Magic, p.16
Magic, page 16
There is a tale that is not told in the Iliad, but is referred to in the Odyssey and is elaborated by poets after Homer, to the effect that after the death of Achilles, there was a question as to which of the Greek heroes deserved to take over Achilles’ glorious god-manufactured armor. One of the claimants was Ajax, who was second only to Achilles in strength and was very likely the least intelligent of the heroes, and the other was Odysseus. It was a case of brawn versus brain.
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the story is told particularly well. Ajax stands up to state his case to the assembled Greeks, and tells of the long, harsh battles in which he was a staunch bulwark, in which his mighty arm fended off the Trojans, and of the time he singly defended the ships at a low point in the war.
When I read this for the first time, I was impressed. Ajax convinced me. I didn’t see how it was possible for Odysseus, a fighter of lesser strength, to maintain his claim to the armor. But then, the wise Odysseus arose and totally demolished Ajax’s arguments. It was not simple strength, not the mere clash of sword and shield that was deciding the war, but strategy … policy … thought. I cheered Odysseus and so did the Greeks, and he got the armor. Poor Ajax went mad with frustration and killed himself.
There is a touching passage in the Odyssey that serves as a postscript. Odysseus visits the underworld, and sees relatives and friends who had passed away; including his mother and Achilles. Ajax is there, too, and Odysseus approaches the dead hero with friendly words, but Ajax moves away silently. Even after death, he cannot forgive.
In other cultures, too, there is the occasional tale of brute strength defeated. One of the great stories is that of David and Goliath, the little man defeating the giant by clever choice of weapons. Reynard the Fox defeats the threatening wolves, bears, and lions in the medieval animal tales, and so does Br’er Rabbit in the American folk tales.
In this battle of brains and brawn, however, the audience is never quite at ease with the victory of brains. The uncomplicated Lancelots and Rolands are cheered to the echo, but clever victors are often met with a certain reserve and suspicion. In many post-Homeric legends, Odysseus is represented as an unprincipled schemer and physical coward. The cleverness of the fox and rabbit is usually represented as based on lies and dishonesty.
In legends, the clever character is often envisaged as someone smart enough to control aspects of the universe through his superior knowledge and wisdom. He is a magician or sorcerer. There are occasionally magicians who are on the side of right and who serve the physical hero, as Merlin serves King Arthur. Sometimes, they even are the hero, as Vainamoinen is, for instance, in the Finnish legends.
Very often, though, the magician is the villain, who threatens the hero with sneaky enchantments, who fights from behind the protective wall of his powers. Our poor hero, who fights in the open with simple and honest thwacks of his sword, must somehow reach and destroy the cowardly, unethical magician.
Clearly, the readers are expected to feel that it is noble and admirable for the hero to pit his own superhuman strength against the lesser physiques of his enemies, and also to feel that there is something perfidious about a magician pitting his own superhuman intelligence against the lesser wit of his enemies.
This double standard is very evident in sword-and-sorcery, in which the sword-hero (brawn) is pitted against the sorcery-villain (brain), with brawn winning every time. The convention is, furthermore, that brawn is always on the side of goodness and niceness (a proposition which, in real life, is very dubious). This is similar to the convention in westerns, in which all disputes are decided by which character can draw his gun the fastest and shoot the straightest. It is then understood that the clean and virtuous white hat is always the fastest and straightest shooter, a proposition which must surely be a variety of wishful thinking impossible to justify in any realistic fashion.
Science fiction, in its early days, often fell into this cliché of smart-is-wicked. Think of all the mad scientists who populated the stories published during the first decade of the science-fiction magazines to say nothing of the comic strips and movies ever since. Think of all the Flash Gordons who have pitted their mighty thews, and their stupidity, against the evil intelligence of the Mings—and won.
I don’t say that I don’t enjoy this, too. I particularly like it when it is leavened with a sense of humor, as it was in the case of the television miniseries Wizards and Warriors. However, the fact is that in the history of the large mammalian predators, humanity came out as sovereign by virtue of brain over brawn, and heroic fantasy would reverse the decision and give the victory to the lions and elephants. (If you disapprove of what human beings are doing to the Earth—as I do—you may wish the lions and elephants had won, but I’m not saying that brains are Good, merely that they are Victors.)
Present-day science fiction has, as one of the characteristics that differentiate it from other forms of fiction, a tendency toward the deification of reason. Scientists are sometimes heroes, and intelligence is very frequently the weapon that must be used, even by those who are not scientists, to solve the problems posed. In my own stories, I almost never make use of violence, and even when I do, it is never the means whereby the crisis is resolved. In my stories, it is a case of reason against reason, with the superior brain winning. (And sometimes it is not completely clear that the superior brain represents the cause of Right and Good, for I have the uneasy feeling that Right does not always triumph—or is even always clearly definable.)
The definition of “good science fiction” ought to include, then, the tendency to have problems solved by the use of brains—the human specialty—rather than by the use of stupid strength.
Not all heroic fantasy takes the reverse stand. In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings intelligence is exalted. Nevertheless, I consider the typical sword-and-sorcery tale to be anti–science fiction; to be the very opposite of science fiction. It is for that reason that you are not likely to find anything of the sort published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, unless it is particularly exceptional in its characteristics.
CONCERNING TOLKIEN
IN MY INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST volume of the Isaac’s Universe series, I mentioned briefly that in inventing a multi-intelligence universe to serve as a background for these stories, I was influenced by E. E. Smith’s stories of the Galactic Patrol.
And so I was—but in thinking about the matter since then, I realized that there was a second influence, much stronger than that first one. Why, I thought, did Galactic Patrol spring to mind and not The Lord of the Rings.
Actually, there’s no mystery to it. Galactic Patrol was science fiction while The Lord of the Rings was fantasy—and when I was thinking up the background to Isaac’s Universe, I was in a science fiction mode of thought.
So now let me break away from the bonds of sf and think about The Lord of the Rings.
The author of The Lord of the Rings was John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) who wrote as J. R. R. Tolkien. He was born in South Africa but lived in Great Britain as an Oxford don whose specialty was Anglo-Saxon.
In 1937, he published a children’s story called The Hobbit. It was not, in my opinion, entirely successful. Tolkien was still feeling his way. In The Hobbit, he tended to write down to his readers with a kind of self-conscious coyness.
This, however, grew less marked as the story went on and Tolkien himself was caught up in it. The hero was Bilbo Baggins, the hobbit of the title, a humanoid creature about half the size of a man. The story involves the quest of a group of dwarfs to regain a treasure that once belonged to them but is now guarded by a malevolent dragon. Baggins is sent to accompany them by Gandalf (a wizard who makes his first appearance as a kind of conjurer).
Baggins goes along very much against his will, for he is scared to death. However, as the story proceeds, he grows more heroic (in a very convincing way) and by the closing scenes, he is dominant—with far more brains, more initiative, and more heroism than the other characters in the story.
In the 1950s, Tolkien decided to elaborate on The Hobbit and write a long, three-volume continuation designed for adults rather than for children. Bilbo makes his appearance at the start and there is much the same atmosphere as in The Hobbit, but he quickly passes on a new task to his nephew, Frodo, who is the hero of The Lord of the Rings, and with that the atmosphere changes, deepens, and becomes wholly absorbing.
The center of action is a ring, which Bilbo had come upon accidentally in the course of The Hobbit and which now turns out to be the key to universal power.
The story becomes a saga of the fight between good and evil. Good is represented by Frodo and his friends, and by his mentor, Gandalf, who is now portrayed as nearly all-powerful, and even, eventually, as a nearly Christlike figure. Evil is represented by the Satan figure, Sauron, who needs only the ring to establish his already fearsomely great power permanently and absolutely. It is the task of our heroes, and of Frodo, in particular, to see that the ring is destroyed and to undertake an appallingly dangerous trek for that purpose.
The forces of good win out, but the difficulties are so great and the writing is so skillful that, even after repeated readings, the suspense holds. (I have read The Lord of the Rings five times.)
One wonders what was in Tolkien’s mind. Actually, I don’t like to try to guess the thoughts and motivations in an author’s mind. I know, from personal experience, that clever analysts can find a great deal more in a novel than the author ever realized he had put in. (Yes, I have been victimized in this fashion, but I also know that despite my vehement denials that I meant this or that—I cannot entirely account for the workings of my unconscious mind.)
In the same way, Tolkien is reported to have denied any application of his saga to the events of the day or any tortured symbolism of various items in the novels—but I don’t believe him.
To me, it seems obvious that Tolkien, between the writing of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, lived through that dramatic and heart-stopping period in which Adolf Hitler and his Germans took over the control of the European continent in the space of ten months, and Great Britain found itself facing an overwhelming enemy without allies of its own.
If that wasn’t Frodo versus Sauron, what was? —And Frodo won.
Another thing. What was this ring of power that all were fighting for? It was an evil ring which took possession of its owner and bent him, all unwittingly and all involuntarily, toward evil. Even Frodo, in the end, was affected and almost failed to carry out his mission. Obviously, the ring was something one feared but perversely wanted; something that once one had one could not let go.
What does that symbolize?
The answer came to me (and an obvious answer, too, once I had it) through a remark made by my dear wife, Janet.
Sauron rules over a region called Mordor, a blasted land in which nothing grows, a land destroyed by Sauron’s evil, and one which Frodo must enter to complete his task. The description of Mordor is of a horrifying place.
Well, one day, Janet and I were driving along the New Jersey Turnpike, and we passed a section given over to oil refineries. It was a blasted region in which nothing was growing and which was filled with ugly, pipelike structures, which refineries must have. Waste oil was burning at the top of tall chimneys and the smell of petroleum products filled the air.
Janet looked at the prospect with troubled eyes and said, “There’s Mordor.”
And, of course, it was. And that was what had to be in Tolkien’s mind. The ring was industrial technology, which uprooted the green land and replaced it with ugly structures under a pall of chemical pollution.
But technology meant power, and though it destroyed the environment and would eventually destroy the Earth, no one who had developed it dared give it up or even wanted to. There is no question, for instance, that America’s automobiles pollute and filthify the atmosphere, and kill uncounted people with respiratory ailments. Yet is it conceivable that Americans would give up their automobiles, or even curtail their use somewhat? No, the ring of technology holds them in its grip and they won’t give it up even if they are gasping for breath and dying.
(Mind you, I don’t entirely agree with Tolkien’s view of technology. I am not an Oxford don used to the calm pleasures of an upper-class Englishman in a preindustrial day. I know very well that the mass of humanity—including me and mine—derives what comfort they now have from the advance of technology and I do not want to abandon it so that upper-class Englishmen can substitute servants for machines. I don’t want to be a servant. While I recognize the dangers of technology, I want those dangers corrected while keeping the benefits.)
Now comes the key question: What has all this to do with Isaac’s Universe?
The Lord of the Rings is set on a mythological Earth, in which the very geography is unrecognizable. Human beings exist and there is a strong suggestion that they are in the process of taking over and that pretty soon “Middle-Earth” (Tolkien’s world) will become the Earth we live on.
In addition to human beings, however, there are a wide variety of other creatures. There are the elves, who are more beautiful and intelligent than human beings, and who are essentially immortal. They are creatures of the pleasant forests and may, for Tolkien, have represented the British preindustrial upper classes.
There were also dwarfs, strong and long-lived; ents who are virtual personifications of the forest; wizards like Gandalf, and, of course, hobbits, who clearly represent the tame farmers of preindustrial times.
On the side of evil are the orcs, who were called goblins in The Hobbit and who, to me anyway, are representative of the new industrial workers as seen by the disapproving upper-class eyes of Tolkien. In The Hobbit he has trolls who speak pure London cockney, but he abandoned that quickly as too broad a representation.
There are also individual creatures that seem to exist all by themselves. On the side of good is Tom Bombadil, who represents nature; on the side of evil is the monstrous spider, Shelob, who perhaps represents the overpowering multinational conglomerates that now dominate Earth’s economy.
There are superwolves on the side of evil, supereagles and a superbear on the side of good.
Most of all there is Gollum, who is, apparently, a hobbit perverted by the long possession of the ring, and who is the most ambiguous creature in the story. Within him is the constant battle between good and evil; and although the weakest and most helpless character in the saga, he manages, in some ways, to achieve the most. It is he, in fact, who, without meaning to, brings the tale to its satisfactory conclusion. I have always sympathized with Gollum and considered him more sinned against than sinning.
This rich mix of different types of intelligent creatures lends unimaginable strength and variety to The Lord of the Rings and it had to be in my mind when I thought up a universe with different types of intelligent creatures in it.
IN DAYS OF OLD
THERE ARE SOME WORDS THAT REEK of romanticism, and “knight” is one of them. Yet its lineage is rather low. It is from the Anglo-Saxon cniht, which meant “boy” or “attendant.” He was someone who attended his master and waited upon his needs. The German homologue, Knecht, still means “servant” today.
Of course, if it is the king we are talking about, his attendants were often fighting men, and in medieval times, that meant someone who could afford a horse and armor, and that, in turn, meant an aristocrat.
In other languages, it is the horse that was stressed rather than the service. In ancient times, to ride a horse was the surest sign of aristocracy (a warhorse, of course, and not a plow horse), just as driving a Cadillac or Mercedes (not a Chevrolet or Volkswagen) does the trick today.
In literary Latin, the word for “horse” is equus, but in soldier lingo, a horse was caballus (equivalent in English to “nag” or “hack”). It was the latter that came to be used for “warhorse.” In Spanish, caballus became caballo, in Italian it became cavallo, and in French it became cheval.
Consequently, a horseman was caballarius in Latin, caballero in Spanish, cavaliere in Italian, and chevalier in French. All were equivalent to the English “knight.” If we want to speak of the whole body of knights, you might talk of the “knighthood” of England, but it is more common to turn to French (for Norman-French, at least, was the language of the English aristocracy from the twelfth to the fifteenth century) and speak of “chivalry.” To behave like a knight—that is, with courtly manners, instead of with the boorish behavior of malapert peasant knaves and varlets—is to be “chivalrous.”
Actually, however, the romantic glow that makes knights seem so wonderful is totally a matter of fiction. In actual fact, knights, presuming on their horses and armor, were arrogant and insufferable in their behavior, especially to people unarmed and on foot. In English, we have another word for “knight”—“cavalier” (usually used for the arrogant fools who fought for King Charles I)—and we all know what “cavalier treatment” means.
Incidentally, I made use of the word “knave” a few lines back. This means “boy” or “attendant”, and the German homologue, Knabe, means “boy” even today. As you see, “knave” and “knight,” which are now treated as opposites, meant precisely the same to begin with. (The German word for “knight,” by the way, is Ritter, meaning “rider.”)
Ever since 2000 B.C., aristocrats did not fight on foot in the way the peasant scum were forced to. The Homeric heroes fought in chariots whenever they could, and the Greek and Roman aristocrats were in the “cavalry” (the Latin equivalent of the French/English “chivalry”).
Nevertheless, until the end of ancient times, the cavalry never served anything but a supporting role. They were mainly important because of their speed of progress. They could spy out the enemy, and they could pursue an already broken and fleeing foe. The actual fighting, however, was done by the steady and disciplined “infantry,” the Greek line of hoplites, the Macedonian phalanx, the Roman legion. (The very word “infantry” is akin to “infant” and is another word meaning “boy.” The term is a measure of the contempt held for the foot soldier by the aristocrats.)
