Time Machine

[Melahny_oftheWoods]

However, the red ink of the Fairy has not been seen for around 6 months and the present administration (whose sense of humour is not always very British) appear to have done away with her. A perfect crime, when you think on it, for the Fairy was always all voice and no body and without a body it is hard to make the charges stick. However, I do not wish to speculate further on this matter as the Dwarf with the hammer is already annoyed with me while I had a massive fight with the Goose a year ago. My policy with the admins atm is to be as nice to them as possible and only say good things about them. Accusations of murder most fowl (pun intended), however well grounded, are therefore off limits.

Ahh, right... the "You Have a Point" thread. I remember that now... and I do remember reading your posts pleading for some points on my behalf (I thank you). But alas, the fairy is "missing"! I will try to request some points for you as well and we'll see if anything happens.

[Melahny_oftheWoods]

@VelvetineZoneOMG Bernard is hilarious. I love him. Thank you for the clips, it reminds me I need to rewatch some of those episodes. They're great. He hates his customers so much hahahaha. Just wants to drink and read and not be bothered by annoying people trying to buy books from his shop.

I would also like to be a grumpy bookshop owner and throw people out of my shop. Let's use the time machine though and go back to the 70s or sometime before cellphones. I don't need whiny brats filming me and "threatening" to post my shenanigans online--although it would make for quite a funny video.... but it's best to remain low-key when you are a grumpy bookshop keeper! We don't want MORE customers coming in. ;)

@Chrysophylax DivesOnly having me to talk to is not so bad, is it?

[VelvetineZone]

@Melahny_oftheWoods we are a Bernard Appreciation Society. Ha ha yes best to be a grumpy bookshop owner before phones.

[Melahny_oftheWoods]

@VelvetineZoneHa yes! We will camp outside Black's Books and deter any pesky customers from going inside.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

@Chrysophylax DivesOnly having me to talk to is not so bad, is it?

It is a pleasure and privilege. (And thank you on the Fairy request!)

@VelvetineZone - what I did yesterday seems good so far. Unfortunately, having gotten up at the crack of dawn with great excitement and started reading the sirens went off before I was half-way through - another ballistic from Yemen - and now the two little ones are up, fighting, and not letting me return to reading. Will return once they settle down.

There was a TV series called, I think, 'Life on Mars' (maybe a different name?) with a policeman who is knocked on the head and wakes up in the 1970s. The show did a really good job of recapturing the 1970s, which is the decade of my childhood. The thing that really made an impression watching it was a white dog turd, which was an inspired detail. When I grew up the streets of suburban London were covered in dog crap, and as a kid I always wondered why, on occasion, they were white. But I had utterly forgotten this detail of my young life.

[VelvetineZone]

@Melahny_oftheWoods I would actually love to have a bookshop. I have worked in libraries mind you, but I never threw anyone out.

@Chrysophylax Dives aargh that's not a very chilled start to the day! I've never seen Life on Mars. The two actual 70s shows I liked before my mum got rid of the TV were The Muppet Show and Tiswas

Here in Wales it is Bad Friday. Happy Bad Friday everyone. Hope you are all being very bad rabbits ("bad rabbit!" is our favourite phrase from the Peter Rabbit film).

[Chrysophylax Dives]

I think the chapter works, or the key bit of it that I wrote yesterday. In the event, I did not draw on the staircase of Elendil at all. I still guess that it was a key in Tolkien's head but don't need to go into it to explain what is happening as the LotR is first imagined. So much of my book is like that, as in behind every paragraph written is around 7 paragraphs-worth of material. It can feel like a great waste, but I have a sense that to write well it is actually necessary to know a whole load more that one does not say.

I do plan to explain on this thread the relationship with the time travel of the Lost Road and the design of LotR and in general talk in minute detail about Tolkien's astonishingly creative mind. For the moment, though, I'd rather watch the second episode of the bookship sitcom (which I cannot because what I actually have to do is a whole load of housework - o joy!)

In the meanwhile, @Melahny_oftheWoods and @VelvetineZone check out the screenshot that I took an hour or so ago from the cam of an eagle's eyrie in Latvia (courtesy @Pele Alarion).

[VelvetineZone]

I haven't read the Lost Road, must do some time. I am quite fascinated by time travel themes though. Watched most of The Time Machine for the first time recently.

Tolkien does have an astonishingly creative mind. I'm onto chapter 17 in The Silmarillion now and marvelling at the detail of the imaginary world and its inhabitants and all the naming and languages and all, as its even more depth and breadth than when you read LOTR. I am really glad I decided to try reading it, it feels like a fairly essential and important element of understanding and immersing in his imaginary world.

I hear you about the 7 paragraphs behind every paragraph. That's very good editing and, I can't really think of the word, sort of synthesising and sharpening your points. I'm in the opposite position with my writing, I'm doing a first read through of an unfinished thing I've been writing and have realised that the first section is an incredibly long account of pretty much just one day, with a lot of information popping up in conversations that I probably ought to be showing not telling. But I kind of like it being quite a slow unfolding, as I've written stuff before where you're immediately plunged into lots of characters, I like writing some slower stuff with less characters nowadays. So I fell asleep thinking hmm I probably ought to make it all faster and shorter and more show not tell, but woke up to a revelation: am I actually even writing a story for people to read, and therefore needing to try to conform to some imaginary external storytelling rules, or am I actually just writing immersive worlds for myself which I disappear into as a change from the laundry, and also mostly just for the sheer pleasure of channeling whatever my imaginary characters seem to want to let flow out through my typing fingers, in which case it achieves exactly what I want, so I'll just carry on.

Wishing you swiftly completed housework and more time to write. I skimmed the early posts on this thread, and due to genuine and frustrating short term memory issues can't totally remember what I read, but was there a reference to @Melahny_oftheWoods writing inspiring the thread? I'm guessing most or all people on the board are writers as well as Tolkien aficionados.

[VelvetineZone]

Aha yes, I have found the link to the thread of @Melahny_oftheWoods poetry and will browse it.

[VelvetineZone]

Oh my goodness.

I like Summers of Old, @Melahny_oftheWoods.

You mention Joan Baez in another poem, I was literally playing one of her songs this morning.

Then you reference Summer Wine and Some Velvet Morning. Summer Wine is one of my favourite songs

[Chrysophylax Dives]

@VelvetineZone given your reaction to 'Summers of Old' may I politely direct you to this thread were you may ask for your appreciation to be translated into points?

The Lost Road is an unfinished work, with only its two opening chapters set in the present and two set in a mythical past. The intermediate chapters were supposed to step back through ever more ancient legends until finally crossing the origin and entering myth. The whole idea is derived from Beowulf, where Tolkien discerned that the king sent over the sea to his people at the start of the poem was imagined by the Anglo-Saxon poem as sailing out of a mythical flat-world and into the round world of history. The Lost Road uses this design, which is given new expression in the myth of Numenor (which is Atlantis): Numenor falls into the sea as the flat world is made round, and Elendil - who plays the part of the king Scyld Scefing in Beowulf - sails out of the flat world of myth as he escapes the destruction of Numenor to arrive at the shores of Middle-earth, which is now a round world.

Not sure that is so easy to follow. But the point is that while the time-travel novel was abandoned its mythical foundation, the tale of Numenor, became the foundation of LotR (and is told as one of two appendages in The Silmarillion). So something of the original idea of time travel is imported into this new Hobbit story.

Jumping over the intermediate steps (due to cleaning duties) LotR contains a really clever idea of time travel. We think of time travel in the way that H.G. Wells taught us to - a scientist makes a machine that allows someone in the present to travel into the past or the future. The Lost Road substitutes dream for machine, so the time travel is by shared dream, but this is not a radical change. But LotR contains the really clever idea that it is the people of another time who have made the time machine and so the heroes of the story in the present simply walk over a rope bridge above a river and, in the Third Age of Middle-earth, enter a world like that of the First Age. In other words, the Three Rings of the Elves, of which Galadriel has one, work as the time machine.

Please do not feel obliged to read all that. It just sort of fell out of my fingers. I have to go and clean the fish pond in the garden (the great project of the Covid days).

[Chrysophylax Dives]

... was there a reference to @Melahny_oftheWoods writing inspiring the thread?

Yes!

[VelvetineZone]

I could follow all that @Chrysophylax Dives. I have also been tidying as we have visitors coming, so I must stop wittering but it's all so interesting. I was musing on submerged worlds only the only day. And because I've been writing a story which features ghosts, I was musing a while back on how ghosts from across eras actually convey tiny impressions of different historical times, so there's some kind of time machine connection there in a way. Archaeology is another type of time travel, in a way. Thanks for the summary of the Lost Road, happy pond cleaning.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

I've been writing a story which features ghosts, I was musing a while back on how ghosts from across eras actually convey tiny impressions of different historical times, so there's some kind of time machine connection there in a way. Archaeology is another type of time travel, in a way.

Yes! Over the last half century Tolkien the fantasy author has been so firmly separated from Tolkien the scholar that people fail to see the obvious. Tolkien did literary criticism in the way that I was taught to do intellectual history, that is, reconstructing the intentions of a dead author. Never mind that this went out of fashion decades ago. If you are trying to reconstruct the intentions of a dead person you cannot help but worry on occasion that you are digging up ghosts and engaging in necromancy. Or such is my experience, and it is why I recognized in the palantiri or Seeing Stones a scholar's fantasy of the ultimate research tool. I think that Tolkien was quite deeply concerned with what aspects of historical research were, as it were, kosher, and what might cross the line into necromancy.

[VelvetineZone]

Yup, reconstructing the intentions of the dead was English Lit GCSE, which I hated at the time, I wanted to feel and read words flow and not overanalyse it all. And yet that's changed now.

I think even as an author you don't even fully see your own intentions, themes and messages as you're writing though, you can reread stuff years later and suddenly notice things.

Scholar and author overlapping bit v interesting, because obviously the two things will interact.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

I think even as an author you don't even fully see your own intentions, themes and messages as you're writing though, you can reread stuff years later and suddenly notice things.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Tolkien is the way that his Literary Criticism and his story-writing overlap on just this point. Basically, Tolkien fully agrees with you. With his reading of Beowulf, this means that he believes that sometimes he can see what the Anglo-Saxon poet thought more clearly than did the poet, that is, he can dig out the intentions hidden even to the author. That might sound a bit incredible until you read the drafts of LotR and realize that this was precisely the method of the book's composition - Tolkien wrote something, then returning to it he saw what he really meant, and revised accordingly, drawing out what had been hidden to him. His method of composition is in a way the same as his method of criticism.

More generally, it speaks volumes to the intellectual improverishment of the post-WWII western universities that Tolkien's Beowulf criticism has consistently been read as a demand that we throw away scholarly investigation of intentions and just let the Anglo-Saxon poem flow over us - enjoy the art for art's sake and don't let the historians destroy it, is the consensus reading of Tolkien on Beowulf. Aside from the violence this reading does to what Tolkien actually says, when dealing with a poem composed 1000 plus years ago it is palpably stupid approach, as I've come to see.

One of my discoveries - and the fact that it is a discoverey when it should have been obvious speaks volumes - is that Tolkien reads Beowulf in terms of changing astronomical model. The Anglo-Saxons had received the rudiments of Greek astronomy from the Church and knew the world was round, but the poet perceived that the ancient myths told of a flat-world. The fundamental basics of Tolkien's Beowulf criticism is an account of how the poet reconciled new and old astronomies - and the result is given expression in 'The Fall of Numenor', a myth of how the flat world becomes round that illuminates the first 52 lines of the Anglo-Saxon poet.

In terms of intentions, Tolkien perceives a straightforward intention of the poet to reconcile two astronomies. That is no magical act of mind-reading, and it is no great shakes when you identify the poem historically as a product of the first few generations after conversion to Christianity, when the old and the new were both present and the old still had meaning. But if you do not take this on board you write a lot of piffle about Tolkien and Beowulf, as has been done.

***

Other news. Am taking a rest after baking my head cleaning the pond (is 30 degrees here today). I only got it half clean and decided I will attack it again next week because it is too hot.

[VelvetineZone]

"Tolkien wrote something, then returning to it he saw what he really meant, and revised accordingly, drawing out what had been hidden to him." Totally this, for many writers I think!

Really interesting: "In terms of intentions, Tolkien perceives a straightforward intention of the poet to reconcile two astronomies."

Visitors due any second so more musing anon... pouring with rain here!

[Melahny_oftheWoods]

Long, obnoxious post coming thru! Meep meep!

@Chrysophylax DivesOnly having me to talk to is not so bad, is it?

It is a pleasure and privilege. (And thank you on the Fairy request!)

When I grew up the streets of suburban London were covered in dog crap, and as a kid I always wondered why, on occasion, they were white. But I had utterly forgotten this detail of my young life.

No problem! I did get 10 points but I don't know what from. Maybe the Fairy is alive again? Or may be from quizzes I did, no idea.

LOL why were the turds white? Poor puppy. Eating gravel maybe?

@Melahny_oftheWoods I would actually love to have a bookshop. I have worked in libraries mind you, but I never threw anyone out.

@Chrysophylax Dives aargh that's not a very chilled start to the day! I've never seen Life on Mars. The two actual 70s shows I liked before my mum got rid of the TV were The Muppet Show and Tiswas

Here in Wales it is Bad Friday. Happy Bad Friday everyone. Hope you are all being very bad rabbits ("bad rabbit!" is our favourite phrase from the Peter Rabbit film).

Really? Not even for reading too loudly or re-shelving a book incorrectly? I would.

What is Bad Friday?

Oh my goodness.

I like Summers of Old, @Melahny_oftheWoods.

You mention Joan Baez in another poem, I was literally playing one of her songs this morning.

Then you reference Summer Wine and Some Velvet Morning. Summer Wine is one of my favourite songs

Aww thank you for checking out my thread! I am glad you enjoyed the poems. I absolutely love the song "Summer Wine," and I also love the cover of it by Lana Del Rey. She does a beautiful and fun cover with Barry, her then boyfriend. It's a very sweet video.

***

I have read through all the posts I missed and all quite interesting. I also studied English literature at University. I think some people take their interpretations too far, but generally, we were taught to provide evidence from the text to back up any claims made... so I think that is the traditional method. A lot of students who were not in English studies seemed to think that literature essays were "all subjective" and just bits of fluffy opinion pieces, which is completely untrue and annoys me. If it was an opinion piece then we'd all get an easy A. All you would have to do is write something with no grammar mistakes and you should get %100. In reality, you never ever get %100 on an English essay, not if the Professor knows what they're doing! Lol. Because there is always room for criticism and improvement. That is the lesson.

I don't know where this "all subjective" idea comes from (ignorance of the discipline, I suppose), but a literary analysis or essay aims to discuss literary devices, morals, intentions, etc., with evidence from the text to support your claim. There is an element of opinion/perspective of the author, but it's really more of a analytical approach... whereas an opinion piece is just someone writing a blog post on what they did or didn't like about a book. I'm sure you all know this--I merely wanted to touch on that part of the conversation as it seems like the point of literary studies is misunderstood by a great majority of people now. I hope it does not become a dying art.

I have Tolkien's translation of Beowulf and I really liked reading it. My professor at the time didn't seem to be the biggest fan of his translation, but then again, it wasn't finished. I believe they published it after his death.

[VelvetineZone]

Bad Friday is just my daft wordplay for Good Friday on Easter weekend, @Melahny_oftheWoods.

I know and love the Lana del Rey Summer Wine as well as the Nancy Sinatra version.

I think the English Lit reply is to the dragon?
I studied Anthropology, and a bit of Archaeology. Fantastic subjects.

I need to stop story writing, which is what I'm currently doing, as it's back to school day here for one of my kids.

[VelvetineZone]

There's a reference to Summer Wine in one of my older stories, I like it that much.

[Melahny_oftheWoods]

Oh nice! I love both versions as well. What a great song. Summer is so beautiful... especially for those of us cursed with wretched winters.

Yes you were both talking about stories and writing, and he mentioned lit studies and Beowulf. I am also writing a story and various poems. I like getting lost in the world I created... although it grows ever more complex every time I work on it.

[VelvetineZone]

It's so nice getting lost in fictional worlds. I'm flicking between writing, reading The Silmarillion, and reading some undemanding romance novel.

[Melahny_oftheWoods]

That sounds great haha. I agree, I love delving into fictional worlds. So much more exciting than mundane life. :P