Drawing From the Model

When Edith Wharton speaks of Ellen Olenska's unorthodox education in her novel "The Age of Innocence" she speaks of 'drawing from the model' as a thing 'never dreamed of before,' an element of Ellen's education that most of New York society can never condone. If we may take "drawing from the model' to mean that Ellen, like many aspiring artists, learned anatomy and muscleture from sketching both men and women in the nude, it's no small wonder the rest of 19th century New York found it so appalling.

Writers of fanfiction also draw from the model -- we take our source text and strip it bare to see how muscles move and bones work underneath the skin. We then take those basic anatomical ideas back to our own canvases and do something new with them.

For the next chapter of A Rose in the Briars, however, I'm finding that drawing from the model has become rather difficult. The scene is a simple one -- two characters are getting married. I need a marriage formula. Tolkien gives me little to go on here -- of the two marriages mentioned in his text, the first (Aragorn and Arwen's) is unspecific and the second (Sam and Rosie's) is unapplicable.

Having nothing in my original model, I turned to my friends at the Gwethil for some suggestions as to who I might get to officiate this important scene. Simon suggested no officiant, in the Pre- Council of Trent Christian tradition, and Robyn suggested having a justice or magistrate. Having no sourcebooks on early Catholic pontifical councils lying around my house, I took the opportunity to ask my grandparents, who know a great deal more about Catholic theology than I do. They, too, were stumped, but suggested instead the Jewish tradition instead.

It is much easier to find documents about the customs surrounding a Jewish wedding than it is to find those pertaining to marriage customs in 14th century Christian Europe. One of those elements common to both types of marriage is a marriage contract, in the Jewish tradition called a ketubah. It lists the date, who is marrying whom, what each party is bringing to the marriage in terms of material goods and what each party should expect of the other. I used a form similiar to the one found here.

Simple, right? A large part of my ceremony will now be the two parties reading and signing the contract to make it valid and sharing a cup of wine, found in both the Jewish and Anglo-Saxon traditions. Except, of course, that marriage contracts involve giving dowries and those usually involve currency, something ELSE Tolkien didn't include much of in Lord of the Rings. After searching "middle earth currency' and coming up with ONE quote on Gondorian currency from Tolkien's History of Middle Earth Volume 7 --

"Similarly farthing has been used for the four divisions of the Shire, because the Hobbit word tharni was an old word for 'quarter' seldom used in ordinary language, where the word for 'quarter' was tharantin 'fourth part'. In Gondor tharni was used for a silver coin, the fourth part of the castar (in Noldorin the canath or fourth part of the mirian). "

Ah, helpful. Currency conversions to more currencies I still don't know about, because Tolkien never discussed the buying power of the castar, only silver pennies. So I arbitrarily decided a Gondoran castar is equal to the late medieval ducat, and using some average dowry figures from the same period converted the whole mess to some numbers I could use.

If Eleanor of Montfort's dowry was 200 pounds a year in 1230, and she's about the same rank as Serawen, what would the same dowry be in Gondorian castari?

Well, Alex, one ducat is equal to 9 shillings 4 pence (according to Sir Robert Palgrave's The History of Politcal Economy, found on GoogleBooks) or 85 pence, and there are 240 pence in one pound (there being ten pence in a shilling and 12 shillings in a pound). If we multiply the number of pence in a pound by the number of pounds and then divide that by the number of pence in a ducat, we should come out with the number of ducats and therefore the number of castari needed to give Serawen a nice nest egg: roughly 565 castari.

Fhew!

And the moral of the story is this -- Not every canon is perfect. Not every model will give you a perfect idea of how the human body moves. Even Tolkien, who has more than nine volumes of supplemental material to his name, doesn't cover all his bases. Covering those bases is what writing fanfiction is all about.

I just wish sometimes I didn't have the compulsion to be so thorough.

Writing in the Margins

When we speak of marginality or marginalized people, we're referring to those groups who for whatever reason (race, ethnicity, sexual orientation) aren't given space to express themselves in the political or social spectrum as much as they should be or when they are allowed a chance to speak, participate in political process or vocalize their ideas aren't given legitimacy as participants.

I'm doing a lot of reading for my education seminar on Human Relations relating to how we better involve those students who are in the margins in our classrooms and how we can give them positive stereotypes to grow into and aspire to. Many of these activities involve self-expression of some kind because young adolescents (the technical term for what we might also call Tweens, the middle-school age group) need a lot of self- expressive, self-reflective activity because this is the stage where children start really developing their sense of who they are and where they fit in the world.

And this, of course, has gotten me thinking about my own writing. When I was stalled over break trying to work more on "A Rose in the Briars" I tried many of my usual techniques for jumpstarting a stalled brain. I watched the movies over again. I reread pertinant passages in the books. I tried to do some photocollages and changed my background several times. I tried (very unsuccessfully) to do some research. And I realized why all this reading and movie watching wasn't helping me.

When we write fanfiction, we are "Writing in the Margins," bringing out characters that the author could have written in but didn't. These characters exist in possibility but for reasons of brevity or a lack of appeal to a wide audience don't make it into the narrative. (There's a technical term for this, but I can't recall what it is.) Jasper Fforde, one of my favorite authors, brings characters like these into his books by literally putting them in the margins when they have footnoterphone conversations. Thursday overhears two extras from Anna Karenina discussing AK's affair with Alexei Vronskey on her footnoterphone -- marginalized characters being pulled into the narrative.

I can't find the characters I'm writing by reading the original material because they're not there, and if they are, they're in the background, very faintly. Fanfiction has a long history of trying to include the marginalized populations, particularly when it comes to sexual preference -- anyone who's familiar with the origins of widely recognized fanfiction in the 70s is familiar with the concept of slash coming from the notation Kirk/Spock, a widely practiced pairing in the Star Trek fandom.

In the case of A Rose in the Briars, as it is in most of my work, my marginalized population is women. There aren't many female characters in Lord of the Rings, and there isn't a lot written about the ones that are there. Add to this the additional problem that most of the women who are mentioned can't come into my story for reasons of rationality and geography, and therein lies my dilemma. But I think I've finally gotten over it by realizing this is an opportunity for me to break some new ground in LOTR. For instance, last night I wrote several pages about Rhoswen and her friend Faeldes preparing the body of Faeldes' husband for burial. It's a very emotional passage, but a female-centric one. It's women's work, and it allows Rhoswen space to both face what she might one day have to do, deal with the war-heavy context of Gondor and show off some things Tolkien never really talks about; the daily lives of women, how death is received at home, and what princesses do when they're not gracing high tables at feasts and fighting off Witch Kings.

If only bringing marginalized students in my classroom was this easy.