I began reading J.R.R. Tolkien when Tolkien was still alive.
I read The Hobbit when I was 11 or 12, I don't exactly remember. (Fun fact: I have been a Star Trek fan even longer; I saw the first episode of Star Trek the first night it was broadcast. And the first time I heard the name Bilbo Baggins was when Leonard Nimoy sang "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins." At the time, I had no idea the song was a reference to a book; I thought it was a standalone story song, like "Puff, The Magic Dragon.") I read The Lord of the Rings in high school, and re-read it once a year for many years after that.
There was no such thing as a "Fantasy" section in the bookstore back then. Tolkien's four books (that's all there were at the time) were found in the "Science Fiction" section of the bookstore, as, more often than not, was I. (Usually they stuck it all the way in the back of the bookstore.)
Like many younger Tolkien fans of the time, I read and re-read the books and asked "What's next?" The only "next" at that time was Dungeons & Dragons, the tabletop roleplaying game. If you couldn't find more fantasy to read, the next best bet was to improvise your own.
I tried to read The Silmarillion when it was first published, but couldn't get through it. After a while, there was more fantasy appearing in the bookstore, and by the 1980's, dedicated "Fantasy" shelves began to appear.
I tried writing a fantasy story for the first time when I was in college. It was set in the southwestern United States (a place I have never visited), in an alternate universe where magic worked and the southwestern US was organized as a medieval feudal society, complete with royalty and earls and barons, for reasons I don't believe I explained in the story, or understood myself. The hero was on a quest to rescue a princess from a dragon, somewhere out in the desert.
Twenty-five years ago, a wrote a whole novel set in an alternate England during the reign of Henry VIII, in which magic works and is controlled by the Catholic Church, (which gives the Reformation a whole new dimension!).
I got tired of re-reading those four books after a while, but, like a lot of older Tolkien fans, my interest in The Lord of the Rings was rekindled by Peter Jackson's film version.
In 2010, I started listening to the podcast of Corey Olsen, the Tolkien Professor. I have been listening ever since. I have attended a couple of Corey's Mythmoot conferences, and have been fortunate enough to spend some time one-on-one with the professor, discussing our mutual interest in Tolkien's works.
Thanks to Corey Olsen, I finally got through The Silmarillion. Corey introduced me to Tolkien's essay "On Fairie Stories," which I sure wish someone had pointed me to before I wrote that Arizona story. Or the other fantasy stories I tried to write since then. It is both Tolkien's apology for fantasy fiction, as well as an analysis of what fantasy is and how and why it works.
Corey also taught me to appreciate Tolkien's use of language, and, in particular, his great love of English words with Anglo-Saxon roots and how he uses them to give Middle Earth its feel. I wish I had learned all this a long time ago, too.
So when I began to write The Sorcerer's Apprentice, I wanted to apply this new understanding of fantasy I had gotten from Corey Olsen to this novel, and I wanted--if this is not too presumptuous--to pay tribute to J.R.R. Tolkien. Not that Tolkien needs my tribute, or that no other fantasy writer ever tried to pay tribute to him, but still, I want to do it anyway.
As you might have guessed from my descriptions of my Arizona story and my English Reformation novel, I am fond of writing fantasy stories set in some variation of the real world, as opposed to making up a world out of whole cloth, as Tolkien did. I think it's fun to create a world that's like ours, but different. And I want to do it again.
A fitting tribute to Tolkien, as well as a great device for deploying my new understanding of Anglo-Saxon and its role in Tolkien's writing, would be to set The Sorcerer's Apprentice in Anglo-Saxon England. Besides the language, Tolkien was a great lover of Anglo-Saxon culture and history, and so much of modern fantasy owes an often-unacknowledged debt to Anglo-Saxon England. (Dragonslayer, for example, is set in an imagined land that looks an awful lot like Anglo-Saxon England.)
But this book isn't going to use indirect or unacknowledged borrowings from the Anglo-Saxons. It's going to be explicitly Anglo-Saxon.
That's a major decision, and now that it's been made, it's likely going to take several more blog posts to work through the consequences.
Today's word count is 55,171.
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