October 14, 2006

• 
• aha! the vacuum of space! Was about 8 or 9, in the throes of first passion for comic books, when for some reason it occurred to me that Tarzan of the Apes NEVER PEED! Further scrutiny of other fictional characters I came into contact with revealed that NOT ONE had anything resembling normal anatomy. They could go forever (hemhem) without needing a toilet. Incredible!
• That wasn't a leather loincloth Tarzan wore, bees, it was a sponge. (Nobody in LotR shits or pisses either, as I noted when I was 8. After a hard day marching across the fens, you need to let an impressive stream of piss out in a golden arc into the bushes when you make camp, believe you me)
• What is there about being 8 years old that this suddenly comes to the forefront of one's attention? Seems a pity in a way that we shall never know for sure how often hobbits, dwarves, elves, orcs, dragons, oliphants, balrogs, wargs, etc had to attend to such matters.
• dng = genius.
• "Seems a pity in a way that we shall never know for sure how often hobbits... etc had to attend to such matters." Hobbits had hairy feet. Probly they had hairy arses 'n all. Anal shrubbery. Think of the clag! The dingleberries must have been outrageous. Mein Gott. I expect they farted a great deal, too. Balrogs? They shat lava globes. Dwarfs? Shat rocks & pebbles. Elves didn't shit or piss at all. Orcs.. they eat their own poop. Dragons? Shit jewel encrusted dung. Oliphaunts buried whole towns in their excreta, & flooded low-lying river valleys upon micturation. Wargs.. poop studded with bone. Note: Jesus never took a piss, either, according to the good book. He ate a lot of bread, I expect that to have come out the other end at some point, unless the Manicheans were right.
• Too harsh?
• Yes, at least about the orcs and the wargs. And I believe the orcs are more probable dingleberry candidates than hobbits. Description of everything about Balrogs is so skimpy, who knows? But I think likely they were more cacafuego-ous than dingledberried. Don't think it's so easy to conclude anything about the overall body hair of hobbits; they were apparently beardless, despite having hairy feet. Seesm a different set of secondary sex characteristics than humanity's. But if ye eat the vast number of meals attributed to hobbits, there must be considerable need of some sort of waste disposal in hobbitholes. Though I can't recall any mention of this. Bathing, yes and bath-songs, but no mention of baser functions. Dwarves, now, eat food, and drink wine, according to the descriptions in The Hobbit. I suppose it's possible they also ate gravel, just as fowl consume grit to aid in digesting less tractable tidbits. Perhaps dwarves have craws/gizzards? Though I doubt they actually shat stone. (Be just like the Victorian-raised Tolkien NOT to mention it if this were the case, though.) Dragons clearly have a very alien physiology. Because they have six limbs (2 wings, 2 forelegs, and 2 hindlegs) one might think an insectoid anaolgy could be drawn, but I on the whole I don't favour such an approach. I think they may have passed gas in copious amounts, and rather think they must have belched ditto. Combustible gas, of course. Hard to say, but bones have been seen lying around, so I don't place any credence in the notion dragons have internal furnaces. As to Jesus, either he is human or he isn't: don't think we can have it both ways there.
• The yes refers to your previous remarks, mate.
• bees pwned me!
• Spot on about the elves, though. Even if they did shit, it wouldn't stink.
• To be serious for a moment (which is difficult for me, so, please, some patience) Dragons lay dormant for long periods, apparently sometimes many years, perhaps even generations. I suspect, then, they had a sloooooow metabolism, or some mechanism of shutting down metabolic functions during periods where they were just sleeping on their hoard of gold & jewels. When active, they obviously produced a great deal of energy, so one has to posit some kind of power source other than the ordinary animal bodily processes. Tolkien (IIRC) does not describe Smaug eating people, just torching them, so it is hard to figure what that energy source was. However, the Desolation of Smaug, that great area of wilderness created by the ravaging monster, seems to indicate that perhaps the dragon did venture forth continually to harvest animals & whatever else. If Farmer Giles of Ham (by Tolkien) is considered canon or agreeable with the Middle Earth tales, then Smaug would indeed have consumed cattle, other animals, humans, & anything else he could capture. The picture of the dragon in The Hobbit, however, is of a beast that mainly stays asleep for long periods & does not devour maidens or sheep, which accords somewhat with other, non-Tolkien, tales of dragons sleeping long beneath mountains without venturing forth. Only significant, perhaps magical, events cause the creatures to stir. Unless you're Anne McCaffrey. Like Balrogs, perhaps, dragons had some kind of non-mortal power source. Which makes sense, if my fading memory of information from The Silmarillion is true, since both species of beastie were bred by Melkor (or someone) as a twisted version of the creatures created by the Valar (or Ilúvatar, or whoever it was who created life in Tolkien's complex mythology). Dwarfs were distinctly different from the other races. IIRC, they were created separately by another of Ilúvatar's minions, but left to sleep until the other races awoke. They were creatures peculiarly kindred to minerals, thus my speculation that they shit rocks. :D Mayhap their internal organs, being unknowable & hidden from ordinary men, may turn wine & earthly food into some coprolithic excressence. Therefore I cleave to my earlier theory that Dwarfs crap rocks.
• I must also add, that as a D&Der I *always* played a Dwarf. They are a race close to my stony heart, thus anything I say about them is not to be taken as an insult (take note, Thorin).
• Plus I have been a little backed-up recently.
• I love this place
• 1.Eat more prunes. 2.Avoid cram. 3.If these fail, contemplate the purchase of a plumber's snake. ;] Tolkien's dwarves' seem to trade with men in order to get food, which dwarves don't produce themselves. D&D dwarves - or are those dwarfs? - don't seem to be the same as the Tolkien-type, if I'm recalling the D&D dwarf correctly. Smaug eats prodigious quantities of cattle, sheep and possibly maidens and men. However, he does hoard treasure, and doesn't seem to consume it: the Arkenstone and other items lay unnibbled for many years in his den. (I believe dragons have an exaggerated miserly streak, and may even wring their clawed forefeet with glee as they contemplate their treasures.) Your idea about dragons doing some sort of quasi-hibernation/estivation-ish (but not necessarily tied to seasons) retirement is interesting. The whole question of how dragons manage to breathe fire has not been very satisfactorily explained, not so much by you but by everyone in general. MacCaffrey's dragons are the product of early settlers/colonists using bioengineered critters to combat the episodes of falling thread. Why, I have never really understood.
• Dragons breathe flame for the same reason Balrogs are wreathed in flame and shadow, IMO. They aren't strictly speaking just in existence in Middle Earth but rather are the visible intrusions into Middle Earth of creatures that have an existence in other planes. (By analogy with the Ring itself - if the ring did not exist then Sauron would not be able to manifest in Middle Earth. If the dragon form did not exist, then the behind-the-scenes dragonish essence would not be able to manifest). Having manifested, the form is then not just biological but also a gateway. And the flames/shadow/magic pass through the opening. Clearly the physical form is vulnerable, which makes sense - a permanent, mobile, plane crossing gateway pretty much has to be a delicate & fussy thing.
• That sounds very interesting. A theory I can invest in, without doubt. We appologise: Currently Chy is too drunk to think or type. He will possibly respond in +12 hours. At this point we are lucky he can still spell. Good luck to you all! I go now to visit mr pillow..
• Elves poot. 's true!
• Tolkien's elves in The Hobbit were ... more trivial ... than the elves in LOTR. Which by itself would be okay, but then there is The Silmarillion which is stuffed with more elves, among other things. And then a slew of posthumous publications as Christopher Tolkien edits his father's papers ... some of which put me to sleep, so I haven't sorted out all elvish things.[And one more volume, The Children of Hurin, due to be published ? next year? Elbereth save us!] Don't feel qualified to say much about the physiological foibles of elves.
• I read The Silmarillion & Book of Lost Tales back in high school, but found them dull. Some parts of Silmarrillion were interesting, but for the most part it was rather dry. The Book of Lost Tales has some interesting tidbits, but nothing of real consequence, AFAIC. I forget, now, which one had the history of Numenor & Sauron's backstory, which was fairly interesting, but because of the 'high style' Tolkien was attempting, there are no characters you can empathise with. The perfection of Lord of the Rings is that we have great characters like Aragorn, & to a lesser extent Legolas & Gimli, & the Hobbits who serve as the reader's eyes in the mythic world Tolkien created. I don't know if he accidentally fell upon this technical device of using the halflings as the reader's interface with Middle Earth, or whether he hit upon it after finishing The Hobbit. I rather suspect the latter. But it is a genius piece of composition, which every other fantasy writer is much in thrall to. Everything else he had written prior to that was in that neo-classical High Style, which, frankly, doesn't make for engaging reading. Not that he meant it to be, though. But, technically speaking, there is no point to art if it is not accessible, IMHO. The faux classic style he was trying is stuffy & not a little pretentious, if you ask me. It only works in some circumstances, book-within-book style perhaps, but not for the whole narrative. With a 'sub-creation' of such complexity, one needs a technical hook in order to keep the reader oriented. CS Lewis used children for the same reason, I think, in the Narnia books (which I despise, btw). Stephen R. Donaldson used the transported Thomas Covenant character for similar reason in his books. It's necessary in all complex fantasy novels for some device such as this. I'm unsure how other fantasy writers have solved this problem as I long ago gave up reading other novels of this genre, finding them too derivative. I have my own solution in a long-term 'sub-creation' fantasy project of my own, which I will keep to myself for now. I think Christopher Tolkien should just accept the fact that his father didn't finish any other stuff & leave it at that, because he himself is not a very interesting writer. I don't think we need all these endless bits of notes & appendices from JRR. They don't add anything. And in most cases, he's using fragmentary material, & doing a lot of editing with presumably quite a bit of textual additions of his own to stitch it together, so you have to ask, is it really JRR's writing anymore?
• Yes, Christopher's dull as ditchwater, isn't he? Think he has the (probably correct) notion that everything JRR wrote will be of ultimate interest to scholars, and that's why he's so annoyingly careful to tell us whether a certain bit was written in pencil or not (!) when all most readers care about are the stories and not how he arrived at them. It is fascinating, though, to see how someone goes about creating a world of such complexity as Middle-earth. And rather appalling to realize the amount of time it took. (Certainly JRR has to be regarded as the exemplar of a nerd, whatever else we may say of him.) Every writer of fantasy coming after Tolkien has the templates JRR invented to look to, but JRR himself had to craft it all from scratch, which is a most impressive accomplishment. As to technical hooks, in fantasy I'd think the oftenest used (as for example in Eddings' Beleriand or T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone or Grahame's Wind in the Willows) is the naif hero - child, hobbit, Mole. The ignorant stranger/offworlder/outsider/alien/time-traveller seems just a variation on this idea.
• Yes, exactly. I think that the main reason it took JRR so long to create his books is that he did everything, created the languages, maps, king lists & almost every detail down to armour & heraldry. This is an enormous undertaking, I think most writers don't create this amount of backstory, because, well, they want to be published in a year or two, not 40. The thing is, this immense sub-creation (Tolkien's term) gives the writer a certainty & depth of knowledge that shines thru in the prose. This is one reason why Tolkien's work is so immersive, he's describing a real place, or virtually real, for him. This gives his writing a level of detail & reality that cannot be synthesized by the bloke writing a 600 page socko-boffo sword & sorcery epic on a deadline from Ballantine. He might be a great writer, but he won't be able to describe things in such immersive, absolute language. He's inventing ruins along the road for his heroes to stumble upon, while Tolkien knows that those ruins were built by such-an-one 2 thousand years earlier, they're on a hill & are a natural feature of the landscape that his travellers are bound to see & head towards, because that's what you do. I don't know exactly why, but when Tolkien writes about such things they have a gravitas or solidity more like historical fiction than fantasy, & I put it down to the massive amount of history he created, stuff that the public would never see (well, until now). It's an incredible technique, & despite many flaws in his writing, such as some cardboard interchangeable characters & dodgy poetry, it really counts as brilliant modern art for that reason. Staggering, really.
• Yes, he's very much an original in those respects. His art, although modern, is also retrospective. Not just that it has echoes of assorted northern Germanic and Nordic tales and even flashes of Malory, but there's that underlying, elegiac sadness present in LOTR. Frodo is very much aware, and the other hobbits are always learning, that a great deal that was good in Middle-earth has already passed away. No one on Middle-earth could take very seriously Browning's 'the best is yet to be' because it can't become what it once was. He does a fine job allowing both the hobbits and his readers to experience the tremendous weight of Middle-earth's long history. And there's a sense in which LOTR can be read as a sustained lament. For the world of Middle-earth has been broken. Its beauty has been distorted. Evil is manifesting everywhere. And with a re-manifest Sauron risen again, it can be no joyful romp the hobbits go on. Which in another way is a pity. Because it's the hobbits' sense of fun and friendship and essential decency as revealed in the early part of the first book that makes readers interested enough in their fate to keep on reading all through the protracted darkness of that second volume, and to accompany Frodo and Sam into the ugliness of Mordor. (And alas, even after the ring is destroyed, there can be no bright future for the peoples of Middle-earth, which is still in decline, and one gathers will eventually succumb to the darkness. Toklien's is an unusual and utterly heroic work, conceived on a grand scale, and in its sheer scope and detail makes Milton look like an amateur.
• You're making me feel bad for falling out of love with Tolkien now
• Well, in the west we're living, if the tenor of many threads on MoFi can be the standard, in an anti-heroic period. Which tends not to make for much really heroic writing - black humour and a sardonic atmosphere seem to prevail, even in comic strips. Perhaps the central thing about SF or other genres that can makes the heroic work - or seem plausible - is for an author take his creation seriously. That s/he maintains a certain respect for it. Not easy to do when fiction in general is widely viewed as 'escapism'. But our age is also anti-respect, anti-authority of any kind, really. So an author/comicstrip artist has a continual uphill struggle against acurrent in which to assert that there is hope for humanity or for an indivdual's basic decency to be revealed, is regarded, in the popularly articulated view, of the act of a Maroon. Otherwise, the result's parody. Or more probably a work where the author's despair becomes overwhelming, or descends into mere snark.
• *sigh* =as the act of a Maroon
• What is there about being 8 years old that this suddenly comes to the forefront of one's attention? Milk, milk, lemonade... ...temporal proximity to toilet training days?
• *resolves to ponder atemporal proximity* Instant Buzzback: Ginger ale, the sham pain of its bubbles ... Milk, memo to self: don't EVER drink that stuff again right after you've eaten an orange! ... Possibly so, InsolentChimp.
• Weirdness, bees: I've often wondered if orange soda and milk could be made into a drink in the right proportions. It'd be similar to orangina, but instead of the angina - milk. I'll let you know how it works out one day.
• A Word to the Weird: it is mostly other folk's weirdnesses that seem weirdest. The flavour of milk atop the (acidity?) of a raw orange was exzematremely unpleasant. To me, anyhow. As a full-grown fool I refuse to drink the nasty stuff, whether pre- or post-orange. (OK, maybe a small shot in my tea, but otherwise, no.)
• Milk is full of pus, you fools! However, I cannot give it up. Gotta get some more of that wonderful pus. How about cheese? You don't eat cheese? What kind of monster are you! Cheese is the great leveller. Except Camembert, which I don't dig so much. (I just bought some, & found that I didn't like it).
• Mixing the acids and bases are belong to us!
• To be sure, I eat cheese, and yogurt, too. Camambert is marvellous stuff! Please don't hide it under the fridge again, Chy. ;]
• I am eating cheese RIGHT NOW.
• I just had a cheese & tomato sandwich. With onion & cracked pepper. MMMMmmm.
• Homemade black bean and rice burrito, homegrown cucumber & carrots sticks, slice of homemade apple pie, thanks to the kitchen gods.
• Cheese is what keeps me from veganism - the concept of milk is repulsive to me, but damn - a bubbling bit o' broiled cheese is a siren song!
• *bares his teeth* MY salmon! Unhand it at once!
• There's lots of things that are repulsive in concept but damn tasty in reality. I'm a big fan of mussels - though not raw. Smoked or chilli mussels. I have this big old 1950s animal encyclopedia from since I was a kid, a page has one of those marvelous hand painted cut-away diagrams of that era, this one of the innards of a mussel, the organs & whatnot. It must have stopped me eating them for nearly 10 years. But they taste gooood, specially if you've had a few beers. I don't eat the animals I can be friends with, is my rule, but I'm a sinner in regards to chicken, they're evolutionarily in a bad place because they taste so damn good. I eat fish. I eat eggs. I can't see why Vegans think eating eggs is out, the chook will lay the egg whether you want it or no. Don't bother explaining it to me, I think it's nuts. The Buddhist monks up here at the Perth monastery will eat meat if given as alms. Their philosophy is that the animal is already dead - they had no part in harming it. Not sure if I can buy into that. I dunno how I'm gonna explain any of this shit to Vishnu, Allah or Glub - whoever it is at the end of the rainbow. I presume the creator of the universe expects consistancy from our behaviour. I still dig cow milk. I find it particularly refreshing as a cold draught after exercise. Amazing how the topics drift in this place, but I like it.
• dear little topic when ye drift from shore to shore our spirits lift!