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I discovered The Hobbit in sixth grade, The Lord of the Rings in junior high, and thought it the best thing ever written. Heroic fantasy! Elves, dwarfs, and wizards fighting the Dark Lord in an alternate Medieval world! Infinitely superior to sword and sorcery (about mighty-thewed barbarian heroes in an ancient world), and to those dreary naturalistic novels about high school basketball stars that teachers were always pushing at us. Even better than science fiction.
Around eighth or ninth grade, my friend Darry and I started working on our own alternate Medieval world -- if we couldn't find a "good place" in our world, why not make one of our own?
We developed a gazetteer-full of new countries, wrote historical timelines spanning thousands of years, compiled detailed genealogical charts, and invented a dozen languages of Elves, Dwarves, and Men (well, some words in each). We got ideas from fantasy novels, myths, folklore, the histories of obscure countries, and anything else we could get our hands on:
The country of Runoe after forgetting the name of Runde Island in My Village in Norway.
The forest-dwelling Colemonas of Jotunheimr after the Norse giants and Coleman camping equipment.
The Dark Lord, Moi, after a book in the junior high library, In Search of Moi (we hadn't studied French yet, so we pronounced it Moh-ye)
We worked every day at lunchtime and after school, on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, during holidays.
Fantasy worlds must be used as the setting for novels, so by eighth grade we were working on a plot about a Midwestern teenager named Jim swept away through a time-space warp to the world of Toulbium, where he gathered companions to fight the Dark Lord Moi.
Everyone we told about the story screamed “You’re plagiarizing The Lord of the Rings!”
Everyone we told about the story screamed “You’re plagiarizing The Lord of the Rings!”
But we patiently pointed out that:
1. Jim is rescued by Ray when he enters the world of Toulbium. Frodo and Sam Frodo and Sam already know each other.
2. Jim and Ray travel west to Montenia, not east to Mordor.
3. There are Eluses instead of Elves.
4. Jim is black. There aren't any black characters in Tolkien.
5. Montenia is surrounded by dark forests, whereas Mordor is bounded by mountains.
6. Instead of throwing the One Ring into Mount Doom, Jim throws a magic sword into Pair Daedeni, the Cauldron of Life.
7. Jim becomes a born-again Christian. (I was Nazarene, remember?)
Every Saturday we took the bus downtown to Readmore Book World to spend our allowance on heroic fantasy novels for research. They were part of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, bright, shining paperbacks with evocative titles: The King of Elfland's Daughter, The Broken Sword, The Wood Beyond the World, Beyond the Golden Stair, Golden Cities Far.
Every Saturday we took the bus downtown to Readmore Book World to spend our allowance on heroic fantasy novels for research. They were part of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, bright, shining paperbacks with evocative titles: The King of Elfland's Daughter, The Broken Sword, The Wood Beyond the World, Beyond the Golden Stair, Golden Cities Far.
But there were some problems:
More after the break
More after the break
1. Most of them were unreadable, reprints of stories published in the 1920s, with characters using stilted Medieval diction.
2. If you looked closely (or not so closely), you could see that the cover art showed naked women. Beefcake was highly stylized, when you could find it at all (here the Welsh god Manawyddan wades across the English Channel).
The cover of Imaginary Worlds, a survey of the fantasy genre, morphs into a woman's face. I just noticed that while researching this article.
The King of Elfland's Daughter is about the Young Man's quest to meet and win her.
3. The male heroes were entirely obsessed with goddesses, fairy queens, and damsels in distress described in loving detail.. The Well of the World's Desiring, the Goal of the Quest, the Reason for Living is always, invariably, the Eternal Feminine.
The Well at the World's End is not about the well, but about a woman of such supreme beauty that she must have drunk from the well. Ralph wins her.
The Sorceror's Ship sends a young man from our world to Nanich, where he pilots a ship and wins The Woman of His Dreams.
Phantastes sends a young man into a dream world in search of "The Embodiment of Female Desire."
Even The Lord of the Rings ends with Frodo sailing off to the Undying Lands, and Sam abandoning the love of comrades for a wife and kids.
We reluctantly put a Girl of His Dreams into the last chapter, for Jim to meet and win, but writing those scenes made me feel sad and sort of guilty. I couldn't articulate why.
Darry and I remained friends through high school. Then I came out to him, and he abruptly left the room and never spoke to me again (well, not for 30 years).
I tried to revise the novel into something publishable in college and during my horrible year in Hell-fer-Sartain, Texas, but always ran into that stumbling block: why did Jim have to fall in love with a girl? It ruined the pure, true story of Ray and Jim crossing the wide world together.
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