I bet this never happens to people who write LotR fic...

[edenfalling]

After long and serious thought, I have settled upon an idea for my NFE fic. I have my main character, I have my time period, I have my general plot.

But.

I am still in the middle of some canon research, because Lewis's statements on the subject in question are brief and scattered through several books in the series.

They also make no sense.

Ye gods, why was Lewis such a lousy, inconsistent, illogical, slapdash, incompetent world-builder? WHY?! Do you have any idea the kind of weird anti-scientific (and anti-common-sense!) contortions I will have to do to force his casual pronouncements into anything that even vaguely resembles a functional system? DO YOU???

I could just scream.

But no. I will persevere. Because the end product will be worth it, and also by this point I need to find some kind of handwave just for the sake of my own sanity -- the inconsistencies are starting to keep me up at night, they are that irritating.

*retroactively slaps Lewis upside the head*

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ETA: If you want some specifics about the issue that is driving me nuts, go read this comment here. Basically Lewis + astronomy = EPIC FAIL, but I need to systematize his idiocy because of Reasons even though it's not directly the subject of my fic. Argh.

Comments

[speakr2customrs.livejournal.com]

Yes it does happen to people who write LotR fic! Tolkien was a crap world-builder too. Part of it is excusable; he was writing before the discovery of Plate Tectonics and so it must have seemed to him that geography was random and whimsical. However Newton discovered the laws governing the behaviour of light between 1666 and 1704 - he didn't get it completely right but he covered the basics - and Tolkien ignores this completely. And there is nothing in LotR that gives any clue as to how the economies of Gondor and Rohan functioned.

But I will concede that C S Lewis was worse.

[edenfalling]

Where does the deliberate ignorance of the laws of light come into play? (I am genuinely curious here -- it's been years since I reread Tolkien so I can't think of any potential examples off the top of my head.)

I tend to figure that Rohan worked on a farming, herding, and raiding economy, but Gondor, yeah, no clue. Especially no clue how the Stewards financially supported the endless war against Mordor, which may have had lulls but never seemed to really stop chewing up their people and their land. And annoyingly, that complete lack of economic interest seems to have been one of the main things a lot of later fantasy writers picked up and carried over into their own works. :-/

[speakr2customrs.livejournal.com]

The Light of the Trees - the whole world being illuminated by, effectively, two street lights thousands of miles from many of the populated areas. The light, apparently, evaporated from the trees and then fell like rain. And there is the instance where Legolas saw, and identified, Éomer and his Riders at a distance of forty-five miles! And he wasn't looking down from a mountain, either, but was on the plain. Either light travelled in a curve or else Middle Earth is enormously larger than this Earth but, somehow, still had pretty much the same gravity.

In some of his posthumous works there are mentions that he was thinking of scrapping the whole Trees thing and having Middle Earth always having been illuminated in the conventional fashion by the Sun - but the version of the Silmarillion that was published had the insane cosmology firmly entrenched in the plot.

[edenfalling]

Evaporated light. Evaporated light. Yeah, that is a glaring failure of physics. I think I didn't really notice that before since the general progression of the Silmarillion is from mythology through legends to history, so I wasn't expecting the earlier sections to be strictly literal... and/or I wrote it off as the world itself settling down into the normal rules of physics over time. I mean, Arda canonically starts out as a FLAT world and only becomes round after the fall of Numenor, and the sun and moon are fruits carted around by minor holy spirits, which is not much better than evaporated light. (I always did wonder how Tolkien made that cosmology square with the heliocentric solar system, not to mention the complete non-centrality of our sun to the galaxy, let alone to the universe at large.)

But Legolas's curved light vision is much less easy to handwave, since LotR itself ought to be firmly in the quasi-historical era of that world, not the poetic allegory era. That is just carelessness.

[pencildragon11.livejournal.com]

I ran across a neat book called The Science of Middle Earth that tried to work out actual rules for how Legolas could have seen and identified horsemen at such a distance, and as I recall it had something to do with (a) Elves having huge eyes and (b) handwave Elf brains do wacky cool things okay?.

[edenfalling]

(b) handwave Elf brains do wacky cool things okay?

Sounds about right to me. *wry* Or maybe more accurately, *handwave* "Inherent elf magic can warp physics in subtle ways, look, they can make magic rings, don't argue with me here!"