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reading and myth-making
Feb. 27th, 2019 12:55 pmI did go ahead and start reading the Heroes of Olympus series, and this turns out to be an excellent call -- I finished The Son of Neptune last night and am looking forward to starting the next book.
But it may not be the next thing I read, because last night A & I went to hear Marlon James at the Pembroke Tolkien Lecture, and picked up a copy of his new book, Black Leopard, Red Wolf. James was a delightful speaker -- erudite, witty and engaging. Also very cheery, which came as a surprise to me, because I have always assumed that people who have won major literary awards like the Booker Prize will be miserable S.O.B.s or at least extremely conscious of their own dignity.
James started out by talking about Tolkien's mythmaking as a response to his experience in the First World War, as a way to look for (or maybe create) meaning in something that did not have meaning; he went on to talk about studying myth as a kind of active process, so that ultimately you don't just study the myths but are driven to make them yourself. This brought him on to Black Leopard, Red Wolf, and he talked about his research and writing project -- which sounded absolutely fascinating. Apparently he read for about two years, before he put a word on the page. And of course it made it very clear how much about what we think exists is really based on what we can easily access: it's no problem for me to read the Iliad, if I want, but if I want to read, say, an epic poem from Ethiopia, that's a lot harder for me to get ahold of.
James is clearly someone who has read a lot and thought deeply and really knows what he's talking about on a whole range of issues: not just related to literature, or the genre of epic fantasy, but also about history and language and culture. All in all it made me very excited to read the book although I'm going to have to arm-wrestle A for it.
One thing that he didn't talk about, that I thought was a telling omission -- because he talked about growing up without a sense of having his own myths, and that one of the things that Black authors in the US are doing is creating myths for themselves -- was Tolkien's ambition to create an English mythology, as opposed to the Germanic or Norse or Welsh. Instead, and I think that this makes sense from James' own perspective, he talked about Tolkien as a "British" writer, which is not I think how Tolkien would have seen himself. But it tied in with something that he discussed in the talk and in the question period about his own treatment of African myth, and how he wanted to focus in his sources on a specific region (the Omo Valley) rather than write a pan-African jumble: on the one hand, the specificity of myth, but also I wonder about the extent to which it is hard to see one's own myths. They don't look like myths when you're inside them, and unless you're exposed to the views of outsiders who are interested in looking at your myths -- so that your myths are visible to them as myths instead of as just part of reality -- they remain invisible.
(I think I have more to say about Tolkien's ambition to create a mythology for the English, and his failure, but this probably isn't the place for it.)
But it may not be the next thing I read, because last night A & I went to hear Marlon James at the Pembroke Tolkien Lecture, and picked up a copy of his new book, Black Leopard, Red Wolf. James was a delightful speaker -- erudite, witty and engaging. Also very cheery, which came as a surprise to me, because I have always assumed that people who have won major literary awards like the Booker Prize will be miserable S.O.B.s or at least extremely conscious of their own dignity.
James started out by talking about Tolkien's mythmaking as a response to his experience in the First World War, as a way to look for (or maybe create) meaning in something that did not have meaning; he went on to talk about studying myth as a kind of active process, so that ultimately you don't just study the myths but are driven to make them yourself. This brought him on to Black Leopard, Red Wolf, and he talked about his research and writing project -- which sounded absolutely fascinating. Apparently he read for about two years, before he put a word on the page. And of course it made it very clear how much about what we think exists is really based on what we can easily access: it's no problem for me to read the Iliad, if I want, but if I want to read, say, an epic poem from Ethiopia, that's a lot harder for me to get ahold of.
James is clearly someone who has read a lot and thought deeply and really knows what he's talking about on a whole range of issues: not just related to literature, or the genre of epic fantasy, but also about history and language and culture. All in all it made me very excited to read the book although I'm going to have to arm-wrestle A for it.
One thing that he didn't talk about, that I thought was a telling omission -- because he talked about growing up without a sense of having his own myths, and that one of the things that Black authors in the US are doing is creating myths for themselves -- was Tolkien's ambition to create an English mythology, as opposed to the Germanic or Norse or Welsh. Instead, and I think that this makes sense from James' own perspective, he talked about Tolkien as a "British" writer, which is not I think how Tolkien would have seen himself. But it tied in with something that he discussed in the talk and in the question period about his own treatment of African myth, and how he wanted to focus in his sources on a specific region (the Omo Valley) rather than write a pan-African jumble: on the one hand, the specificity of myth, but also I wonder about the extent to which it is hard to see one's own myths. They don't look like myths when you're inside them, and unless you're exposed to the views of outsiders who are interested in looking at your myths -- so that your myths are visible to them as myths instead of as just part of reality -- they remain invisible.
(I think I have more to say about Tolkien's ambition to create a mythology for the English, and his failure, but this probably isn't the place for it.)
