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take-the-hidden-paths · 1 year

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HIDDEN PATHS: A Celebration of the Smaller Tolkien Canons

Hello, and welcome to Hidden Paths, a fortnight-long event dedicated to the celebration of smaller Tolkien canons!

We all know and love the tales of Tolkien's Middle-earth, but the Professor's creative and academic endeavours didn't stop there. However, fanworks for smaller Tolkien canons (such as Farmer Giles of Ham, Mr. Bliss, Leaf by Niggle and more) are much rarer than works inspired by their Middle-earth counterparts. This event was created to be a low-pressure, low-commitment opportunity to explore those lesser known works, and create and share fanworks based on them.

Define “smaller Tolkien fandoms”.

Basically, any Tolkien canon or text (including academic works and translations) that is not explicitly set in Middle-earth and is not based on The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, or The Silmarillion and closely related histories. This includes, but is not limited to:

Beowulf/Sellic Spell

Farmer Giles of Ham

The Fall of Arthur

The Father Christmas Letters

Finn and Hengest

The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son

The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun

Leaf by Niggle

The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún

Mr. Bliss

Mythopoeia

The Notion Club Papers

Pearl

Roverandom

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Sir Orfeo

Songs for the Philologists

Smith of Wootton Major

The Story of Kullervo

Tolkien (2019 film)

Tolkien's essays, poems, letters and non-ME artwork

We also accept fanworks based on The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (because it collects a number of poems that were not originally intended as part of the Middle-earth canon) and The Book of Lost Tales (because it differs so significantly from later versions of the legendarium), and/or centring characters or concepts that only appear in extremely early drafts of The Lord of the Rings (e.g. Trotter).

We know that this leaves a bit of a grey area, but ultimately, we will trust and accept the judgement of fanwork creators. Act in good faith, and assume that others have done the same.

How does it work?

At the start of the event (14th February) the mod will post seven optional prompts to inspire you. There will be a thematic prompt, a character-based prompt, a setting-based prompt, a text prompt, a visual prompt, an audio prompt, and a wildcard prompt. A second batch of prompts will be posted on the 21st.

If you like the prompts, then use any or all of them to create and share a fanwork based on one or more small Tolkien canons. If they don't speak to you, then please feel free to do your own thing – the prompts are there to spark creativity, not impede it!

What types of fanworks do you accept?

Anything you like. Fic, poetry, meta, art, edits, vids, podfic, craft, cosplay, rec lists, playlists, compositions, interviews with fellow fans...it's all good.

Are there any minimum requirements?

No, none. Want to write a six-word story? Be our guest.

Are crossovers permitted?

Yes! We accept crossovers with the Middle-earth canons, and with non-Tolkien fandoms. We only ask that one of the smaller Tolkien canons plays a significant role in your fanwork.

What do you consider a significant role?

We don't. The event is intended to be low commitment and low stress for both participants and the moderator, and we trust that people will act in good faith. We are not going to police fanworks or apply an arbitrary definition of “significant” - we leave that up to the creator to decide.

Does actor RPF count?

For the purposes of this event, no it doesn't, unless you are also drawing on elements from a smaller canon (e.g. Liv Tyler encountering the Shadow-Bride).

Where do I post my fanworks?

We have an AO3 collection, but you may post your fanworks anywhere you like. We'd appreciate a link back to our Dreamwidth or Tumblr page, though, to spread the word about the event!

Are there any restrictions on rating or content?

Nope. Tag and warn appropriately, as you normally would, but make whatever your heart desires.

Can I post fanworks that were inspired by or created for another event, or created prior to the event's inception?

Yes! The goal is to celebrate and increase content for the smaller Tolkien fandoms. Please feel free to share your creations and add them to the collection, regardless of whether they were created specifically for this event.

I want to take part but I don't know anything about the smaller canons. Help!?

Tolkien Gateway has helpfully collated a list of Tolkien's writings, and some of the articles reproduce or link to the actual text. This is a great place to start browsing, and to find out more about a text before you invest in your own copy.

Have a look at fanworks for some of the smaller canons and see what appeals. Innumerable Stars and TRSB both have several works for the smaller canons in their collections, and many of them can be understood with no prior knowledge of the source material.

Lists of characters appearing in the various texts and canons can also be a useful jumping off point - like this one for The Book of Lost Tales.

Many of the smaller canons are just that - small! If you can get hold of a copy from your local library, book store or from a fellow fan, they are generally quick to read and digest.

If anyone has any other ideas and resources for folks wanting to dip a toe into the smaller canons, please get in touch so they can be added to this list.

When does the event run?

Officially, February 14th-28th. Unofficially, as long as you like; the prompts will stay up and the AO3 collection won't close.

#hidden paths #tolkien #tolkien fandom event #signal boost

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blackswaneuroparedux · 2 years

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Anonymous asked: I know you’re steeped in the Tolkien lore and as a college professor teaching English Lit at an Ivy League I respect that and your Oxbridge credentials, if not your problematic politics (of which I am very much to the left of). I suspect you and I will disagree but I didn’t think Amazon’s Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power series wasn’t the complete failure the hysterical fandom made it out to be. It was faithful to Tolkien who was, in his own way, woke.

Calling Rings of Power a 'failure' is like calling the Titanic a 'small boating accident'.

Jesus wept.

I keep hearing the word ‘problematic’ freely thrown around like confetti, primarily from the American cultural left and increasingly used in Britain too. This or that is ‘problematic’. It could be anything from a piece of art, or a character in a story, or a sincere belief held, or most commonly when judging the past, not on its own terms, but through the lens of the present. It’s essentially a passive aggressive term to show off a smug superiority that they, and only they, know better. It’s patronising too of course.

So let me point out why I find your thoughts - should I say ‘problematic’? - illuminating.

I respect your intelligence but isn’t a university education more than just having credentials?

In my corporate work place I manage and work alongside people with the shiniest elite education credentials imaginable. They are all highly motivated individuals representing the cream of the cream of their countries. Yet as smart and clever as they are, they - like me, but not you of course - are prone to doing pretty silly things because they over-think or their cleverness trips them up. Intelligence is not the same as wisdom. This is another way of saying that having university credentials is like having your head as empty as a eunuch’s underpants.

Please, let’s agree to disagree on the politics because I suspect you haven’t really understood what I believe - if you did you might understand on many things we are not that far apart, even though we may very well differ on the premise of a problem. Contrary to what you might presume not everything in life has to be refracted through the lens of your American politics and culture for those of us who live outside of America ie the rest of the world.

Tolkien woke? Oh come now, you’re just teasing. No one versed in Tolkien’s literary works or his life really believes that. You should know better. No, wait. You’re an English Lit prof at an ivy league. That explains everything.

Remember what Tolkien wrote in one of his letters, “Affixing ‘labels’ to writers, living or dead, is an inept procedure, in any circumstances: a childish amusement of small minds: and very ‘deadening’, since at best it over emphasises what is common to a selected group of writers, and distracts attention from what is individual (and not classifiable) in each of them, and is the element that gives them life (if they have any).” We should respect the writer’s own words rather than twist them to fit into any literary fad of the day.

Hallowe’en is almost upon us but JRR Tolkien has already been turning in his grave at the abomination of this continued leftist American cultural colonisation of our English cultural and literary heritage.

Perhaps at a later time I shall address how problematic mistaken you are ideas are. Right now I don’t have the energy as I’m neck high in work. I will get back to you (DM me if I am a little tardy on this).

But in the mean time, may I recommend an excellent tumblr blog @middle-earth-mythopoeia for an indepth discussion of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings lore - and even be open to real fan views on Rings of Power. It’s one of the best blogs I’ve come across on the lore of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. You should reach out to the fans there and have an honest exchange.

And more than that...

Odúlen gi nathad.**

I faer nîn *nínia *aden a-govedinc. Posto vae. Na lû e-govaded 'wîn.**

Thanks for your question.***

**Tolkien of course was inspired by Finnish to invent his Elvish language for LOTR. But Elvish is real. Yes, it’s real. They speak real Elvish in Elfdalian, Sweden. It’s originates from Old Norse. With the assistance of dedicated linguaphiles, the language has been kept alive for centuries in one of the most homogenous linguistic and cultural countries in the world. Elfdalian speaking communities have miraculously avoided assimilation into the wider Swedish culture, until recently, when mass media and migration have pushed the language to near extinction. Today, just under half the residents of Alvdalen - roughly 4000 people - speak Elfdalian, including a Norwegian cousin of mine married into that community.

***Because I’m British I suffer from the disease to apologise...for anything. But I apologise sincerely if my tone is a tad uncivil. It’s been a long week at work here in Dubai. I should edit my remarks but I’m just too tired, so instead may I appreciate your understanding.

#ask #question #lord of the rings #amazon #rings of power #tv series #television #arts #lore #tolkien #jrr tolkien #elvish #swedish #elvish is real

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the-far-bright-center · 2 years

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On Lucas' saga, Joseph Campbell, and mythopoesis

Mythopoeia (Ancient Greek: μυθοποιία, lit. 'myth-making')—or mythopoesis—is a narrative genre in modern literature and film where an artificial or fictionalised mythology is created by the writer of prose, poetry, or other literary forms. This definition follows the use of the word by J. R. R. Tolkien in the 1930s. The authors in this genre integrate traditional mythological themes and archetypes into fiction. Mythopoeia can also refer to the act of 'myth-creation' itself.

A compilation of quotes on Lucas' Star Wars and how it was directly influenced by Joseph Campbell's mythopoeic concepts. I'm sharing these here mostly for my own reference purposes, but also because I feel it's important for people to remember that the saga in its original form was intended to function as a modern myth. And as such, it was not meant to be 'realistic' in its outcome, but rather transcendent.

Quotes on Lucas' saga as a 'created myth':

"With his galactic fairytale, Lucas hoped to reinvent a classic genre. Among his influences, were the writings of scholar and educator Joseph Campbell, in which he explored the origins of myth and world religions."

— Robert Clotworthy, Empire of Dreams (2004)

"What Joseph Campbell was interested in, was to see the connections between myths, the myths of different cultures, to try to find out what were the threads that tied all these very disparate cultures together."

— Professor and Cultural Historian Leo Braudy, Empire of Dreams (2004)

"Lucas, too, was interested in [comparative mythology], in particular when creating Star Wars. Lucas actually asked Campbell to supervise his work on Star Wars, to be sure it fit with what he was trying to convey. Campbell, in turn, described Lucas as his best student. This is truly the crux of the matter. What Lucas was attempting to accomplish was the writing a modern myth, following conventional, thousand year old methods, all the while having it be relevant, fluid, cross-culturally and generationally meaningful."

— Star Wars: The Creation of a Modern Myth

"I did research to try to distill everything down into motifs that would be universal. I attribute most of the success of to the psychological underpinning, which had been around for thousands of years and the people still react the same way to the stories as they always have."

— George Lucas

"From the beginning, Star Wars was conceptualized not as a science fiction film, but as a mythical epic, consistent with those of poetic eddas, from Beowulf to the Iliad and the Odyssey. In Empire of Dreams, these are cited as influences, as well as the Legend of King Arthur, and other assorted Arthuriana, determining that they comprised the pool from which Star Wars drew it’s mythic archetypes."

— Star Wars: The Creation of a Modern Myth "...Lucas speaks of the cinematic storyline of Star Wars as an example of modern myth-making. In 1999 he told Bill Moyers, "With Star Wars I consciously set about to re-create myths and the classic mythological motifs." [Frank] McConnell writes that "it has passed, quicker than anyone could have imagined, from the status of film to that of legitimate and deeply embedded popular mythology."John Lyden, the Professor and Chair of the Religion Department at Dana College, argues that Star Wars does indeed reproduce religious and mythical themes; specifically, he argues that the work is apocalyptic in concept and scope."

— Mythopoeia (Wikipedia)

"[Lucas] drew from ancient mythology, medieval literature, Japanese cinema, and American westerns, creating a modern myth in the form of a sci-fi fairy tale."

— Anthony Parisi, 'Revisiting the Star Wars Prequels'

"The six films form one larger epic that is constructed like a piece of music....built on archetypal themes and psychological motifs that reverberate throughout the six episodes."

— Anthony Parisi, 'Revisiting the Star Wars Prequels'

"The saga has religious sensibilities that stand in marked contrast to the secular moods of science fiction. Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek followed an Enlightenment view of history where religion is left behind as humanity arrives at a benevolent utopia. Luke Skywalker’s journey is precisely the opposite, where the hero must reach back to recover the spiritual traditions of the past and save the galaxy."

— Anthony Parisi, 'Revisiting the Star Wars Prequels'

"...the moral drama at the heart of these six films has proven to be quite exceptional. The story is entirely centered around the fall and redemption of the human soul."

— Anthony Parisi, 'Revisiting the Star Wars Prequels'

"...Star Wars is not a futuristic world, it is a mythological one. Star Wars happened a long time ago, so it is more mythology than science fiction. Consequently, what we design doesn't have to make scientific sense, but it must spark some recognition of with a familiar mythological archetype."

— Iain McCaig, Myth Making: Behind the Scenes of Attack of the Clones

Joseph Campbell quotes on 'myth' (applicable to Lucas' saga):

"Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another. The function of the artist is the mythologization of the environment and the world."

— Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

"One thing that comes out of myths is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light."

— Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

"Perhaps some of us have to go through dark and devious ways before we can find the river of peace or the highroad to the soul's destination."

— Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces

"Death closes in; there is nothing we can do, except be crucified—and resurrected; dismembered totally, and then reborn."

— Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces

"The usual hero adventure begins with someone from whom something has been taken, or who feels there is something lacking in the normal experience available or permitted to the members of society. The person then takes off on a series of adventures beyond the ordinary, either to recover what has been lost or to discover some life-giving elixir. It's usually a cycle, a coming and a returning."

― Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

"The hero…for a moment rises to a glimpse of the source. He beholds the face of the father, understands—and the two are atoned…. For the son who has grown really to know the father, the agonies of the ordeal are readily borne; the world is no longer a vale of tears but a bliss-yielding, perpetual manifestation of the Presence."

—Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

"Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; and where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world."

— Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

"Sober, modern…judgement is founded on a total misunderstanding of the realities depicted in the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedies of redemption. These, in the ancient world, were regarded as of a higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete. The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man."

— Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

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jellicoelodge · 3 years

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Jellicoe Lodge: Return of the King (Professor Tolkien)

After a very fun ride out into the wild west of Mars last week with Harry Harrison’s classic pulp sci fi Story “The Arm Of the Law,” this week we return to our final Tolkien submission in the inbox: the long poem “Mythopoeia,” suggested by @as-dreamers-do and available online here: http://www.tolkien.ro/text/JRR%20Tolkien%20-%20Mythopoeia.pdf

In conjunction with this poem, the Lodge may wish to review a previous work submitted to the Lodge and recommended by @called-kept: Tolkien’s Essay “On Fairy Stories,” which may be read online here: https://archive.org/details/on-fairy-stories . It may be interesting to see how these two works inform each other as well as illuminate Tolkien’s theory of Story. We hope for some lively discussions and plenty of fun and lightbulb moments for all!

As always, the tag remains “#jellicoe-lodge” for thoughts, questions, musings and memes, and the inbox remains open for further reading suggestions! (A special thank you to everyone who helped replenish it a bit over the last few weeks!)

May we now begin to enjoy this good literature in good company, as Professor Tolkien intended.

#jellicoe-lodge

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zafaria · 4 years

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Mythopoeia

She told them her school.

They had said “That’s fine, we guess, but be careful what you do there.”

They had said “We really trusted you would be a thaumaturge. We’d have even been okay if you were a pyromancer, like your uncle; or maybe a diviner... you have creative energy.”

They had said “Is it too late to change?”

Was it too late to change?

Was there an expiry date on learning? No, maybe not. She’d stick with it though, the test was adamant to her, it almost seemed to threaten what would happen (or, worse, what wouldn’t) if she didn’t submit to being a conjurer.

A tricky thing.

It was all fine and well those first few years at the school. Kind of boring, actually. Cyrus was a very mean professor, and she was a meek and restless child. So, maybe her disposition wasn’t great for Myth. She was flighty and subdued, not grand, not like a legend. She did daydream a lot, in a lost, wistful way, but the haze of it all made her think maybe she would’ve been better off curled behind the desk in the back of the Storm classroom. At least, maybe, Balestrom wouldn’t yell at her for it. Maybe he wouldn’t even say anything.

She did like her preliminary classes in the Fire school. She liked the flame and the heat, but she was absolutely miserable at casting, at focusing her attention and getting things to stay and materialize with enough magnitude to be meaningful. She’d have switched over to Fire, but she dreaded the idea of starting all the way from the bottom of the ladder, years and years and years behind, trying to overcome what appeared to be just an innate lack of a knack for it.

So, in the Myth class, she found her spot. Not quite at the bottom of the ladder, but low enough on it. Good enough in ability to pass, bad enough in her behavior to warrant lots of public ridicule in front of her classmates. Cyrus seemed to think that by calling on students, bad students, in front of everyone, he had embarrassed them or taught them a lesson or something, but the reality was that none of the other students really cared. There was no bullying or rumors or harassment for being called on, just a glance of well-meaning but undesirable pity after class. They all got it. They had all been the kids sitting disengaged at the back of the classroom once.

Her parents would write her once every week or so.

“How are you doing?” “Fine.” Occasionally, she’d add in one episode of her trip to the Shopping District and what she bought.

“What are you learning now?” “I’ve been stuck in the Library for three days writing essays.”

“Have you made any friends yet?” “I have a lot of friends, but they are all in different schools so I don’t get to see them during the school days because our schedules are different.” Signed. Stuffed in an envelope. Wax dripped over the fold. Stamped. Sent.

Her signature took on a different look every time. The top loop of the “J” got larger and wider, more grand, the little loop at the bottom got finer, more dagger-thin. In a few days, the return letter would arrive.

“Be smart with your money. Do you have a part-time job where you’re earning?” and,

“Work hard.” and,

“Do you think you would like to switch schools so you can be with your friends?”.

She would sit on the letter and let it expire, waiting instead for her parents to send another one that reverted back to the usual questions.

And it went on, for a couple of years. And then, it changed. And then there was the noise, the loud rumbling from all around the City during one of the afternoons she had detention.

She wanted things to change so badly, and everyone was distracted, and she was just finally fed up with wasting her afternoons continuing to be forcefully immersed in a subject she couldn’t bring herself to care for. She ran down Unicorn Way towards the sound to see what was amuck; when the guards asked her to show her badge, like a pass, to show she wasn’t a novice and would be safe, dutiful, thoughtful, she palmed her sister’s old adept’s badge from her pocket. The guards looked at it quickly and waved her along, not noticing the mismatch of the Ice symbol on the badge and the yellows and blues of her robes.

So it spiralled from there. The dead were undead, and then they were dead again. Had she really done that? With Myth magic?

The cards and spells were so different in battle than the practice duels that Cyrus would take them to in the Arena and the few seconds of spellcasting she and her classmates would do in the classroom before Cyrus entered in the morning and told them all to hurry to their seats, sit straight, and prepare for lecture. They rarely got to attempt magic, and then they'd have practicals where their nerves got to them and the spells came out wonky.

But there, in the streets she had once only been able to try and stare down, it was all so real, so vibrant. The magic pulsated through her, like a second heartbeat.

She had that same kind of enamor with it all the way through the worlds. In Krokotopia, her magic never made her feel bad. In fact, it was the fire that made her feel bad; when she burned the Ahnic mummies. That left her feeling like her hands were always covered in soot, grimy, guilty. The soot stains on her soul never faded.

Then in Marleybone, there was just a hint of a shudder running around her bones, a shiver within the marrow, when she beheld the faces--or lack thereof--of the agony wraiths in Big Ben. Where had they come from? Did they miss those places, those tombs or graves or mausoleums? Were they even of Marleybone, or were they far from the grounds of their homes?

She didn’t try to think much of it when she went for the duel. She was too busy thinking of giants dislodging the bones with a club, long hollow femurs clattering to the wooden floor; an earthquake following and swallowing up the center of the clocktower. When she left, her lungs felt blackened from spending too long in the city breathing in the smog.

In Mooshu, it sank in the most. She would summon earthquakes in spirit realms and feel the little chunk of earth she was on rattle, the chasm opening up from nowhere. The friction between the worlds and shifting dirt underneath would normally propel the earthquakes, but in those disconnected little places, where the grounds were thin and hammered out flat like saucer-plates, she wondered where they stemmed from. The chasm and the shadows within it seemed to plunge deeper than the earth actually was.

The onis that stared into her seemed to be looking deeper than they actually were. Her mind sweltered. The whole of the place was confusing and demented. And she thought that maybe it rubbed off on her too. Everything felt out of reach.

Her parents wrote a letter.

“How are you?” “I am tired. I have been travelling a lot. I am doing an externship as a part of my schoolwork, for Headmaster Ambrose. It is very busy.”

“What are you studying?” “High-level Myth magic. I have learned some new spells, but they required that I go collect some things from different worlds, that’s why I’ve been visiting so many places.” She’d include one of her sketches she did of the yellow windows of Marleybone or the endless fields of Mooshu in the envelope. Her parents would’ve liked her to travel, as long as they knew it was purposeful and being done in structured way, a safe way.

“How are your friends?” She didn’t address the question, and instead sent her parents a pressed flower. Sealed. Stamped. Sent.

Then, before Dragonspyre, Cyrus pulled her aside after class. He said “Malistaire is my brother,” like she wouldn’t have maybe guessed from appearances. And then that he wanted to duel her, to see if she was competent enough to handle the war-ravaged world alone.

She desperately wanted to prove she had attained something, she had learned, she was good at this. She desperately wanted to come close in the duel, to be on the precipice of winning, but just barely lose, and to sob, put her head down, beg for help. She wanted to prove she could, and also that she couldn’t do it alone.

But the flow of battle, the rhythm of that second heartbeat in her dictated in a way all its own. It was powerful in that duel in a way it never had been. It was totally engulfing, pounding in her ears and vibrating against the veins in her wrists, and she won and she had to. If she didn’t, maybe her skin would crawl and split from the overbeat of the magic that was left unfulfilled.

Oh, and that feeling rose up once more when she faced Malistaire, when she could smell a metallic and humble aura of death and lava all across the top of the volcano in Dragonspyre. The same feeling, rushing over her, her hands floating in the air like she was only watching the spectacle and not acting in it, like her hands weren’t even hers. She was acutely aware of all she was doing, how fast her mind was moving, though. Her actions were all her own. At least, she thought, these few things I own wholly, no matter what, and they were not left to fate, nor the headmaster or the Book of Secrets, or ancient warring tribes, or an old tree’s prophecy, or her professor or her parents.

She wondered if she became overzealous at the thought. If it made her too fierce. Cyrus sat back somewhere, afraid to intervene, maybe knowing he couldn’t. Maybe he didn’t want to have his brother meet an unfortunate end at his hands, so he made his student do it for him.

Or maybe she wanted to show Cyrus her unflinching worth, and that training and practicing across the worlds and in the streets taught her something he never could, that he never thought would emerge in her: a dauntless courage to face cruelty, sometimes with cruelty in turn.

But, deep down, both knew that the most important factor of why Malistaire died, why he lost the duel and didn’t manage to stand to his feet again after, was because he was an incredibly ambitious man with a gravely weakened soul. His magic truly had split out of his skin, creating the aura that permeated around them, and infusing with the rituals to raise the Dragon Titan. And the human, non-magic parts of his soul were broken all across too. His wife was gone, truly gone. And his brother couldn’t face him, and he was beating on…a child. A hopeful, brave child who had the whole world in their eyes. And he just had nothing left in him at all.

Returning home after that was difficult for her. She walked out of the volcano and into a portal, with Cyrus’s hand pressed against her shoulder. He was guiding her toward the foggy vision of the Headmaster’s office, urging her forward but also holding her down to the ground. Under his palm, she wasn’t going to float away in a confused mire, and she also knew she couldn’t slink from under his palm into a ball on the ground and cry. She could only move forward. She knew he was telling her she had done well, she had done the right thing.

How was she going to explain to her parents that this is what her “externship” was about? That she wasn’t being a student, not at all; she was being a hero. And though a hero seemed much grander and fancier, it was very, very different from what she had prepared for. It was thoroughly taxing in the most unpredictable, inexplicable, extraordinary ways. There was no training for how to be a hero.

And after she was emotionally spent and wasted away in her room for a few days, she packed her things and went home.

“Sabbatical, dear.” That’s what Greyrose said to her. “When you’re old and wizened like me, you take one every so often to remember to slow down.”

“You need one,” said Balestrom. “Very badly, you do need one. You look tired.” She was tired, and confused, and no longer hungry when all her life she had loved food, and she felt dirty and greasy.

She turned in a letter to Cyrus, who just stared down his nose at her, then nodded. His mouth stayed pressed shut through the entire process. She almost cried. She could feel her teeth pressing into each other, and they were so tightened in her jaw they felt soft, like little marshmellows. She thought she could maybe tell that Cyrus’s jaw was also more levelled out, more squared, like he was also clenching his teeth.

She walked out very quickly.

She walked into her home very quickly. Her parents hugged her, her father gave her a kind of firm pat on the back that made her shake a little. Like he was welcoming someone he didn’t particularly like into his home. Maybe she overthought, but her mother’s laughter was all wrong too. It used to fill the room, like a joyous thing, but now it filled the room in a suffocating way.

“We laugh to show our teeth, to show they’re still there,” she remembered from the readings for one of her essays, where she spent her time in the library for a day.

They sat together at the dinner table, a plate of mashed potatoes with a loaf of bread and turkey casserole before each one of them. She picked at some of the things, then had her elbows on the table as she tore the bread into tiny pieces and began to chew them slowly, one-by-one, like a mouse.

“Are you okay, honey?” they asked. “Do you want to talk with us about something?”

“No, it’s fine.”

“Oh. Okay. How are classes, by the way? Have you been doing well?”

“Yes. I actually, uh, I did some directed independent studies with Cyrus.”

“OH! Advancing so fast, are we? Are you the teacher’s pet, and that’s why you get to do higher-level work?”

“Uhm, kind of. I also just needed to do something different. For my learning. Sitting in the classroom all day wasn’t really working for me.”

“Oh, like a practical? You’ve been safe, haven’t you? Are you missing any classes?”

“No, I’m actually on a short break right now,” she said. The questions were sweltering.

“Listen, we received some post from Headmaster Ambrose, that you’d maybe have something you want to share with us? Maybe about the kinds of schoolwork you’ve been doing? That you’d have something to tell us?” The curtain was up. She stared blankly, with her mouth open, blinking a little.

“Well, yeah, I... uh, Ambrose had a special assignment for me, I guess. There was...Listen, it sounds mad, but you must’ve felt it, the disruptions, and all of the ash and stuff. Anyways, there was an unhinged necromancer trying to destroy the Spiral? So, Ambrose had me and a few other strong students help him out with getting rid of undead monsters on the streets.” Calling Malistaire “unhinged” felt wrong, like a spike was being driven across her mouth, through her cheeks. She added the bit about there being friends, thinking that maybe if other students had been a part of the picture, her parents would find it less dangerous.

“So he had students acting like dogs for him,” they said, sitting back in their chairs. Her mother crossed her arms. She could barely look to them, unable to balance one disapproving face and the other. “And Cyrus approved of this all and had this count as your study versus the schoolwork you should’ve been doing on-campus?”

“It wasn’t as bad as it seems.”

“You’ve went all over the Spiral, you could’ve been killed. And we are aware about the changes recently, from that necromancer. And we’re also aware that he was a Professor at Ravenwood once, a Professor Drake. Cyrus is a Drake too, yes?”

They sounded like they were accusing her, but she wasn’t sure of what. It wasn’t like it was up to her that Cyrus and Malistaire were brothers.

“So your professor had you meddling in his family affairs. Ambrose and Professor Drake had you engaging in some blood feud with Drake’s old family. That isn’t appropriate for a student,” her mother said, like she was going to try and create a case against the school and Ambrose. “You know, we didn’t like the idea of you being a conjurer,” she continued.

They all got into a yelling match over the schools, whether she was a disappointment, if she was cut out to continue on there. They blamed conjurery, endlessly. Always. Always, it was the fault of the Myth school and Myth magic.

Out of one of their mouths came “you killed someone,” or perhaps it was “I killed someone,” from her own mouth, owning it. Whoever said it, it greatly upset everyone at the table. Her parents talked to her, level again, and said “you can’t go back.” They would consider getting her an apprenticeship in something like bookkeeping or art.

“You could’ve listened to us. This wouldn’t have all happened if you had just studied under Professor Greyrose, like Katarin.”

Sitting at the table, she now could look her father in the eyes as he said those words. She was frowning, and crying furiously, a silent crying, and untempered one that showed no weakness, but instead infinite and defiant strength.

She had learned some things in Cyrus’s classes. Not magic, nor imagination. She had been ridiculed in front of her peers, she had known that her professor saw her as low and untrying. She learned an unending patience, and the grace to know when the fight was over.

“That’s fine,” she barely murmured. “That’s fine.” A tear dripped off her chin with the movement of her jaw as she spoke. She grabbed her plate off the table with both hands and walked it over to the sink, scraping the contents off in one motion, then walking to her old room.

She spent the night there, passed out after dinner with the door locked in a stupor that reminded her of what her past few years should’ve been like. And then, in the morning, she packed everything she cared for from that room, swiping things off the dressers and desk and putting them into every corner of her backpack until it was nearly splitting its seams and lumpy all around.

And then she left, waving goodbye to the silent dark house behind her as she opened the door. She knew that her parents were people so different from her and that, despite their words, they had sent letters every week, cared about whether she was lonely or not, invited her back home often though she didn’t visit every time she possibly could’ve. They didn’t understand. They might never have understood. And because they didn’t understand, they seemed to want to wash their hands of her, their restless, second, failed child. At least for the immediate future.

So she would let them. They acted like she might be a student of some promise, like her studies and advancements were making them proud. They let her throw out their follow-up letters and pretended like they never existed. She would let them pretend like she didn’t either.

But she understood. She would find them later, if they wanted to be found by her. They didn’t think she was doing things that a mere student should have been resigned to. She was a conjurer, roped into an unfortunate, yes, feud. And she had done one thing that was horrible, and many things that were wrong, and she would never rid herself of those things. She resolved to do the only thing that she could’ve done, and pressed onwards as a hero.

#w #j

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mebediel · 5 years

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Tagged by @toooldforthisbutstill!

when did you last sing to yourself?

Yesterday, I think.

if a crystal ball could tell you the truth about anything, what would you want to know?

Who wrote the Voynich Manuscript and what does it say?

what is the greatest accomplishment of your life?

Oh, that’s hard to answer. So far, my greatest accomplishment has been graduating university without imploding, but hopefully I’ll surpass that accomplishment soon!

what is the first happy memory that comes to mind, recent or otherwise?

Rather recent one: getting accepted into grad school :3

if you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living?

I’d probably quit my job, decline my grad school offer, and move back in with my parents/travel around the world saying goodbye to people and places.

do you have a bucket list? if so, what are the top three things?

I don’t, but here are three things I’m making up on the spot:

1. Learn Shanghainese,

2. Get published in the academic world,

3. Get published in the fiction world.

describe a person close to your life in detail

My sister:

Short-medium height; long, long brown hair; brown eyes; heart-shaped face.

Analytical, artistic, broad-interests, sometimes awkward and self-conscious, often opinionated and argumentative.

do you feel you had a happy childhood?

Overall, yes. There were definitely a lot of rough spots, and I regret the ways I acted back then, but I wouldn’t trade any of the bad experiences for the world because they’re part of what made me grow into who I am now.

when did you last cry in front of another person?

Literally today on the train in front of a bunch of strangers lol.

pick a person to stargaze with you and explain why you picked them

The friend occasionally nicknamed Egg (he is not on this site) because (1) he knows astronomy and I like stealing knowledge from people and (2) we used to do that in college sometimes and it would bring back good memories.

would you ever have a deep conversation with a stranger and open up to them?

Yes, and I’ve done this before.

when was your last 3am conversation with someone, and who were they to you?

I think in December, and they’re a college friend in a different city.

if you were about to die, and you could only say one more sentence to one person, what would you say and to whom?

"Thanks, Mom, love you.”

what is your opinion on brown eyes?

They’re great, they’re pretty, and I need them to see.

pick a quote and describe what it means to you personally

“All wishes are not idle, not in vain

fulfilment we devise - for pain is pain,

not for itself to be desired, but ill;

or else to strive or to subdue the will

alike were graceless; and of Evil this

alone is dreadly certain: Evil is.”

- JRR Tolkien, Mythopoeia

The poem as a whole is important to me, but this passage in particular I think encapsulates the idea that (sub)creation is an act of hope and defiance in a dark and painful world.

what would you title the autobiography of your life so far?

Not Lost, I Promise

what would you do with one billion dollars?

Pay for education (mine and others), build homes (mine and others)...I don’t really have a conception of how much a billion dollars can pay for, so I guess the rest can go to various charities.

are you a very forgiving person? do you like being this way?

I would like to say that I am, but I don’t think that’s my judgment to make. How forgiving is “very forgiving”?

would you describe yourself as more punk or pastel?

Punk

how do you feel about tattoos and piercings? explain

Cool on other people, but the idea of altering my body wigs me out.

do you wear a lot of makeup? why/why not?

No, I don’t wear any makeup. I never thought that I needed it, and now I’m not patient enough to learn + I break out when I do + it would take too long in the morning + I save money by not wearing it.

talk about a song/band/lyric that has affected your life in some way

CORNY BUT Switchfoot’s “Live It Well” from their album “Where the Light Shines Through” made me cry my third year of college. It helped me change my attitude toward a lot of things that were going on that year, which in turn helped me be more understanding and act more respectfully toward the people around me.

list the concerts you have been to and talk about how they make you feel

Erm, I haven’t been to a lot of concerts honestly. I went to a TobyMac concert once and a Switchfoot/Relient K concert. I tried to go to a Mitski concert with my roommate but we got the date wrong so we’re trying again in a couple months. I like them! I don’t think I could go to a concert alone, though.

who in the world would you most like to receive a letter from and what would you want it to say?

A specific medieval professor (Geraldine Heng). “You are smart and not dumb :)”

do you have a desk/workspace and how is it organised/not organised?

I have one of those corner desks from IKEA. It’s not super organized...there are books on the shelves/all along the top, and the rest of it is covered in papers and stationary and random stuff. Part of the problem is that I need more drawers/organizational furniture, but I don’t want to buy anything until after I move to a new place.

what is your night time routine?

Collapse onto bed, go through tumblr/emails, pet cat, force myself to get up and brush my teeth/shower, crawl back into bed.

what’s one thing you don’t want your parents to know?

All of my political views. They already know some of them and the result hasn’t been the awesomest.

if you had to dye your hair how would you dye/style it and why?

Hmm maybe some ombre of purple or red. I think it’s pretty. I can’t dye my hair easily because it’s so dark, but I don’t want to bleach it.

pick five people to go on an excursion with you. who would you pick and where would you go/what would you do?

My sister, my three childhood friends, and one of my college friends...lets call him Potato. We’re all pretty different, but the combination of the five of us would mean that there’s enough overlap in interests that no one would have to do any activities on their own. And I’d pick Japan because (1) one of the childhood friends is currently living there, and (2) it would be cool to take a couple weeks to explore the different aspects of historical and modern culture there.

name three wishes and why you wish for them

1. That I were better at abstract analysis. So that I could analyze better,

2. That I could memorize things better. Faster language acquisition + know more facts/poetry,

3. That I had more time in the day. Get more things done.

what is the best halloween costume you have ever put together? if none, make one up

I made this really janky Glunkus costume once and it worked out pretty well. It was a joke on the “sexy cat lady” costume...you see a girl in pleather and cat ears and then she turns around and her face is just a void with teeth.

what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done while drunk or high?

I’ve never been drunk or high, but the number of dumb things I’ve done while sober is still pretty considerable.

if you’re a boy, would you ever rock black nail polish? if you’re a girl, would you ever rock really really short hair?

Sure, why not.

what’s your starbucks order, and who would you trust to order for you, if anyone?

My Starbucks order is literally just a tall chocolate milk or a tall Chai, depending on my mood. I’d trust anyone with that order...it’s pretty hard to mess up.

what is the most important thing to you in your life right now?

Learn all the things and learn them well.

Tagging:

@paranormal-paralegal, @ashinypenguin, @molybendium, @pekasairroc, @mnmdash...anyone else who wants to do this?

#meb's stuff

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foxhenki-blog · 7 years

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Cthulhu and Medusa Go To The Prom - Part One

Front Matter

Oh boy, I’m sorry, it’s been too long since my last post. Really, the last post was the beginning of last week and now it is the end of, um, this week, but it seems long. I guess that means it has become a habit, eh?

I’ve been on vacation from my Normal secret identity since last Thursday. I haven’t done anything spectacular like traveled to Machu Pichu or conducted a midnight sabbath in a long forgotten stone circle in the peat bogs of Ireland. Nope, I stayed home. My four year old started 4K (which went swimmingly, thanks for the inquiry), and I paid attention to my family and myself. It was needed.

If you read the Gnome School blog then you’ll know that a few weeks back I hit a magical nadir that coincided with the ‘Great American Eclipse’. So, while most of my witchy internet cohort was busy charging devices with eclipse energy and singing orphic hymns to Luna, I was hiding. I hid in books so that I could remain magically adjacent while my cohort practiced.

Last night and this morning, I felt Luna’s call again. Actually, I’ve been feeling it for a few days, calling me back to prayer, back to practice. I’ll begin again tomorrow morning.

While I was busying myself with magically adjacent and, well, non-magical activities like cleaning my garage (how would one make that a magical experience, I ask you? Did Alexandrian magicians have to clean their houses? Probably not…) I updated the site a bit. Just a few tweaks to the design, added a front page and a shop featuring some occult fashions from Ghostly Harmless, and I innovated a slightly new format for the blog.

Instead of one long James Joycean diatribe, the blog will be broken up into at least three sections now. The section you are reading now is called ‘Front Matter’ and will contain some the more connected, grounded material Gnome School offers. You know, life stuff, so that I appear as human as possible. The second section I am calling ‘Imbrications’. An imbrication is a layering of material, most commonly described as how fish scales lay on top of one another. The intention of this second section is to offer found things, people, ideas that layer in some way on top of the Gnome School vision and our magical performative aesthetic. The third section will by the post itself where we dig into theory, practice, and analysis of twenty-first century magic.

Imbrications

The first imbrication I’d like to offer is the work of the band ‘Fungoid Stream’. They are listed as a ‘Funeral Doom’ group (I mean, the deep rabbit hole of metal and experi-metal music taxonomies. If only I could base my librarian career on untangling that Gordian knot.) hailing from Argentina. I really dig their slow grind and think it fits the pace at which one contacts the world of spirits and demons in the beginning of one’s practice, that is slow, plodding, with brief moments of exhilaration and danger.

Check them out...

The Bridge Between the Mundane and the Magical

The title of the series I’m beginning to this week is a reference to a short quote I found in Donna J. Haraway’s ‘Staying with the Trouble’. It is brief and potent:

"Cthulhu and Medusa ('the only mortal Gorgon') are similar shapes…"

It is difficult to take things out of context from Haraway, because it is hard to nail down exactly what her context is to begin with, which is what makes her theory beautiful, if you ask me. To me, this quote helps connect the larger-than-death spirit entity, the High Priest Cthulhu in his dreaming under-ocean city (an ocean that has repeatedly crawled far inland numerous times in the past few weeks) with the human. Medusa, a terrifying and powerful magical being, is the bridge. She bridges the gap between us and the undying and madness-inducing spirit world through her connection to death. The next four weeks I will explore this dance, Cthulhu and Medusa, slow-dancing on an empty dance floor encircled by black cloaked acolytes that are too afraid to look, their hoods pulled low over their eyes, their ears interpreting the shuffling of tentacles and snake coils the best they are able. Haraway has a word for these adepts, she calls them ‘Guman’s’. Again from ‘Staying with the Trouble’:

"Guman are full of indeterminate genders… full of significant others… human is adama/Adam, composted from all available genders and genres… [their world] has kin-making… and SF writer's practices of wordling…"

This dance unfolding in front of us, yes, if you are tuned into Gnome School you are defiantly part of this group listening for voices in the tentacular shuffle on the gym floor in front of you, this dance represents our kin-making with the animal and spirit realms and our connection to those spheres through the very guman act of worldling, of mythopoeia, of journeying through the vehicle of fiction. What are those murmuring pseudo-spirit voices, the product of Cthulhu and Medusa’s awkward fumbling dance saying (Keep those tentacles above the waist, Cthulhu)? As I stand in this stone-petrified crowd of initiates they intimate they existence of edges between the human and the animal. Again from Haraway:

"In human-animal worlds, companion species are ordinary beings-in-encounter in the house, lab, field, zoo, park, truck, office, prison, ranch, arena, village, human hospital, forest, slaughterhouse, estuary, vet clinic, lake, stadium, barn, wildlife preserve, farm, ocean canyon, city streets, factory, and more…"

What Haraway is talking about here is niche-construction. I’ve written about niche construction here and here, but I’ll recap a bit for the purposes of this post.

I came across the idea of niche construction during my undergraduate education. I was capital B I G big into linguistics and in particular American Indian languages at the time (still am, I’m working my way back there, stay tuned). In the book ‘Adam’s Tongue’ by Derek Bickerton. Bickerton takes the evolutionary theory of ecological niche construction off-book and applies it to his argument on how language must have evolved. It is a materialist view, obviously, but I found a lot of useful ideas in Adam’s Tongue, so much so that I sought out his source text, ‘Niche Construction; The Neglected Process In Evolution’ and proceeded to take it even further off-book and see if the theories therein could be used to explain, not the existence of the spirit world, but rather the existence of contact and congress between the human and spirit worlds. Let’s augment my last quote from Haraway a bit to fit this experiment:

"In human-[spirit] worlds, companion [spirits] are [extra-ordinary] beings-in-encounter in the house, lab, field, zoo, park, truck, office, prison, ranch, arena, village, human hospital, forest, slaughterhouse, estuary, vet clinic, lake, stadium, barn, wildlife preserve, farm, ocean canyon, city streets, factory, and more…"

There, that’s better.

Now, let’s connect this improved statement with a quote from “Niche Construction” by Olding-Smee, Laland, and Feldman:

"A focus on niche construction has important implications for the relationship between genetic evolution and cultural processes. One implication is that niche-constructing organisms [in our context that is Haraway's gumans] can no longer be treated as merely 'vehicles' for their genes because they also modify selection pressures in their own and in other [entity's] environments, an in the process they can introduce feedback… [Gumans] can and do modify their environments mainly through cultural processes…"

For our purposes, the most significant cultural process is, of course, magic. Moving a little further down this wormhole:

"The assumption that human cultural inheritance can directly bias human genetic inheritance may also be reasonable even when the source of the natural selection pressure that is modified by cultural activities is no longer human, provided the relationship between whatever cultural information is being expressed and whatever natural selection pressure it is modifying is sufficiently direct."

There is no more direct and impactful cultural information available to us than spirit contact.

The Loneliness of the Long-Winded Writer

If one were to brave the basilisk gaze of Medusa in her fuschia and teal prom dress, or Cthulhu’s madness-inducing a-bit-too-tight-around-the-middle rented tuxedo and look up towards the gymnasium’s stage, there you would see an even more perplexing sight. Instead of a king and queen, this particular dark prom has four kings standing there, unafraid of the two dancing in the greenish-hued spotlight and acrid mist of stage smoke. The presence of four kings *means what it implies* but we will table that sub current for now and concentrate on the manifestation of these four kings at our ‘Enchantment Under The Sea’ dance.

Since I was off all week, I decided to tackle an analysis of one of Lovecraft’s longer tales, ‘The Whisperer in the Dark’. The four kings on our stage are the four archetypes from that tale that map back to the four kings of the tarot. On stage there is a stoic professor replete with corduroy jacket and arm patches, a grizzled but highly intelligent farmer from high in the near-impassable hills of Vermont, a refined and probably bespectacled trench-coat wearing turn-of-the-century Boston elite, and a steam-punk apparatus of gleaming cylinders, vacuum tubes, primitive electronics, speakers, lenses and dials. Our kings are Professor Albert Wilmarth, Henry Wentworth Akeley, the shadowy Mr. Noyes, and the mysterious B-67.

The Whisperer in Darkness begins in November with the Vermont Flood of 1927. With the current score of man vs nature being a solid 0 to 3 this year, two of those points coming from massive flooding, wind damage, and real human suffering as a result of Hurricane’s Harvey and Irma, I thought it was right off the block the most relevant Lovecraft tale for us to deconstruct.

One of the things that I love the most about Lovecraft is is precision with dates and places and that the majority of these nodes can be visualized in great detail. For reference to the scene he paints in the beginning of Whisperer, we can for example turn to the Vermont Historical Society’s entry on ‘The Flood of ’27’ or amazingly enough, the below YouTube video

in order to see for ourselves the environment where

“huge, light-red [crabs] with many pairs of legs and two great bat-like wings…”

were witnessed by townsfolk floating like bloated corpses in the floodwaters.

Our first of the four kings, and the first to be introduced in ‘Whisperer’ is Dr. Albert Wilmarth, a professor of literature at Miskatonic University. I’ve read that Lovecraft wanted to go on to university but lacked the funds in order to do so. This instance of Albert Wilmarth, among the other archetypal doppleganger’s of Lovecraft himself, I think embodies his regret and angst at never having achieved this goal. I personally emphasize with him in this regard as I felt that way for a very long time before life presented the door that allowed me access to a college education, for what that’s worth.

Wilmarth, within the context of his fictional world and in relation to the other three kings on the stage, maps to the King of Cups, which in turn resides within the sphere of alchemy as a magical path. The keyword for the King of Cups on the reverse of the Etallia deck is ‘Homme en Place’, or Man in Place. Throughout the majority of ‘Whisperer’, Wilmarth remains in place, interacting with the primary action in the story only through letters. The word ‘place’, can be traced etymologically back to the 12 century, in which it meant ‘space’, or ‘dimensional extent’. We will find out later that this aligns with the professor quite well towards the end of the tale.

Benebell Wen’s Holistic Tarot assigns the keyword of ‘Distraction’ to the King of Cups. A word from the mid 15th century that means ‘the drawing away of the mind’. An action that progresses steadily for Albert throughout the tale. Wen also defines the King of Cups as a professional strong in the arts and letters (as a literature professor at Miskatonic University should be) but one often overwhelmed by loneliness. This loneliness manifests in ‘Whisperer’ (and also in Lovecraft’s life) through voluminous letter writing. The prime mover of the plot in the early sections of ‘Whisperer’ describe what is essentially a early twentieth-century Twitter fight with Mr. Wilmarth alleviating his internal solitude through regular arguments in a rural Vermont newspaper about those, as described in the tale:

“pinking things about five feet long; with crustaceous bodies bearing vast pairs of dorsal fins or membraneous wings and several sets of articulated limbs, and with [an] ellipsoid, covered with… very short antennae, where a head would ordinarily be…”

with the concerned citizens of that area and in particular, our second king whom we will investigate in part two of this series, Henry Wentworth Akeley.

#Cthulhu #Lovecraft #niche construction

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