As I mentioned earlier, I wrote my first drabble ever a few weeks ago. Since one of the purposes of this blog is to publish any prose I’m not reserving for (I hope) commercial publication, I share it with you today. Read more…
The last few months, I’ve been helping my dad to catalog our family’s somewhat extensive collection of books. In the course of this project, I’ve learned a great deal about the history of book numbering. Read more…
Last year I drew your attention to some of the links in my blogroll, which I was then cleaning up. Now that I’ve been further weeding them (and cutting back significantly on my blog reading), but have added some others, here’s another installment of the links in my blogroll you might particularly wish to follow.
And again, please do peruse the blogroll, which is to your right (just above the length “Archives” section and below the “Top Posts”) if you’re reading this on the blog and not in a blog reader, on Facebook, or through some syndication service.
And if you, dear reader, have a blog you think I might be interested in reading, please do let me know.
Earlier this week I described Imperial Robo Cards, a popular collectible card game in the world of the Shine Cycle. But IRCs are not just a curious bit of worldbuilding; they started as a card game I began to design as a child, and they’re a game I’d like to create, properly, sometime in the near future. Read more…
Following Tolkien, we often refer to the imagined worlds in which works of fiction take place as “secondary worlds”. But in the last half-century or so, many amateur authors have created, and shared widely, works set in what we might call “tertiary worlds”—worlds that are to a “secondary world” as it is to our “primary world.” This is a phenomenon commonly known as “fan fiction”, “fanfic”, or in some circles simply “fic”.
We can divide fan-fiction authors into at least five (significantly overlapping!) groups, based on their reason for writing it. Read more…
Like I said at this time last year, “What a year!”
2011, I might say, flirted with disaster and with sheer glory. Last year began well, but ended in disarray; this year began inauspiciously, as (with how hard the winter was) my schedule became so exhausting that I couldn’t muster enough spare energy to manage even one post some weeks. Since the middle of spring I’ve kept up far better, only missing a few posts here and there, but I’m ending this year nearly as far behind as I did the last. In this, as in many other areas, I’ve made great progress—but that progress has been marred by falling back nearly as far.
I’ll look at the year in various categories. Read more…
The year draws to a close; today is in fact the last day of the Christian liturgical year, and the new year will begin tomorrow with the season of Advent. Last year at this time I looked back over the history of this blog in a three part retrospective; today I’ll take you through the past year since that series. (My Thanksgiving post earlier this week serves as my personal retrospective. And as I follow a schedule for my posts, I’ll be following each “department” separately, so this won’t be strictly chronological.) Read more…
Today is the day designated for public thanksgiving to our Creator for the gracious gifts his divine Providence has lavished on us. Two years ago I wrote at length about many ways he has blessed me over the span of my life so far, and in particular the many people he has brought into my life in important ways for whom (and for which) I am thankful, and last year I continued more briefly, adding blessings which had occurred since the first essay, and those that I had forgotten the first time but remembered in the succeeding year.
As everything I wrote in the lengthy first essay is still true, and would be worth repeating, I urge you to go back and (re)read it. But I won’t repeat those ideas here, since I again have less time to prepare this than I would like.
I begin again with the most important reason to give thanks. I am grateful for the good news of the Gospel, that “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the worst.” That our rightful Lord and Master, against whom we had been in rebellion, came down from heaven to “reconcile us to him by the blood of his cross,” and bound us to him and himself to us by a gracious covenant, sealing it and us with his eternal Spirit.
[It is my only comfort in life and death] that I am not my own, but belong, body and soul, in life and in death, to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood, and set me free from the power of the devil. He also watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my heavenly Father. In fact, all things must work together for my salvation. Because I belong to him, Christ, by his Holy Spirit, assures me of eternal life and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.
I am thankful that this faith has been passed down by, and with the additional witness of, innumerable saints, whose words (such as these from the Heidelberg Catechism) readily allow us to praise him, contend for the faith, and otherwise speak truly and precisely when our own words fail.
I am grateful for another year of life and health, for the small income God has provided me, and for continued ellowship in person with my family and church here, and with my friends virtually.
I am very grateful for the chance to meet with many very dear friends at our reunion early this summer, and for the hospitality of our hosts, who provided a bed and a roof for me on very short notice. I am also thankful for the chance I and my dad got to go to Evart again, for the first time in a few years, and to see dear friends (and dear acquaintances whom I would like to know better, some of whose names I could not remember even ten minutes) again.
I am thankful for the glory that God again opened my eyes to see in his creation and in the faces of the people I encounter. I’m grateful for the chance to go to several dances this year.
I am again thankful that God has given me words this year, in large quantities with effort in the background work I’m doing for the Shine Cycle, and (with scarcely more than delight) more poetry than I’d hoped for. (As I’ve said before, I consider how often I have poetry come to me, and with how much effort it comes, to be a symptom of my spiritual and emotional health.) I am thankful for the critique and general feedback I have finally begun to receive.
I am thankful for continued correspondence with dear friends. (Though I have months-old emails that I keep meaning to reply to Really Soon Now …) As I mentioned already, I’m grateful for fellowship with absent friends; this correspondence has been a large portion of that, and so a generous contributor to my continued (more or less) happiness.
I am grateful for the communities of Christian fantasy writers and enthusiasts into which I have been drawn, through which my fiction has already begun to improve, in which I have found kindred spirits and excellent writers whose work I have greatly enjoyed reading, by which my faith has been strengthened and my mind sharpened, and from which (I suspect) have come most of my more recent, more talkative (and helpful) readers.
I am thankful for music, and the modern technology that lets us with little talent receive music of exceptional quality (and infinite variety, following our whim) at the touch of a button for no more (incremental) cost than perhaps a slight increase in our electric bill.
I am grateful … but may I be mindful, and as grateful, always, not just on this day a competing ruler designates for the purpose.
“Blessed are you, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who gives us bread from the earth, and who gives us the fruit of the vine. Blessed are you, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who has kept us in life, sustained us, and brought us to this moment.”
And, readers: What are you thankful for?
Hardly a week goes by before someone refers to Narnia as an “allegory.” Otherwise-perceptive articles have even called Dante’s Divine Comedy an allegory. And if publishers’ and bookstores’ descriptions could be believed, allegory is probably the single most common subgenre of Christian speculative fiction.
Which is nearly impossible, because for the most part true allegories simply aren’t being written today. Because we’ve forgotten how to read them. Because we’ve forgotten what they are.
To hear people talk, you’d think an allegory was any story where something in the story represents something in the real world. Most people would be slightly more specific and require more than one symbol, and perhaps would say something about something in the story’s plot representing actions or events in the real world. But none of this popular conception is quite right, as I finally learned from reading the first book on my list of books that everyone should read, The Allegory of Love by C.S. Lewis.
Instead of mere symbolism, an allegory is a story that has two levels of meaning, even of plot, going on, though the author is only explicitly writing about one. Generally these are the “outer” story—some (likely mundane) story in the real world, such as a man seducing a woman, or even (since this outer plot need not necessarily be concrete) Truth defeating Error—and the “inner” plot, in which the abstract, emotional, psychological, etc., forces are personified, or the hidden and too-abstract features of the “outer” plot are otherwise made concrete. And the “outer” story is told by means of the inner story—everything in the “inner” plot, i.e. the plot that you read, is either representing something in the outer story, or extra detail to make the inner story feel more real.
How exactly this works varies from story to story. Most allegories pick a battle or a journey for their “inner” story, because those work so well—we often talk about an “inner conflict” or “conflict between ideas” or our life as a “journey”. The Pilgrim’s Progress is a good example, and also illustrates my next point: if a story is an allegory, this fact and the allegorical system should both be fairly obvious about as soon as you start reading. In The Pilgrim’s Progress, “Christian” falls into “the Slough of Despond”, and in Bunyan’s The Holy War the town in and around which the War takes place is called “Mansoul”; slightly more obscurely, the modern almost-allegorical Archives of Anthropos by John White takes place in “Anthropos” (Greek for “man” in the sense of “human being”) and has a King “Kardia” (Greek for “heart”)—and each goes on from there in the same vein. Spenser’s Faerie Queene is far more obscure in its naming, but any character whose idenfication with a real-world concept is not immediately clear is identified in the chapter introductions if not in the text.
So let’s apply this to some other, more questionable, examples. We’ll start with an easy one: Some critics (primarily those writing immediately after its publication) called The Lord of the Rings an allegory, with the Ring representing (in some critics’ theories) the nuclear bomb. We can reject this, first, because Tolkien explicitly denied his work was allegory even (we gather from his explanation) by the broader (incorrect) definition I write this essay to correct. But even if we don’t believe its author (which we should in nearly every case), for Tolkien’s work to be an allegory requires there to be a consistent and complete set of symbols, from people to places to objects. No one has (to the best of my knowledge) proposed any such, as critics prefer to pick one or two symbols and belabor those, and I (here acting as devil’s advocate) can’t think of even one such system.
A second example: The Chronicles of Narnia. First, again, the argument from the author: If Lewis were writing an allegory, he would say so, and it would be a very good example of the form; Lewis knew allegories better than most modern readers or writers, and even literally wrote the book on the subject. The Allegory of Love is still used as a textbook today. And he did write one allegory, The Pilgrim’s Regress, which is very clearly an allegory even if we didn’t know its genre before we started reading. But setting all that aside, while there are some prima facie possibly-allegorical elements in some of the novels—proponents of the Narnia-as-allegory theory cite Aslan as Christ, the White Witch as Satan, and so on—once we start trying to make sense of the bulk of the character and events in any such system we immediately run into trouble. Who or what does Edmund, Lucy, Tumnus, Shasta, Rhindon, the Lone Islands, the Bulgy Bears, or any other major character or setting represent? Narnia has in fact been criticized (rightly or wrongly) for being a “hodge-podge” of mythologies; an allegory by nature must have a consistent and obvious system underpinning its events. And the systems that are now being proposed and taken seriously are not the sort that would lend credence to the allegory hypothesis.
So. An author’s clear intent, a consistent (if somewhat chaotic on its face) system of representation, and a story on two levels with one being told via the other. These are the essential elements of the allegory; finding a symbol, a retelling of a Bible story, or a borrowed plot doesn’t make a book an allegory. If you read one, you’ll know.
Over the past few years, I’ve accumulated a long list of blogs that I read regularly, or in some cases that I used to and would like to read but (because they are so prolific) simply can’t spare the time. Many of them are linked from the two sections of my “blogroll”, to your right if you’re reading this on my blog directly rather than on Facebook or in a blog reader.
Before I begin, I’ll mention that I plan to weed my blogroll in the coming weeks; many of the sites I list, especially those of friends and former teachers, seem to have been abandoned in the last few years, but the main problem is that the list is far too long. (So if you want to investigate all my links, instead of just the ones I’m going to keep, it would be wise to hasten.)
In the remainder of today’s post, I’d like to highlight some of the more noteworthy blogs in my blogroll (in no particular order).
Again, these are just a few of the blogs I follow; I recommend taking a look at my full blogroll (to your right on my blog). And I also recommend subscribing to this blog, so you’ll receive new posts either by email or in your blog reader as soon as they’re posted.
A Christian Worldview of Fiction
Rewrite, Reword, Rework
The Bard on the Hill
