Dean's World

Certainly, "Here's to the Professor."

THIS is a pretty good living on-line Tolkien reference.

I'm reading the Children of Hurin at night, when I have the time. I got the book for Christmas.
It isn't as good as the Silmarillion, in my opinion the best book Tolkien ever wrote, but it is at least as good as, if not superior to, the Lord of the Rings.

An interesting thing his son said, in the intro I think it was, is that Tolkien had decided to create a huge backcloth for his mythos. Then to pick three or four tales to really concentrate upon. He had always intended the Children of Hurin to be one of those tales, along with the LOTR.

In other words he had planned to have many things mentioned in an off hand way in his major works, but have three or four really towering works that he would expound upon in detail, and that these works would be related, but distinct. But that a lot of other things mentioned in the general milieu would not be developed, but left "open" for the interpretation and speculation of the reader.

I think that is both a mighty wise, and a mighty sharp way to approach both myth and literature. The modern tendency to write twelve books on a single subject and explore every single last detail of every single last character and event and implication in a set of works does not strengthen literature, or fiction in general, it greatly weakens and dilutes it's power.

Think of all of the things mentioned off hand in the Odyssey, the Aeneid, in Beowulf, in the Arthurian cycles that could have been exploited in minute detail but were far better left to the imagination of the reader. It deepened the story, made the myth seem far more real, and added mystery and substance to the overall literature. Hell, the Bible is brilliant at that and it is no doubt why it is the most popular book on religion and myth in the world. And the most commented upon. God says, he does not explain.

When you explain too much about what should be left unsaid you explain away what is best left to wonder about.
Since we're talking about Tolkien I think a lot of modern writers should remember that both myth and literature are at heart not technical manuals, but deep mysteries, like God. You catch them out of the corner of your eye and you speculate and say, "could that be what I think it is?" And if it is then what does that mean?

Or, "I'm drawn to that, but I dare not go down that road, best to just know that most never return and know the rumors of why that is, than the reality of that."
Myth should send a chill down your spine, not make you comfortable, but astounded.

Literature and myth are not sciences, though they can be approached scientifically and methodically, ultimately their job is to point at a thing and say, "God that's big and bizarre," not to try and explain why it is big and bizarre. Because if you explain why it is big and bizarre it becomes small and ordinary. And that ain't the point at all.

A lot of modern writers, if they are paying careful attention, could learn a helluvah lot from that kinda thinking.

It's what sets apart a Shakespeare from a Salvatore.

You don't explain myth, you describe it. You don't detail literature, you unfold it. And you leave what don't need saying unsaid, so it will echo for a long time like the whisper of a ghost in the mind of reader.

A lot of writing exercises suggesst much the same thing— you write a short scene, or two, or several, featuring your character... and then you never refer to them in the final story. Most writers forget that last bit and seem to think that it matters to have every last bit of character detail in the text.

At one point I was writing a bunch of dialogues with characters being asked questions by the narrator, and it was fun to see how each of them responded. One got mildly annoyed and started trying to mess with the questioner's head. (The story in question is currently in long-term shelving since it really hasn't coalesced. But I still work on the characters from time to time because they're fun to work with.)