NEW POETS OF RUM-RAM-RUF: Susan Edwards (“Tuilinde”)

Last week, when comparing medieval retellings of the Trojan War to contemporary fan fiction, my reason involved more than there simply being folks like M. Wendy Hennequin around, people for whom medievalism and creative fan activity are deeply entwined. My other reason is that the Middle Ages can seem so distant to my students. Popular culture helps them grasp some aspects of medieval life and culture, albeit often in distorted form, for instance feudalism and chivalry, but otherwise? The instinctive concern for rank, the holy awe of kingship, the ubiquity of religion in daily life … all these things tend to be beyond the everyday experience of college students in the 21^st century. As a teacher, you have to find a bridge. Calling stories about the Trojan War or King Arthur “fanfic” therefore breaks down a historical barrier. Students know what fan fiction is. They understand the conventions. So while it’s easy to be intimidated by a syllabus that contains Dante’s Inferno with the ghosts of Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler staring down at you, sermonizing about the Great Books, it’s another matter entirely when you can start thinking about Dante as a Mary Sue.

Still, such iconoclasm only works because students know that medieval literature isn’t “real” fanfic. The real stuff is what happens when contemporary fans take copyrighted material from well-known franchises, Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings for example, and compose artworks based on that content. Thanks to the internet, too, sharing such work is easier than ever before. Huge repositories of such stuff can be found on sites such as Commaful, Wattpad, or Archive of Our Own.

Just as fandom, though, is the unsung hero of the Modern Revival, its King Arthur, fanfic is fandom’s Excalibur. The most obvious stepping stone has been Tolkien. Although the Tolkien Estate frowns deeply on fan fiction – the most recent (and most hilarious) instance happened after one deeply clueless fan self-published an unauthorized sequel to The Lord of the Rings and then, disastrously, tried to sue the Estate for copyright infringement – but that hasn’t stopped a large cohort of fans from producing Tolkien-related fanfic. Scholars of popular culture have even started studying it. For example, Dawn M. Walls-Thumma has surveyed Silmarillion-based fan fiction looking mainly for historical bias in Tolkien’s legendarium, or at least what fan writers imagine such historical bias to be, but one of her more fascinating side discoveries is that an overwhelming percentage of authors in her sample size (88.5%) identified as women. Nonbinary gender identities pulled a distant second at 6.0%, and male-identified authors constituted a mere 3.6%.

Long before the internet, however, Tolkien fan publications such as Mallorn, Orcrist, Mythic Circle, and Mythlore were producing fanfic … and some of this fanfic includes poetry composed in an alliterative meter. One of the better revivalist fan poems belongs to “Tuilinde” (aka, Susan Edwards). I haven’t managed to track down any solid biographical information on Edwards yet, but her name “Tuilinde” is the word in Quenya for swallow, the bird. Anyway, I’ve found two of her alliterative poems, both well-crafted: “Slaying the Dragon” (Mallorn, 2010) and “The Paths of the Dead” (Mallorn, 2011). Long-time Tolkien fans can easily guess their subjects by titles alone. Each represents an excellent example of an impressionist-leaning poetics – caesuras and heavy alliteration, but no Sievers types or formal alliterative patterning – but, of the two, “Slaying the Dragon” is much stronger. The other poem is a straightforward retelling of Aragorn’s passage through the haunted Dwimorberg, free from surprises or notable innovations, but her Smaug poem is fresher, darker, moodier … and strangely, atmospherically, grim.

In The Hobbit, you see, the central action is one Tolkien borrowed directly from Beowulf: Bilbo stealing a golden cup from Smaug’s hoard. Since it is a truth universally acknowledged that “dragons gonna dragon,” Smaug imitates his Old English model by laying waste the surrounding countryside, including Lake-town. Although this city has many virtues, dragon-proof fortifications are, sadly, not one of them. Only the heroic Bard the Bowman prevents total destruction, and this he accomplishes by shooting the Black Arrow – a family heirloom – straight into Smaug’s undefended underbelly. The great wyrm’s carcass plunges into the waters of the lake, and Lake-town survives, although now more than a little crispy.

This sounds like a dark tale, and many critics have noted how Tolkien’s later chapters in The Hobbit, including the vengeance of Smaug and the Battle of the Five Armies, are tonally darker than his earlier ones. Still, The Hobbit remains a story for children. It never subscribes for long to the horror and fear that surround the tensest moments in The Lord of the Rings, and, devastating though Smaug’s vengeance may be, it lasts but a single chapter.

In “Slaying the Dragon,” though, Edwards exploits her fan-fiction medium well, accentuating two separate affects muted within Tolkien’s original novel: the core direness of Lake-town’s situation, and its resolute bravery, each focalized through Bard’s humorless perspective. Edwards’s alliterative meter contributes greatly to this effect. Generally speaking, light-hearted poems in the Old English measure are few and far between. One successful example is Lewis’s The Nameless Isle but, otherwise, this alliterative tradition gravitates naturally toward a slow, sonorous kind of stoic heroism, especially in the face of desperate odds. The effect is something like what happens when we read extended passage of interior monologue in prose fiction; we see Bard’s perspective in a way that Tolkien never gives us for long … and this perspective, even when shown by Tolkien, is one heavily mitigated by other factors in The Hobbit.

For one thing, by the time readers reach the Smaug chapters in The Hobbit, we’ve come to rather like Thorin Oakenshield and his company of his dwarves. Sure, they’re not perfect, but we’ve learned to agree with the narrator when he says (after none of them volunteers to follow Bilbo on his first foray into Smaug’s lair): “Dwarves are not heroes … but are decent enough people … if you don’t expect too much.” Plus we still remember the humor and good-fun of Tolkien’s first chapter when the dwarves farcically invite themselves – Gandalf presiding – into Bilbo’s home.

None of this is known to Bard. Nor would he care. He cannot afford to. Upon their entry into Lake-town, bedraggled yet proud, Bard sees Thorin and his dwarves clearly for their “graceless grandeur, their greed and foolishness” (l.2). And if Bard views them without sympathy, it is only because he anticipates all too well the consequences of such unmerited self-importance. The opening lines of Edwards’s text capture his grim foreknowledge with a powerful concision:

Then the Dwarves came    with confusion and controversy.

Ragged refugees,     claiming royal rights.

Hopes were heard,    and were hurriedly believed—

Rich and poor saw     a bold brightness brandished. (l.12-15, emphasis added)

In Edwards’s text, as the original, the citizens of Lake-town mock Bard for his caution. They can see only the possibilities, not the inevitable consequences, of promised wealth and glory. These citizens are in “excitement bound · to their unreal dreams” (l.24 ), enchanted by false glamour, the new King Under the Mountain.

Focalizing her text through Bard, Edwards removes any mitigating sympathy for Thorin’s bedraggled royal hauteur. She also removes the mitigating perspective of Lake-town itself. As Tolkien says almost explicitly in The Hobbit, Bard the Bowman – a descendent of Girion, lord of Dale – hails from the ancient world of heroes, the world Beowulf, Hrothgar, and King Alfred. However, Bard’s actual home is Lake-town … and Tolkien presents this city-state as essentially modern, a polity full of middle-class citizens for whom material acquisition – not glory, not old songs – matters most. For these citizens, their major concerns are tolls and trade, gold and cargoes, and that is why they elect as their leader the merchant-friendly Master.

In “Slaying the Dragon,” Edwards takes all that away. She leaves us only with Bard’s ancient heroism, his grimness, his resolution to withstand the dragon though it cost him his life. Although modernity cannot withstand the terror of a dragon, Edwards grants us one heart-stopping glimpse into how, even for Bard, the theory of northern courage extolled by Tolkien is never something to take for granted. Against Smaug’s fiery holocaust, Edwards intimately evokes a steadfast courage-under-fire (pun intended) that Peter Jackson tried – but failed – to produce in his cinematic Hobbit trilogy. Tolkien, at least, hinted at it … but never for long. He had his child readership to consider.  Yet Edwards brings this terror and this heroism to full flower.

“Slaying the Dragon,” in my view, is therefore an incredibly effective fan poem, a formidable addition to the Modern Alliterative Revival. Her text’s focalization through Bard, humorless and grim-faced yet prescient, is deepened greatly by Edwards’s choice of meter. Free verse or rhyme, the two lighter options, would not have achieved the same thing in the same way. As a result, by combining an innovative narrative perspective with an archaic medieval meter, Edwards finds the Holy Grail of fan poetry: a new text that heightens the aims and themes of the original.