• they/them

plural system in Seattle, WA (b. 1974)
lots of fictives from lots of media, some horses, some dragons, I dunno. the Pnictogen Wing is poorly mapped.

host: Mx. Kris Dreemurr (they/them)

chief messenger and usual front: Mx. Chara or Χαρά (they/them)

other members:
Mx. Frisk, historian (they/them)
Monophylos Fortikos, unicorn (he/him)
Kel the Purple, smol derg (xe/xem)
Pim the Dragon, Kel's sister (she/her)


I used to be way more into J. R. R. Tolkien than I am now, and I eagerly read a fair amount of the ancillary material that his son Christopher published from discarded drafts and fragments of his father's work. Unfinished Tales, in particular, contains a number of fascinating scraps which round out certain points of Tolkien's lore, like what happened exactly to Isildur, how Théodred son of Théoden died in the battle leading up to Gandalf's arrival at Edoras in The Two Towers, and so forth.

Fun reading, if you're totally into Tolkien's subcreation and want to know every detail of it. But does it work as fiction?

"The Quest of Erebor", another of the Unfinished Tales fragments, serves to illustrate my point. Christopher Tolkien unearthed two drafts of material that his father had originally intended for The Lord of the Rings; the premise is that, after the main battles of the War of the Ring are over, Gandalf is at leisure to explain just why he was ever concerned with Erebor and Smaug in the first place. This touches upon a weak seam in the fabric of Tolkien's subcreation: The Hobbit meshes poorly with The Lord of the Rings. It's not just mismatched in tone, but in terms of the larger world of Middle-Earth that's suggested by events: "The Necromancer", in particular, is a generic offscreen villain in The Hobbit, without a hint of the world-ending menace that's presented by Sauron in The Lord of the Rings. Evidently Tolkien wanted a better bridge between the two tales.

And...it doesn't work. It really doesn't work, even though it's still fun writing. Gandalf tries to place the quest for Erebor into the greater context of the War of the Ring, explaining that it made sense to neutralize the threat of Smaug, for fear that Sauron could make ruinous use of Smaug's awesome draconic powers. It's reasonable-seeming, but now Gandalf's got to explain why sending a slightly comical gang of dwarves and a hobbit on a treasure-hunt was a sensible way to go about this important job. (Gandalf really tries to sell it, too, talking about how if it weren't for Thorin and company, all Eriador might have been laid waste during the War.) The old mage tries his best but we're left in Thorin's position, wondering whether Gandalf hasn't completely lost it. Why does it all somehow work out anyway? Here Gandalf has to lean very heavily on the fates, just as he does with Frodo ("you were meant to have the Ring"), and that's arguably weak writing. "It was fate!" shows the author's hand just a bit too clearly through the Fourth Wall.

Maybe The Hobbit is simply irreconcilable with The Lord of the Rings? That seems a bit pessimistic.

~Chara of Pnictogen


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