In this post here, I confessed to ignorance of the term "subcreation"--and more than a few people have teased me about my lack of true fangirl status, if I never encountered that term. And that is true. I have since seen how ubiquitous this term is amongst true Tolkien fans.
But the reason for this gap in my knowledge is quite simple, really: I first began my love affair with the world of JRR Tolkien in 1979 on a 24 hour car ride to Canada to visit my mother's family. I was five years old, I hadn't even begun school yet. And my mother had brought along a read-along tape and book for me to listen to in the card of the Rankin Bass movie version of The Hobbit. I'm not sure how many times I listened to the story and looked at the Rankin Bass pictures. A lot. A whole lot a lot.
When I returned home, my uncle, a Tolkien fan, and always refusing to acknowledge that as a child I had a reduced intellectual stature, said, "Don't read that baby stuff, here, take this." He handed me a plain covered book (I think I remember that it was white with a green border? I'm going to look for this edition and will post if I can find) and I began reading the original Tolkien. I'm always thankful to my uncle for ignoring my mother and aunt as they told him I was too young to read it--because that also marked the beginning of my journey into the difficult. His belief in my ability to read the original and therefore, I could.
My love of the books never ceased and up until now, I have avoided reading anything ABOUT the Lord of the Rings. Only The Lord of the Rings itself. For one thing, as I got older and entered the humanities as a specialist--I recoiled form turning my longest standing fiction pleasure into work. If I began thinking of the Lord of the Rings, the way I think about, say, Hamlet, I feared it would destroy something pure for me. An escape into pure pleasure.
Le sigh. (@marbenais wrote this the other day, and it made me laugh really hard.)
But here I am on the precipice of beginning a journey into Tolkien as an object of academic study. But I'm not as much interested in interpretations of the stories and their creative elements as I am about the process that went into making them. When I was pregnant with Mena Bug, I began a series of fantasy novels that I've just brought to the next level of development. It's something I save for moments of relaxation and peace, when I think I can afford a break from writing tier 1 (the dissertation) and writing tier 2 (professional paying or potentially paying work) and lounge around in the subterranean hang out of my fantasy novels and my short stories. And while I'm there sub-creation has really begun to embed itself in my process and that of course leads to a desire to Know More About It.
I have to be careful though--a desire to Know More About It can quickly become and All Consuming Obsession and I can't afford to off-load the energy there. But I've begun to casually mark off territory to read as time and energy permits. I'll let out a call for intervention here if it becomes a dangerous endeavor. ;)
And it also doesn't surprise me that the special world of my books are beginning in a very crypty-and subterranean subworld that exists beneath the flora and fauna of the ancient world above it.
The above link is an interesting article on the Holey-ness of the Hobbit world and how holes and underground spaces operate in Tolkien's Middle Earth. It is an article more about reading Middle Earth than making it--so I'm already treading the borders of what it is I've marked out to read. But I happened across it and my eyes started skating it, and I thought I'd share it with you here since it presented some interesting thoughts.
A good friend has given me some suggestions for books about the forging of Middle Earth. If you have any, I'd be glad to hear them. I'll eventually post my bibliography here. For now. Timer has gone off.
And by the way. The artist for the above is John Howe.
