All posts tagged literary discussion

guest post: charlie anderson

Hi all,

Today I have a guest post for you from a new independent author. Charlie Anderson is the author of The Vision. She lives across the pond in the UK and is here to talk about three of my favourite things (and yours too, I hope): fantasy, Tolkien, and Norse mythology.

Over to you, Charlie:

Norse mythology, fantasy and Lord of the Rings (LOTR)

I want to thank Brondt for inviting me to guest-blog. It’s a great privilege, and Brondt, I appreciate your generosity.

In this post, I’ll discuss how J R R Tolkien’s background as a linguist might have helped him create a new branch of fantasy.

Tolkien’s mesmerising Lord of the Rings (LOTR) trilogy (1955) was one of the first books I read, and I couldn’t get enough of humans; Elves; Orcs; Goblins; Trolls and Dwarves living alongside dragons; magic; magic swords; walled forts; magic finger-rings and a thrilling battle that decided the fate of the heroes and villains. Once I discovered that these were all elements of Norse (Northern European) myth, I started reading anything I could find on these myths in earnest.

The Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda, the oldest and main sources of the Norse myths, describe humanoid beings with different cultures and languages / dialects called ‘Aesir’, ‘Vanir’, ‘Jotnar’, ‘Trolls’, ‘Elves’ and ‘Dwarves’ living alongside humans. Having learnt nine languages with varying degrees of success, for me the Poetic Edda poem Alvissmal is fascinating, because it gives glimpses into the dialects / languages of these beings. For example, the human himinn (‘sky’) is hlyrnir to the Aesir, vindofni to the Vanir, uppheim to the Jotnar, fagraræfr to the Elves and drjupansal to the Dwarves.

Tolkien was a Professor of Anglo-Saxon and then of English at the University of Oxford in England. He lived and breathed the sources of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic myth, which are related to Norse myth. As a professional linguist, Tolkien must have seen that some translations of Alvissmal, for example Bellows’ (1936), failed to show that the different dialects / languages might be unintelligible, and that the common language between the Aesir and the Dwarves was the language of humans. Imagine sports-shoe being a sneaker in the US, trainer in the UK, runner in Canada, and basket in France, and basket is translated as ‘container’ and sneaker as ‘someone who sneaks’!

Furthermore, the Eddas list different types of elves:
dokkalfr = dark elf
alfr = elf
ljosalfr = light elf
svartalfr = black elf

Brodeur, Bellows, Hollander and others translated alfr and ljosalfr as ‘Elf’, and dokkalfr, svartalfr and dvergr as ‘Dwarf’. Dwarves live in stones and in the ground, and Elves live in the sky (Gylfaginning chapters 14 and 17, Prose Edda). Thus, in Norse myth, Elves and Dwarves can be seen as one people (alfr, pl. alfar) with linguistic, cultural and physical differences, but Tolkien made them two peoples, and other writers followed him. What Tolkien did, very brilliantly, was reinvent Elves, Dwarves, Trolls and humans. He built on their cultures and physical appearances as described in the Norse myths, expanded the vocabulary for their dialects, and gave each dialect a script so that they became separate languages.

Other Norse mythology elements that are important in LOTR are:

the setting: LOTR’s human-habited ‘Middle Earth’ brings to mind the Old Norse ‘Midgard’ (‘Middle Enclosure’) in which the home of humans lies;
a hypnotically desirable gold finger-ring which brings trouble on the bearer: in LOTR this was Sauron’s One Ring, and in Norse myth it is Andvari’s ring;
a final war / battle: in LOTR, this was Aragorn against Sauron, and Frodo against Saruman. In Norse mythology, it’s Ragnarok;
an army of the dead: compare Aragorn’s with the Norse Einherjar;
dragons: in The Hobbit, the prequel to LOTR, there’s Smaug, who’s based on the gold-hoarding Fafnir of Norse myth;
the use of battle axes, swords and shields;
the wise, bearded, wandering wizard: compare LOTR’s Gandalf and Norse myth’s Odin;
warrior women: there’s LOTR’s Eowyn and Norse myth’s Valkyries and Freyja;
names: Frode, Gimle and Gandalf are Old Norse names.

These elements, as well as Elves, Trolls and Dwarves, are still seen in fantasy today, eg in the BBC TV series Merlin (2012).

In fantasy, the hero has a clear quest, reason or purpose, whereas Norse myth describes people getting on with whatever life throws at them. I also think Tolkien’s dogmatic Roman Catholic faith (I know first-hand as I am RC) with its emphasis on ‘sins’, plus his experiences in two World Wars, influenced him to add a ‘good / bad’ dichotomy to LOTR, which Norse myth lacks. LOTR’s Frodo and Sam are ‘good’ and Sauron is ‘bad’, and we know who to support, but in Norse myth, Odin, Loki and nearly everyone else is ambiguous like LOTR’s Gollum / Smeagol.

Click to buy from Amazon

My challenge when writingThe Vision (an Amazon ebook) was to use the surviving sources of Norse myth to create a story arc with many interlinked stories, like a soap opera novel, whilst trying to stay true to the sources. Unlike Tolkien, I couldn’t use a uniform, Norse saga-like descriptive and narrative voice because for a gobby person like me, that’s hard! And since I was using the soap opera format, I tried to use thoughts, speech and action to show place, culture and language.

Tolkien’s genius was to blend his moral framework, his knowledge of linguistics, the products of his imagination and Norse myth to create a new branch of fantasy. One only has to look at Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle (2011) and the BBC TV series Merlin (2012) to fully appreciate Tolkien’s legacy, and to realise that Norse mythology is still live and kicking.

Thanks again to Brondt for my guest post, and thank you for reading it!

If you want more information about Charlie and her work, visit her website.
For you Twitter fans, her handle is @CVAnderson2.
The Vision is available through Amazon and AmazonUK.

2 Comments

by Brondt on October 30, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in Essay

Tagged charlie v anderson, essay, fantasy, guest post, j r r tolkien, literary discussion, the vision

Posted by Brondt on October 30, 2012

http://wbrondtkamffer.com/2012/10/30/guest-post-charlie-anderson/

sometimes the magic only strikes once

Rereading books is an odd thing. Sometimes, the book grows in depth and meaning for the reader. At other times, the reader fails to see why he wanted to reread the book in the first place.

This has been on my mind in recent weeks as I’ve been rereading two very different books by two very different authors. My admiration for Brandon Sanderson is, by now, well known to those who frequent this blog with anything approaching regularity. I recently read Elantris for the third time and declared it my new favourite fantasy novel, surpassing even Lord of the Rings. I’m going through Sanderson’s Mistborn series again now, and I find that it’s just as brilliant as ever. Better, even, than before.

I see things differently, of course. I first read Sanderson’s books while I was writing The Wars of Gods and Men, and since then I’ve written four novels myself. I’ve grown as a writer, and that in turn has led me to see different qualities in Mistborn and Elantris than I saw previously. I have a much greater appreciation for Sanderson’s characters than I did the first time I read the books. Having made it through a few books myself has left me in awe of the man’s skill. I feel humbled–inadequate even–when I dare to hold my own books in the same thought as Sanderson’s.

Oddly, I remember that I did not read through his novels with any great speed. I went through them quickly enough, finding and making time to do so, but I was not consumed by them. I did not lurk in hallways or beneath stairwells at the University, as I often do to find quiet space on campus to read. I simply read them at a quick but comfortable pace.

I’ve also been rereading Terry Goodkind’s Wizard’s First Rule. I loved The Sword of Truth series when I first read it. In fact, I went through all eleven books, WFR to Confessor, in eight weeks! I read the thousand-page beast The Stone of Tears in two days. Admittedly, I was at home sick with the flu at the time, but that is still an inhuman speed at which to read so big a book. I loved the characters, Richard and Kahlan especially, but the entire cast throughout the series was fantastic.

But I’m not so sure anymore. I loaned the series to a friend after I’d finished the books, and he returned the whole box-full about two weeks back. That was great, I thought, as I’d had a desire in the past months to revisit at least the first volume of the saga. Problem is, I’m finding it near-torture to read this thing, and I can’t figure out why. I read the books about a year before I began The Wars of Gods and Men. At the time, I was about 3,000 lines into an ill-fated attempt at an epic poem. I don’t know if my return to novel writing changed my expectations from fiction, but I suspect it has.

To be fair, Goodkind’s story isn’t bad. And Richard and Kahlan remain as interesting as ever. But the writing is just not that inviting. I devoured these books before, so what has changed? The writing certainly hasn’t. I mean, it’s exactly the same physical copy I’m reading now as three years ago.

Here’s the thing: we, as readers, evolve over time. That much is blatantly obvious. But the ways in which we evolve and the reasons for that personal evolution differ. I’ve tried repeatedly to read both Robert Jordan and George R.R. Martin, but I never get beyond the first hundred pages of either. Despite not liking Wizard’s First Rule on this read-through, I have still made it to page five hundred, and I plan to finish the book.

So, I’ve changed enough to no longer like Goodkind, but I haven’t changed enough to stop liking Sanderson or to start liking Jordan and Martin. Nobody says the magic lasts forever. Heck, I can barely stand to watch the Lord of the Rings films anymore. But in the case of the films, it took several viewings for them to loose their magic. Goodkind’s books have taken only one read to lose theirs.

And yet Sanderson’s magic has increased rather than decreased for me. And that is how I would define good books and good writers, and that is why “good” is so subjective in this particular field. You cannot even say objectively that Shakespeare is good. He may be good for you, but if I can’t enjoy his writing, then he obviously can’t be good for me. I’m not talking about technique, either. I don’t know that technique ultimately matters that much to the average reader.

C.S. Lewis in An Experiment on Criticism said that books should be judged on the way they are read, not on some quality that is hard to define. In other words, Shakespeare shouldn’t be considered a great writer because his iambic pentameter is phenomenal. How do we judge the quality of something so subtle as rhythm? For one person, the rhythm could be perfect; for another, jarring. Shakespeare is a great writer because many, many people not only read his plays, they reread his plays.

A good book, then, is a subjective thing. A good book is one you, the individual reader, want to read again. A good book is one that, when read again, makes you want to read it a third time. A good book is there to be enjoyed repeatedly. For poor books, the magic only strikes once–or not at all.

5 Comments

by Brondt on June 7, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in Essay

Tagged brandon sanderson, essay, fantasy, literary discussion, reading, terry goodkind

Posted by Brondt on June 7, 2012

http://wbrondtkamffer.com/2012/06/07/sometimes-the-magic-only-strikes-once/

endings and beginnings (5/14 update)

What makes a good ending? It’s something I’ve been public on this blog about dealing with in the last few weeks. The answers are, of course, quite subjective, but I think I can maybe say a few words about what I think makes a good ending, and then about the sorts of endings I write.

Good Endings

I recently watched the series finale to the USA Network show In Plain Sight. At the end of it, I said to my family that that had to be about the worst thing I’d ever seen in my life. The show kind of ended with a whimper. The traditional conclusion to books and plays is for there to be either a wedding or a major death, but there was nothing of the sort there. The “major” death (which we didn’t really know enough about the guy to care about) happened in the penultimate episode, whereas the wedding loomed but never actually arrived (and given the show’s track record with weddings, well, it ain’t a given thing, let’s just say…). Over all, it was oddly disappointing to watch.

So I started thinking about endings to films and TV series, and pondered what does make a good ending to a series of any sort. How do we satisfactorily tie off the loose ends while making some sort of point about anything? Good endings, I realized, are also good beginnings. Something has to end for something new to begin, only the degree of finality to the closing might be different. A wedding ends two single lives, but begins a couple’s journey. A death ends a life more emphatically, and the beginning is for those who survive to figure out how they are going to survive.

It is certainly no mistake that these define the classic tragedy-comedy divide. Tragedy leaves the living in mourning, wondering about the instability of the future. Comedy leaves the people celebrating the possibilities of the future. There are, of course, all sorts of shades in between, but the simple divide of endings and beginnings always remains.

My Endings

I have also come to realize that I am incapable of writing truly happy endings. If it looks like it might be happy, I’ll cut it short or kill one more person to dampen the mood. This is so evident in The Scion of Abacus that it’s a great example to point to of a characteristic Brondt Kamffer ending.

(On a side note, I’ve just been rereading Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn: The Final Empire over the last couple of weeks, and I was shocked to see how much I drew from that book to create Scion. Outside the magic system, I didn’t really consciously include any Mistborn elements. Yikes!)

I think the bittersweet ending is somehow more poignant. Real life is seldom made up of happy endings. Humans being what we are, we usually get to new beginnings off the back of unhappy endings. It’s the way we roll. Otherwise, there would be no new beginnings for us. Anyhow, I saw a review of Scion Part VI that bemoaned the story as one of love, death, and misery. I looked at that and thought it rather odd. In my mind, it is a story of self-sacrifice. The love, death, and misery are incidental, though not insignificant.

So, I am left thinking about the subjective nature of endings again. Someone might weep while another fumes. One might sigh while another grunts dismissively. For me, happy endings are just unrealistic, but I don’t think that makes me a dark writer at all. I think there is a fundamental difference in tone between my books and, say, Joe Abercrombie’s brand of dark grittiness. My stories are filled with hope, but somebody still has to die or suffer. That’s the way life is. That’s what makes hope so powerful.

Anyhow, you’ve been warned. More misery is ahead in future books!

New Beginnings

The world of Scion is over for me. Let me just quash any hopes of a sequel. I am not a Terry Brooks or Raymond Feist, able to write in a single setting for decades. I am more like Brandon Sanderson, who I’ve mentioned many times before has been an enormous influence on my writing in the last six years or so, in that I must go off on different paths. However, unlike Sanderson, I’m not capable of going back to an earlier universe. It’s just the way I’m wired.

But I am now over 31,000 words into Eidylon, the new book. Looking at that and where I am in the story so far, I worry that my estimated 220,000 words is ambitiously short. But we’ll see. This is the new beginning that will become an old, familiar friend over the course of the next year, as I write all I have planned to in this series.

Lastly, those who have been waiting or wondering about a Nook/epub version of Scion, it is coming. I have to figure out the publishing schedule exactly, as Part III comes out of KDP Select exclusivity this Friday, while Part IV remains there until June 14. I’ll be doing an accelerated serial release, but more details will follow soon.

Right, that’s your lot. Cheers!

religion in fantasy: atheism

*This is the fifth in an eight-part series, which I’ll publish during the month of March. Click for theism, deism, dualism, or polytheism.*

Religion is an integral part of every society in this world, and thus it comes as no surprise that religion often features so prominently in fantasy literature, wherein authors construct imaginary worlds that must balance the fantastic with the believable in a way few other genres have to deal with. The issue I want to explore is how various authors approach this most delicate of human subjects. They say one should never discuss religion with the barber, but as cyberspace doesn’t have a razor blade in hand, I shall take my chances here.

My capitalization of the term “God” will strike some as idiosyncratic, I’m sure, but I’ve tried to consistently capitalize only when the term applies to the Judea-Christian God of our world. Any similar god in another fantasy universe is written in lowercase, unless such a parallel to the real-world God is implied, necessary, or explicit.

Atheism

I must admit that I am surprised more fantasy worlds out there aren’t constructed around a purely atheistic framework. That statement sounds horribly vague to me, so let me try to explain further, for while I believe atheism manifests itself quite a bit in fantasy, it does so through the guise of the other forms of deity I’ve spoken of before (and will summarize at the end of this post). What I mean to examine here is the existence of actual atheistic cultures in fantasy; more than that, even, is the existence of purely atheistic universes.

The first of those two is easy enough to find in fantasy, though far from prevalent. Authors dream up fantasy universes, replete with races and gods, but somewhere there exists an atheistic culture. Christopher Paolini’s elves are an example. The Aarian Dominion of my book The Scion of Abacus is another. But in such worlds, there are those who believe in a god or in multiple gods. Sometimes the religion becomes a point of discussion, whether openly or more allegorically (as in Pullman’s His Dark Materials), and then we see the author’s worldview come to the fore—whether theist or atheist. I think in part the issue here is the modern writer’s perception of pre-modern cultures, which in our world are almost all religious.

I think it should be noted, though, that religion doesn’t necessitate belief in a god (Buddhism, for example), and we are talking atheism here in all its forms. That being said, I have yet to come across a properly Buddhism-like religion in fantasy. The closest thing I can point to is the Jedi “faith” of the Star Wars universe, but I am sure many would argue the finer points with me on that one–i.e. whether Jedi-ism(?) is in fact a religion at all.

Anyhow, given what appears to me an inordinately high number of progressive thinkers who are also fiction writers, I am surprised that we don’t see more purely atheistic universes. In other words, we don’t see god-less universes populated by knowing atheists. We do see god-less universes populated by people who believe in gods, but that is a quite different thing, and I have mentioned it periodically in the past posts. Alternatively, we do see quite a few fantasy worlds in which religion is entirely absent, but that is not the same thing as creating an atheistic universe. That is simply a story in which religion has no part in the conflict whatsoever.

I do wander what a purely atheistic universe would look like, and if there are books out there like that, I’d like someone to point me in their direction. I’ve never encountered one myself. Again, I think the issue here is one of preconceived notions of the pre-modern mindset, and pre-modern cultures are the primary sort found in fantasy. What we do see a lot of is worlds in which people believe in gods that are obviously false fairytales, and this is somehow extended to suggest all religion is fairytale. I think it is no mistake that most of these universes deal with polytheistic deities, for as I discussed in the last post, there seems an odd relationship between atheism and polytheism in their relationships to nature.

Now, I have failed utterly so far in the five previous posts to discuss the manner in which these religions manifest themselves functionally in the literature, in other words, not just the existence of gods but how people go about worshiping or serving them. We will take that subject up next week.

religion in fantasy: polytheism

*This is the fourth in an eight-part series, which I’ll publish during the month of March. Click for part one: theism, part two: deism, or part three:dualism.*

Polytheism

Pure polytheism probably vies with pure theism for the most used religious manifestation in fantasy. In fact, it probably wins out. There are good reasons for this, I think, and some interesting facts about this manifestation of the divine that are worth thinking about.

Firstly, it must be noted that polytheism died out in the West between 800 and 1600 years ago, depending on the part of Europe you are looking at. Therefore, we are dealing with something that, in the Western mind, is purely fantasy. The roots of the modern genre as laid down in the early and middle part of the Twentieth Century show a heavy reliance on Greco-Roman and Germanic-Norse mythology, which are, of course, polytheistic in nature. There is also something in the Western mind that equates polytheistic belief with a more primitive thought pattern, and therefore it becomes a requisite in pre-modern fantasy worlds.

Let’s think briefly about the nature of the gods as they are presented in fantasy. I find two primary types: personal gods and anthropomorphized natural forces. The personal gods are like the Greek gods as they appear in Homer. They are physical, they meddle, and they have distinct personalities. The other sort of god is the exact opposite: they do not manifest physically, they typically don’t meddle, and they don’t have much in the way of distinct personalities. As the first sort is more commonly understood and easily grasped, I will take a moment to focus in on the second sort, which I think is actually becoming much more prevalent in the fantasy genre than the first.

In some senses, these “natural force” gods are related to the dualist gods in the last post, as well as the deist god. They are often used in stories to question the very existence of any god, polytheistic or monotheistic, for they seem so distant from the characters. Their lack of involvement in human affairs is a centerpiece of the mythology, and it certainly puts the onus on the heroes to perform without any hope of a true deus ex machina moment. This is not a bad thing at all, and it accords nicely with a contemporary naturalistic worldview. There is another draw, of course, and that is the lack of filling in pages of back story on each of the gods, for all they need is a name and association, and the writer can let the mysteriousness of them do the rest. That may sound as though I am cheapening this form of deity, but many authors are not interested in the finer points of theology—or at least it has no place in their stories—and so this sort of polytheism is a nice workaround to give the appearance of religion without having to go into much depth.

As I’ve mentioned Richard Dawkins before, let me mention one of his detractors, Oxford mathematician John Lennox, who points out in several places that polytheism has much in common with naturalism as a world view, more than one would expect, and in many ways more than in common with monotheism. What does he mean by that? Well, the “god” of atheism and naturalism is nature itself, and polytheism is usually nothing but personification of natural forces. It is important to note that almost all polytheistic pantheons in fantasy (and certainly all in real life) are created gods, or non-eternal in nature. They form out of some primordial state. They are natural beings, just of a higher sort than humans.

It boils down, again, to where an author begins. A God-believing author may use a polytheistic universe because she is uncomfortable presenting some form of God as a fantasy and so will use what is clearly fantastic in its place. Alternatively, as I have done in The Ossian Chronicles books, polytheism could be used as a false religion (worshiping either imaginary or very real, but evil, gods). For an agnostic or atheist, polytheism is yet again another fantasy, and just as appropriate as a monotheistic god would be. Or, a thoughtful atheist may already recognize that all he is doing is personifying the very forces of nature he believes are behind everything to begin with, which accords well with the theory of the origin of polytheistic belief in Earth’s past. On which thought, we will end, to take up atheism in fantasy next time.

Brondt Kamffer

All posts tagged literary discussion

guest post: charlie anderson

Norse mythology, fantasy and Lord of the Rings (LOTR)

sometimes the magic only strikes once

endings and beginnings (5/14 update)

religion in fantasy: atheism

Atheism

religion in fantasy: polytheism

Polytheism

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