For the longest time I doubted that any book series would ever be as important to me as Tolkien’s legendarium. Then I discovered the Discworld in my high school library. At first I didn’t love it. Rincewind’s and Twoflower’s adventures in The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic were funny and entertaining but didn’t threaten to overthrow any of my established favourites. I liked them enough to keep reading though and after a few more books I was addicted, picking up gaps in my collection at charity shops and market stalls and Waterstones whenever I could.
The humour is great, yes. Pratchett’s puns and his dry wit are exactly my cup of tea. But there’s so much more to them than that. They’re wonderfully written. I have never once been bored or found myself wanting to skip pages when reading a Discworld book. His characters are some of the most complex and memorable I’ve come across. And, as a lot of other people have pointed out (including Neil Gaiman), there’s this very constructive sense of anger throughout that I’ve not seen anywhere see. It’s not hectoring or nihilistic at all, however. Through Discworld Pratchett looks at and calls out the ugliness in our own world but says that we, as human beings, are capable of doing better. It’s hopeful without being naïve.
Night Watch (which is where the glorious 25th of May comes from, in case anyone reading this isn’t aware) is one of the darker Discworld novels. It’s set earlier in the timeline than most of them, in an Ankh-Morpork under the rule of a sadistic tyrant, and while there are points of familiarity to me it felt like a very different place to the city I’d come to love. There’s a rebellion, which fails. There’s a group of men who aren’t heroes but they try to do the right thing, no matter how pointless it seems. And that’s important, the trying. The narrative values innocence and kindness and camaraderie, and that will always be meaningful to me than any ‘realistic’ or edgy, grimdark piece of fiction.
I don’t know, none of this is very original and other people have said the same things a lot more eloquently, but today I just felt compelled to try and say and something about what these books mean to me. GNU Terry Pratchett.
Category: fannish musings
Thoughts about Bree-land
I’m probably shouting into the void here (Do I even have followers who aren’t bots? Signs point to no…) but Lord of the Rings is never far from my mind and I’ve been having a few thoughts about Bree that I wanted to try to get down.
What strikes me is just how unique Bree-land seems to be when you compare it to other places in Middle-earth. It’s not a kingdom or a formalised realm with a named ruler like Gondor, Rohan, Lórien, or the Woodland Realm in Mirkwood, and it’s not a kind of city-state under the authority of a mayor or a master either, like Laketown. Nor do it’s people fit into another category often found in Tolkien, that of the wandering band of exiles (Beren, Thorin & Co., the Rangers of the North).
It was a part of Arnor, of course, and becomes part of the Reunited Kingdom during the Fourth but inbetween there doesn’t seem to be much central authority or government at all. Is there a mayor or some kind of council of town worthies we don’t see? Presumably somebody has to organise the watch on the gates that Harry Goatleaf is part of. And do the outlying villages such as Combe and Archet have their own laws and governance? We just don’t know!
The thing that I think is most interesting about Bree-land though is that it’s the only place, at least that I can think of, where you have two different races living side-by-side: men and hobbits. There are obviously plenty of examples of co-operation between races, particularly elves and men, going right back to the First Age. But none these examples actually involve elves and men or dwarves living together in the same settlements. Which makes sense, given longstanding feuds between elves and dwarves and different lifespans etc.
By contrast though there seems to be a lot of intermingling in Bree. I think there are some villages which are said to be predominantly populated by either men or hobbits, but it’s implied that the two populations live together without any major problems. The Prancing Pony, for example, has rooms built specially for the use of hobbits and hobbits work there. Barliman Butterbur seems to know quite a bit about about the lifestyle and preferences of hobbits.
To be honest I don’t really have much of a point here but I just think Bree has a lot of interesting wordbuilding potential and I feel like it should get more attention from the fandom!