I‘ve never made a secret that I do a lot of reading. Indeed, I’ve done rather the opposite, and there’ve been a few times that I’ve done it to such excess as has prompted people to punch me in the face. I’ve also not made a secret that I’ve read Tolkien and that I’ve read about Tolkien; it shows up in many entries to this webspace, but perhaps most emphatically here, here, here, and here. I’ve got other stuff I’m doing on the subject, as well; I’ll discuss that more later. It should come as no surprise, then, that when I saw “Tolkien’s Deplorable Cultus” by Robert T. Tally, Jr., pop up on one of my social media feeds, I was interested, and I read it. And, given my history of such things, it should not be a surprise that I feel the need to engage with the piece by responding to it.

Tally’s central argument is that Tolkien’s Legendarium is amenable to a Marxist reading that can be used to at least partially counteract the vocal hypercapitalist / neofascist actors and their supporters that are appropriating the Legendarium and, by extension, fantasy literature as a genre. For him, “Fantasy is fundamentally the literature of alterity, a means of empowering the imagination to think of the world differently,” and that a Marxist reading of Tolkien’s work and the genre for which that work is the dominant, guiding example has value in “exposing its ideological limits while also limning its potential for helping us to imagine radical alternatives.” Although some might have problems with Tally’s specific framing, I think he is correct; the text does stand multiple interpretations, fantasy is necessarily concerned with alterity and thus inherently offers access to other ways of thinking (and perhaps being), and pointing out the limitations of a thing does not preclude identifying and making good use of its potentials.

Tally does well to note the limitations of his proposed reading, commenting at some length on popular and academic receptions of Tolkien’s work as reinforcing hierarchies along racial and what might well be called ethnic lines. I am not sure that the associated contention that fantasy literature at large is thus received is accurate–and Tally also voices some frustration of it in a list of fantasy authors whose politics are decidedly out of step with such a world-view–although it is certainly the case that a great many fantasy authors echo, follow, emulate, or parrot Tolkien to a greater or lesser extent, such that the Tolkienian tradition of fantasy literature remains dominant in English-language texts. (It might in others, as well, but I am not sufficiently proficient in other languages to look into it at this point. It might also be argued that I’m not sufficiently proficient in English to know what I’m talking about, although I think it would be a harder case to make.) Tally also does well to point out those features of Tolkien’s writings that seem to animate vocal hypercapitalist / neofascist actors and their supporters in their seizing upon the Legendarium as support for their own positions, even if there are places in the article where I’d be comforted by seeing some more specific citations. And, on a more personal note, I do appreciate Tally’s identification of the inconsistencies in the actors’ stated positions, the ways in which what they claim to value fails to align with what they act as if they value; none of us is completely consistent, especially over time, but there are levels and levels of irony.

(As an aside, I do not like the citations provided. The information’s fine, so far as I can tell; I just like to have citations where I can see them. But that’s more an issue of the platform than the person standing on it; I’ve commented on such things before.)

Correspondences or resonances with other readings I have done come to mind as I further consider Tally’s article. For example, when Tally remarks on the seeming reliance of the vocal hypercapitalist / neofascist actors and their supporters on Jackson’s films for their understanding of Tolkien’s works, I was put in mind of Sturtevant’s Middle Ages in Popular Imagination. I also found myself in mind of a number of pieces by Helen Young when reading Tally’s discussion of the embedded racial hierarchies at work in Tolkien, including but not limited to commentaries early on in Travels in Genre and Medievalism. The series “Race, Racism, and the Middle Ages” on The Public Medievalist also came to mind for me (partly because of overlaps, I admit). I understand well that a journal article can only take in so much at a time, however.

I think I will have some use for Tally’s piece in some work of my own that I’m doing (again, I’ll talk more about it later). I think I may have some use for his ideas in other work that I’m doing; given my predilections, I have to wonder how Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings or Soldier Son works (and I am going to get to those, I promise) would work under such an interpretive rubric. As with so many other things, though, that’s a “someday” project. I’ve got more than enough to do right now, and there’s never as much time to do it as might be best.

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I‘ve written a time or two before about excursions my family and I have taken, going out and about in the vicinity of our own little part of the world. In truth, it’s an odd thing for me; I’m a homebody (if I put things politely, which not everybody does or should), not inclined to “get out” much, so trips further than going to the gym, to work, to church, or to the grocery store aren’t commonplaces for me. That’s part of why I write about them. I know that my field trips don’t show up as being the kinds of things of which major events are made for a lot of other people, they stand out to me for their relative rarity, even as I am aware that they don’t go far into the field at all.

The most recent little expedition we took was this past weekend, one last hurrah before my daughter started school. (She returned to class on Wednesday. It’s a late start, I know.) We returned to the vicinity of Lost Maples State Natural Area, one of the gems of the Texas Hill Country, lodging for a few days at one of the properties operated by Foxfire Cabins. We’d stayed at another of the properties about this time last year, finding it a generally enjoyable experience, and we decided we’d work to make it something of a family tradition. Hence the return this past weekend, when many of the area schools had already started back up, making for a less crowded time for us to enjoy.

My wife, my daughter, one of her friends (whom I’m still considering how to pseudonymize; I don’t generally discuss minor children by name for privacy reasons), and I made our way down to the location on Friday afternoon, my wife having taken off work and my own job being such that I’ve not been in office on Fridays for some months, now. Our drive was reasonably good, although we got off to something of a slow start, as there were some errands that needed running before we could pack up and head out. Too, we got delayed along the way; stopping off for lunch took longer than expected, as did going to the grocery store along the way. But, as ever, the drive was scenic, with the rolling hills parting at times to offer spectacular views of hardy trees stretching to the limits of vision in the distance.

We got to our lodging, the Alta Vista cabin operated by Foxfire, in good form around five pm. A two-bedroom, one-bathroom place with a wraparound porch, firepit, grill, and picnic table, the cabin–and the neighboring Buena Vista–offers remarkable quiet and excellent views of the towering hills enfolding FM337. There was a bit of a trick to finding it (including a steep drive up an unpaved drive), to be sure, and another window unit would have been welcome, but it was from the outset a good place and restful.

The next morning, all four of us on the trip slept in until close to nine. After breakfast, we went to the main Foxfire facility, right on the upper Sabinal River. There, my wife and the girls swam a bit, the latter playing with the children of another group of families that were having something of an annual reunion on the property; given that I swim just about as well as a rock (about which more later), I abstained. My wife and I got some information about local happenings, as well, and we decided that we would make arrangements to take the Frio Bat Flight tour that evening. Right off the intersection of TX127 and FM2690, the tour takes visitors to the entrance of a cave system that hosts between 10 and 12 million Mexican freetail bats–a colony whose emergence shows up on weather radar as often as not. The guide was informative, and the setting was beautiful–although I was sad to see the falcons hunting the emerging colony miss so many of their attempts.

We drove back to Alta Vista by way of Utopia, missing much of the scenery in the darkness that followed the bats’ emergence. After another long sleep, and a Sunday morning breakfast, though, we were back at it, heading down FM337 to Leakey (pronounced “Lake-ee,” for those not familiar) to see about visiting a river outfitter and floating the Frio. The one we visited in town gave an…unhelpful answer, but the next one we called, Happy Hollow in Concan, was much more accommodating. With them, we made arrangements to rent inner tubes and be shuttled upstream on the Frio River–I believe to the crossing on FM1120, but I could not see road signs from where I was sitting–to enter the river and float on down. While the water was generally low, and I managed to scare my daughter and entertain her friend with the prospect of my drowning where the river got deeper (she had complained of nearly falling through one tube, so I switched her to one with a net, and I went into the water more energetically than I expected), it was a generally peaceful, pleasant experience. Much of the float was shaded, and the people still on the banks so late in the season were friendly.

After the float, a picnic lunch, and more swim time for my wife and the girls–I abstained again, not wanting to tempt matters–we drove back down to TX127, where we put in at The Frio Float, a little ice-cream shop right on US83. I got a small cup of ice cream that I ate with delight; my wife and my daughter’s friend each got floats with Dublin Bottling Works Texas Red Creme Soda, and my daughter got a big helping of a strange concoction of ice cream and toppings. The three of them overestimated their capacities, which made for a bit of a delicate drive back to Alta Vista (once again by way of Utopia, although with much better views in the daylight than in the previous darkness), but things were well settled by the time we got back and lit up both the grill and the firepit on site.

Monday morning, we didn’t sleep in near so much, as we had to eat our breakfast, pack our stuff, and skedaddle. My wife and I both had to go back to work on Tuesday, and the girls had their Wednesday start of school; in preparation for the latter, there was a Meet the Teacher Night we were pleased to attend. It was a sadness to leave, as it most always is to return to the real world from a vacation from it, but we’re already looking towards next year, and we got back to our lives with more vigor for having had the time away.

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I‘ve been adding more to my ongoing Fedwren Project than Matthew Oliver’s piece or the work of Busse and Farley–albeit slowly, the demands of daily life outside academe being what they are. Most recently (to this writing), I read Benjamin Bruening’s “Word Formation Is Syntactic: Adjectival Passives in English,” which I entered into the Fedwren Project here. (It is the fiftieth entry in the project, although I am listing alphabetically rather than when I encounter and annotate the pieces.) There’s a summary of the article there, and Bruening himself provides an abstract, so I don’t feel any need to give another one here. I do, however, think I need to offer some response to the article here–not one in which I point out what I see as problems with the piece, but one that leads me to some reflection on what I see as a tendency in scholarship involving Robin Hobb–now that I feel I’ve got enough material described that I can speak with some certainty about such things.

As might be guessed from the title, Bruening’s article is a linguistics argument. I’ve got some training in linguistics; it’s effectively a requirement for working as a medievalist, and, as I noted long ago, my own graduate training had specific guidelines about it. (It’s been a while since I was there; things might’ve changed in the interim.) Too, my wife’s formal academic training is as a linguist, and, as might be expected, many of her friends from her adventures in New York City–on which I joined her for many years–were in similar training. I can safely claim, therefore, to have some familiarity with the discipline, although I am not a specialist in it by any means (insofar as I am a specialist in any academic field at this point in my life). Even so, Bruening’s article was…challenging…to read–but then, academic wok is written by specialists to other specialists, and I am, again, not a specialist.

(I do wonder what reaction Bruening has faced in challenging the orthodoxies he does in the article, however. He does seem to say he thinks a lot of people are wrong, and it’s possible they might be, or that he’s right–which isn’t the same thing. But it’s also the case that academics are all too human, and there’s no shortage of ongoing grudges attested in the literature of several disciplines. [I point at a small example here.] There are stories of fistfights, even–some of which are true; I saw one. It’s a personal curiosity, but one I’d not mind having indulged.)

Despite the challenge, however, I did manage to make my way through the piece. And I noted in it the use of Hobb’s work as an example of natural English language text, a use that follows the same pattern a number of other works I’ve annotated for the Fedwren Project display. It seems that several social scientists read Hobb; they make use of her work as examples of community formation, word formation, and the like. I suppose it suggests her appeal beyond “the usual suspects” (people like me who get accused of not being part of “the real world” or of doing work that has any utility or sense behind it), since it’s not likely the researchers in question would have recoursed to her without being familiar with her work already. I suppose, too, that it suggests Hobb’s writing style as a model worth mimicking, since it does seem to be accessible to non-literary types and even to machine learning. Certainly, there are worse examples for such to follow, although I have to wonder about issues of consent and compensation.

There is, of course, more work for me to do on the Fedwren Project. I have other articles printed out and ready for me to read and remark upon, as well as others in PDF waiting for similar attention. There’s a dissertation waiting for me to read, too, and I am certain there is other work out in the world that I don’t know about quite yet. How much, if any, of it falls into this same pattern, and what other patterns of research are out there, I look forward to seeing.

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