Prelude to Revision: Complex Composition from Tolkien, 3 - Exposition by Loremaster

[caper_est]

"Last night you began to tell me strange things about my ring, Gandalf," said Frodo. "And then you stopped, because you said that it was getting late, and we still had another sixteen pages to go..."

Well, nearly!

Tolkien loves this technique, as well he might, being no little of a loremaster himself. Lord of the Rings is full of the beggars. Gandalf, Elrond, Tom Bombadil, Aragorn, Galadriel, Treebeard - and Faramir and Bilbo and Merry and Frodo himself, on a lesser scale - all serve this function at some point or another. Loremaster exposition is one of the opposed methods to maid-and-butler dialogue/As You Know, Bob: it allows one character, who knows huge dollops of stuff almost nobody else knows, to helpfully inform the reader in the process of reasonably informing the character.

For my present purposes, the main use of a loremaster is to tell a story, or the selected highlights of a story, which neither their real nor his fictional audience could otherwise be expected to know. Because they are so lore-wise, they potentially have a lot of such stories at their fingertips.


Maybe they will dump some Ancient Scholarly Lore (like the forging of the Elven-Rings); or Ancient Lost Lore (like the tale of Isildur's Bane); or Ancient Stuff I Know 'Cos I Was There (Tom, Elrond, and Treebeard, passim); or Obscure Stuff I Reconstructed (Gandalf's tale of Gollum). There is often a further implication that they have got it right, and are honest at least in this matter, and thus in some sense standing in for the narrator. Playing games with this can wrongfoot the reader to good or bad effect; but especially in high fantasy, I think the default expectation is that loremaster lectures are part of the narrative furniture, and can mostly or wholly be trusted.

Sometimes this goes beyond merely conveying the needful details of the secondary stories. High loremasters, of whom Gandalf is more or less the archetype, may be charged with conveying not only how things were, but also the grand narrative of how things are, and even how things will be. Authors who, like Tolkien, have a definite moral worldview incorporated into their world's metaphysics, can and do add in Word of God to the characters/readers about how the world works, and what kind of things they ought to admire and shun within its founding assumptions. This trick is as risky as it is frequent.

Moreover, if this is a world where Providence is real or prophecy is possible, high loremasters may have something to say about how things will be in the primary story, or at least how they had better be, sunshine!

Gandalf does all of these things in the epic loremaster lecture which occupies most of the second chapter, from which today's almost-quote was almost-quoted. "His heart tells him" many quite specific things over the course of the story which his mind most certainly does not, and it is just as well he has such a big and wise heart, given the otherwise absolute fecklessness of the plans that come out of his head.


On re-reading Chapter 2, The Shadow of the Past, I find whole new levels of craft in the way Tolkien breaks down this massive infodump, sets it to a compelling rhythm, and controls its tone for fascination, tension, oppression, and release. The only reason I'm not going to analyse it right here and now is a practical one - it's not very close to what I'm trying to achieve. It would be truer to say, in fact, that several features of Three Katherines are a reaction against what it represents. Let's turn now to what I hope to get out of this.


The loremaster's knowledge about the present world and its deep nature, and the high loremaster's cloudy insights into destiny and cosmic duty, are mostly matters for other posts, though they're so deeply tied up with the job that I'm glad to have teased them out here. All I will say for the moment is that they're far more marginal possibilities in the Kateverse than in Middle-Earth. The deep structure of my world and its natural ethics are questions fiercely contested; and, whilst the presence of Elfland screws up causality in some pretty brazen ways, it's not clear that even elves find them useful ways, whereas suggestions of either paradox or prophetic doom are both existentially dreadful and pragmatically difficult to talk sense about. So any loremaster exposition in this tale will be much more strongly focused on those secondary or imaginary tales.

Looking through my story for candidate loremasters, I get the following list: Kit Fox, Katy Elflocks, Shiny Lurker, and the Puffin Superior. In a lower key I also might add Mostly Okay Genius, Hero-Father, Flashy Elder Brother, and Elegant Elder Sister.

Kit Fox is certainly the only loremaster in The Deed of Katy Elflocks, and a deeply unreliable one she is - though Katy is quite good at getting something close to the truth out of her. In Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland, she is... definitively unavailable for expository purposes.

Shiny Lurker always talks in ways casually hair-raising in their implications. What... they... don't do a lot of, is what we'd consider straight talk: they make Galadriel sound like Susan Calvin, when they're not doing it the other way around. If they're expositing any secondary stories, they're doing so at an incredibly oblique angle, because they live at such an oblique angle to everybody else. I note this and pass on.

Hero-Father has been everywhere and seen everything, and he's talkative and intelligent. But he's not a scholar, lives very intensely in the present, and trusts his variously lore-wise family to handle their specialities as competently as he handles his. He doesn't do any loremastering worth mentioning in this draft, because that's not really him at all - still, he could handle a loremaster lecture if I had to give him one (and doubtless would make a rare good story out of it). Noted too, and passed.

Mostly Okay Genius is sort of the opposition's loremaster, and there might be room to use him some more there. Flashy Elder Brother is less of a loremaster than a magic geek, and I want to keep him that way.

Elegant Elder Sister... yes! She's doing some of that work already, for both sides: she's not one of the most learned of our candidates by any means, but she might actually be the best at expressing her lore in terms of what it means to people. For exposition purposes, that makes her ideal. In particular, she's got some significant stories of her own - not all of which I brought out, but the one most closely involving her family being plot-relevant enough that maybe I'll need to in the second draft, at that. And there's an offstage branch of the primary story for which she's the perfect contact-point: the obscure struggle between her mother and the Big Bad. Yes. The way I've handled this will definitely bear looking into and buffing-up in the revision.

Which leaves our really heavy-hitting loremasters. The Puffin Superior knows a lot about a lot, some of it of dreadful significance. She also has a very interesting story, most of which I shall probably never get to tell. For worldbuilding-lore, and a vision diametrically opposed to Katy's without being obviously worse, she is my go-to metaphorical seabird, who is and will be doing some heavy expository spadework in those fields. Secondary stories? Not so much.

And Katy Elflocks herself... well, by Killer-Kate she ought to be the greatest of them, but when I analyze it, I have to say that it just isn't how she functions in this story. She can talk about healing, psychology, chickens, or certain kinds of politics or magical technique till the cows come home (and she can tell you when the cows ought to, and how to deal with the three kinds of horror most likely to have eaten them if they haven't). But she doesn't like talking about herself, or about great mysteries and grand designs, any more than she ever did. The one secondary story she does come in strongly on, is the one whose course the reader knows about already, but about which her interlocutor is painfully wrong. Finally, for most of this second story, she's not on hand to exposit anything. For all her lore and wisdom, she simply can't Gandalf this tale very much at all.


So I don't get to do much exposition of secondary stories by loremaster at all in Three Katherines - and what I do, is not likely to come from the mouths I expected. My takeaway is to focus on Elegant Elder Sister where that needs doing, and to a lesser and highly specialized extent on: Shiny Lurker, Hero-Father, and Mostly Okay Genius. Hm-m-m!