Cascade Moot

It was a whim, of sorts. I spent Saturday in Seattle at Cascade Moot, one of the numerous regional meetings sponsored by Signum University, Corey Olsen's Tolkien-oriented study group, and presented the John Wain paper I'd written for Mythcon. The moot's theme was "The Importance of Secondary and Tertiary Characters," so I retitled it "John Wain: A Tertiary Inkling."

About 35 people, some older but mostly 30s-40s by the look of them, gathered in a ground-floor classroom in what is otherwise mostly a dormitory (though you wouldn't know it from what we saw of it) of the University of Washington, but it wasn't really necessary to be there, because there was also a large Zoom attendance. In fact six of the ten papers were given over Zoom, which is why it was a whim for me to travel this far.

Five of the ten papers, not counting mine, were Tolkienian in topic. Despite some of the presenters confessing nervousness at giving a presentation, they were fine, though more than one presenter pronounced "Aragorn" as "Aragon." The best papers were close readings of the texts of minor characters' appearances, squeezing out what could be fairly deduced about them: a theory that Goldberry is the personification of a yellow water lily; a comparison of three encounters with gatekeepers in LR, each introducing a new culture to the story in what are quite different expressions of the same basic concept. The same was true of some of the non-Tolkien papers: the very little that's said of Mrs. Hudson, the landlady, in the Sherlock Holmes stories, but she's been expanded on in pastiches and film adaptations; and the evolution of the concept of a "Scooby gang" and how it differs from an Avengers-like collection of heroes or a hero-and-sidekick situation. Besides Scooby-Doo and Buffy, The Goonies and Stranger Things (neither of which I've seen) were cited as having the distinctive characteristics of a collection of diverse misfits who contribute individual skills to form a protagonist group greater than any of them.

More broadly, we had a firm reading of Eowyn from a woman who understood that her driving force was despair, and who suggested that victory opened the future for her and offered Faramir as a non-military role model, thus leading to her change of heart; and an even firmer reading of absent mothers, mostly in the Silmarillion, and how they're blamed for their children's misdeeds. Somewhat more dubious was a paper on Beregond which ran out of time to address the character's distinct appeal and human qualities after having spent an enormous amount of time on categorical throat-clearing of unnecessarily trying to distinguish primary, secondary, and tertiary characters in LR: why are you obsessed with these fine distinctions? what difference does it make?

The day got off to an awkward start when it turned out the AV setup hadn't been tested beforehand, and what was supposed to be the 15-minute introduction turned into 20 minutes of computer troubleshooting, and we only got back onto schedule when one paper on some minor character in some book I didn't know turned out to be so minor the paper was exceedingly short. But it mostly worked out well, and my own paper, which came last, attracted some interest and a few favorable comments, as well as a number of people now determined to read Diana Glyer's The Company They Keep.

I took the light rail in from the suburbs where I'm staying. Parking at the station was dicey as the lots have been hijacked by people using them as free airport parking for the holiday weekend (there's a station at the airport), but a few spaces had appeared early Saturday morning and I was on my way.