do elves sleep, and other problems of lore
the alternate title of this post was "lore: what is it good for (absolutely nothing)" so count yourselves lucky I guess
Longtime readers of this newsletter know that I have a particular hatred for the Amazon TV show Rings of Power. In fact in my upcoming book I use the first season as an example of the worst IP garbage available, though in the book I focus slightly less on Rings of Power’s many aesthetic failings and more on the way that its superficial diversity is intended to wokewash Amazon, a notoriously racist, sexist, and labor-abusive company.1 Anyway the second season is airing, and I ask you all for your support in this trying time. I’ll have to watch it eventually, if only because I wrote about it in print, and because the badness of the first season still sometimes keeps me up at night. I’ve heard a few people say that the second season is better; this doesn’t surprise me, as it could hardly be worse. But mostly I haven’t run across many people discussing it at all. I’ve seen a few sharp, specific criticisms, and a few rave reviews which are suspiciously vague on details (much like last season). I’ve also run into a couple of posts which repeat the same curious sentiment, basically: “I know the fanboys hate RoP for ignoring canon, but I think it’s enjoyable.”
This last part is interesting, and not just for the defensive, other-focused posture (which is always an interesting attitude to strike in criticism, revealing a lot more about the speaker than the subject). Contemporary fantasy is beset by arguments over “canon” and “lore,” both of which are closely related to arguments over the strictness of worldbuilding and magic systems. What details are critically important in fantasy worldbuilding; what kinds of rules does a writer have to establish in order for the story to work? And how consistent do these rules and details need to be, internally in a novel and externally across adaptations?
For an example of how these sorts of arguments tend to work, let’s consider the moment in the first season of Rings of Power where a human character declares that elves don’t sleep and that’s why elves will be able to steal human jobs.2 Do Tolkien’s elves sleep, canonically? This is the sort of question that drives fanboys (and fangirls, me) into a frenzy. There are a couple of moments in Lord of the Rings where Legolas is described as not really sleeping: “resting his mind in the strange path of elvish dreams” even as he walks around in daylight with his eyes open. But then in The Hobbit, Legolas’ fellow wood-elves pass out after drinking too much wine, and in the Silmarillion, Luthien casts a spell that puts other elves to sleep, and is also herself asleep at a critical moment when Beren slips away from her side.3 You can, if you want, create consistency out of this—elves don’t really sleep unless they pass out from some external force; Luthien is half-elf and half-Maia so she doesn’t count and also Beren’s dick game must be insanely strong (this last part, at least, is definitely canon). But it doesn’t matter: none of it matters. The answer to whether elves sleep is inconsistent because it isn’t meant to be consistent. Tolkien was writing literature, not a lore sheet.
Consistency is important, however, when you are using lore sheets: that is, when you’re playing games. In fact Dungeons & Dragons establishes, canonically, that elves don’t sleep but enter a kind of reverie state, something that was probably cribbed from those ambiguous lines about Legolas and systematized into a rule. I’ve had some insomnia lately,4 and I’ve found myself reading the Forgotten Realms (aka D&D) wiki to help me get back to sleep. The rules are weirdly soothing, and sometimes I run into hilarious stuff like the fact that 85% of drow are evil (how do they know if they’re evil or not? is there a test???) Anyway when you’re playing a game, rigid stats and numbers matter, and the rules of a given world need to be firmly established. In fact lore and canon in their modern sense really descend from gameplay, and often gameplay created from worlds heavily inspired by Tolkien. But to use the same “this is canon/this isn’t canon” approach to Tolkien’s works is to miss the point of them entirely. The legendarium, which is mainly a series of drafts, isn’t meant to be read like the Bible. The Bible is itself, of course, full of contradictions, which do matter to some degree because it’s supposed to point at truth. The legendarium, however, points to dreams. It’s an attempt (despite Tolkien’s own warnings on the subject) to catch Faerie in a net of words.
In this sense, Rings of Power can’t be bad because it disregards Tolkien’s “canon”; it’s bad because it doesn’t treat the legendarium like literature. When it diverges from Tolkien’s themes it isn’t in order to meaningfully comment on them—as an intelligent, literate adaptation would—but solely to create the kinds of details that are commonly found in fantasy stories. The factoid about elves not sleeping and the fear of elves taking human jobs could fit comfortably in any of the knockoff versions of Tolkien’s universe that already exist. The show is full of bits of “worldbuilding” moments like this—in fact the showrunners responded to critics of the first season with the claim that the show had to get the worldbuilding out of the way, and the second season would necessarily be better. But the details that were so dully established in season one didn’t mean anything at the point of delivery, and it’s hard to imagine they’ll mean anything later on: they have no greater resonance, they don’t participate in storytelling or thematic development. They are wiki-level facts.
As far as I can tell, the fans of Rings of Power are pretty much wiki-level fans.5 They’re the sort of fans who have an indiscriminate liking for all pop culture, anything with an established bank of lore that they can obsessively memorize or discard as needed. They are fans of fandom, and fandom is in large part about lore: the correct learning and application of details. Some nerds are driven to madness by the divergence from details—they want everything to remain the same as it was when they first encountered it, often for racist reasons—but whether the fan is a bigoted nerd or an enthusiastic progressive geek, the details are what matters to them. They don’t care if these details have any larger meaning within a work of art, because there’s no actual aesthetic engagement with the material. They really could just read the wiki.
I talked about this a bit last week, but there’s a certain kind of genre fan who finds aesthetic criticism baffling and besides the point. These fans have no taste, in the sense that they are literally unable or refuse to operate within the framework of taste. Isn’t this a fantasy thing, and isn’t fantasy a thing I like? Who cares if it’s “good”? Rings of Power is certainly a fantasy thing. It has costumes and magic; it establishes rules, though for no meaningful purpose. The existence of the rules is the point of them: the bare look of things is all that matters. In this mindset, a fantasy novel or TV show only needs to have the right costumes and characters moving through locations, with fight scenes and romantic moments interspersed frequently enough; it probably ought to gesture at nice progressive politics here and there regardless of the actual politics of the people who made it. It doesn’t matter what’s actually happening and what people are saying to each other because it’s literally generic. It may have “rules” and random details but it has no specificity, no distinguishing features, and nothing to say. Every now and then there’s an obvious trope that a fan can point to with a corporate IP branded tie-in sword they bought at one or another interchangeable Comic Con.6
I normally try to be chill when people enjoy different things than I do, and I also understand the satisfaction of rules (after all I read wikis to fall asleep sometimes, and I find police procedurals very satisfying, even with their dreadful politics.) But the fan who loves rules and tropes to such an extreme that they don’t actually notice art is the fan who only loves themselves. For this kind of fan, genre fiction only exists to establish their otherwise flimsy sense of being: the rules define the fans’ own boundaries (a person who likes this genre of thing) and nothing else. They literally can’t see the actual work of art that lies before them, and they don’t care. They didn’t come here to perceive.
Fantasy and science fiction novels (especially science fiction) are curiously less popular now than they used to be, even as IP adaptations of fantasy and science fiction continue to dominate TV and the film industry. A number of reasons have been cited for this, but the most obvious for me is that publishers are doubling down on their worst tendency: choosing books that they know they can sell because they’ve already sold books like them. They cater to a guaranteed fanbase that will always show up, even if it’s a smaller crowd than it used to be. Books require more engagement and concentration than screens. A lot of contemporary fantasy novels drive me to tears of boredom: I have no interest in their inert magic systems and trope parades. I’m not a rules person or a fandom person; I’m a literature person. I actually did come here to perceive.
The appeal for me of fantasy—and I still love it very much—is that you can do anything with it, this free unbounded unsystemic thing. Fantasy literature is at its best when it isn’t about iterating the self back to you, your own familiar comforts and boundaries, but about the strange, unfamiliar, and marvelous.7 When fantasy writers use genre conventions—for example, elves—it isn’t supposed to be purely for the sake of familiarity (elves are a thing I recognize and like) but because these writers are trying to say something that can’t be expressed through the ordinary images of reality. Fantasy has “worldbuilding,” it sometimes establishes “lore,” not to fit generic marketing categories of things with worldbuilding and lore but for its own reasons: to express the outside, the alien, which operates by its own unfathomable rules.
Amazon has been sued so many times for discrimination that the examples I used above aren’t even the same ones I use in the book!
The most generous reading of this moment is that this particular human doesn’t know anything about elves: he’s only repeating something he’s heard which may not be true. But pulling off this sort of interesting ambiguity would require irony, something which Rings of Power lacks entirely.
Also in the Book of Lost Tales, a very early draft of The Silmarillion, Idril has a disturbing dream which didn’t make it into later versions of the story (which is too bad because it’s a cool moment.) I bring this up mainly to demonstrate just how far gone I am on this stuff.
My really bad bouts of insomnia are usually unrelated to the badness of Rings of Power but I’m still holding it partially responsible.
A certain proportion of Tolkien’s internet fanbase has pretty clearly only read the wiki and fanfic rather than the legendarium itself. I appreciate that I am being very “name five of his albums” here but also name five of his albums.
Somebody called the Galadriel/Sauron dynamic in season one “Kirkland-brand Reylo” and I y e l l e d.
In fact, Lord of the Rings is literally about leaving your familiar comforts and boundaries. “Damn, Lyta, when are you going to stop talking about Lord of the Rings?” literally never, eat it.
There's another thing that I think of when I see this, which is the Dungeons and Dragons "wizards have to memorize their spells every day" thing -- this is usually attributed to Jack Vance's Dying Earth series, and it's interesting because it is in that. But this use-it-and-lose-it feature of magic spells only appears in one story -- Mazirian the Magician -- and 1) is only one of many different things that wizards can do (Mazirian, for example, has Live Boots that help him run somehow), and 2) is also never mentioned again.
In another story they mention that the council of wizards or whatever has established that there are 100 spells that they know work, and whenever a magic spell is mentioned, it's effects seem completely unrelated to any of the other spells -- spells that make a guy spin around in the air until he explodes, spells that shoot multicolored lasers, a guy finds a spell that will turn a hill inside out, &c.
And I think there's an interesting irony here, because Vance is very clearly sort of taking the piss of the very idea of formalized magic; magic is weird and specific and idiosyncratic and nobody knows how or why it works, and the features of magic in Dying Earth reflect that. Why do you lose a spell after you cast it? Who knows. Can this spell that turns a hill inside out turn other things inside out? No, probably not. Just hills.
It's Gary Gygax that formalizes it, because he wants to make a fantasy equivalent of Napoleonic war games and "fireball" is a pretty good equivalent to "grenadier", and so Vance's wizardry, which is very specifically meant to be anti-systemic, becomes the poster child for Magic Systems by way of D&D.
That's an insult to Kirkland.