On Writing Aman, or the Balance between the Mythic and the Real by Dawn Felagund

Fanwork Information

Summary:

Fantasy writers, including creators of Tolkien-based fanworks, have long struggled to depict the "otherness" of realms like Aman. In the past, the Tolkien fan fiction community showed a preference for an idealistic portrayal of Aman that left little room for imperfection. My work has long taken the opposite approach, and in this essay, I argue for the artistic need and canonical basis for grounding stories set in Aman in a more recognizable reality of human experience. This essay was written for Back to Middle-earth Month 2017 for the orange/nonfiction path with the prompt "Worldbuilding."

Major Characters: Fëanor, Melkor, Ungoliant, Valar

Major Relationships:

Artwork Type: No artwork type listed

Genre: Nonfiction/Meta

Challenges: B2MeM 2017

Rating: General

Warnings:

Chapters: 1 Word Count: 2, 841
Posted on 3 March 2017 Updated on 3 March 2017

This fanwork is complete.

Table of Contents

On Writing Aman, or the Balance between the Mythic and the Real

Comments

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I think this is a fascinating discussion. It was a very important one to me--if not THE most important one to me--when I first came around the Tolkien fandom. I felt in my early experiences that I was banging on a closed door when all I wanted to do was to have fun and write some semi-authentic, emotionally relevant, character-based fantasy fiction which showed how deeply rooted was my love of Tolkien's work for over 40 years at that point. Although Lord of the Rings was my first love and a profound one, one of the reasons I was drawn to The Silmarillion fandom vs. the HASA-based mostly LotR fanfiction archive dealt largely with this exact question.

My first consideration of the worldbuilding aspects of my Tolkien fanfiction was arrived at through characterization. How does one write Tolkien's world in a way that does not contradict everything I want to think about relating to character-building? The humanity of the Elves came first for me and the worldbuilding that surrounded them followed as a close second.

Aside from you, two early Silm writers who greatly influence me were Tehta and Darth Fingon (writing as Claudio at that time). Their Elves were vain, foolish, vulnerable, wicked, passionate, and sympathetic (even the bad ones! or, in my case, especially the most flawed ones!). One of my favorite Tolkien fandom story titles is Tehta's "Flawed and Fair." A very nudge, nudge, wink, wink acknowledgement of her own self-consciousness about writing human Elves, who deal with a familiar physical reality, despite chasing giants spiders and living in Gondolin. These Elves are still other while remaining familiar and so very human.

I would also throw in that Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series had a huge influence on my first writing of Tolkien's Elves, from a different but more realistic angle. She also wrote hybred-human character an innate specialness and gifts, existint in an alien, if oddly familiar, environment. She, in turn, was greatly influenced by Tolkien, but she, like many women fantacists of her gneration, departed in the direction of a fantasy setting with realistic elements and day-to-day concerns and, most significantly, dealt with relevant issues of gender and human sexuality, based in her acute awareness of women's issues being debated and discussed at that time.

I have always asserted, as you point out above, that Tolkien did write human Elves. He and I might differ a little over the high fantasy tone from time to time. My Elves' English usage leans away from Medieval High Fantasy-based stilted dialogue and perhaps a bit (ha! more than a bit) into a colloquial tone--but it was not an unconscious or lazy decision on my part. A lot of pain and stress went into my final choices and no shortage of wading through fandom wank on the issue!

A great essay in a few words. I hope my comment is not longer than your essay!

 

It was very important to me too. I feel like I had a more fortunate start than you, though; coming directly into the Silmarillion fandom, for one--which was not without its canatics but also wasn't waging war on the sins committed by PJ's LotR trilogy via a hardass bookverse canaticism--and falling in right away with Enismirdal and Uli/ford_of_bruinen, both of whom wrote not just slash but intelligent, thoughtful, character-driven stories. I also steered mostly clear of HASA and the big Tolkien archives; most of my work went up on LJ and then the SWG, so I had the privilege of playing mostly in spaces I controlled. The HASA people I was friends with--Juno whom I quote in the essay and Arandil I remember particularly--were likewise intelligent fans and more than a little heretical. All the same, I remember being terrified to the point of physical illness on AMC posting days. I was convinced that it was just a matter of time before the canatics found me and descended on me like a plague of locusts and shredded my story that had become such a joyful part of my life.

I remember some of what you went through, and vulnerable and young as I was at the time, the same thing probably would have driven me from writing Tolkienfic.

Likewise, my stories start from characterization. AMC began as a character study; I didn't know it wanted to be a novel until I was almost to Chapter Ten. I wanted to understand the Feanorians, and that's why I started writing it. Anything that doesn't make sense from the human/character perspective has no place in my worldbuilding. I have no interest in elevating people to something more than people; I get the "escape" argument, but that's not why I write. I write to understand PEOPLE.

I loved Tehta's work when I was still a lurker; I read everything she wrote. I was introduced to Claudio's writing later and then read everything he wrote. They are both writers of the sort I aspire to be. I've read a little of Darkover (on your recommendation! :) and have enjoyed those I've picked up so far.

> Tolkien did write human Elves.

Yes! I noted to Dreamflower's comment on this essay that, back in the day, I could always tell the people who hadn't read the Silm: They were the ones griping about fan fiction that included "imperfect" Elves or who made statements like, "Elves are too good and in control of their impulses to ever have pre/extramarital sex!" RIGHT. But that goodness and impulse control doesn't extend to murdering each other from time to time!

You know I love the style and voice of your writing. It is so uniquely yours. I feel like I could pull a story of yours out of a lineup with no problem. I read back on my early work, like AMC, and wish I'd allowed myself to relax the dialogue a little bit. At least I didn't attempt thees and thous! I've learned from writers like you that a more natural voice in dialogue can be done, even in Tolkienfic! :)

Thank you for the comment which was not as long as the essay but much loved. <3

Thanks for your kind acceptance of my yammering and managing to understand me despite my generous salting of typos! I was just thinking the other day about being told that Elves don't use contractions and a story involving digging Elven latrines by Jael (another canon heretic)! She had the nerve to write Elves that shat.

It always struck me as hilarious back in the day, at how everyone seems to slavishly worship Shakespeare (myself included and I would assert with good reason) and yet those people griped about my fanfiction including contractions, slang, and informal usage in dialogue. Whatever! I felt like the Silm fandom freed me of the need to let the naysayers alter my vision.

I finally worked a tattoo into a Tolkien fanfiction just this past month. I had one in my novel The Princess and the Horse Lord and under immense pressure and objections from people reading the early chapters of it in serial on HASA, finally was persuaded to take it out! I wish I had not caved in now. It really was hilarious and would have given me another thing to add to the arsenal of age-appropriate decisions that Elves and Men could tease my young princess about throughout that novel.

Way too late now! If I could give a brand new young fanfic writer any advice it would be to use spell-check and be true to yourself and your own version of the story.

Oh you know I love your yammering and don't give a fig about typos! If I have my druthers and can make Drupal work for this site, everyone will be able to edit their own reviews so you can angst over them then. ;)

I loved the tattoo story immensely. I'm sorry in retrospect that you didn't keep it in TPatHL too, although it's easier to look back and say we should have done more to stand up to canatics then now that we aren't constantly in their midst! This is supposed to be fun, after all. (It's unfun enough at times that I'm wholly unwilling to sacrifice more of the joyful parts!) I also took things out of my stories that I thought would be "too much" for some readers and would bring down unnecessary wrath upon me. Those details didn't seem worth the effort of the defense I'd inevitably have to launch. Thank goodness the fandom (at least the fanworks part) has progressed beyond that for the most part. We complain about how things are now, but writing this essay and looking back at what things were like ten years ago makes me grateful for what we have now. Ten years ago I would not have imagined sharing a story like "The Sovereign and the Priest" or my Fifth Age Aman series! (Unless under the protection of an AU label. I remember being told to defensively label AMC as AU because my Elves sleep with their eyes closed!)

I agree on that advice, and I think that we as a community/subculture have come a long way in making it possible for that to happen without people feeling like they are committing the fanfic equivalent of volunteering to march off with Finrod into the dungeons of Tol-in-Gaurhoth!

fascinating and thought-provoking !

as my mum said to her brother, when he visited her in Mexico and kept commenting on the fine weather: 'this is Mexico, every day is fine !'. 

that is poignant stuff about Fëanor, i had not considered how inexplicable he must have found himself. however, with reference to your point that they came from Middle-earth to Aman already aware of death and the Enemy, Fëanor surely must have been able to confide in survivors of the crossing to Aman ?

curious that Fëanor should say 'first of all the Eldar in Aman' about his death, do you think he has forgotten his mother, or simply does not think her dead ? denial ? a symptom of the storm ?

yeah, making elves 'other' is tricky. i've read alot of sci-fi, the best aliens are in Bob Shaw's book 'Orbitsville'; they are so alien that 'our heroes' literally have nothing to say to them and no way of saying it anyway. ha, even dragons like Smaug are recognizably 'people', with emotions like pride, anger, and greed.  

of course, the marring of Arda began with the Music of Melkor before the world was made, and Aman is within Arda, so it is already flawed. but, for instance, what is Taniquetil really like ? eagles fly in and out with news.  big eagles. either Taniquetil becomes iced with guano, or Elves are shovelling eagle-droppings into wheelbarrows and carting them down to the fields. 

'illusion' is a loaded word, it implies the intent to decieve, but the Valar are naive, and limited, so they do what they can to improve things. they do not force on everyone the view that they have already succeeded, like real world 'leaders' do. 

i mean, the Valar were right, that staying in Aman would have been better for the Eldar. but then the Eldar would not have brought their culture back to Middle-Earth, which was better for middle-earth. did Eru sacrifice the Elves to save Middle-earth ? are Elves merely embodiments of the laws of nature, or symbols of the heroic dead of WW1 ? 

encore, maestro!

Thank you for reading and especially for such a thoughtful comment! ^_^

> Fëanor surely must have been able to confide in survivors of the crossing to Aman ?

It's certainly possible. Finwe himself, I would think, would be able to offer some consolation: As a leader of his people, he surely consoled those who grieved for their lost ones (possibly even lost people himself). I suppose it comes down to the extent that one believes the Valar were able to create this veneer of "deathlessness"; I wonder also how many Elves from Middle-earth regarded their lot in Aman as much improved over what they had in M-e, and whether Feanor might have felt that itself created a wall that prevented them--even if they understood grief--from fully connecting to HIS grief, as specifically occurring within Aman, i.e., grief was something left behind in M-e, which must have been particularly difficult for Feanor to hear, suffering as he did IN AMAN.

All of this is speculation, of course, but this is why we need fanfic. ;)

> curious that Fëanor should say 'first of all the Eldar in Aman' about his death

But he specifically says "slain" first in Aman, i.e., killed by the deliberate act of another (the Valar), which does not apply to Miriel.

> either Taniquetil becomes iced with guano, or Elves are shovelling eagle-droppings into wheelbarrows and carting them down to the fields.

LOL, that's a brilliant image! These are the things I often suspected I wasn't supposed to think about but, once I started writing fanfic, found I couldn't NOT think about.

If this detail appears in a Republic of Tirion story, I'll credit you. ;)

> did Eru sacrifice the Elves to save Middle-earth ?

There's a line from Eru in the Ainulindale that I think explains this (and also strikes me as vaguely sinister to and that I exploited particularly in my story "Hastaina"): "And thou, Melkor, shall see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devisting of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined."

So as you point out, the exile of the Noldor to M-e and all the tragedy that came with it was a necessary instrument to the eventual defeat of first Melkor and then Sauron. I would say, yes, the Elves were sacrificed in a way, though I don't think Eru would phrase it as such: Rather, their suffering produced something more beautiful than if they hadn't suffered. (Hence the sinister aspect! :)

Thank you once again for such a thought-provoking comment and taking the time to read my blatherings in the first place!

First of all - thank you! I stumbled on The Heretic Loremaster while looking for Maglor meta and from there discovered TSWG. I’ve spent the last few days happily rolling around in fics and fabulous essays (loved, loved yours on historical bias! I’ll hopefully stop squeeing and be coherent enough to comment sometime soon).

I’m new to the Silmarillon, and found it through a somewhat circuitous path: I loved LOTR, red some of the appendixes and decided I wasn’t overly interested in reading more. I dipped my toes in the fandom but didn’t fall in love with it - I never stayed long enough to uncover the divisions and different stances.
Fast forward almost 20 years, I discovered the existence of HoME and went -that’s more my cup of tea! Gimme non-fictional minutiae about the building of a word of which I know only a small corner! Lol. And lo-and-behold I fell in love with the rebellious, restless, contentious Noldors. Perfect lords of Elfland they were not, even in their own historical records - always the kind of document one should at least suspect of self aggrandizing, pushing political agendas and, of course, bias (love, love those essays of yours).

“readers' unease with elements of the story that felt too "human" or "not Aman enough," like weapons and predators and Elves who pee”

Frankly this explains a lot about the fics end environment that made me barely dip my toe in back in the day before looking elsewhere.

“Aman isn't a flawless realm but a realm that carries a convincing veneer of flawlessness.”

Yes! This, this exactly!

No wonder they spent their time inventing, studying and improving everything that could get their crafty hands on, they would have had to find ways to escape boredom and stagnation a place where “naught faded nor withered, neither was there any stain upon flower or leaf in that land”. And btw, what would there even be to improve in a truly perfect paradise? Perfect is in the eye of the beholder, and I’m sure to people used to the tender mercies of Melkor Aman felt perfect for a long while.

“One doesn't have to look far to realize that this description is idealized”

Thankfully! The concept of an actual flawless word, of Arda remade and unmarred is terrifying to me. One has to wonder how many of the characters we love would even be allowed to exist in such a word - nevermind Feanor, I’m thinking about 75% of the Noldor we know just disappearing in a puff of smoke, leaving...well, the really boring ones. The unrelatable ones, who never doubt, or rebel, or act unreasonably in haste and stubborness and grief.

“The power of the Valar may be more limited than the idealist description of Valinor in the text would suppose and doesn't seem to extend across the extent of Aman.”

That sounds pretty on point to me.

I’m still not nearly done with HoME but this makes me want to know more about Rumil, and think more about what exactly in the texts was attributed to him and which of his writings were available to Pengolodh (books of lore for the everyday elf? For the palace library? An advanced text meant for other loremasters? A support for teaching young elves the basis?). How heavy an editorial hand did he use on Rumil’s works? How much idealization from an elf who hadn’t ever seen Valinor was heaped on the original idealization put in by an elf who escaped Melkor and survived a hard journey to get to this safe paradise? And how much Rumil’s later works were trying to deal with the seeds of rebellion and unrest by going all “you don’t know how good we have it here”? What was the -conscious or unconscious- agenda there?

I’m also thinking that while the writings on the creation of the word, the journey and the noontide of Valinor are definitely based on Rumil’s work things get a bit more complicated around the darkening of the trees - It sounds like a stretch that Rumil would have had the time to update his works with the latest news and then give them to somebody who dragged them to Middle Earth when most of the Noldors were busy “departing in haste”. Were those parts added during the first years spent on Middle Earth by some unknown author, before Pengolodh was born? Were they added by Pengolodh? Those parts don’t feel like his hand (or his biases) to me. But then again I think at some point Tolkien was imagining that the human author of the Silmarillion was in Aman and not in middle earth when he got his hands on the source texts/had his chat with Pengolodh so who knows?

Sorry about the endless blather, my mind is going through possibilities like a hamster on speed :)

No apologies needed! Having done intermittent work on historical bias in Tolkien's works for several years now, this is exciting stuff! Once you see it, you can't unsee it, and it shows up everywhere. I totally get it--I've been on that hamster wheel a couple of time myself! :)

Gimme non-fictional minutiae about the building of a word of which I know only a small corner!

YES. I feel exactly the same. That the work we do as readers of "The Silmarillion and its related works" bears a strong resemblance to the work of historians and scholars is not, to me, a coincidence as far as explaining why it has occupied me now for eighteen (!!) years. It's like putting together a puzzle where 75% of the pieces are missing.

I have to laugh that the "non-peeing Elf" stories turned you off given the grief I sometimes got for my "too realistic" Elves back in the day. I did have a reader tell me they were abandoning my Feanorian novel Another Man's Cage because my Elves peed too much in it. Well, I can't complain ... I did do it to be provocative so I got the response I was aiming for, I guess!

And btw, what would there even be to improve in a truly perfect paradise?

I've always felt like this was a crux of Feanor's unhappiness in Aman. Where is the joy in invention, creation, discovery, when those things make no difference? Bring about no improvements to anyone's already-perfect lives?

I think Middle-earth appealed to him because he knew his talents would be useful there, not merely an adornment to an already "perfect" realm. Something built/made/created/invented there had the possibility to improve and reshape the lives of the people who lived there.

The unrelatable ones, who never doubt, or rebel, or act unreasonably in haste and stubborness and grief.

Yeah, and these aren't people, and stories without conflict aren't much of stories (in my opinion), which is why I think LeGuin's concept of Elfland is so fundamentally flawed, at least once one stops holding it at arm's length, as a place that could be visited but never actually is, and bothers to actually go there. Even in the absence of cataclysmic conflicts, people still find reason to "doubt, rebel, and act unreasonably" (to borrow your words!), even if it's over something dumb like who gets the nicer pen. Fantasy being fantasy, sure, we can write characters with no inclination to conflict, but I questions whether our conflict-ridden human brains could even comprehend--much less enjoy stories about--them. They seem damned boring to me! :D

Re: Rumil and Pengolodh ... I have also thought a lot about untangling which parts of the text belong to whom and seeing if and how they differ. It hasn't gone beyond "thinking about it" thanks to always putting my historical bias work on the backburner in favor of other projects: a bunch of fanfiction studies opportunities to dropped on me and, of course, rebuilding this website for the better part of the last year. That's going to change now that the site is done! I'm on spring break for the next week and hoping to pick up work on a paper I started research for last year, before the pandemic sent my life into an odd sort of chaos. (I'm a teacher, so that last year has been ... interesting, to say the least.)

The gap between when Rumil would have written and Pengolodh's birth is so enticing to think about. What the heck even happened there? Who kept the histories ... if anyone? Did Pengolodh pick up with the oral tradition when he was old enough? That was probably in Gondolin, based on the timelines we have, leaving him with very limited sources (as I've mentioned in I think everything I've written on historical bias). Tolkien's choice here is just so interesting. In my wilder imaginings, I always want to believe he meant to pair Pengolodh's work with the same story told by a Feanorian loremaster.

Anyway! Thank you for the long and thoughtful comment, which was the perfect kickoff to my work for the next week!