I have long immersed myself in the world of fantasy. To me, it is both an important part of my character and an essential element of my collection of fiction. Fantasy allows us to investigate themes of humanity in a much more intense and visceral way than in conventional novels, because in fantasy we are allowed to see humans in contrast with other beings. We can compare humans with elves, gnomes, dwarves, goblins, giants, vampires, mermaids, and many other non-human creatures. We can examine the depths of human nature by asking what if? By putting humans into a world that is distinctly Other, we can explore the question what would humans be like here? In other words, what makes us human?
Sometimes, I am disappointed in fantasy novels because this part of this humanocentric equation is not handled to my satisfaction. The elves, gnomes, dwarves, mermaids, et al, are basically subsets of humans rather than discrete beings. Elves are often portrayed as the kindly, ethereal nature-lovers and fonts of immortal wisdom; dwarves are the gruff miners and engineers who are looking for resources and material advantage. The trouble is, we all know people just like those elves and dwarves, so they do not appear different from us. They appear the same as humans, but are more limited.
Dungeons and Dragons made this mistake in its early incarnations. First, elves were a race and a class unto themselves. Then they could have the same professions as humans, but they weren't permitted to be as good at them for the sake of game balance. This doesn't tell us anything about who elves are: how they think, what they're like, how they see things differently than humans. Because D&D began as a set of dice-driven combat simulations, it treats elves as little more than a special human with a specific set of tactical advantages and limitations.
So I thought: when I write my fantasy novel, the alien creatures should really be alien. What's the point, after all, of creating a different race of beings, but not allowing them to be different?
Of course, D&D got their inspiration from early fantasy writers, Tolkien among them. I presume for this audience I needn't explain who Tolkien was, or describe the long shadow he has cast over the world of fantasy fiction. He was a giant in the field — neither the first, nor the author with the biggest catalog, but almost certainly the most influential. Tolkien's world, despite all its magic and wonder, had some ... problems. Or more to the point, I had some problems with Tolkien's world, problems which became more pronounced the older I got. I've already mentioned the limitations of non-humans in fantasy, circumscribing them to their narrow roles. Let us now turn to Tolkien's problem telling stories about women.
As I child, I'd never noticed that Tolkien's world had almost no women. In fact, in the main body of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, only a tiny number of female characters are even mentioned. I can think of seven: Arwen (who appears in an appendix), Galadriel (who has no effect on the plot), Tom Bombadil's wife Goldberry (who does nothing), Rose (whose only function is to wait for Sam to come home), the unnamed healer in Minas Tirith (whose function is limited to commenting on how awesome Aragorn is), Lobelia Sackville-Baggins (whose only function is to covet Bilbo's silverware), and Éowyn. In fact, apart from Éowyn, the female character with arguably the greatest influence upon the plot is a giant spider named Shelob — who is essentially a barely-agentive booby trap that a male character leads another male character into. She's hardly a character at all. Tolkien, in short, was not very good to women in his stories. It's sometimes difficult for me to read Tolkien and put this fact out of my mind, at least the way I used to. Lord of the Rings is very much a boys'-day-out book. The game of D&D, and the cornucopia of fantasy games and novels that likewise followed in Tolkien's footsteps, have been little better. To paraphrase Monty Python, "There's no room for sentiment in big fantasy fiction." (He's right you know.)
I would like to say that this isn't all Tolkien must answer for. No, there is another problem with his novels, and that is Time.
Things happen, often for good reason. This is particularly true when it comes to inventions and discoveries, from technology to social structures. For an example, let us look at the gladius — which we will define here as the short Roman sword lacking a crossguard and knucklebow. For those of you who are not sword aficionados, a) what are you doing here, and b) the crossguard is the bit that sticks out on both sides of the sword to protect the hand, and c) the knucklebow is the curved bit that encircles and protects the fingers from getting gruesomely chopped off.
You might wonder why a gladius was considered effective, considering it lacked these specific hand protections, yet it was a very successful weapon for a very successful empire for quite a long time. This is because it was designed for a specific purpose: to be wielded as a stabbing weapon in a shield line. Each soldier is lined up with a shield to protect himself and the man on his left; each sword is stabbed at the enemy from between the shields. All those extra pointy bits would get hung up on something, caught on the edge of a shield or hooked in a belt or buckle, and endanger the soldier. The narrow, sleek gladius was perfectly designed for its purpose. It didn't need to be changed, because it worked.
What does this have to do with Tolkien and Time? Consider Bilbo Baggins again: sitting in his nice comfortable hobbit-hole, with his larder full of pies and seed cakes, his crockery, his pocket handkerchief, his waistcoat with the brass buttons, his chair by the mantel, and a clock upon the mantel. He mentions it specifically to Gandalf: "I didn't get your letter on the mantel until 11:15, to be precise." "Well, don't be precise!" says Gandalf.
So Bilbo ... had a clock. A clock accurate enough to tell the quarter hour. Nobody else in Hobbiton had a clock, at least that we know of. There wasn't even a clock tower. Does this bring up a whole host of questions for you? It does for me. How did Bilbo set that clock so that he would know it was accurate? How did Gandalf know when to meet Bilbo — do the Istari also carry clocks around? Does Gandalf have a pocketwatch? When Gandalf zooms around the map, as he so often does, riding on Shadowfax or on the backs of eagles, is he setting his pocketwatch to local noon time everywhere he goes?
Just like the gladius, the clock was invented for a purpose. The ancients had a water clock called a horologium by the Romans and klepsydra by the Greeks. It was basically a basin of water, with a second interfitting basin with a hole in it. The upper basin would float, at least for a while; the hole was calibrated to admit water to the upper basin at a predetermined rate. On the inside of that upper basin were marks to show the passage of time.. Usually, they were set daily at sunrise, but they were not terribly accurate. Gandalf certainly couldn't carry one around, and I doubt they could accurately register the quarter-hour.
It's not just the mechanism of the clock — that's fairly easy. We must also posit also the acceptance of the clock. It is easy, perhaps, to imagine the utility of a timer, such as might be used to measure the time it takes to cook an egg or to monitor time-sensitive activities like delivering a batch of wet cement. That's relative time, and I'm not concerned with that. What Tolkien showed us by giving Bilbo a clock is that his world accepts an absolute time.
For Bilbo to say "11:15" only means something when the Gandalf knows when that time is too. But why would he? The only reason to have a device to keep track of absolute time in common with others is because society demands it. Society has reasons and expectations for keeping track of time: work, prayer, curfew, navigation, or what have you. The Romans had a bath hour in the afternoon; they had hours set aside for doing business. Later, in Medieval Europe, clock towers governed the laboring classes: when to get up, when to work the fields, when to eat lunch, and so on. As these clock towers were large, expensive mechanisms requiring expertise and upkeep, they were owned (at first) only by the richest people in town — the churches. And the churches had staked a social claim that they should be allowed to keep time for the village, because of the need to remember when to pray, when to have holy days, when to celebrate Easter, and so on. Churches set themselves up as an authority on timekeeping, and the village had accepted it. Later on, during the Age of Sail, we permitted shipyards and navies to become the arbiters of Time. In many seaport cities, a giant red ball, visible from the sea, would descend from a tower at exactly noon. It established the local noon hour to a certain level of precision, to allow captains to set their chronometers aboard ship. Still later came the industrial age, when we came to realize that local noon was not a useful concept when discussing the timetable of a transcontinental train; so we shifted allegiances to permit railroads to watch the clock. Today, we have atomic clocks whose precision lets us regulate such things as global positioning satellites.
What did the hobbits have, on this scale, that would have demanded they collectively agree on the meaning of time? Nothing as far as I can tell; hobbits were farmers, and farms are worked to the season and the sun, not to the clock. Hobbits weren't in charge of gangs of peasants, weren't landowners with tenants who worked the fields. There weren't churches. There was no central authority on time.
Okay, maybe clocks were an invention of the dwarves, you say. Perhaps they came from nearby Bree, where Men lived; they could have begun the habit of timekeeping. But why did Bilbo have one? He had no use for it.
It doesn't stop there. Bilbo had books — which implies a bookmaker. Who is making them, who is buying them? Bilbo has pocket handkerchiefs — which implies a surplus of luxury linen. Bilbo has a gardener — which implies a liquid economy, otherwise he has no means of paying that gardener's salary. Bilbo has silverware, which Lobelia Sackville-Baggins covets — which implies not only that silverware has value, but social value (otherwise everyone would want the cutlery, for no other reason than to melt it down into ingots). The rest of Middle-Earth doesn't appear to be doing a raging business in clocks, books, handkerchiefs, or spoons. Why does Hobbiton have these things?
The Tolkien nerds are already furiously preparing their ripostes. Tolkien was a product of Victorian-era thinking, where men and women did not mix. He was telling the tale of a battle, a story in which women had no major parts to play. Tolkien was introducing us to a world through the eyes of naïve Bilbo Baggins, who knew no more of larger Middle-Earth than Tolkien's reader; to ease this introduction for the reader, he gave Bilbo the arguably familiar trappings of a 19th-century country gentleman: a sitting room, a chair by the fire, a mantle with a clock, a waistcoat, a library, pocket handkerchiefs and so on. The reader is more likely to accept a Secondary World that is, at least initially, of a similar appearance to the Primary World. Haven't I read On Fairy Tales? And so on. You can hear the nerds now, sharpening their keyboards (though why they would do that, I don't know).
But I get it. Tolkien's abuse of Time was a device. More specifically, it was a device that Tolkien thought that he needed. I happen to think he was wrong in this instance.
The same can't be said for the fantasy writers that followed him. In various games and stories, weapons and armor from different centuries, continents apart, are gleefully intermingled because of their cachet. Not because the combinations make sense. "Pikes versus longbows? Katanas versus plate mail? Chainmail bikinis versus crossbows? Why not!" the writers say, throwing everything into the shitheap together.
No. Just ... no. Time doesn't work that way.
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