren’t characters, per se. We learn very little about their motivations, and they only appear at a remote distance. There’s no reason Sauron wants to conquer Middle Earth; he just does. Sauron is the magnetic pole that pulls our characters towards the Dark Side, while Gandalf (representing the Valar over the sea) is the magnetic pole for the Light.

So the orcs and the trolls and the Nazgûl get short shrift by Tolkien, because they’re not really who he cares about. He cares about all of us down here in the middle, wavering between good and evil, trying to make the difficult choices between them. His “villains” are Boromir, a brave soldier who gives in to temptation; Gollum, a hobbit-like creature who’s in over his head; Wormtongue, a man who’s chosen the most expedient side in a brewing war; and so on. People caught in between the two distant poles of Absolute Good and Absolute Evil, struggling to find a way between them and choose a side.

It’s a very Christian concept. Discern the moral choice; make the right choice, even if it’s the least expedient or most fraught with danger; and have faith that the right will prevail in the end.

*****

An interesting side note:

You may laugh, but I find some very solid gay overtones in the relationship between Sam and Frodo, especially in The Two Towers. Yes, I understand that Tolkien didn’t mean for them to actually be gay, and that the main thing he was exploring here was the master/servant relationship.

But what to make of Sam attacking Shelob like a “small creature armed with little teeth, alone, will spring upon a tower of horn and hide that stands above its fallen mate”? What to make of Gollum finding Sam and Frodo dozing with their arms around one another and Sam’s head in his lap? What are we to make of Sam, in the midst of preparing rabbit stew for Frodo, studying the lines on his sleeping face and then saying, “I love him. He’s like that, and sometimes it shines through, somehow. But I love him, whether or no”?

There are plenty more examples. So scoff if you want, and tell yourself that J.R.R. Tolkien lived in a more innocent time where these things could be written without having any homosexual overtones. But I’m sure that even in Tolkien’s time there were old English bachelors who lived together and puttered in the garden together and finished one another’s sentences, and even J.R.R. wasn’t completely naïve about what was going on.

I’m convinced the overtones are there. Why exactly Tolkien put them there, I’m not sure. Any ideas?

*****

Another side note:

Peter Jackson got a lot of heat from fanboys who felt that Treebeard’s decision to march to war in the film was completely out of character. After a two-day colloquium with all of the ents, he suddenly reverses himself at the sight of a few burnt trees? But on re-reading The Two Towers, I was shocked to discover that Treebeard’s decision to go to war is just as hasty in the book as it is in the film. In a single conversation with Merry and Pippin, Treebeard goes from “I have not troubled about the Great Wars… they mostly concern Elves and Men” (middle of p. 461) to “I have been idle. I have let things slip. It must stop!… I will stop it! And you shall come with me” (top of p. 463).

While I admit that the films are flawed, more and more I’m coming to the conclusion that Peter Jackson and his co-screenwriters read these books very, very carefully and came to many of the right conclusions.

Ideally one should write about the three books of The Lord of the Rings as a unit, since that’s the way J.R.R. Tolkien wrote them. It was the publisher’s decision to split the novel into three parts, a decision that the author only grudgingly accepted. He wanted LOTR published in six parts, with book 1 called The Return of the Shadow, and book 2 called The Fellowship of the Ring.

But more importantly, in an ideal world one would be able to discuss The Fellowship of the Ring without being overshadowed by Peter Jackson’s film of the same name. Unfortunately, for me that’s impossible. I’ve seen the films probably a dozen times each since their release, enough that I can recite most of the dialogue word for word. The Extended Edition of Fellowship is one of my favorite films ever, ever, ever.

But this is the first time I’ve re-read Tolkien since the film’s release, I was constantly reacting to things that were different from what I’m used to — as if the books were the adaptation of the films and not the other way around. And in case that’s not irritating enough, I couldn’t picture anyone but Viggo Mortensen and Elijah Wood as Aragorn and Frodo, while Ian McKellen’s voice kept ringing out whenever Gandalf opened his mouth. It’s kind of like reading those annoying New Testament Bibles where Jesus’s words are printed in red; every snippet of dialogue that was used in the films stands out.

It’s especially a nuisance when you consider that J.R.R. Tolkien and Peter Jackson had vastly different agendas. Jackson made wonderful films in their own right. But they’re distinctly different in tone from the books, and I’m convinced now that Tolkien himself would have hated them.

What’s the difference? Take just one example, the battle with the orcs and the cave troll in the mines of Moria. Jackson lavishes plenty of attention on the battle, with multiple decapitations, thrown swords, close escapes, and a (somewhat clunky) CGI troll that vexes the Fellowship for a good ten minutes. But in the book, here’s how Tolkien describes that battle:

The affray was sharp, but the orcs were dismayed by the fierceness of the defence. Legolas shot two through the throat. Gimli hewed the legs from under another that had sprung up on Balin’s tomb. Boromir and Aragorn slew many. When thirteen had fallen the rest fled shrieking, leaving the defenders unharmed, except for Sam who had a scratch along the scalp.

There are a few more paragraphs describing the setup and denouement, but you can tell that Tolkien’s heart isn’t in it. The entirety of the scene that Jackson spends fifteen minutes on is a single page of Tolkien’s manuscript.

In fact, I was stunned to discover that all of the action sequences that thrilled me as a kid are really much, much shorter than I had remembered. The flight to the Ford? A measly 2 1/2 pages. Gandalf’s confrontation with the Balrog? 2 1/2 pages. Frodo’s fight with the Nazgûl near Weathertop? One page. And just think of all the dramatic sequences that Tolkien either doesn’t describe at all or relegates to a character’s secondhand report:

• Gandalf’s confrontation with Saruman and escape from Orthanc
• Gandalf’s battle with the Black Riders on Weathertop
• Gollum’s escape from Mirkwood
• The Black Riders’ incursion into Bree
• The elves’ battle with the orcs inside Lothlórien
• Boromir’s last battle with the orcs
• Glorfindel’s attack on the Nazgûl at the Ford

And that’s all just in Fellowship. The issue will become even more pronounced in The Two Towers, when Tolkien chooses to sit out the ents’ attack on Isengard.

The fact of the matter is that J.R.R. Tolkien has no taste for blood. He goes out of his way to avoid describing action sequences by keeping the action offstage. As soon as the swords are drawn, the authorial voice recedes and becomes distant summarization. And the summarization itself? Well, it’s not clear to me from the text that Tolkien knows anything at all about sword fighting or horse riding or archery; his descriptions don’t contain any specialized knowledge outside the imagination of your average 14-year-old. Certainly Tolkien doesn’t know swords the way George R.R. Martin knows armor, for instance, or the way Stephen Hunter knows guns.

So if Tolkien doesn’t care about the action sequences, what does he care about?

Consider this: in my edition of The Fellowship of the Ring, the Council of Elrond is 33 pages long. Gandalf’s infodump to Frodo in “The Shadow of the Past” stretches for about 17 pages. There must be at least 20 solid pages of verse interlaced throughout the book.

It’s clear that what Tolkien adores is the act of storytelling. The book is full of it. Every five pages, it seems, the characters are sitting down around a fire to recount old history or sing a narrative song. Sometimes it seems like the entire Lord of the Rings is just a framework for Tolkien to hang the folk tales, myths, and poems on.

But not only are the characters always telling stories; they’ve got this strange postmodern awareness about their own story in progress. Sam says to Haldir in Lothlórien: “I feel as if I was inside a song, if you take my meaning.” Aragorn is often compared to the verses Bilbo has composed about him (”All that is gold does not glitter / Not all those who wander are lost”). Bilbo is constantly talking about how he’s going to write everything down in his book, causing Frodo and Sam to wonder several times what their story’s going to sound like when it’s set down on paper.

It might sound like I’m complaining about The Fellowship of the Ring — but I’m not. The most astonishing thing I discovered on re-reading the book is how incredibly good Tolkien is at the fundamentals of storytelling. His pacing is absolutely perfect, which as a published author I can tell you is very difficult to accomplish. He’s always very careful to properly foreshadow things that need foreshadowing. Alfred Hitchcock knew that the scariest things are the ones you don’t see onscreen, and Tolkien follows this rule to the letter (see above). He builds up a slow but persistent tension and menace of the unseen.

And his prose is better than I had remembered in most places, though surprisingly it’s not nearly as divergent in tone from The Hobbit as I had thought. The poetry, however, doesn’t stand up so well. Even Tolkien’s verses about the most sublime subjects are too heavy handed on the meter and rhyme. They all sound like limericks about a man from Nantucket.

(Tolkien also has the irritating habit of switching point of view whenever it suits him. Out of the blue, the omniscient narrator will jump into Gandalf’s or Aragorn’s head for a moment to show the reader their thoughts. Then in the next moment, their actions and motivations are shrouded in secrecy, leaving the reader to wonder what’s going on. Not a hanging offense, but sloppy writing nonetheless.)

But the place where Tolkien really falls down on the job is in characterization. Most of the time, he’s far more interested in lingering on the details of the terrain and the architecture. (J.R.R. might not have known sword fighting, but man, did he know his trees. Ever notice that there are only four forests on the map of Middle Earth, and through the course of LOTR and The Hobbit, we spend time in them all?)

Frodo, Sam, and Gandalf are wonderfully realized characters, but Merry and Pippin are scarcely distinguishable at all in Fellowship. Legolas and Glorfindel might well have been named Anonymous Elves #23 and #24. When he does indulge in character description, Tolkien mostly doles out rather useless flowery aphorisms. Take his description of Elrond:

The face of Elrond was ageless, neither old nor young, though in it was written the memory of many things both glad and sorrowful… Venerable he seemed as a king crowned with many winters, and yet hale as a tried warrior in the fulness of his strength.

Then there’s the Balrog, which he describes thusly:

[I]t was like a great shadow, in the middle of which was a dark form, of man-shape maybe, yet greater; and a power and terror seemed to be in it and to go before it… Its streaming mane kindled, and blazed behind it. In its right hand was a blade like a stabbing tongue of fire; in its left it held a whip of many thongs.

Er, thanks. That helps a lot. Try putting those descriptions in your next short story, and watch everyone in the workshop roll their eyes.

Characterization is actually one thing that Peter Jackson’s films did better than the books — and I think that’s the real reason behind the films’ success. Aragorn, in particular, gets some much-needed humanization. I’m not sure why the author chose to relegate the love story with Arwen to the marginalia in the back of The Return of the King, but without it we’re frequently robbed of much-needed context for Aragorn’s decisions. Boromir too is given short shrift by Tolkien, but the combination of the script and Sean Bean’s superb acting truly make him come alive. And Saruman, of course, is given an actual role in the films, while in the books he just makes a few choice cameo appearances.

So one-third of the way through, I can definitely say that re-reading The Lord of the Rings has been an eye-opening experience. I can’t wait to dig in to The Two Towers.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Silmarillion contains a beautiful depiction of the world’s creation through music by Eru Ilúvatar and his choir of Ainur. It has passionate love stories, an Oedipal tale of woe, and theological conundrums aplenty.

The Hobbit, by contrast, contains:

• A character who invents the game of golf by knocking the head of the goblin Golfimbul into a rabbit-hole
• Dopey trolls named William, Bert, and Tom, who speak in Cockney
• Goblins who sing doggerel verse like “Clap! Snap! The black crack! / Grip, grab! Pinch, nab! / And down, down to Goblin-town / You go, my lad!”
• Silly Rivendell elves who giggle too much and sing verses like “O! tril-lil-lil-lolly / the valley is jolly, / ha! ha!”

If you’re going to read the complete works of Tolkien properly, you definitely should not follow The Silmarillion with The Hobbit. (Read my take on The Silmarillion.) I was planning to read The Children of Húrin or Unfinished Tales next, but I don’t own copies of these books at the moment. So rather than get off my duff to go buy them, I decided to read the next Tolkien novel I had at hand, and now I wish I hadn’t. The works are so unalike in tone they don’t even seem to be written by the same person, much less take place in the same world.

Originally, Tolkien’s intent was to keep The Hobbit a light children’s fable with a few cameo appearances from the characters and places of his Middle Earth mythology. And so Elrond has a token role, and the swords of Gandalf and Thorin were made in Gondolin, and there’s a passage about how the Mirkwood elves were “descended from the ancient tribes that never went to Faerie in the West.” After giving a brief child’s overview of the difference between Light Elves and Dark Elves, Tolkien concludes unhelpfully, “Still elves they were and remain, and that is Good People.”

There’s a lot of this irritating condescension throughout the course of The Hobbit, and at several points, I was tempted to just throw the book down and move on. The plot for the first half of the book goes something like this: Gandalf the wizard picks Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit of no special ability or importance, to accompany a band of dwarves on a quest, for no apparent reason whatsoever. Dwarves, wizard, and hobbit have unconnected adventure after unconnected adventure, wherein Bilbo largely sits back and does nothing. Bilbo stumbles on a magic ring by sheer luck, which allows him to sit around and smirk at the dwarves while still doing nothing.

Then something interesting happens: about halfway through the book, The Hobbit grows up.

Suddenly Bilbo is thrust into a position of responsibility. And then not only must he make the standard decisions that any hero must make — should I take responsibility? should I take command? should I risk myself for the sake of others? — but by the end he gets thrust into a number of more complex moral dilemmas as well.

And this is where The Hobbit ventures into territory that’s most peculiar for a children’s novel. Whereas the first two-thirds of the book is quite simplistic, the last third is strangely psychological and postmodern. I hadn’t remembered this from my previous readings, and I wish I could give Tolkien credit for planning such ambiguity from the beginning. But the book doesn’t read that way. It reads more like a tale that’s quite content to bumble along for a while until Tolkien discovers some use for it.

In the book’s last third, the dragon Smaug, until now just a convenient cipher of evil, turns out to be strangely human. He’s hoarding Thorin’s ancient treasure — but as Tolkien clearly points out, he doesn’t really have much use for it. It’s not like Smaug can cart some of that gold down to Laketown and go on a spending spree. So why does he hang on to it? Here Tolkien starts talking about how the wealth casts a “spell” and an “enchantment” on all who see it. Why does Smaug guard the treasure? Because he can’t help himself. He’s compelled to.

But not only is the treasure not much use to Smaug — it’s not much use to Bilbo or Thorin’s company either. “Had you never thought of the catch?” the dragon tells Bilbo. “A fourteenth share, I suppose, or something like it, those were the terms, eh? But what about delivery? What about cartage? What about armed guards and tolls?” Men, elves, dwarves, goblins, and dragon were all living in a nice-if-imperfect equilibrium before Thorin’s arrival, with the gold safely tucked away in legend. But now suddenly the arrival of Thorin’s company and their lust for gold has thrown everything into chaos.

Once the dragon has been disposed of (thanks to the much-too-convenient appearance of an English-speaking bird), things get even more unsettled. Not only do the men, elves, and dwarves all begin squabbling over who deserves what share of the money — but Tolkien goes out of his way to give everyone a pretty damn good claim too. Men deserve a share because their gold is mixed in the hoard, and they slew the dragon, after all; the elves deserve a share because they stepped in to aid the Laketown people after their town was destroyed, at great personal risk to themselves; and the dwarves deserve a share because they inherited it in the first place.

And it’s here where Bilbo makes the redemptive move that proves he’s a hero and not just a bystander. He pilfers Thorin’s prized Arkleseizure Arkenstone jewel and tries to use it to bring a peaceful settlement to the conflict. It’s a moral labyrinth that’s quite beyond the prepubescent audience the book’s opening chapters are written for: Bilbo steals something valuable that’s not his, lies to and betrays his friends, and then gives it away to provide the men and elves bargaining leverage to secure peace.

Having made his point about the corrosiveness of wealth and the moral greyness that clouds everything (cf. the oath of Fëanor from The Silmarillion), Tolkien decides he’s had enough. He quickly wraps things up with a rather anti-climactic battle at the end, which reads like an excerpt from a more adult work altogether, and Bilbo goes home.

In fact, the whole novel reads like a condensed, simplified version of The Lord of the Rings. Both works have a quest that begins with moral clarity and ends in ethical confusion; a seductive evil at the heart of the quest that warps the minds of those around it; and hobbits who begin the tale as small, insignificant players but eventually find a place on the wider stage. Some of the principle characters are conquered by evil and pay for it with their lives; others persist to the end because of their innate humbleness and resistance to greed.

Whether fortunately or unfortunately, Tolkien wasted enormous amounts of time and energy later in life trying to smooth out the inconsistencies between his three major and somewhat incompatible works (The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion). He went back and made a few alterations to the “Riddles in the Dark” chapter where Bilbo encounters Gollum and finds the One Ring. And he very cleverly hinted in the marginalia of LOTR that Bilbo Baggins himself was responsible for writing The Hobbit — thus providing a convenient explanation for the jocular tone. The Hobbit therefore isn’t just a children’s tale, but a hobbit children’s tale, told by a hobbit, and told by a somewhat self-important hobbit who isn’t exactly a disinterested third party.

So there’s The Hobbit, in a nutshell: a pleasant children’s tale that morphs suddenly into an unsettling adult one, with some clumsy footwork to try and justify the shift. If Tolkien had never finished The Lord of the Rings and his son had never posthumously published The Silmarillion, we might be remembering The Hobbit as an odd, yet charming, story that began as high adventure and found postmodernism along the way.

***

(Actually, if you want to think about it another way, The Hobbit provides a nice little allegory to the U.S. situation in Iraq. Bush/Thorin decides he’s going to slay the dragon/Saddam Hussein. The dragon/Saddam warns that while evil, he’s actually a stabilizing factor in the region, and that his death will only cause chaos. Once the dragon/Saddam is gone, Bilbo Baggins/Colin Powell attempts to find a peaceful compromise, only to be tossed out on his ear by Bush/Thorin. Previously subdued rival factions — elves/Sunnis, men/Shiites, dwarves/Kurds — begin bashing each other to pieces. Meanwhile, foreign infiltrators — goblins/Iranians, wargs/Syrians, eagles/British — pour over the border…. How far do you want me to go with this?)

After finishing up MultiReal (for the time being, at any rate), I felt that I needed to immerse myself in something familiar. Something classic. And so I decided to re-read J.R.R. Tolkien’s books on Middle Earth chronologically from start to finish, from The Silmarillion to Return of the King with a pitstop at the newly published Children of Húrin.

This will probably be my fourth round trip through the whole cycle, the first being sometime around 1978 and the last coming somewhere around 1996. So as I go back and revisit Middle Earth, I’m going to blog about my impressions here. I assume just about everybody in creation has either read the series or seen the Peter Jackson films by now, so I won’t worry about spoilers.

*****

I’m always struck by people who claim to love The Lord of the Rings but find The Silmarillion impossible to read. In the same vein, I wonder exactly why LOTR readers from the ’60s and ’70s went so gaga over it.

To me, The Silmarillion is what the whole thing is about. The Silmarillion is the cake of Tolkien’s work, while The Lord of the Rings is largely the frosting. (Which might leave The Hobbit as that gooey ribbon of fudge that runs through the middle.) Now there’s nothing wrong with indulging in a nice big dollop of frosting — I’m a sucker for that salty-sweet stuff they put on cheap grocery store cakes — but it’s more satisfying when you’ve got something to anchor it.

So if you’ve read The Lord of the Rings and you haven’t read The Silmarillion — or at least spent long hours studying the appendices in Return of the King — then you’re missing the Big Picture. You don’t really know what Tolkien was up to. You’ve got a great adventure story with some fabulous characters and a peerless amount of detail around the edges, but that’s about it. For many people, that’s enough.

So what was Tolkien up to? Once you see the entire tapestry laid out, you realize that J.R.R. Tolkien was writing one of the world’s great parables about mankind’s Fall from Grace.

The main thread of The Silmarillion chronicles the rebellion of the Elf Fëanor against the Valar, the gods who are his shepherds, teachers, and protectors. Both are faced with the treachery of the evil Morgoth, who mars the world the Valar built and steals the Silmaril jewels Fëanor created. The Valar choose to fence themselves inside their land of Valinor and leave Morgoth to his own devices; Fëanor, on the other hand, refuses to accept compromise. He announces he’s going to leave Valinor and do whatever it takes to recover the Silmarils. And in doing so, of course, he overreaches and drags his whole people down with him over the next thousand years.

Call it blasphemy, but to me, Tolkien distilled the essence of the Fall from Grace much better than the actual Bible does. I find the Old Testament frequently hokey and morally confused, while Tolkien’s achievement in metaphor is a beautiful, transcendent, and clear as a bell. (Keep in mind, of course, that I’m an atheist.) The story of Adam and Eve’s exile from the Garden of Eden strikes me as ludicrous and almost laughable; but when I read about Fëanor’s exile from Valinor in The Silmarillion, I get it.

The Bible uses all kinds of metaphors for Heaven. It’s a pasture, it’s a garden, it’s a place in the clouds, it’s a kingdom full of light. All metaphors that must have been really impressive to the nomadic desert-bound Jews who first heard them. But for us, these images don’t have so much potency. Paradise is a garden? Dude, if I want to see a transcendently beautiful garden, I can drive to Delaware and see Longwood Gardens.

But Tolkien? Tolkien writes about the great lamps of Illuin and Ormal that the Valar built to light the world, which Morgoth overthrew — and then about the trees Telperion and Laurelin grown by the Valar to replace those lamps, and how Morgoth poisoned those — and about the second-rate tree Galathilion the Vala Yavanna made to remind the Elves of those original trees — and the seedling of that tree named Celeborn, which was planted on the Elvish island of Tol Eressëa — and then the seedling of that tree, Nimloth, that the Elves gave to the Men of Númenor — and then the fruit of that tree that Isildur managed to smuggle out of Númenor before its destruction — and then the sapling of that tree Isildur smuggled out of Minas Ithil when Sauron destroyed it — and then the sapling of that tree planted by the twenty-seventh king of Gondor, until it died — and finally the sapling of that tree which Aragorn finds in The Return of the King.

Now that’s a Fall from Grace. That’s a metaphor for the spark of God’s majesty continuing on despite adversity and debasement which I can understand.

But similarly, Tolkien puts this divine spark inside of us, too, the readers. We’re (theoretically) remote descendants of the people of Gondor, who were descended from the people of Númenor, who were descended from the Edain that helped out the Elves in their battles against Morgoth. And we’ve also got in our blood strains of the Elves (through the marriage of Beren and Lúthien) and strains of the gods (through the marriage of Thingol and Melian the Maia). It’s remote, it’s diluted, but it’s there in all of us.

This presumes, of course, that you are of white European descent. Which leads to one of the most controversial — and least understood — elements of Tolkien’s world. If you’re not a white European, according to Tolkien’s mythology, you’re descended from one of the wicked tribes of men who fell under the sway of the evil god Morgoth.

Racist? Sure. But it’s only right that Tolkien should put things that way, and I’m glad Peter Jackson didn’t try to appease these cries of racial insensitivity in his films by casting a bunch of polychromatic hobbits. Why? Not because I believe in that kind of white-is-right bullshit — but simply because Tolkien’s other major purpose in writing these stories was to create an alternate Anglo Saxon mythology.

These are the tales that the Anglo Saxon warriors told around the fire after everyone got sick of hearing Beowulf for the five hundredth time. And when you’re tired from a day in the field hacking away at people that don’t look like you, the last thing you want to hear is how these enemies are just misunderstood souls with their own culture, history, and moral compass. You want to be reminded that you’re a true defender of the faith, the one doing God’s duty, and they’re the heathen scum not fit to scrape the mud off your boots. Otherwise, why go back out there to fight the next day?

Tolkien wasn’t attempting to create a complete and self-contained universe. He was engaging in an exercise of nationalistic mythology. It’s an attempt to construct an entire folklore, history, and set of morals for a people from the ground up. And in that sense, it has to rank among the most ambitious undertakings in modern literature. Tolkien might not have been one of the world’s great prose stylists — boy, there are some clunky passages here — but as a worldbuilder he’s unparalleled.

And make no mistake about it, the world Tolkien is building here is ours. It’s no accident that the map of Middle Earth looks a heck of a lot like Europe, and it’s no accident that the polite, happy, good-natured, British-seeming hobbits live not too far away from where Tolkien’s own England would fall on the map. (View a larger version of the map to the right on Wikipedia.) The dark-skinned Haradrim live where Africa would be, and the noble, civilized Gondorians are in a great position to found Greece and Rome in a few thousand years.

So The Silmarillion is full of tales of purposely one-sided nationalistic folklore. It’s got plenty of heroism and adventure and derring-do. It’s got love, rebellion, betrayal, comedy, tragedy, romance, redemption, and sacrifice.

But The Silmarillion also provides a crucial framework for The Lord of the Rings that’s somewhat elusive if you read the latter without reading the former. Without The Silmarillion, Galadriel’s just a queen afraid of losing her realm; with it, she’s the last remaining Noldor and participant in Fëanor’s rebellion, hesitant to give up all she’s built in Middle Earth and beg forgiveness from the Valar. Without The Silmarillion, Aragorn’s just the heir to an old kingdom who comes into his own and regains the crown; with it, he’s the last descendant of the Edain, the elf-friends who fought against Morgoth, and the Númenoreans, the once proud people who rebelled against the Valar and fell into ruin.

The thing that struck me the most reading The Silmarillion this time was how short the book was. Excluding the index, it’s only 300 pages. So what are you waiting for? Pull that sucker off the shelf and tell me your thoughts about the book.

I’ve finally completed Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast Trilogy and thought I’d share my impressions. (Read my review of the first novel, Titus Groan.)

Gormenghast is a suitable companion-piece to Titus Groan. The two are so alike in tone and theme, that they seem to have been written in a single burst of inspiration. Peake provides us with an extended cast of characters, this time including Headmaster Bellgrove and his professors; he follows the rise of Steerpike’s crooked ambitions to their ruinous end; and he gives us a climactic manhunt that’s every bit as insanely drawn out as the battle between Flay and Swelter from the first novel.

In fact, I think I enjoyed Gormenghast more than its predecessor. Peake’s voice seemed more assured here, and unlike the first novel, even what initially seemed like extraneous plot strands were gradually woven into the main tapestry by the end. Characters like Mr. Flay that teetered close to caricature in the first novel are here drawn more sympathetically.

But Titus Alone is a completely different animal altogether. It’s an amazing novel in its own way, but it stands completely aloof from the first two novels of the series.

Whereas Titus Groan and Gormenghast are ponderous, dense, slow-moving psychological explorations, Titus Alone is a spritely wafer of a book. Its chapters are frequently only a paragraph long, and it zips along at a pace that’s much more conducive to short attention spans. Groan and Gormenghast took place in a world devoid of all but the vaguest mentions of higher powers, while Titus Alone brims over with Biblical allusions. Groan is an entirely sexless book and Gormenghast approaches the subject with the utmost of discretion; Titus Alone is full of sexuality, both expressed and repressed. Groan and Gormenghast strolled through the narrative at a leisurely pace, often taking an entire page or two to describe a character rounding a corner, while Titus Alone gives us incomplete sketches of even major characters like Muzzlehatch and Juno (with occasionally redundant descriptions to boot).

Even more shocking is that Titus Alone appears to take place in an entirely different world than its predecessors. The only hint of time or place I could find in the first two novels was a brief reference to “the Arctic” in Gormenghast; there was no other historical or technological context to anchor the novels in any particular time or place. But in Titus Alone, Peake gives us cars, airplanes, elevators, factories, telescreens, helicopters, and glass buildings. There are jarring references to a remote controlled spy device of some sort and flying mechanical needles. It’s perhaps closer to our world than the first two novels, but not by much.

What are we to make of all this? It’s tempting to think that Mervyn Peake was simply out of his gourd by the time he began work in earnest on Titus Alone. The foreword to the revised edition speaks of Peake’s deteriorating mental state in the later stages of the draft and the necessity of editing out some of his more incoherent passages. There are multiple references to madness in the novel, and one of our protagonist’s central conflicts is to decide whether all the memories of his entire childhood (and therefore the contents of the first two novels) are simply the hallucinations of a diseased mind.

I couldn’t help thinking of Philip K. Dick’s (contemporaneous) novel Time Out of Joint, which features a similarly deluded protagonist living in a dreamworld stitched together by carefully labeled pieces of paper.

And it’s worth noting that we’re never given any external validation of the existence of Gormenghast in the course of Titus Alone. The one physical piece of evidence of home that Titus carries with him, a flint, is lost halfway through the novel, and is a perilously thin reed to hang one’s sanity on anyway. It’s notable that, while Titus is convinced he’s found his way back to Gormenghast Mountain in the book’s final scene, he chooses not to peer over the edge of the rock. He chooses not to return to Gormenghast.

I wonder how much the progress of Peake’s Parkinson’s disease influenced the subject matter of the novel. In addition to the tremors and the slurred speech, visual hallucinations are one of the classic symptoms of Parkinson’s (which I can tell you since I have a close relative who’s suffering through such hallucinations right now). Was Peake writing about himself in Titus Alone? Was he himself having trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality? Peake’s friend Michael Moorcock writes in his marvelous and touching exploration of the man’s later years that “People who didn’t know him very well often said Mervyn Peake’s books were so darkly complex that writing them had sent him mad.” Moorcock properly scoffs at this notion, but I wonder if it didn’t work the other way around: the process of mental deterioration inspired him to write a darkly complex novel about his condition.

In the end, however, Titus Alone, while concerned with questions of sanity and reality, isn’t a Philip K. Dick novel. While it does share elements in common with novels of the psychedelic ’60s, the book is ultimately more backwards-looking than forwards-looking, as Anthony Burgess points out in his introduction to Titus Groan. It’s ultimately a traditional coming-of-age story about a Prodigal Son learning to trust himself in a strange and hostile world. It’s more Cervantes than Philip K. Dick.

Unfortunately, Titus Alone was intended to be only a middle novel in a five-book series. The fourth, Titus Awakes, was barely even begun by the time Peake succumbed to his illness (and the existing fragment is available online); the proposed fifth, Gormenghast Revisited, remains wholly hypothetical. So we’ll never get to see the 77th Earl of Groan’s homecoming. Titus will always remain out there, wandering and homeless, living off his wits and questioning his place in the world.

I kind of like it that way.

–

(As a small postscript, I think it’s worth pointing out that the Vintage UK set of the Gormenghast novels whose covers are pictured here contain some of the most arresting cover art I’ve ever seen. The silhouetted black birds are cleverly set on the spine of the book to indicate the number of the book in the series: one bird for the first book, two for the second, three for the third. But strangely, the interior is printed on horribly cheap paper, and as a result the type is often very difficult to read. I picked up these books in Paris, as I mentioned before, and I wonder if that has anything to do with it.)

Originally published at David Louis Edelman's Blog. Please leave any comments there.

I've mentioned before that I'm new to science fiction conventions. ReaderCon 2006 was the first con I ever attended (if you don't count an experience at Balticon in 1990 that's better left unexplained). That makes this weekend's PhilCon 2006 only my fourth con ever.

So don't take my word for it when I say that PhilCon was a tad disorganized. Take the word of other veteran congoers I talked to who said they wouldn't be coming back to PhilCon. The word "sucks" was tossed around more than once. The best opinion that could be heard came from an insider, who said that "there have been better PhilCons, and there have been worse."

Keep in mind that my circle of friends is pretty much confined to the Literary track. You know, the people who were more excited about seeing Charles Stross than dressing up like their favorite Buffy character. To the gamers and the filkers and the people dressed up in chain mail and goth makeup, PhilCon might very well have been a blast. But to the Literary folks, the common wisdom was that PhilCon 2006 was a bust.

Some of the frustrations included:

• A rather lackluster keynote interview with Charles Stross. There was nothing lackluster about Stross himself, who appeared relaxed and humorous and fully engaged. But the MCing by Darrell Schweitzer was quite haphazard, as if someone either threw him a microphone at the last minute or he lost his prepared list of questions.
• None of the moderator assignments were given out ahead of time. I arrived at PhilCon on Friday only to discover from the program booklet that I was moderating two panels that weekend. Some moderators didn't realize they had been assigned to moderate until they arrived at the panel.
• Room changes were rampant. Everything was constantly moving around at the last minute. And because the panels were spread liberally among at least five floors of confusingly labeled rooms, salons, parlours, ballrooms, and (in at least one instance) the middle of some random hallway, finding one's way around was close to impossible. My understanding from various sources is that the Sheraton hotel was mostly to blame for this.
• The hotel closed the bar on Saturday night for a private function involving some very well-dressed people who had some involvement with Barbados. No bar to hang out at on Saturday night at an SF con? Lame.
• Parties died down early. The SFWA party was the place to be on Saturday night, but even that was on life support by midnight. When you hear lots of people say on Sunday that they retired to their rooms a little after 11 p.m., you know that something's a little askew with the social vibe.
• The reading schedule bordered on the farcical. I had hoped to do a reading from Infoquake at PhilCon. But as late as Saturday noon — halfway through the con — we were being told that the reading schedule was "still being worked out." Finally, mid-afternoon on Saturday, a sign-up board materialized at the top of the escalator with slots for each hour and a few names scribbled in (illegibly, in one case). How could one sign up to do a reading? Well, if you could decipher the (also pen-scrawled) message in the bottom corner of the sign, you would be directed to someone in room 1200-something who could get you on the list. Where were the actual readings held? Who knows? The room listed in the program booklet was wrong, and the sign didn't say.
• Bizarre panel assignments. I'm not sure how I ended up moderating "Teleportation Is More Than a Way of Getting Somewhere" and "Navigating Amazon," while I wasn't even on panels for "Blogging and SF" and "Websites for Writers." I suppose this could have just been me, however.
• Nobody in the dealer's room was carrying Infoquake. I've just about given up on getting con dealers to carry my book. The only people on the programming they go out of their way to stock are the guests of honor. Hell, it doesn't matter, I get a much better margin hand-selling them anyway.

But don't let my list of gripes give you the impression that I didn't enjoy myself despite the confusion. Some highlights:

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at David Louis Edelman's Blog. You can comment here or there.

Kafka never reached his castle. K., protagonist of his last, unfinished novel The Castle, was hindered in his quest to reach the castle by petty bureaucracy, malevolent chance, and, not least, the sudden death of the book's author from tuberculosis.

In Franz Kafka's eyes, at least, the castle is forever unreachable. Even though K. has been summoned by the castle itself to conduct an important land survey, he will never make it inside the castle's gates. Instead, he will live and die at the foot of the castle, prostrate to its whims and powerless to control his destiny.

And how could one possibly imagine what awaits K. inside that castle anyway? You can't describe the capricious will of fate in words. God doesn't pose for snapshots.

But if Kafka never reached his castle, then Mervyn Peake (pictured, left, in 1935) surely did. Not only did Mervyn Peake reach the castle, but he wrote an exhaustive exploration of it in his novel Titus Groan (1946).

If I had heard of Mervyn Peake before, say, 2003, I knew him as an author of the macabre in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, but hailing from the other side of the Atlantic. I can't recall ever having seen a copy of Titus Groan or its two sequels in a U.S. bookstore, though admittedly I never sought them out. But when I read that China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer, and Hal Duncan all count Peake among their major influences — VanderMeer even going so far as to rank his work #2 on his list of Essential Fantasy works — I knew I had to take a peek at Peake myself.

I expected bogeymen. I expected Creeping Horrors and Blood-Curd'ling Chills. I didn't expect Franz Kafka.

I'm unclear how familiar Peake was with Kafka, whose works really didn't find a wide audience in the English-speaking world until the Willa and Edwin Muir translations of the '40s. But even if there was no direct connection between the two men, clearly they were channeling the same ghosts. Titus Groan is nothing less than the extension of Franz Kafka's vision to its chilling nadir. It's Franz Kafka narrated by a stuffy British professor in tweed who's long ago retreated into the bitter chambers of his imagination and shut the doors, tight.

Titus Groan chronicles approximately two years in the life of the inhabitants of Gormenghast Castle. Where is Gormenghast? Does it reside in our world? And when does the story take place? Unknown, unknown, and unknown.

Gormenghast is a world so encrusted with ritual that any hint of spontaneity has been choked away. Sepulchrave, the 76th Earl of Groan and master of Gormenghast, spends his life as a slave to a series of meaningless rites and mysteries handed down by his predecessors. Kafka's protagonists stood timorously outside mystery's gates, waiting in vain for a chance to enter; Peake's protagonists inhabit the mystery, they live and breathe it, they are the mystery.

(And when you say "mystery," don't think we're talking about God, as Kafka was; Gormenghast has no God. It has no magic. It's a world utterly devoid of the divine, a world of ritual that seemingly only exists for its own sake and not for the gratification of any higher power.)

The hallmarks of what has become known as the Kafkaesque — the stultifying obsession with self, the inability to communicate with one's fellows, the frustration with a world ruled by faceless fate, the gallows humor — can all be found in Gormenghast. But there's a certain egalitarianism at work here that's not found in Kafka's work. There are no insiders and outsiders here; Titus Groan shows us a world in which everyone is a self-contained, autonomous, impenetrable unit. Kafka's Gregor Samsa awakes to find himself transformed into a giant insect, and thus shunned by and cut off from society; Peake's Sepulchrave lives in a world where everyone is a giant insect, where society itself is but the discordant babble of giant insects.

And so we have Doctor Prunesquallor, who communicates in enigmatic bursts of soliloquy and then provides his own laugh track. We have twin sisters Cora and Clarice, who speak to one another only for the purpose of self-examination. We have the Earl's daughter Fuchsia, who secludes herself in a series of attics above her room that only she can find. We have the servant Flay and the cook Swelter, whose poisonous feud feeds on itself in silence over months until it reaches its inevitable murderous conclusion.

Into this world comes the Machiavellian youth Steerpike, a kitchen hand who yearns to rise above his station. And rise he does, through careful scheming that undoes countless centuries of tradition and ritual at Gormenghast, to the ruin of all (except Steerpike).

So is Titus Groan a meditation on self-improvement? A call to arms against tradition and conformity? A polemic against capricious fate?

It is, in fact, none of those things. It's a hermetically sealed story from which no hint of a moral or message escapes. It's a book smuggled from inside the castle itself, where we are not allowed. It's a linguistic artifice of the highest order that's both grindingly dull at times — Peake can spend an entire page describing the expression on a man's face — and eminently fascinating.

One hears these words applied many times to this or that work of art, but in this case it's absolute truth: Titus Groan is a completely and utterly unique work of literature.

Enter at your own peril.

(Further reading: Check out the official Mervyn Peake website set up by his estate. I have not yet read the second and third novels in the Gormenghast trilogy — Gormenghast and Titus Alone, respectively — as they're still sitting in my "in" pile. Under, ironically enough, books by China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer, and Hal Duncan.)

Originally published at David Louis Edelman's Blog. You can comment here or there.

(Warning: spoilers ahead.)

A Storm of Swords, the third novel in George R. R. Martin's projected seven-book "Song of Ice and Fire" series, had me believing that the author was just shy of walking on water.

He spent the first two and a half books building up a panoply of fascinating and believable characters who ranged the spectrum of moral grays. Then in A Storm of Swords, Martin proceeded to yank the rug out from under our feet by killing off two of the series' principle heroes and one of its principle villains. And these weren't noble deaths in battle we're talking about — these were nasty fates. Robb and Catelyn Stark betrayed and murdered at a wedding feast, Tywin Lannister shot through the belly by his son Tyrion while on the privy.

Now, after a five-year wait, Martin has given us... a retreat?

It's hard to think of A Feast for Crows as anything but a retreat, after the grand flourish of the series' first three novels. We're brought closer to a wealth of new point-of-view characters who seem to have only a peripheral relation to the main thrust of the story — the ailing Doran Martell and his three rebellious nieces, the various aspirants to the throne of the Iron Isles, Brienne of Tarth — while some of the series' main characters are nowhere to be seen. Sorely missed are Tyrion Lannister, Jon Snow, Daenarys Targaryon, Brandon Stark and Davos Seaworth. And certain other characters who do put in an appearance, such as Sansa Stark and Arya Stark, seem to be stuck in a holding pattern.

One can't help but think of another epic fantasy author whose series began to wander astray four or five books in. (Hint: his initials are RJ.)

The fault clearly lies with Martin's decision (explained on his website) to lop this volume in two. The subplots revolving around the southern half of Westeros are recounted here in A Feast for Crows, while those in the northern half and overseas will have to wait for next year's A Dance with Dragons. The decision seems arbitrary and hastily derived, more the product of a publisher looking for a Christmas blockbuster than a novelist trying to solve an artistic dilemma. We're left with a book that sorely misses its vanished characters, a book seemingly without a center.

Even some of those subplots left in A Feast for Crows are meandering and without resolution. Brienne's quest to find Sansa Stark, for instance, takes a lot of exposition to go nowhere. We leave Brienne hanging from a noose fighting for life. Do we need to wait another three or four years for Martin to reveal her fate? In King's Landing, Cersei Lannister schemes endlessly against the titular queen of the realm, Margaery Tyrell, but it's only in the book's final fifty pages that the plotting bears any fruit. And once again, Martin leaves us here with a cliffhanger ending.

Martin still remains the reigning champion of epic fantasy in my book, but much will hang on his next novel. A Dance with Dragons could reinforce the strengths of "A Song and Ice and Fire" and propel the series towards a rousing climax, or it could further wander into the Jordanian wilderness. Time will tell.