another online conference

This weekend's was co-sponsored by the Tolkien Society (UK-based, though very international) and the Tolkien Society of Serbia, and Saturday's papers were to be in Serbian. I was busy anyway, so I skipped that, and listened to as much as I could - not much, as it turned out - of Sunday's in English.

The best one I heard was a presentation by Erik Jampa Andersson on the historical framing of the legendarium. He talked lucidly and with command of the material about the purported fictional translations, and about the real-world historical setting, postulating that Tolkien pulled back from the initial idea of a mythological English origin story to something set further and further back in history,* to the point - Andersson said - that the legends could be depicted as the origins not just of English or even broadly European myths, but more generally - so as to authorize anybody to write Tolkien fanfic or create media adaptations? I wasn't quite clear what the argumentative point was here.

Andersson then segued into discussion of media adaptations in general, and here I lost more of his thread. Noting Tolkien's belief that drama was naturally hostile to fantasy, producing mechanical tricks which strain to generate secondary belief, Andersson simultaneously argued that viewers of fiction films can't be totally immersed into the experience because they can't forget that they're watching actors and not the 'real' people, but also that a movie, because it is visual and auditory, not just textual, 'cements' that version of the story in viewers' minds, making them think that's the 'correct' version.

This ties in with my argument about media colonization - that you can't just ignore an effective movie and take the book down from the shelf, because the movie will be in the head - but Andersson was more interested in contrasting this 'cementing' with Tolkien's preference for unreliable narration.

Here I thought he went a little far. It's true that Tolkien experimented with writing stories that were factually unreliable within the fictive universe, but I think you can tell which ones those are, and while there are small points in The Lord of the Rings which are unknown or unanswered, the oft-used trope of claiming Sauron as the hero and depicting the book as a giant libel on him does not, I think, fall into that category. I mean, you can write that, but don't claim Tolkien's imprimatur on it.

*Andersson said what I've also noted, which that it is often difficult to explain to people that Tolkien's legendarium is set - as Andersson very nicely put it - not in an imaginary place, but in a real place in an imaginary time.