Mythcon report

Since the pandemic, the Mythopoeic Society has moved its annual conference in alternating years online, and this year's online one was last weekend. I didn't get to much, being busy with reviews, but I did attend a couple panels and papers.

The theme of the conference was to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the publication of the Society's first anthology, Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J.R.R. Tolkien. For a Guest of Honor speech, we had the two editors of the anthology, Janet Brennan Croft and Leslie A. Donovan, reminiscing about envisaging the anthology, putting it together, and publishing it. They also talked about their own personal experiences with Tolkien. Janet asked herself why, as a young female reader, she hadn't been irritated by a novel with so few female characters in it. She said she found the answer later when she read Melanie A. Rawls's essay on "The Feminine Principle in Tolkien" - an essay reprinted in Perilous and Fair, making it easier to find. Tolkien's favored male characters have traits associated with women: they're caring, introspective, intuitive. Both Elrond and Aragorn are healers. And so forth.

At the other end of the conference was a panel including several contributors to Perilous and Fair. They talked about what scholarly work they're doing now - often research into newer fantasy, much of which hasn't gotten much scholarly attention yet. Someone pointed to an article online which seemed to me, when I read it, to be reinventing Melanie Rawls's feminine principle. Great minds ... There was also news that more anthologies are in the works following on from what Perilous and Fair did. Tolkien is a multifarious author, and it's impressive how many readings of his work are possible without giving the sense that the scholar is stretching the text to fit.

There were several papers on the forgotten or little-known women of Tolkien's imagination: papers on Aredhel, Melian, the Corrigan (know who that is?), and Robert T. Tally's truly virtuoso paper on the unexaminable topic - because absolutely zero is known about them, but they must have existed - of Orc women. Rob used Tolkien's distasteful comment that Orcs physically resembled "Mongol-types" to extrapolate onto Orcs the customs of Mongols of the Genghis Khan era - if the men went to war, some women went too, and the rest stayed home and ruled the kingdom in the men's absence, applying that to Azog and his son Bolg - after Azog was killed, what role might Bolg's mother have played?

Saturday evening I got to the Tolkien trivia contest. Log on and the moderator would assign you to a team by sending you to a breakout room. I was a little late arriving and was gratified by my team's pleased reaction that I was joining them. We won the contest, too. And I didn't guess all the answers: it was someone else who remembered that the Westron name for Eregion was Hollin. But I knew that before Tolkien read chunks of The Lord of the Rings into a friend's tape recorder, what he first recited was the Lord's Prayer. To exorcise the machine, he said. And, being Tolkien, he recited it in Gothic.