Lancelot Schaubert — What was the first picture you remember drawing?

Zach Weinersmith — Oh wow, that’s a good question. The earliest one I’m sure I can remember would have been, I think, in second or third grade. It was a giant talking bomb insisting that everything would be fine. I believe it was part of a series of comics, possibly inspired by The Far Side, that I and some friends had drawn at the time, but I can’t remember any others, and frankly I’m not sure I remember that one for certain!

Lancelot Schaubert — Hahaha awesome

Do you have a copy of it? Or any of your old ones you don’t mind sharing?

Zach Weinersmith — Oh nah, I don’t tend to save old stuff, at least not on purpose.

Lancelot Schaubert — Oh wow, that’s interesting. Why’s that?

Zach Weinersmith — I’m not, like, a minimalist. Just a very disorganized person. I do have a stack of old artwork from when I used to hand-draw, but it’s probably getting mildewed in the attic as we speak. I once had a very good art teacher who said it was important to get rid of old sketches, because obsessing over that one time you made something good was the mark of an amateur, or of stagnancy. But, to be perfectly honest, most of what’s going on here is that I tend to really detest my old work. Actually, Bea Wolf is the first thing I’ve written where I can go back and read portions of it happily.

Lancelot Schaubert — Oh man. Dollar for your mildewed attic sketches for sure.

That’s very true about the “one time I was good.” I think often about Degas’ ballerinas: how so many of them feel like ghosts because it was more important to him to have a painting showing him in the process of learning to paint a ballerina rather than the ballerina. He was just riffing over and over and over and over.

Who were early inspirations for you?

Zach Weinersmith — Some combination of the then-popular newspaper comics, especially The Far Side and Dilbert (Scott Adams wasn’t out as a crazy person back then), as well as the early webcomics from that time, like Penny Arcade and The Parking Lot is Full. Later, when I got more into comics as a potential career path I was really into Glen Baxter, who was obscure-ish then, and I think quite obscure now. But his working and The Parking Lot is Full were so amazingly different from other work at the time, and many of those comics remain fresh and ambitious compared to much of the work being done now.

If the topic is literature or poetry or non-fiction writing, my inspirations are quite different, but that stuff came later in my career.

Lancelot Schaubert — What was it on the literary side?

Zach Weinersmith — Kinda depends… lately I’ve been doing a lot of poetry stuff for Bea Wolf, stealing wherever I can. The Beowulf poet, of course, and other anonymous Old English stuff. Also Cynewulf, Conrad Aiken, Dickinson, Shakespeare, Kipling, Hausman, Rosetti. I like anyone who pushes language fairly far without losing the sense.

Lancelot Schaubert — Seems from your work you dabble in philosophy and… dare I say Christianity?

Zach Weinersmith — I’d rather say religion, though of course for most of my readers a Christian deity is the familiar one, so I use that framework more than others. Also a lot of the authors I look to for analysis of Old English texts, as well as the writers of those texts, were Christians of some sort, and by modern standards we might say reactionary.

But I guess my reaction to that question depends on whether we’re talking comics or poetry!

Lancelot Schaubert — Fair to say theist?

And I’m asking more as a both-and, not an either-or…

Zach Weinersmith — As in I’m a theist or my work is influenced by theist views? For Beowulf, well, my dirty secret is I have a Bachelor of the Arts in literature, mostly focused on British literature, and so it’s just part of my working knowledge. But actually Bea Wolf started as a joke, and originally had a very different tone. More mock epic than epic about kids. And with that fake 19th-century-pretending-to-be-10th-century tone Tolkien uses at his worst. But the long story short version is that I started incorporating more of the original poem’s tone and methods, and it seemed every time I did so my kid liked it more. So eventually I went all in.

Lancelot Schaubert — Both? Either?

Zach Weinersmith — I’m not religious, and was raised Jewish. For Beowulf, having read a decent amount of interpretation, my view is more or less that you have a text bringing, or trying to bring together a part of a Christian worldview, having to do with eternity, sacrifice, powers beyond mortals, with an older Germanic worldview with somewhat similar orientation, though whether God can be interchangeable with Fate is a bit tricky!

But, I think much of what animates the original poem, and what I tried to put into the book (though this’ll be more clear when the sequel is done) is that spirit of somehow reconciling with fate while also fighting to one’s utmost. Anyway, I think when doing an adaptation you’re trying to carry something across about the original text, and so I’m sure there’s some Christian influence, at least in that sense.

Lancelot Schaubert — Gotcha. Would you consider yourself philosophical? Or do you believe in God at all? I’m trying to tease out some of that substance.

Oh for sure. I remember being surprised how much was in there. I thought it was a thoroughly pagan text. But I suppose, as Chesterton said, everything in modern society is of Christian origin and the only thing of pagan origin is Christianity.

Also: what got you into Beowulf?

Zach Weinersmith — I consider myself agnostic. And Yes, and I think Chesterton’s a fun source here because he was in a similar tribe to the Inklings, Lewis in particular. In terms of paganism, I’m no expert, but I found reading e.g. Cynewulf very informative, in that he’s much more clearly trying to gussy up Christian stories with Germanic sensibilities, for instance presenting the Apostles as mighty warriors engaged in a kind of battle. The weighing of these things is more weird and subtle in Beowulf, which never mentions Jesus in particular and as I recall talks mostly (exclusively) about Old Testament stories and figures.

Lancelot Schaubert — Gotcha. Any philosophical pedigree or reading or you just like riffing on those subjects?

Yeah he’s sort of a proto-Inkling, friend of Dorothy Sayers, etc

Yeah that and new testament citations but not the gospel. What disciplines formed your study of the alliterative meter?

Zach Weinersmith — No credentials anyway, I’m just a nerd.

Lancelot Schaubert — Oh I didn’t mean credentials. More like “what do you nerd out about” ?

Zach Weinersmith — Ohhh.

Lancelot Schaubert — I’m about as credentialed as a used car salesman running a DAV office. God help us all if I’m ever put in charge as an academic dean.

Zach Weinersmith — Just about everything, I suppose. I mean, I’ve been employed as an entertainer for 20 years and most of what I do is read. My main strategy to keep things going is just to read everything. That said, since I’ve started writing for traditional publishers, at a given time I’m a bit more focused. E.g. I just spent 4 years getting expertise in space settlement design and law for a book! In terms of verse, I suppose I’m mostly passing through. The next few projects are quite different.

Lancelot Schaubert — Did you read anything to prep for the alliterative meter?

Zach Weinersmith — Yeah, mostly a million versions of Beowulf. Also Tolkien’s essays and his bits of alliterative verse and a bunch of volumes from Dumbarton Oaks’ OE translations.

Lancelot Schaubert — Did you do CS Lewis’s articles or any other manuals?

Zach Weinersmith — I’ve read most of CS Lewis, I believe. Well, most of his non-fiction — has fiction is generally too allegorical for me, and I’m afraid I just am not that into Narnia.

Lancelot Schaubert — Oh try Till We Have Faces. Its a more honest novel, but yeah the man did his PhD on allegory so he couldn’t really get away from it

(I was thinking though more CS Lewis’s stuff on the alliterative meter)

Lancelot Schaubert — How do you feel about the Hugo nomination?

Zach Weinersmith — My personal feeling is awards don’t do a lot for me emotionally, but lots of other people do and I’m very happy about that. As you know, books are generally made by a large team. And, especially for a book like Bea Wolf, a lot of people were willing to take a risk – not just my illustrator, but the editor and publishing house. I mean, it’s a weird project. So, to be able to deliver on sales and various accolades is nice. When people work with me I always fret they don’t feel they’re getting a good bargain, so something like a Hugo nomination is a kind of relief.

Lancelot Schaubert — Yeah I feel that with Bea Wolf — and awards. It’s something you can wield, potentially, but not something to seek.

I thought the “Hey wait” pun was hilarious, by the way, at the very start of Bea Wolf.

Zach Weinersmith — It’s funny with Lewis you use the word “honest” because my main gripe, having read his complete essays, is that they always feel a little false.

Like I might not say dishonest, but that they’re a kind of performance of wise college professor, whereas with people I think of as the very greatest of essayists, say Orwell, even if it’s a performance it feels very real.

So as a performer I always (or anyway, usually) appreciate Lewis, but as a human, I’m always left wanting. It feels like there’s a subterranean layer you’re never quite let into, between all the good writing and erudition. Even someone like Gore Vidal who is almost always and actively playing a character, lets you in around the corner. Maybe “A Grief Observed” is the exception, but even there there’s that Lewisian shadow-play.

Lancelot Schaubert — I meant honest in terms of genre. “Honest novel” instead of “allegory written in a time of novels that’s often mistaken for a bad attempt at a novel.”

Perhaps I should clarify: which books do you feel that way about?

Like with Lewis, his entire project is just western canon 101. Discarded Image is Medievalism 101. Miracles is supernatural theology 101. Probablem of Pain is suffering 101. Mere Christianity is creed 101. If you want his more obscure stuff, you need to get into something more like “The Personal Heresy” which is a debate about poetry with another critic or his intro to Spenser in the Spenser volume or even the select literary essays. But at the end of the day, I don’t think “performance” is what I’d say so often as “autistic.” He was a man who admitted one of his greatest weakenesses was physical affection from other men. So he was very, very closed off emotionally and started debates all the time. Probably had more in common with Harlan Ellison or David Bentley Hart in personality: acerbic, however friendly. Blunt. Ready to debate at the drop of the hat. He was a man who thought “meeting of the minds” was an intimate term and who shunned hugs. But again, depends on what you mean by “real,”

I was just asking primarily because of the alliterative meter article — didn’t know if you had a ruberic or just read the texts and tried to emulate it.

Zach Weinersmith — Ahhh, I see what you mean. In that case, I think the honesty, so to speak is that he didn’t like modernism and did like e.g. Pilgirm’s Progress. Which, if a book like that is your standard than Lewis could be considered to have a comparatively light touch!

Lancelot Schaubert — Perhaps that’s why he called them “supposals.” Sort of a proto “speculative” term.

Zach Weinersmith — In terms of allegory, I suspect I’m thinking more of his novella-length fiction, e.g. The Great Divorce. In terms of performing, I’m thinking of his non-fiction, and in particular his many essays. I think you’re right that he’s more real in his more technical western canon stuff — I was recently reading his preface to Paradise Lost which is much as you describe. I think I’d rather than autistic say that he seems to me to have been, like many smart people, so capable of wielding conversation that he was able to paper over any insecurities or sentimentalisms with wit.

BUT, it’s always dangerous to psychologize the past this way. Regarding alliterative meters – I didn’t use that article to my recollection. The meter in Bea Wolf is fairly free, though it kind of blends iambs with those older Old English and Norse patterns. Very loosely though. I’m mostly going by sound, and in any case modern English isn’t so good at those old styles, since it lacks complex conjugation since so can’t fit so much info in one word. re: awards – yes, you should never seek awards because beyond a certain level of quality the nomination and selection are pretty stochastic. Sometimes also political within the organization, which adds another layer of randomness. Boethius says you shouldn’t be proud of distinctions that you know are given to people you don’t respect, and whereas this could of course be said of any award by any person, well, awards should be of little value in terms of self-assessment. The real prize is the hope of writing a book that’ll live in the library for many years. Thanks re: Hey Wait! I have a couple other puns snuck in, but tried not to lean on it too hard. That one was just good fortune.

In that it’s something a kid would actually say but also breaks open the story.

Lancelot Schaubert — “shouldabeenloved” seems to me to be a common midwest conjugation.

What are your big dream projects? Your big hairy audacious goals?

re: psychoanalysing the past — that’s precisely the subject of The Personal Heresy debates: the poet is not the subject of the poem, merely the author. The subject of the poem is the subject of the poem and the poem is a means by which to see whatever the poet is looking at. If anything, what we may see is that in an era where every other author made every other subject selfishly and pridefully about themselves, Lewis had the humility to make the subject about the subject and to forget himself. Unless the subject was himself, in that case A Grief Observed and Surprised by Joy. It may be that we moderns are simply too obsessed with cults of personality

Zach Weinersmith — I think it’s correct to say Lewis was pushing back against a certain kind of literary navel-gazing. As I’m sure you know he didn’t like verse that couldn’t be parsed and there’s a story that he was once asked if modern lit should be taught in university and compared it to teaching students to blow their noses!

But I’m not sure I’m willing to ascribe a sort of pure humility to Lewis. I don’t think it’s possible for writers, and anyway it’s clear from his letters he was sad when the public didn’t receive his work well and happy when they did. I understand he had a very humble home life and found most of his pleasure in books and beer and fellowship, and no doubt he had more humility than, say, Hemingway or Joyce, but that’s a pretty easy bar to clear. But I do agree that he was at least trying to partake of a medieval viewpoint that the goal of art is not self-expression, but perhaps something like glorification.

Back to me! Well, Bea Wolf is kind of my audacious dream project, and I’m writing a somewhat more audacious sequel to finish it. As a general thing, I aspire to write a particular kind of middlebrow work – stuff that is accessible and amusing while being about something other than the present zeitgeist.

Lancelot Schaubert — “Back to me” — you’re frigging hilarious. I’m dying over here.

Certainly not a pure humility — even amid, say, Catholic saints, that’s only a momentary thing. They’re saints not because they’re not sinners, but because they showed heroic virtue in a specific way. For Francis, that was animals and the poor. For Thomas, theology. For Nicholas, orphan slaves. For Patrick, pirates. So I guess the last line — not self-expression, but glorification of the subject matter — is what I meant, yes.

In that sense, he may well be (other than perhaps Tolkien or Nabokov) the most “real” writer of the 20th century. “Authentic?” I mean he was crap with emotional vulnerability, he definitely wasn’t live journaling, live blogging. live streaming, or doing the Kerouac or Gozno journalism thing.

Wow you’re doing it! You’re doing your dream project!

Zach Weinersmith — I think in kids’ lit in particular there’s a lot of moralizing and not a lot of art. I say that as someone who agrees with most of the morals being pushed – environmentalism, anti-bullying, anti-bigotry etc. – but I wonder who our Shel Silverstein or Maurice Sendake or Mark Twain or PL Travers is now? I mean if you look at children’s bestsellers, it tends to be about celebrities, celebrity franchises, or books written to precisely target the political/social concerns of millennial parents who buy books. But I want more weirdos.

I mean Maurice Sendak was absolutely bonkers, for example. But there’s a kind of spooky depth to his writing that is hard to see these days. I’m sure it’s out there, but it doesn’t appear to be prominent. Probably these things go in cycles, but I think it’s good to push for a kind of pure aesthetic that transcends other values. And I think kids’ want, or anyway need, that too.

Appropros of this conversation, I believe Lewis says somewhere something like “Any book worth reading as a child is still worth reading as an adult.” I try to bear that in mind, even when I’m doing some light work.

And now, just to add something less philosophical, I would like to try more longform verse. I think poetry is a kind of candle that went out in the Anglophone world. Or anyway, separated into modernist and drivel, causing the death of the romantic. And the bummer is when people neither write nor read it they can’t appreciate achievements in it, so (to at last return to the metaphor), blowing on the candle gets harder. The highlight for me of writing Bea Wolf was the 6-year-old girl who sent me stanzas of an epic she was working on.

Lancelot Schaubert — Yeah I feel that. Even like… Little Women? The new movie? Did you see that? It was sooooo preachy. So preachy. And the message it was saying differed not a whit from the 90’s version. And the 90’s version is a better story. Granted, the new one is wonderul as a work of art — almost straight out of the Hudson School of painters

Where are our Dostoevskys though?

I think you’ll sell well because of that, honestly. I think kids want stories. True “in the flesh,” ensouled, embodied, enstoried ideas.

Sendak’s a great example yes.

That’s a great quote. Madeline L’Engle has similar vibes in her Walking on Water — where she’s talking about how children never really struggled with the idea of a tesseract.

Dude that’s amazing. To hear a 6-year-old working on an epic.

That’s quite the achievement.

Anything else you’re working on? Or aspire to?

And are there any questions I should have asked, but didn’t?

Zach Weinersmith — re: Lewis – ah, yes, I see what you mean. Personally I have trouble separating the idea of authenticity and realness as such. Have you ever read, for instance, Dymer? Obviously it’s juvenialia, so this is a bit unfair, but it’s just line after line of technical perfection and not a single clause is as good as Yeats on a bad day.

That’s a hard comparison, but I do wonder if he could’ve just lowered the veil a little more the words themselves would have come out more beautiful. Perhaps not, though. He’s certainly more like a maker of illuminated manuscripts than a Walt Whitman.

Well, I guess I would want to close it out for what it’s worth by saying for me Lewis was like Tolkien’s essays or the literary critic Harold Bloom – I read mostly for the pure enjoyment of people who really really like books, are good at writing, know a lot, and aren’t interested in pretending that most of Foucault makes sense. But I don’t think I’d take poetry lessons from any of them, except possibly a little theft from Tolkien’s Fall of Arthur.

Put another way, many times I’ve wished to have my own Inklings as a group, because when you’re writing in a longform verse format there is basically nobody to talk to who’ll cheer you on and insist you’re not crazy, other than my 10-year-old and a small number of friends who don’t live near me.

But, I don’t know how many notes I’d end up taking from Lewis’ ghost if he were here!

re: preachiness — I think it’s mostly about parents, not about kids. Like, have you noticed there are all these shows that’ll trick a kid into saying “hypothesis” in the presence of a teacher or parent, but which don’t actually teach science so much as the idea that, say, bugs are neat? I feel at my best I can write things where adult and kids both enjoy it, and more or less enjoy it as the same book — not e.g. because of jokes that went over kids’ heads.

Lancelot Schaubert — Oh he’s a terrible poet. And that’s also before he was a Christian, at his conversion he gave up poetry. I think that’s telling.

He wanted — desperately — to be the next Milton.

And when he was finally humbled he gave up his poetry because he realized he’s a terrible poet.

Zach Weinersmith — Yes and in a very weird and particular way – he’d read all the great stuff, knew why it was great, but just seemed incapable of creating anything living. I don’t know of anyone else like that. That’s what feels to me like there’s a something under the surface that was restrained.

In terms of other stuff – I’m working on a comedy of errors for kids, but I can say no more about it. I have several ideas for graphic novels I’ve tabled for ages, but having had a little success with Bea Wolf, I have a little window, I suspect, for publishers to take a risk on weird things with me. I also have pop sci stuff I do with my wife, that’s occupied much of my life for several years. But the big thing now is Bea Wolf 2, or as it’ll probably be titled, something like The Fall of Bea Wolf.

Lancelot Schaubert — I don’t think none of it’s living. I wept at the end of Till We Have Faces

Living poetry? Surely. Hard agree.

Zach Weinersmith — Sorry, I mean the poetry, not the prose

Lancelot Schaubert — Oh sure

He’s not a poet. He even praised George MacDonald’s father who taught him to “give up the boy’s game of poetry at an early age.”

Then again, sometimes his phrases ARE poetry, but they come nested inside things he cares the most about

And again, I don’t know that I’m the best judge. I’m not a great poet.

I try, but I’m not great.

But I think his poetry sucks.

Zach Weinersmith —But see MacDonald actually could be weird in a way Lewis couldn’t! Like you ever read The Princess and the Goblin? There’s the image of the ghostly grandmother figure, in a room the princess can’t always find, secretly spinning an invisible thread that connects her to the little girl. MacDonald can be incredibly tiresome, especially when he’s preaching, but I don’t find anything so vivid in Lewis.

Lancelot Schaubert — Yeah I get what you’re saying about their notes.

Oh yeah that’s super weird. And, granted, some of this is just taste

Yeah MacDonald is a mythopoet, but little more for sure.

His prose sucks, even Lewis said that. But you don’t like The Lord of the Rings at all?

Regarding hypothesis, yes. But that’s mostly because we live in an age of scientism. No one realizes that all scientific method was predicated on the scholastics. Or, better, that each hypothesis begins and ends in syllogism, which is inherently unobservable

Zach Weinersmith —In terms of other stuff – I’m working on a comedy of errors for kids, but I can say no more about it. I have several ideas for graphic novels I’ve tabled for ages, but having had a little success with Bea Wolf, I have a little window, I suspect, for publishers to take a risk on weird things with me. I also have pop sci stuff I do with my wife, that’s occupied much of my life for several years. But the big thing now is Bea Wolf 2, or as it’ll probably be titled, something like The Fall of Bea Wolf.

Lancelot Schaubert — Wonderful. Well that’s great with the weird things. I look forward to that for sure. Couple more questions:

Do you have any pictures to accompnay this? Happy to share whatever you have, personal or professional. If a City on Mars was merely run by Elon, would you work on his farm?

We’ll see if anything comes up with the LOTR question, etc.

Zach Weinersmith — re: LOtR – my nerd confession is I’m not a huge high fantasy fan, even when it’s good. I’m more on the literary end. Like as meandering and often boring it is, Phantastes left more of an impression on me.

For my sensibilities, Tolkien’s essays are his high watermark, both in terms of craft of writing and insight. I also enjoy reading about his life and views on poetry. He’s easily the best poet among the Inklings. Again, no Yeats, but I guess I would describe it as giving me a similar feeling of seeing a nice cottage made entirely out of rocks, dirt, grass, and thatch.

I think that’s very conscious, and when he strays it gets worse. Consider this from the Hobbit, where it’s great until the last four lines:

Roads go ever ever on,
Over rock and under tree,
By caves where never sun has shone,
By streams that never find the sea;
Over snow by winter sown,
And through the merry flowers of June,
Over grass and over stone,
And under mountains in the moon.
Roads go ever ever on
Under cloud and under star,
Yet feet that wandering have gone
Turn at last to home afar.
Eyes that fire and sword have seen
And horror in the halls of stone
Look at last on meadows green
And trees and hills they long have known.

— Tolkien

Like, what’s this “horror in the halls” business? You either crack that open with something vivid or let it lie. After “afar” you’re good – you’re right on the rim of oversentimentalism, but then he’s gotta go all in. The best line to me is “feet that wandering have gone” because “wandering have gone” is so much better than “gone wandering” because you get a double sense of gone as both motion and absence.

re: science – Ha, well, I mean I don’t think kids are going to submit to a course in Bayesian statistics and the limits of knowledge. Or anyway, you’d have to add a lot of music and jokes. But I think it’s a kind of innocent scientism – parents know science is high status, so they’d like to see their kids doing science-like things. If philosophy were more prominent, they’d be carefully elocuting “Eudaimonia” to impressed adults.

re: pictures – there are some publicly available images from Bea Wolf, but I don’t think I have the rights to give more than that? I’m not sure… re: City on Mars – lord no. I mean one of the things we carp about is that “closed-loop ecology” systems are deeply underfunded by the people who claim to favor nearterm settlement. It’s silly.

Lancelot Schaubert — Or just… syllogisms, which aren’t really flashy and are easy to learn early on. And predicate science

I think the trick of Tolkien’s poetry is that he’s intentionally writing bad for bad cultures

Of whom else can we say that? That they purposefully didn’t try their best when a lesser society within their subcreation called for their worst?

Zach Weinersmith — Oh, I don’t know re: Tolkien’s poetry. Two thoughts. One, a while back I did a little research project on Shakespeare’s sonnets, and a funny thing is there’s a tendency to say of any of the really bad ones that it must’ve been farce.

See sonnet 145:

Those lips that Love’s own hand did make
Breathed forth the sound that said “I hate”
To me that languished for her sake;
But when she saw my woeful state,
Straight in her heart did mercy come,
Chiding that tongue that ever sweet
Was used in giving gentle doom,
And taught it thus anew to greet:
“I hate” she altered with an end
That followed it as gentle day
Doth follow night, who, like a fiend,
From heaven to hell is flown away.
“I hate” from hate away she threw,
And saved my life, saying “not you.”

— Shakespeare

This is awkward teen levels of bad, and duly it is ascribed to his youth or to not be serious. Sonnet 24 contains a horrifically tortured metaphor and so it’s considered to be perhaps some kind of farce. Second thing – when you read Tolkien trying to write lofty pretty language, it’s pretty similar. I think if you took a passage from Fall of Arthur or Sellic Spell it’s going to have similar qualities. Not that he wasn’t consciously doing something, I just don’t think the something was the way it was because it was in the mouth of Hobbits. Tolkien, as he himself remarked, was the Hobbit!

My impression in general is he is not good at differentiating this stuff. Like Dwarf poetry sounds the same, but is just about dwarves, as I recall. I can’t remember if Elves had poetry, but I’d bet you if they did/do it sounds the same, only talks about Elf stuff.

Lancelot Schaubert — *ahem*
**sits up straight in printer’s armchair**

Clap! Snap! the black crack!
Grip, grab! Pinch, nab!
And down down to Goblin-town
You go, my lad!

Clash, crash! Crush, smash!
Hammer and tongs!
Knocker and gongs!
Pound, pound, far underground!
Ho, ho! my lad!

Swish, smack! Whip crack!
Batter and beat!
Yammer and bleat!
Work, work! Nor dare to shirk,
While Goblins quaff, and Goblins laugh,
Round and round far underground
Below, my lad!

That, seems to me, to be a purposefully bad poem in the tongue of the goblins.

I mean I agree with the Shakespeare thing, for sure. But I might come at it from a different angle: is being an awkward teen, still, as an adult a bad thing? Ought we be so afraid to blush? Or perhaps that’s what you’re saying: that it’s bad and there’s nothing to be ashamed of. Sometimes Shakespeare wrote duds. That’s okay.

Versus this by Treebeard:

In the willow-meads of Tasarinan I walked in the Spring.
Ah! the sight and the smell of the Spring in Nan-tasarion!
And I said that was good.
I wandered in Summer in the elm-woods of Ossiriand.
Ah! the light and the music in the Summer by the Seven Rivers of Ossir!
And I thought that was best.
To the beeches of Neldoreth I came in the Autumn.
Ah! the gold and the red and the sighing of leaves in the Autumn in Taur-na-neldor!
It was more than my desire.
To the pine-trees upon the highland of Dorthonion I climbed in the Winter.
Ah! the wind and the whiteness and the black branches of Winter upon Orod-na-Thôn!
My voice went up and sang in the sky.
And now all those lands lie under the wave,
And I walk in Ambarona, in Tauremorna, in Aldalómë,
In my own land, in the country of Fangorn,
Where the roots are long,
And the years lie thicker than the leaves
In Tauremornalómë.

Versus Theodin:

Arise now, arise, Riders of Théoden!
Dire deeds awake: dark is it eastward.
Let horse be bridled, horn be sounded!
Forth Eorlingas!

Arise, arise, Riders of Théoden!
Fell deeds awake: fire and slaughter!
Spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered,
a sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises!
Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor!

Versus Frodo:

When evening in the Shire was grey
his footsteps on the Hill were heard;
before the dawn he went away
on journey long without a word.

From Wilderland to Western shore,
from northern waste to southern hill,
through dragon-lair and hidden door
and darkling woods he walked at will.

With Dwarf and Hobbit, Elves and Men,
with mortal and immortal folk,
with bird on bough and beast in den,
in their own secret tongues he spoke.

A deadly sword, a healing hand,
a back that bent beneath his load;
a trumpet-voice, a burning brand,
a weary pilgrim on the road.

A lord of wisdom throned he sat,
swift in anger, quick to laugh;
an old man in a battered hat
who leaned upon a thorny staff.

He stood upon the bridge alone
and Fire and Shadow both defied;
his staff was broken on the stone,
in Khazad-dûm his wisdom died.

Upon hearing this poem, Samwise Gamgee suggested another stanza:

The finest rockets ever seen:
they burst in stars of blue and green,
or after thunder golden showers
came falling like a rain of flowers.

Ha! I withdraw the point. Sounds to my ear like he’s doing the Bible for the Ents, Northern alliterative verse for dwarves, and traditional English ballad for the hobbits.

Lancelot Schaubert — I mean I’m happy to be wrong, but I definitely don’t think it’s as clean cut as “this guy only knows one meter.” If you’re talking his prose, HARD AGREE.

Zach Weinersmith — Regarding teenage stuff – I think you have to divide the value of sincerity / earnestness from the simple fact of the poetry being quite bad! i think it’s possible, though surprisingly rare, to appreciate both. it’s the poetic impulse minus the craft, though there are of course occasional good teenage poets!

The trolls are something else — I wonder if he was inspired by Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” ?

Lancelot Schaubert — Yeah that. Or just the potential for bad to sometimes indicate sincerity, which, I now realise, may be what folks like about bad movies? I always assumed that was schadenfreude…

I’m ignorant about Hall of the Mountain King. Teach me.

Zach Weinersmith — re: mars – Oh, well you know it’s a book length treatment, but one of our big arguments is that rockets are only a small part of the picture and there remain big open questions, like how to construct a sealed ecosystem underground, whether we can have babies anywhere in space, longterm medical effects of altered gravity regimes.

Very little is being spent on these things, and even less is being spent on harder questions having to do with law and governance.

re: grieg – oh, well, just the use of quick hard consonanty sounds to convey the poetry/speech of monsters.

See the choral version of that song (from wikipedia):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Hall_of_the_Mountain_King(edited)

“In the Hall of the Mountain King”

Looking back over Tolkien, this bit seems to me clearly grabbed from the Poetic Edda, and the Seeress’s “a sword-age, an axe age” “a wind-age, a wolf-age”

I was actually thinking of stealing that for a portion of Bea Wolf 2, and now I feel I have to!

re: badness/sincerity – so, my view here is that one of the unfortunate aspects of life is that sincere poems do not make great poetry, any more than being able to yell loudly makes for great singing. Now, if you can yell loudly at many pitches, that might indicate singer potential, but then that’s where training and talent come in. But, if the great yeller becomes a great singer, that doesn’t mean we should pretend the yelling was great too. (I’m getting Lewisian here, for some reason)

re: bad movies – I think part of its schadenfreude, but I think it’s also like Taco Bell, so to speak. I mean you should want fine cuisine, but if you go to taco bell, you can eat food, laugh at how bad it is, and feel no need to have an opinion on anything. It’s relaxing because it’s unchallenging. Also, some movies are so bad, they loop around to being genuine comedy with or without the schadenfreude – at least to me!

Lancelot Schaubert — You should! Full circle!

I’m glad you called out the irony (or tu quoque) of the sincerity / honesty opinions there. I think i have nothing to add other than that.

I suppose Taco Bell counts for artisanal diarrhetics?

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