How the ring got good

I’ve been tearing through a series of books I never expected to read, and they have revealed some­thing breath­taking about where The Good Stuff comes from.

In this edition, I’ll tell you about them, then share my cus­tomary bundle of rec­om­men­da­tions and links.

I’m Robin Sloan, a fiction writer with wide-ranging interests, which I capture here in my newsletter. This is an archived edition, originally transmitted in March 2023. You can sign up to receive future editions using the form at the bottom of the page.

The His­tory of The Lord of the Rings sounds like it might be a nerdy diegetic ref­er­ence work, some­thing from Elrond’s library. Oh — it’s far nerdier than that:

These books present J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings at many stages of its devel­op­ment, from jotted notes to pub­lished text, with exten­sive com­men­tary from Christo­pher Tolkien, the son who became THE great scholar of his father’s work. It is Christo­pher Tolkien who brought The Sil­mar­il­lion into the world, along with many more, but/and, it’s this series — this dialogue — that feels to me like his great achievement.

I men­tioned pre­vi­ously that I’ve recently fin­ished a reread of The Lord of the Rings. It turned into a very tech­nical engagement, really inspecting the welds, which led me to The His­tory of The Lord of the Rings, and I feel lucky that it did, because these books have been a revelation.

The heart of it is this:

Tolkien, for all his vaunted designs, only got to The Good Stuff when he was IN it, really working the text of the novels (or novel, if you con­sider The Lord of the Rings one big book). He could not world­build his way into a work­able story; he had to muddle and dis­cover and revise, just like the rest of us.

Here is the example that took my breath away.

Early in the pub­lished ver­sion of The Lord of the Rings (hereafter, LOTR) we learn about the inscrip­tion on the One Ring, which pro­vides the whole engine of the plot:

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

Those lines are inscribed on the ring in the Tengwar script, which is repro­duced in the book’s pages, fantastic:

We learn from Gan­dalf that these let­ters do not rep­re­sent any lan­guage of the elves, but rather the Black Speech of Mordor.

All of this is SUPER cool. In a single stroke, we get: a mythic backstory, a grand MacGuffin, a sense of lan­guage and his­tory, the sub­limely sat­is­fying train of magic numbers — three … seven … nine … ONE! — plus some­thing graph­i­cally weird and beau­tiful on the page.

It’s all just tremendous — the per­fect kernel of Tolkien’s appeal.

And, guess what:

Not only was the inscrip­tion missing from the early drafts of LOTR … the whole logic of the ring was missing, too. In its place was a mess. The ring pos­sessed by Bilbo Bag­gins was one of thou­sands the Dark Lord manufactured, all basi­cally equivalent: they made their wearers invisible, and even­tu­ally claimed their souls. They were like cursed can­dies scat­tered by Sauron across Middle-earth.

Tolkien’s expla­na­tion of this, in his first draft, is about about as com­pelling as what I just wrote.

It’s fine, as far as it goes; he could have made it work, prob­ably? Possibly? But it is not COOL in the way that the final for­mu­la­tion is COOL. It has none of the symmetry, the inevitability. It does only the work it has to do, and nothing else. It is not yet aes­thet­i­cally irresistible.

There are sev­eral revised approaches to “what’s the deal with the ring?” pre­sented in The His­tory of The Lord of the Rings, and, as you read through the drafts, the mate­rial just … slowly gets better! Bit by bit, the familiar angles emerge. There seems not to have been any magic moment: no elec­tric thought in the bathtub, circa 1931, that sent Tolkien rushing to find a pen.

It was just revision.

I find this totally inspiring.

You have to understand: Tolkien, among writers of this kind, is revered as THE grand designer. The story goes: he’d worked it all out in advance — invented these amazing lan­guages, plotted out this sprawling leg­en­darium — so, when he sat down to begin LOTR, it was all there to draw upon.

This is tech­nically true — he HAD worked out the lan­guages and leg­en­darium years before — but (I have now learned) that story doesn’t cap­ture or explain, in any way at all really, the process of com­posing these books. It doesn’t tell us how Tolkien came up with the things that actu­ally made them good.

The One Ring is not the only example; they are thick on the page. Aragorn, son of Arathorn, was missing entirely from early drafts. In his place was a ranger hobbit with wooden feet named Trotter.

Ranger hobbit. Wooden feet. Trotter.

And a char­acter as indelible as Galadriel — think of her pow­erful pre­siding role — was the product not of some grand architecture, but an errant note:

There is then a sentence, placed within brackets, which is unhappily — since it is prob­ably the first ref­er­ence my father ever made to Galadriel — only in part decipherable: “[?Lord] of Gal­adrim [?and ?a] Lady and … [?went] to White Council.”

Tolkien dis­covered her on the page, just as we did.

The analogy is clear, and hugely heartening: if Tolkien can find his way to the One Ring in the middle of the fifth draft, so can I, and so can you.

There’s a sec­tion where Christo­pher Tolkien repro­duces the var­ious pasted-together iter­a­tions of his father’s first map of Middle-earth:

Not even the MAP was mapped out in advance!

I cannot rec­om­mend The His­tory of The Lord of the Rings to everyone, or even to most people. It is really very dense. But … IF you have read and enjoyed the books … and IF you find this kind of in-the-workshop analysis engaging … then you MIGHT find them as cap­ti­vating as I have.

(Note that there exists a 12-volume series titled The His­tory of Middle-earth, con­taining too much gristle even for me. What you want is the subset pho­tographed above: The His­tory of The Lord of the Rings.)

Here is Christo­pher Tolkien artic­u­lating his father’s great theme:

As [my father] declared, I’m sure rightly declared, the fun­da­mental under­pin­ning con­cern of all his work was: death. The intol­er­able fact.

Adam Roberts continues his LOTR reread:

My view is that the ideal number for uses of the exclam­a­tory “lo!” in a novel is: zero.

In his concluding post, he iden­ti­fies LOTR’s striking “mode shift”, which I also noticed in my recent reread:

LOTR starts out as a piece of late 19th-cen­tury bour­geois narrative, then shifts into an earlier, prose-Romance adven­ture mode, and then shifts again in the later books into a cod-Biblical ele­vated Epic mode.

Once again, I find this electrifying: Tolkien as fal­lible composer, not totally in con­trol of his mate­rial. Tolkien as mere AUTHOR, the same as any of us.

Behold, the Braggoscope

The long-running BBC show In Our Time is a treasure; I love the way Melvyn Bragg allows his schol­arly guests to range and roam. The episode on Sir Gawain on the Green Knight absolutely cracked the poem open for me.

Now, Matt Webb has built a Braggoscope that allows you to explore the show’s archive in new and exciting ways. I’ve already used it to find the episodes fea­turing my favorite guest, Laura Ashe.

Characteristically, Matt has not only con­structed this cool thing, but winningly doc­u­mented the process. He used OpenAI’s GPT-3 for the “heavy lift” of cat­e­go­rizing the episodes, which con­forms to a pat­tern I’ve noticed more broadly: while the buzzy appli­ca­tion of these GPT-alike lan­guage models is chat, the real work­horse seems to be some­thing we might call “text under­standing and transformation”.

If you’re curious about media, lan­guage models, and/or charis­mastic invention, it’s well worth reading Matt’s intro­duc­tory post.

An exemplary web application

I have been totally delin­quent not rec­om­mending this ser­vice earlier; I meant to include it in my 2022 gift guide!

Pirate Ship is the best way to pur­chase and print USPS postage. It is a truly exem­plary web appli­ca­tion: simple and legible, blazing fast, not to men­tion shock­ingly cheap, with not a sub­scrip­tion in sight.

If you have ever pur­chased a ship­ping label from UPS or FedEx online: it is the oppo­site of that.

If the whole internet demon­strated this level of respect for its customers: global GDP would sud­denly increase by two percent.

In a world in which Pirate Ship exists, there’s no reason to wait in line at the post office, ever. Remember, you don’t even have to get the weight of your package exactly right; these days, the USPS has machines that will charge or credit you appro­pri­ately if it’s heavier or lighter than the weight you specify.

Printing your postage on plain paper and affixing it with tape works fine, but if you ship more than a few things a month, it’s prob­ably worth it to get a Rollo label printer and a stack of 4×6 labels.

I know this sounds like the kind of ad that plays midway through a podcast! I wish. Pirate Ship, I’m avail­able for sponsorships! I dis­covered the ser­vice because of Fat Gold—we use it for all our ship­ping, happily, gratefully — and now I use it, too, when­ever I need to send any­thing anywhere.

Chronicle capsules

I just fin­ished a reread of The Chron­i­cles of Narnia, all in audio­book form, all while bot­tling olive oil, over the course of about a year. Here are my updated cap­sule reviews:

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
Perfectly seductive. This is simply one of the all-time great invitations into a fantastical world.

Prince Caspian
Good enough. For me, the indelible image is Caspian on the ramparts of the castle with Doctor Cornelius, gazing up at the stars.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The best in the series. A strange and sparkling picaresque; a train of images almost science fictional.

The Silver Chair
Offers some stirring vistas, but feels hollow at the core.

The Horse and His Boy
I have never, in any format, made it all the way through this book.

The Magician’s Nephew
In a way, the most coherent story in the series. The Wood Between the Worlds and Charn are fantastic — again, almost more sci-fi than fantastical.

The Last Battle
A dreary finish, unworthy of the series.

Basically, I think a person ought to read the first three books, then skip to The Magician’s Nephew, then stop.

Here is a post about new music and get­ting old, with the very com­pelling title Bey­once vs. ChatGPT.

I’m very glad to be reading Mehret Biruk, who insists: “THE VIBES ARE OFF.”

I loved Tomi­hiko Morimi’s novel The Tatami Galaxy, trans­lated into Eng­lish by Emily Bal­istrieri. It was recently longlisted for the Pen Trans­la­tion Prize and, though it didn’t win, there’s at least the con­so­la­tion of this blurb from noted author Robin Sloan:

The team of Tomi­hiko Morimi and Emily Bal­istrieri is unbeatable: this novel vibrates with a voice that is sharp and funny, wacky and winning. It’s a per­fect slice of con­tem­po­rary Japanese pop: a tangle of fates, simul­ta­ne­ously cosmic and comic. I loved my voyage through The Tatami Galaxy.

I am very excited for the arrival of How to Sew Clothes, the new book by Amelia Green­hall and Amy Bornman. I come to it through Amelia, who is an absolute dynamo: her studio ANEMONE designs and prints some of the most beau­tiful zines in the world.

I have done a bit of sewing in the past; my great tri­umph remains my travel bag, made from Dyneema, a straight­for­ward DIY rip of Outlier’s Ultrahigh Duffle. But that’s an accessory. I have never suc­cess­fully sewn any­thing intended to fit a human body, and I feel like it’s time to try.

The Ani­ma­tion Obsessive is doing some­thing really special; in its depth, it more pow­erfully evokes a glo­ri­ously niche print mag­a­zine than any other newsletter I receive. If you’re inter­ested in global animation — past, present, and future — you really ought to be reading, and per­haps paying for a sub­scrip­tion, too.

TAO’s discussion of the anime short Invisible was wonderful; I’m grateful to have learned about this mes­mer­izing work. I strongly rec­om­mend first reading that newsletter, then watching the short here.

Bicycle designer Grant Petersen writes:

I think the best wid­gets allow the per­fect result but don’t guar­antee it. You can pick how much help you want it to provide, but leave a gap to fill in with skill.

Here is a lucid lec­ture on “Einstein’s unfin­ished revolution” by Lee Smolin, whose schol­arly stage pres­ence I find totally cap­ti­vating. A cen­tury later, we are still living in the wake of that incred­ible period, 1905-1935.

(If you watch this lec­ture, please note that I am not as hos­tile to the post­modern stance as Lee! But, it’s fun and bracing to hear his argument.)

Ernest Rutherford: “We have no money, so we shall have to think.”

Dan Bouk, his­to­rian of things shrouded in cloaks of boringness, is the most serious and com­mitted walker I know. (Keep in mind that I know Craig Mod.) In a recent newsletter, he writes:

I did my best these last few weeks to schedule all meet­ings as walking meet­ings. When pos­sible I located those meet­ings in Cen­tral Park and walked 120 blocks south along the Hudson just to get to the meeting. Those were good days.

120 blocks south!

Dan goes on to describe what he thinks about along these walks, and where he stops along the way.

I’ve written in the past about “super sweet spots”, the times and places in his­tory about which you could plau­sibly say, “nobody had it better”. I happen to think my own Bay Area neigh­bor­hood is such a super sweet spot. I believe the Man­hattan ambles Dan describes here might also qualify.

I’ve pre­vi­ously men­tioned the book I Am Error by Nathan Altice, a deep his­tory of the Nin­tendo Enter­tain­ment System. This sec­tion on The Legend of Zelda struck me pow­erfully:

Miyamoto has cited two influ­en­tial videogame prece­dents for Zelda’s play style: Black Onyx and Ultima. The former, released for the NEC PC-8801 in 1984 (and later ported to the MSX and Famicom), was a land­mark in Japanese gaming his­tory. Black Onyx devel­oper and Amer­ican expat Henk Rogers, a devotee of Lord of the Rings and Dun­geons & Dragons, intro­duced party-based, fan­tasy dun­geon crawling to Japanese audiences, paving the way for Japanese RPG break­outs Final Fan­tasy and Dragon Quest. The Ultima series, also Western-developed, first reached Japan in 1985, the same year Zelda’s devel­op­ment began. Like Black Onyx, Ultima II revolved around first-person dun­geon crawling, but also fea­tured an impres­sive tiled over­world map that linked the game’s under­ground labyrinths — a clear pre­cursor to Hyrule. Ultima’s inno­v­a­tive time-traveling mechanic was also part of Zelda’s ini­tial design. In a 2012 interview, Miyamoto revealed that the player was meant to travel between Hyrule’s past and future, and the hero would act as the “link” between them. Weirder still, the Tri­force pieces were meant to be microchips. Though they ulti­mately set­tled on the fan­tasy setting, Miyamoto and team would revisit the time-linking con­cept in future Zelda titles.

Isn’t it all just fabulous? The ecstasy of influence: across borders, across genres. Every­thing goes back and forth, back and forth; nothing is original. How could it be? What would that even mean?

The newsletter I Spy with my Typo­graphic Eye is a new favorite. I enjoyed Pooja Saxena’s recent edition exploring the typog­raphy of Indian coins and bills.

Pooja is also a delight to follow on Instagram.

Here is a very cool project: Ancient Exchanges, an online journal devoted to lit­erary trans­la­tions of ancient texts.

I want to draw your atten­tion to the web­site itself, which is sturdy, clear, and appealing, all in the some­what chal­lenging con­text of side-by-side translation.

Some­body give this web designer a raise!

Here is an exciting new book­store in Los Angeles, funded in part by a few pio­neering publishers. I have to say, it’s a real plea­sure to be reading a story about pub­lishing innovation, thinking, “ah, wow, cool … this is exactly how it ought to work … ” and then, surprise: encoun­tering the name of your own publisher. Like, yes! Of course! Hello!

That’s it for this edition! Thanks, as always, for fol­lowing along.

From Oakland,

Robin

P.S. You’ll receive my next newsletter on April 5.

March 2023