Walking an old beat here - having spent an embarrassingly prolonged portion of my day procrastinating, I find myself in a fit of stubbornness working out in a park near my Sandy Hill apartment at an ungodly hour of the night (caught an old couple making out under a streetlight on the way back - they were adorably bashful about the incident) and now find myself unable to sleep. Part of this stems from one of those creative epiphanies which often strike me as I meander through those creative low-points when considering my fantasy world. I was sitting on the porcelain throne and cracked open David Day's A-Z of Tolkien, a deliciously antiquated old Middle-Earth compendium grotesquely illustrated in bold, black ink. The sketches are the stuff of nightmares and fantastic, Scandinavian dreams. In any case, from now until my limbs realize how weary they are I'm furiously going to type out a ramblings' worth of considerations.
When I think of Middle-Earth, there are two worlds which come to mind. The Hobbit was one of the first books I read as a pre-teen, before Peter Jackson's re-imagining and before contemporary popular culture had slapped a new coat of paint on an old series of cultural icons. The edition of The Hobbit I read was a gold-bound Bible of a tome cob-webbed with emerald-colored Elvish script and whose yellowed pages were lined with gold-paint the way those old King James' are in the drawers of hotel bedside tables (hence the reference). The book itself slipped out of a kind of stiff sheath. It was a marvelous thing - it looked and felt like a spell-book in my hand, so weathered and ancient (it was given to me by my grandparents and was probably one of the earliest published editions) that it read - to my juvenile mind - like an authentic history of ancient Britain. It seems bizarre and almost self-serving to say I believed Hobbits existed (or had once existed) when I read that book, but then again I also waited up all night for an owl to cordially invite me to attend Hogwarts' School of Witchcraft and Wizardry on my eleventh birthday despite better judgement. Kids are impressionable. I have been accused of being a very practical man but in hindsight my household growing up was... well, pretty magical. My mom and dad went out of their way to make us believe in Santa Claus and my dad terrorized us into our beds on Christmas morning with a misshapen magical Christmas potato which he claimed would turned into some kind of Troll if we crept downstairs before my parents got out of bed.
Yeah that last one seems really fucked up, but I am shitting you not.
In Pitchfork's Chrono Trigger Retrospective he claims that 16-bit pixel art acted as a kind of visual poetry in the medium - that the constraints of the graphics gave the worlds we were interpreting almost more depth and realism than the gorgeous vistas and landscapes of, say, The Witcher 2. Part of this probably owes more to the impressionable nature of youth, but the same way the horror genre works best when there is no monster behind the door (and no zipper to give it away) I think the fantasy genre works best when its aesthetics are skewed through a lens of bizarre surrealism.
I know it seems like I'm digressing here but when I speak of Middle-Earth existing as two worlds I am differentiating between the artwork of its earliest inception and, say, the Hollywood franchise in which it exists now. Disclaimer - I am in no way criticizing Jackson's portrayal of Tolkien's universe, the man had his own vision. I am merely making an observation. Look at the weirdness of The Neverending Story and and note the similarities between its and the super deformed early Hobbit-artwork. Flipping through A-Z of Tolkien I am amazed at the violently stark contrast between earlier interpretations of Tolkien staples and their nowaday mainstream.
But there something to be said for that - something rustic and authentic about the deformity of Tolkien's personal cartography and marginal doodling. The same way Goblinoid's Labyrinth Lord sings an ode to Gygax's flimsy Creature Compendium.
When Charles Darwin explored the Galapagos he drew sketches of the new animal life he discovered there. When the Great Explorers plundered the fertile depths of the Americas, they drew their own maps. And when Tolkien drew his first map of the Shire, there wasn't a doubt in your mind that it was somewhere between Sussex and Brighton (or had been, long ago).
Anyway, moving on - the Foreword to Day's A-Z is really what got me going earlier. I was not unaware of this fact, but it lit my brain like a halogen lantern either way. When Tolkien created Middle-Earth, he was driven by a need to create a mythology that he felt Britain sorely lacked. This may even contribute to why The Hobbit felt so damn authentic at first read. I have a book, The Stoneholding, written by a pair of Canadian authors who sought to do a similar thing with our nations geography (and I believe J. V. Jones, and hell, every fantasy author has attempted to do - think of Stephen King's Dark Tower series and why The Good, The Bad & The Ugly had such a stormy influence). So why not me? Instead of attempting to establish a moppish series of European provinces battling for political supremacy... why not establish a fantasy period-piece set to replicate the Colonization of the Americas? Why not have my Black & Green Jackets act as a mercenary rogues gallery of hunter-trackers in a largely unexplored land? Why not have elves - only draw strongly from Native American and Scandinavian Poetic Edda to morph a kind of unique elemental progenitor race of my own? Dwarves? Ents? When I dabbled (a while ago) into Inuit mythology the notion that an entire ethnic sub-culture lived in fear of the ghosts (or anima) of living things seeking horrible vengeance against them for mistreatment romanced me insensible. Why not have a race of elfish aborigines worship a god that is essentially the entire arctic circle? No, not worship. Fear. The "white", an elemental Zeus or Gaia of their own pantheon, as indifferent and ruthless as Howard's Crom of the cruel god of Afghan religion. I could likewise turn East, in select tales, and flesh out Kaja-Rang and his armour of dragon's teeth, and of the colonist Europeans and their own pantheons...
Getting a little big for my britches here, but I think I'll be cooling the embers into something workable in due time. The language of magic will still be pre-eminent, and the Fae, although now I have a whole other series of perspective which would warp its surreal landscape - the way Alan Moore's Immateria is warped by the collective consciousness of the human race in his Promethea series (if you haven't read it, fucking read it).
A whimsical blend of sword and sorcery, and flintlock rifles - of the Metis-like Tenes and the war between nations fought in overseas theatres... it makes for a rather tasty concept, no?
Melkor/Morgoth of Middle-Earth, mind you, is cemented in badassness as the Father of Monsters in Tolkien's mythos. he is to faux-British mythology what Typhon and the Titans were to Ancient Greece. Reading this nifty little encyclopedia I am learning just how bad a mother he is, and how many terrible monsters he wrought into creation from flame and shadow. There is something primordial about the concept of a spider-god as terrible as Ungoliant living in the dark of the American jungles in this new, unplundered territory that I think i may put into use. A kind of horrid goliath, as much as a spider as a dragon, a monster, so guttonous it would eat itself. I seethe with possibility!
I owe in no small fashion my overarching motivation to do this to my current employment as a Researcher for the War of 1812 by the Ottawa Arts Commission. I genuinely do enjoy trolling journal archives for primary-source evidence of older time periods, and the early 19th and latter 18th Centuries are just of seriousness coolness to me. My Modern Brit Lit class has me studying the proverbial works on Empire by Kipling, Orwell and Conrad, and fucking seafaring tales of Victorian derring-do and ivory poaching have given me a boner for Alan Quatermain and his imperialist ilk. Ho, boy!
Anyways, as predicted my eyes are getting heavy and my full-body cardio routine has taken its enormous toll on my constitution. I'm going to leave on an administrative note and state that I plan on segregating my blog-writing into multiple blogs; one I think I will dedicate to fitness, in that I plan to at some point within the next few months, attempt to cycle through every WOD in the crossfit WOD-book by category and chart the results; another, I will dedicate to my fantasy; another, I will dedicate to the creation of my Camerons-in-Afghanistan collection of narratives; and finally, this one as a kind of reviews and ramblings pertaining to writing and possibly schoolwork in general. I think blogging has become a pre-eminent medium in the literary world and overlooking it as an instrument of notoriety... may be unwise.
I leave you with a sexy, sexy, heavy groove by Tame Impala from their new album Lonerism. For some reason I imagine chicks shakin-ass to that beat and it boils my blood with lust.
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