Constructing Middle Earth

The Lays of Beleriand
The Shaping of Middle Earth
The Lost Road and Other Writings
Sauron Defeated
J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Christopher Tolkien

I first read J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy when I was 12, and I’ve re-read it at least a dozen times since then, and probably more. Each time I find new things to consider, new perspectives to explore.

I’ll grant that it’s a far from perfect creation, but what captivates is the scale of that creation. The weight and depth of history and custom and culture, of myth and poetry, that lies behind the story is evident in every page, and it’s the astonishing complexity of the world of Middle Earth that entrances. I never forget, when reading Tolkein, that he is one of the greatest world-builders in all of literature.

And the best way to see how it was done is to read the collected writings of J.R.R Tolkien, meticulously edited by his son Christopher Tolkien. I’ve been working my way though the 13 volumes of Tolkien’s early writings on the creation of Arda, the battles between Melkior and the Valar, the history of elves, dwarves and men, the tales of Middle Earth.

It’s exciting to watch the development of each element of The Silmarillion and The Lord of The Rings, the choices made and the roads not taken, and to see the wealth of detail growing, the world of Arda becoming more rich and solid with each successive approach to the material.

I’d read the two volumes of Lost Tales before this year, and have now read – due to the limited availability of specific volumes in a printing that uses paper stock that doesn’t emit some kind of chemical that doesn’t gas out and that I cannot tolerate – the books that cover the development of the material that went into The Silmarillion, some of the material that falls between the two great works and deals with the history of the Númenóreans, and the material that went into the last chapters of The Lord of the Rings. Not a problem, I sometimes read the books out of sequence, too.

A delight for literary detectives, and I’m looking forward to the rest of the books.

From Harar to London

Sweetness in the Belly, Camilla Gibb

Camilla Gibb spent a year and a half living in Harar, Ethiopia while working on her PhD in social anthropology. Out of that experience, she has woven a truly remarkable novel.

Lilly is a white Muslim woman, born in North Africa to European parents of a distinct countercultural persuasion. she is raised after their deaths by a Muslim cleric and in time comes to live in Harar just before the collapse of the government of Haile Selassie. Narrowly escaping civil war and chaos, she settles in London, where she maintains her Muslim identity among the Ethiopian refugee community and holds on until the end to her hope that her lover has also survived and that she will someday find him again.

The book is beautifully written, compelling, and thought-provoking. It works well on multiple levels – it’s a strong story, with characters that are fully realised and easy to identify with. It addresses universal themes of identity, love, survival, facing catastrophe and finding balance and joy. It examines the increasingly common experiences of living in dangerous times, of losing one’s home and way of life, of becoming a refugee trying to find a life in a new world while holding on to some part of one’s culture and life of origin.

This is a woman-centred book. Its primary characters are women, the story focuses on them and how they deal with life – including the men around them, some of whom are fathers, brothers, husbands and lovers. The great gift of the book is that the lives of the North African Muslim women presented here are not exoticised, or crafted to support any of the current political stereotypes. They simply are who they are, and live as best as they can, through hardship and happiness, terror and joy.

Some Year-end Recommendations

The sad truth I must face as someone who has tried to maintain a book journal for a year now is that I read too many books (at least for someone who wants to do something other than read, work, sleep and snuggle with my partner), which leaves me less time than most of them deserve to talk about them. Here are some very good books I read in this past year. I enjoyed and learned greatly from them all.


The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Overture and the San Domingo Revolution, C.L.R. James

This book has been called a masterpiece of Marxist historical analysis, the best account of the Haitian (San Domingo) Revolution of 1791-1803 ever written, a seminal text in the study of the African diaspora, and a good many other fine things. It is not an easy read, and it certainly helps to be familiar with the course of events of the French Revolution (as a French colony and a major link in the African slave trade for the French empire, the course of the revolution in San Domingo was inevitably affected by events within Revolutionary France and by its relationships with the United States, Britain, and Spain). But it’s a good read.


Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, Andrea Smith

This is an immensely important book. Lest my simple words fail to express how important it is, I will instead point to some reviews.

I am most intrigued by the simplicity with which Smith links sexual violence to land to bodies to spirituality, in such a way that you can see the cause and effect of colonization on each link which then influence the other links. It is a circle that is hard-pressed to be broken or to know where to begin the healing and repair. What makes Smith's text so powerful is her illustration of a cycle of violence and genocide that has a long history and what looks like a long future, especially when colonial attitudes of violence, rape, and power are being internalized in our Native communities. "All women of color," Smith notes, "live in the dangerous intersections of gender and race." Megan L. MacDonald, American Studies Program, Purdue University

Conquest examines the relationship between the violence of state institutions and experiences of interpersonal violence. Smith argues that a culture reliant upon dominance and intimidation for social cohesion will inevitably result in violence within interpersonal relationships. Through a series of thematic chapters, Smith demonstrates how people of colour, and Aboriginal peoples specifically, have been further victimized by the state through racist and sexist policies and surveillance structures that maintain control over every aspect of their lives. Zoe Aarden and Deborah Simmons

The Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada, ed. Benjamin Drew

During the 1850s, the American abolitionist Benjamin Drew travelled to various communities in Upper Canada (now, roughly, southern Ontario) collecting accounts from people who had escaped slavery in the U.S. and settled in Canada to avoid being captured and returned (including Harriet Tubman). Some of these narratives discuss the conditions under which they lived prior to their escape; others simply recount the flight to Canada and their experiences on settling in a new country. The accounts are fascinating, sometimes harrowing. One element that struck me in many accounts is that the narrators did not try to pretend that they did not experience racism in Canada, but they did almost universally agree that this was not a matter of great concern to them; they appeared to believe that in Canada there were laws that would protect them – or in the worst case, allow them redress – should they suffer harm from any racist acts. Another element was the frequent insistences that virtually all the refugees they knew, including themselves, had been able to make good livings and support themselves and their families, and to live temperate and law-abiding lives. The book’s introduction suggests that the assertions of self-sufficiency may have been in part a response to various undertakings in the northern US at the time, some of them fraudulent, to collect money that would supposedly be sent to Canada to help support refugees, while both arguments could have been intended to counter racist propaganda arguments from Southern slave owners that Blacks needed the institution of slavery to protect them from themselves.


Memoirs of a Race Traitor, Mab Segrest

Recounting the experiences of a white Southern-born lesbian doing anti-racist work during the 70s and 80s in the American South, the book puts a primary focus on race issues, but doesn’t forget how gender and sexual preference issues intersect with them. An interesting and honest book, and one that I found personally interesting – as a white queer who was involved in the late 70s and early 80s in a coalition of people from both the black and queer communities fighting against one of the KKK’s perennial attempts to establish a greater presence in Nova Scotia. Very different situations, circumstances, histories and personalities involved, but just enough of a similarity that it struck me close to home at some points.


My Dangerous Desires, Amber Hollibaugh

An excellent collection of Hollibaugh's writing (with a foreword by Dorothy Allison!), with essays and interviews that address various aspects of the relationships between class, gender, sexuality, political activism, and desire from the perspective of a working-class femme lesbian activist and sex worker, among other things. Many of these essays are deeply personal, grounding the theoretical concepts she is exploring in an analysis of her own roots, influences and life journey. Some of the pieces are conversations with other writers, such as Deirdre English, Gayle Rubin, Jewelle Gomez, and Cherrie Moraga, including the groundbreaking "What We're Rollin' Around in Bed With."


Talking about a Revolution, South End Press Collective (ed.)

A collection of interviews with some of America’s truly great radical left activists and intellectuals – Michael Albert, Noam Chomsky, Barabara Ehrenreich, bell hooks, Peter Kwong, Winona LaDuke, Manning Marable, Urvashi Vaid and Howard Zinn – about their experiences and hopes for progressive social movements in America and about the spirit of revolution. Much food for thought if you aspire to be a revolutionary, in any sense of the word.

The Axis of Belief

The Great Transformation, Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong is one of the best contemporary thinkers and communicators on the subject of religion and its place in human thought, culture, history and politics. Some of her other books – notably The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths, A History of God: From Abraham to the Present, the 4000 Year Quest for God and Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today's World – are, in my opinion, essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the context in which a great many of the important social, cultural and political trends and events of our time must be situated.

This is one of her more scholarly and historical works – it’s more about the development of the religious impulse in humanity from its beginning expressions to the foundations of the major religious traditions of history and the present than about how those traditions might affect us today. In this book, Armstrong sets the stage for, and carries the reader through, the Axial Age among the peoples of four distinct regions, tracing the origins and early developments of Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India; monotheism in Israel; and philosophical rationalism in Greece.

It’s an ambitious project that, by its very size, limits the depth of historical detail that Armstrong is able to provide. Also, one can, I think, legitimately raise some questions about the validity of the concept of the Axial Age as originally developed by German philosopher Karl Jaspers. For example, I don’t accept that only these four cultures developed religious traditions that exhibit “Axial” characteristics, as Jaspers posited and Armstrong has supported by examining only these four in her book. To quote a brief and lucid summary of Armstrong’s characteristics of Axial Age religions:

What are these radical principles of the Axial Age? First, the ability to recognize the divine in both the other and oneself, along with a "likening" of the other to oneself—an empathy later to be called "The Golden Rule." Second, the rise of introspection and self-discovery over external ritual and magic. Third, the recognition of the inevitability of suffering and the development of "spiritual technologies" for transcending it. Fourth, the capacity to see things as they really are—a realism terribly undervalued in our own time. Fifth, the spread of knowledge, beyond the confines of an elite, to ordinary folk. Sixth, an awareness of the limitations of human knowledge. Review by Michael Alec Rose

While these were certainly a part of the early development of the religions that Armstrong, following Jaspers, addresses, I am hesitant to accept the notion that these qualities did not develop as part of the religious thought, life and traditions of other cultures, both before and after the great ripple of the Axial age transformations.

As an animist, I was also annoyed by the argument that religious thought and experience based in an animist religious or spiritual tradition is necessarily “magical,” which in this context implies pre-Axial and hence not “developed.” There’s a part of me that wonders whether Armstrong has unconsciously dismissed – as many scholars do – the spiritual history of people who did not build great civilisations, in Western terms.

However, while I have some concerns about what may have been left out of the picture, the book is nonetheless well worth reading for what it does contain – a comparative tracing of the origins and ideas of some of the key religious and philosophical traditions of human history.

Of Interest

Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey Into Manhood and Back Again, Norah Vincent

An interesting journalistic account of the experiences of a woman passing as a man. Norah Vincent spent over a year in full drag, immersing herself in a variety of social situations, from mixed gender ones such as work and dating, to exclusively male ones such as a men’s bowling league, a monastic retreat, and even a men’s movement group, complete with a weekend in the woods. The story she has to tell is interesting. What I wanted, however, was more analysis of her experiences. What did it all mean?

Vincent indicates that she was forced to bring her experiment to a close due to something akin to a nervous breakdown, where she became lost somewhere between herself and her alter-ego Ned, which raises the question, who was Ned, and how did he differ from Norah? At times, she seems to look at her experiences through a frame of essentialism, wherein men are men and women are women, and the psychological stress she experienced was a result of creating a male persona that didn’t, and couldn’t, fit her female self. At other times, especially when looking at the experiences of the men she interacts with, she appears to be indicating the ways in which gender is constructed and revealing the human foundation on which we build the gendered edifice. Certainly, her observations provide support for those who argue that the demands of institutional sexism and heterosexism constrain and damage men, especially men who may have male and heterosexual privilege but lack class and race privilege, and pay for their privilege by being constantly armoured against the threat of being seen as in any way not male and straight.



Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman, Phyllis Chesler

I really want to like Chesler’s work, because she is a feminist of unquestioned pedigree and she addresses important topics, but somehow, I just end up feeling that perhaps I should wait until someone else comes along and looks at those topics through different eyes.

The topic is relationships between women, and why we can play the bitch so well to each other. It’s an important look at the other side of sisterhood – we cannot go on pretending that women are “essentially” nicer, kinder, more understanding, forgiving, and gentle, and that this is naturally the way we behave toward each other. The secret is that all sorts of nasty undigested and unexcreted lumps of internalised sexism, to say nothing of classism and racism and heterosexism and ablism and lookism (someone who lives without privilege in one area, it seems to me, is often very happy to find and vigorously exercise some other form of privilege to try and compensate) lead to behaviours between women that range from petty (but damaging) gossip to out and out physical violence. Sometimes we are more vicious among ourselves than men are among themselves, or toward us. And we can’t do anything about this until we acknowledge it.

The problem for me in Chesler’s book is that she individualises the issues, situating their basis in the nuclear family (as far too many psychiatrically trained theorists tend to do) rather than looking at the phenomenon as a consequence of internalised sexism and the circumstances that institutional and interpersonal sexism have place women in and continue to place women in.

An interesting, thought-provoking but ultimately unsatisfying read.