Two Roads and Dark Woods -- or, When Fandoms Collide

Random things that make me happy:

1. The Hobbit trailer came out yesterday. I watched it six times and shared it on facebook and squee'd with all my freinds.

2. I found out one of my former roommates is now into Downton Abbey. Now I have someone else to squee with.

3. I got Christmas letters and Christmas packages from friends far and near, including one from a lady I work with that I wasn't expecting at all.

4. A freind from high school randomly called to go see a movie.

5. I found tea that says "Keep Calm and Have a Cup of Tea" at the store. I proceeded to buy said tea so I can keep the box.

6. I have two books to review for Quirk, and both of them look amazing.

7. I've read so much good fanfic in the last week my head might explode.

8. I just finished reading John Keegan's The First World War, which was excellent, and am now working my way through Bright Young People, which is so far also excellent.

8. The cute intern at work asked if I was going to be in on Thursday. I am. I'm trying not to read too much into it.

9. And oh, by the way, it's Christmas next sunday.


There's been such a lot of stuff happening in my life lately that I haven't really been giving any time to blogging. Heck, I haven't even given a lot of thought to the fact that Christmas is next week, but that could be because we don't have any decorations up at my house. I've been thinking about writing blogs a lot, but never actually writing anything. Probably becuase no one was reading for a while. But enough fannish stuff has happened in the last week that not to blog about it would seem a little funny.

For starters, that Hobbit trailer! Could it have BEEN any more perfect?  Let's watch it again, shall we?

I love everything about this trailer. I love the slightly Arthur Dentish moment Bilbo has in the trailer when they tell him they're recruiting for an adventure and he says "I am a Baggins of Bag End"  as if trying to reassure himself that Ford has NOT just said the world will end in eleven minutes. (Yeah, like this.) I love Richard Armitage's smoldering Thorin (this movie is going to make dwarf-centric fanfic explode, let me tell you) and the odd and kind of endearing Gandalf/Galadriel moment. I also really love all the dwarves, all thirteen of them with their rhyming names and their hoods and their plate-rolling antics.

But the thing I like best and most of all the lyric quality they gave the "Over the  Misty Mountains Old" song that the dwarves sing in Bag End to explain to Bilbo why it is they have to go to the Lonely Mountain. It's one of my favorite poems in the books (and one of the only ones I always read, which you can do here) and I never heard it in my head like it's sung here. But in the book, Tolkien says "And suddenly, first one and then another began to sing as they played, deep-throated singing of the dwarves in the deep places of thier ancient homes; an this is like a fragment of thier song, if it can be their song without their music." (Hobbit, p. 26) And that's what it is, plain and simple. You could have lifted it right off the page.

As I was going around like a madwoman last night listening to the trailer, I went to go check my Google reader and find a  load of Downton Abbey pictures from this awesome Tumblr I started following -- fuckyesdowntonabbey -- and suddenly my Hobbit trailer euphoria pulled up short. It was an odd moment -- suddenly my two fandoms seemed totally incompatible.

I've figured that for a while now -- I've shelved further work on A Rose Among the Briars to work on a Downton Abbey christmas fic for a freind because I just couldn't keep my mind in two places. But the more I thought about it, the more these two fandoms have a lot in common, working through the person of JRR Tolkien.

Like several of the characters at Downton, JRRT served in World War one with the Lancashire Fusiliers. It was a harrowing expericne for him, (I read somewhere that he was in one of the 'pals' regiments and of the six freinds that he went out with, only one -- him -- came back) and one that would impact him for the rest of his life. I like to think that it's his experience with the merciless way of war on the Western Front that drove him deeper into his studies and appreciation for epic literature, the kind of literature that couldn't (and wouldn't) be written about his own conflict except by jingoists and propaganists.


If any question why we died
Tell them, because our fathers lied.


That's Rudyard Kipling right there, one of the more nationalist poets at the end of the war after his own son had died in the fighting, and let's face it -- epic and honorable and rosy it isn't.


 And even though he didn't want parallels to be drawn that way, it's not hard to find a sort of crossing-over between the expereince Frodo -- and Bilbo, really -- and Tolkien, and millions of other young men, have when they return from thier adventures. The tired soldier comes home from war expecting to find his home as he left it, and finds instead that home has irrepairably changed, and, perhaps more sadly, so has he. For Frodo, it's coming home and finding an industrialized menace in his hometown, just as JRRT found in Oxford. For Bilbo, the changes have more to do with him personally-- he's no longer content with life in his cozy hobbit hole, and spends the rest of his life longing for the adventures of his youth, all the while holding on to a very small ring that is almost like shell-shock; it changes his disposition, changes his values, and at the end, makes him push away some of the people he loves the most, like Gandalf.

So JRRT comes back, forever changed, and instead of writing poetry about the war the way the rest of his generation seem to have done, he writes a piece of epic fantasy (with lots of really great poetry in) that harkens back to the fairy stories of our childhoods and the epic poetry of another time, a place where wars still have meaning, enemies don't have to have human faces, and death in battle is honorable and valuable to the cause and valued by all.

Since I've already watched season two of Downton (Thank you, internet denizens of YouTube) I won't give away the ending for the characters there in the War to End All Wars. But it will be interesting to watch those that are left deal with the scars the war has dealt them. For Bilbo and Frodo, the real closure on the War of the Ring (and the Ring inself) comes when they go into the West. Somehow, I don't think the same will be true for the Crawley Family -- a trip to America just doesn't have the same allure.

But hey, one of them could always write a novel.

Before The Pen Hits The Page -- Pre-Writing Your Way to Good Product

Yesterday in Pedagogy we began our unit on Writing Instruction, a process that my whole class (all eleven of us) has agreed is nuanced and complicated and definitely intertwined with reading. If you want good writers, it's been decided, you have to make them good readers first, and if you want them to be better readers, you have to get them to reflect on their reading activities by writing. Creating this kind of classroom, with the constant stimulus of new reading material and the constant expectation to have to think about it later, allows for the most development of a student's personal voice and taste when it comes to their own books, which will hopefully encourage them to read more later.

I've been reading voraciously for years. That is why I know what I enjoy reading and what I don't enjoy reading. I have a hard time explaining to people that I put the book down because I don't like the way the author structures sentences. Some people get it; some people don't. It's also why after three years, my mom can read this blog at home and hear my voice coming out of the computer. Constant practice is making it easier to put my narrative voice into type.

The first step of the writing process in the classroom should begin with Pre-Writing, a brainstorming process where the student puts down a lot of thoughts on paper first and then goes back to organize and further distill those thoughts. One process is webbing, where a central idea (the big question of the paper) is placed in the middle and offshoot thoughts are added to form a thought web. Another is questioning, a method where a question is asked by the teacher, the paragraph answer is written down and then four or more questions are asked to further shape your answers and finely tune your paragraph. This second method is a freewrite, where your brainstorm takes place in complete sentences and may form part of your finished work.

And while we were learning all of this, I began thinking about prewriting in fanfiction. The PJO people (I love them dearly, but they are really quite young) are showing more and more stories about "How to Write A Better Fanfic" and it saddens me that pre-writing never seems to show up on their lists.

So I've created some interrogative prewriting questions for fanfic. When I defined Fanfiction for my Linguistics paper (boy, was that a while ago...) I decided this brand of writing comes down to this:

Fanfiction. N., fan(atic), one who admires or follows + fiction, a work of writing not based in fact. A story written by a fan of a particular existing work in which the writer re-examines the work and attempts to answer a question the work has raised. Also the entire body of said works. May also be clipped to 'fanfic.'

Questions in fanfic are things like "What event or series of events was Jack Sparrow talking about when he said 'Clearly, you've never been to Singapore'?" or "What happens to Elizabeth and Darcy AFTER the happily ever after?"  The first prewriting question an author should ask themselves is


1. What question in the Narrative am I trying to answer?

I just started a fanfic recently to answer a question I have about the character Godfrey in Kingdom of Heaven -- "What was Godfrey like before he came to the Holy Land?" We'll use that for example purposes here.

The second question is harder for younger writers because we don't teach them to look at both sides of an argument.

2. What possible answers can I find in the Narrative already? Am I creating this story because I don't like those answers?

This question is especially important because we need to see what preconceptions people already bring to our fanfic when they read it. If the book says that Percy and Annabeth end up together, it's going to be harder for you to make the case that Percy should really be with Rachel. You can do it, and you should do it, because fanfiction is meant to be subversive, but know that you're going to be talking to a tough crowd if you do. Come to the fight armed.

If the answer to the second part of that question is "Yes, of course!" you're going to have to work harder to answer some of these other questions. For the Godfrey question, I have to look at what other characters say about him; Tiberias and Baldwin IV both describe him as a friend, Baldwin recounts the episode where Godfrey determines he has leprosy, his brother in the extended edition talks about how his brother took the Cross. In this case, I don't need to answer the second part because I like the answers and I want to reveal more of them. The second part becomes important when creating stories around the premise of an alternate romance than the one the Narrative offers.

3. What answer did I want to find when I was reading?

I'd call this question the 'I could have been chasing ghosts' evaluation. Regardless of what it is we read, we bring to that text a list of assumptions and world views that shape what we read and what we pass over in a text. I'm going to use religion for this question because it's a bigger example (and I can make a pun!) I read the Gospel accounts of the Last Supper and relate it to the Eucharist because I'm Catholic and that's what my theology teaches me. Judaic scholars read the same accounts and recognize that Jesus celebrates the Passover wrong because it's their tradition and they're trained to notice that. Catholics pass over the Passover part, and Jews pass over the 'Jesus is trying to be divine here' part of the story.  (Passover, pass over...see, there's my pun. I didn't say it was going to be good.)

If we read to look for evidence, we often skip the parts that could form a counterargument. This is bad, because in those counterarguments we could find (or create, as in Question 5) more evidence towards our goal.


4. What answer do I want to create?
Hopefully you already answered this question when you created what question it was you were trying to answer, but if not, now's the time to do so. Recognizing here that you're going against the Narrative is important -- if you are, it means you have to work harder than those canonically leaning fanfic folks to sell your case.

5. What, if anything, can I use from the Narrative to create my case?
Return to the evidence you collected or recalled in question 2 and see if there's anything there you can use. With Godfrey, I realized I could include his brother, his friendship with Tiberias and Baldwin, and his 28 year stint in the Holy Land as building blocks in my narrative. His brother's the reason he leaves in the first place, one of the first people he meets is a sixteen year old Raymond of Tiberias, and the story takes place over a good 28 year chunk of time. I'm also using the image of his house at Ibelin and Godfrey's flashbacks from the beginning of the movie.

6. What additions to the world of the narrative will I have to create in order for this story to work? How or where can I find help creating them?

Since very little is said about Godfrey in KoH, I needed to create his parents, where he was from in France, his hobbies, and perhaps most importantly, his history in love. To do this, since I had little Narrative scaffolding to work on, I turned to my Medieval Life sources about life in Frankish towns and cities during the 1150s, SCA name lists and chivalric code books.

In my Rose ReWrite, I needed to create the domestic sphere within Gondor -- what the women do when they're not looking pretty in the narrative. For help on this, I returned to Tolkien and looked at points in the narrative where women are involved in Rohan and in Gondor as well as researching what life was like in medieval cities and castles. Armed with these facts, I'm working on the less war-like side of life in Gondor during the War of the Ring.


When I was discussing the  'cyberbullying incident' of several weeks ago with my Pedagogy teacher, she seemed to think researching the links between home literacy and school literacy and the links that exist (or don't exist) between the would make a great senior thesis. Why do fanfiction writers shy away from teaching influences online? Why aren't they using tools they learned in school and applying them to their productions outside of school? Do we need to give them more tools they can use outside of the classroom? Is there a way to bring products like fanfiction into the classroom for instructional use?

It would be a fascinating study, I think.

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.

Observations on Lord of the Rings

I decided, on a whim the other day, that I was going to watch "Return of the King" because it's my favorite of the three LOTR films and I was kind of in an epic mood. Don't ask.

Anyway, I made two rather interesting observations. One is that, during the Two Towers, Eowyn sings a lament for her cousin, Theodred, a list of the kings that have gone before him into death. One of the lines, the only one I ever remember, is "Frecan, Folcan," a reference to Freca and Folca, both of whom were kings in Rohan. The -n ending on the end is an inflection that deliniates what part of speech the name is functioning as. Rohirric is an inflected language, much like Latin or, of course, Old English, which is what Tolkien based both the langauge and culture of the Rohirrim after.

Of course, I knew that already, but my linguistics class (Thank you, Ozzie Mayers and Melvyn Bragg and The History of English) didn't make it apparent until now.

The second is much more movie-oriented -- during the siege of Minas Tirith, Pippin pulls Gandalf aside and says...

PIPPIN
I didn't think it would end this way.

GANDALF
End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path. One that we all must take. The gray rain curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass. And then you see it.

PIPPIN
What, Gandalf? See what?

GANDALF
White shores. And beyond, the far green country, under a swift sunrise.

You know where else they have white shores and beyond a far green country?

The White Cliffs of Dover. See, there's the white shores and if you keep going over the little island they're attached to, there's another little island that a lot of people have taken to calling the Emerald Isle on account of its green-ness.

Funny, innit, how these things happen? Gandalf has just given us a vision of England as Valinor.

You're a sneaky one, PJ, I'll give you that.