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wonderful ladies of Heroines of Fantasy have decided to add a male voice to the
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When I considered what I might do for my first post, I was
neck-deep in edits for novel number two, and I realized I had a number of
important scenes taking place in taverns and inns. I don’t feel too uneasy
about that because two of my main characters are poets forced to make their way
as entertainers of sorts. I see a role for the ale-house-wine-shop-village
watering hole in my stories, but I am still forced to confront the questionable
use of what many consider an over-used scenario.
In other words, what is the deal with all the inns and
taverns in fantasy?
I have read quite a few blog posts and critical articles
decrying the “trope”: those elements that get so overused that they become
hackneyed and stale to the point of being crutches for bad writers to cling to
when they need help with a story. Others
have exhaustingly catalogued these tropes (just word itself suggests tired and
misdirected), so I won’t add any more invective to the pile. I get it. Certain
images and situations seem to get overused in fantasy more than in other genres. Why that happens is perhaps
a topic for another entry, and I am sure there are some who visit this blog who
can ably direct you to those more expansive examinations. The tavern or inn has
a place at the head of that list, but I wonder if we haven’t been a bit harsh
and dismissive.
Today I want to talk about taverns or inns and make an
apology of sorts for their frequent use in fantasy novels. I come by my affliction by inclination
because I’ve been addicted to Middle Earth and all its incarnations since I
first heard about Bilbo’s mad dash down the hill to meet the dwarves at the
Green Dragon in Bywater. In fact,
Tolkien probably did more to cement the idea of the tavern/inn as a staple of
fantasy than anyone else. We could blame
him for all the copy-cat crutch use since, or we could take another look at the
role taverns have played and temper our judgement.
The simple truth is we love our taverns. We frequent them.
We take ownership of them (rugby gangs, anyone?). We leave bits and pieces of
ourselves in them (my initials are still legible on a brick in the inner wall
of the Tav in Ellensburg , Washington
In Tolkien’s world,
the tavern stood for civility in a wild world, a gathering place for locals and
travelers to interact and share news of the road. They helped knit Tolkien’s
pre-industrial, not-everyone-has-a-palantir environment together. For the
professor, the inn helped define part of the human experience in middle earth.
Anyone ever come across a Dwarfish tavern? An Elvish waystation? Nope. Taverns
show up in Middle Earth in places where Men and their near cousins the Hobbits
settled. Man built the roads in Middle Earth. Everybody else built really
interesting things, kingdoms and enclaves and refuges and such, but Man is the
one who knit all the various places together by a system of roads, villages and
towns. There are wonderful hints of how
widespread the Numenorean culture was throughout The Lord of the Rings. In fact, some of the earliest writings
Tolkien put together were the tales and poems that take pace in the ‘cottage of
lost play’…nice euphemism for a tavern from my so-very-temporary-human
perspective. Let’s face it, Tolkien liked his pipes and his pints. The Inklings
were vital to his creative genius, so it should come as no surprise that
taverns in all their convivial glory appear in his writing where it dealt with
the world of Man/Hobbits.
For JRRT, the tavern was a sign of elevated culture. Where are
the references to ale-houses in Rohan? Laketown? I can’t find any (although
Tolkien does give hints to trade—wine barrels down the river, etc, that is
suggestive). All the references seem to point to the Shire, Bree, Tharbad, and
Minas Tirith. Settled places. Places where people collected for pints and news.
Places where trade occurs.
Do we give the professor a pass on his use of the trope? I
think we should because he avoids the kinds of mistakes that so many others
make. I point to several instances where his use of the tavern serves an
important moment in LOTR. Sam’s early
interaction at the Green Dragon prefigures the reality of the Ents and also
illustrates his romantic, sensitive nature that will bear such wonderful fruit
later on in the story. The other, of course, is how he uses The Prancing Pony
at Bree. In his letters and other
writings, he tells us the story stalled at Bree. Maybe intuitively he knew he
was at a contrived place. What leads me to give him the pass here is how well
he developed Barliman and his inn as an integral plot element of the story. In
fact, nearly everything that happens later in the tale hinges on the way things
unfold at The Prancing Pony.
I’m not talking about Frodo and the ring or Aragorn in the
shadows or Nazgul blades in the night.
I’m talking about an undelivered letter. Butterbur’s
establishment was so much more than a place for events to happen. Tolkien
lovingly establishes its local and regional importance. Barliman was the
unofficial postmaster for the district, and if he had managed to get that note
to Frodo in time, the Fellowship would have been a far different and less
exciting story.
And this is where I feel the most strongly about how we use
our ‘places’ in our stories. Great
events transpire in Tolkien’s Bree: violence, terror, character, intrigue.
These sorts of things appear over and over again in other novels incorporating
the tavern, and we get the accusations of ‘tropeness’ when THAT’S ALL THAT
HAPPENS.
Bree is actually where the hobbits' growth begins in earnest.
It is the place at the end of the novel where we, and they, see the results of
that growth. It knits together the tale like it knits together the culture
within which Tolkien makes it exist. It
is not just a plot device designed to introduce Strider. It is a reminder of
what happens when communication goes awry.
Frankly, I like taverns. I like using them in my own writing
because the world my characters inhabit need them for poetry duels,
assignations and rest.
I am sure my defense of the tavern/inn has holes. I’d like
to read what all of you think about taverns and various other ‘places’ that
seem to pop up time and time again in fantasy.
Mark Nelson
8 comments:
Great post, Mark! So good to have you on board.
I love taverns in stories, though interestingly enough I don't think I have any taverns in my own. But I think taverns evoke a sense of community -- in addition to everything else you've already said -- so if you don't have taverns you have to find another way to establish what taverns bring to the story.
Since my college days I've held to the belief that all the truly great ideas in human history were conceived of in taverns.
Bavaria has a patron saint, Aloysius, who left heaven so he could spend eternity in a tavern. He's my patron saint, too. ;)
I think it's difficult NOT to have taverns in a fantasy story that uses the travelling Adventurer. I've been on the road myself and, sure, you can sleep outside but if you have enough money a nice bed is much more comfortable, not to mention a full meal. So if your Adventurers are travelling it would be a bit strange for them to turn up their noses to a nice, comfortable Tavern, wouldn't it?
I honestly don't know if the importance of the tavern in fantasy mimicks the time-period equivalent in actual history, but it seems to me that such gathering places are vital. They're a place to get information. Where else would you get it? It's not so long ago that the town crier was the masses' best and sometimes only source of news. Revolutions were planned in taverns, if American and French history are to be believed. I don't see taverns as being a trope; I see them as being essential.
That being said, the form a gathering place is going to take will vary by culture. When it came time to put such a place in Finder, I couldn't give it the look and feel of a European style tavern/pub. Instead, I called it a doovah (riffing off an old Arabic word loosely connected to the concept) and styled it more after what one would find in a desert settlement. But there is always one thing in common--alcohol! And beer is one of the oldest there is.
amuletts--very true!
You know what I found disconcerting? When visiting Colonial Williamsburg, during a tour of the local inn, we were told that there were not ROOMS to be had in such common places, but bedspace. There would be several beds set up all over an open room, in any nook or cranny available. Very often, that bed would fit two, three, even four patrons. A traveler often ended up sleeping with several strangers.
Of course, if you had more money, you could afford to stay in a place with individual rooms, but in FACT, someone with that much money would have to be pretty desperate to do so. Typically, the local "nobility" would put you up.
Does Tolkien actually mentuion any taverns in Minas Tirith? I can't recall such. Pippin eats in what is essentially a military mess and there is an old guest hall mentioned, but that doesn't seem to be a tavern.
I agree that implicitly one might assume that the inns that are mentioned (in the Shire and Bree) are holdovers of Numenorean power and so it's liukely there would be such in Gondor. But actually I think it's more to do with the Shire and Bree being based heavily upon early c.20 rural England and so the pub being a staple of village life. In that sense I think they are somewhat anachronistic (there's little evidence that, for instance, way-stations on the Royal Road of the Persian Empire were devoted to drink) but in fairness both the SHire and (to a lesser extent) Bree have clearly been preserved (by the activity of the Rangers) as isolated beacons of prosperity in the north.
Pipe-smoking is equally a Shire trait (that was picked up by dwarves and rangers both) and, like drinking, was a staple of early c.20 recreation in rural England.
All that aside, a tavern depends on prosperity. Most rural cultures are not prosperous. Those that are can feature taverns (though drinking and the provision of accomodation could as well happen in a lord's hall -- like in The Children of Hurin when Turin returns home to find the Easterlings in residence, or, we may fairly presume, as would have been commonplace amongst the Rohirrim) if it fits with the culture. But the inclusion of commercial drinking-houses will imply a lot about the surrounding culture in economic terms (there must be considerable folk with surplus income living nearby or regularly passing through).
Pongo--I was hoping you'd chime in. You are always our Tolkien scholar in residence.
Mark's having some issues with posting comments. I'm going to ping him now and escort him in. :)
Mark said:
In fact, Tolkien probably did more to cement the idea of the tavern/inn as a staple of fantasy than anyone else
And I'm not so sure.
Tolkien didn't introduce the tavern or inn to fantasy. i'm not sure who did but it was likely Rober E Howard. While Tolkien mentions 3 taverns (the Green Dragon, The Prancing Pony, The Ivy Bush) - all in one relatively small geographic area: The Shire/Bree, Howard mentions (unnamed) drinking houses in many stories - The Tower of the Elephant, Black Colossus (Conan has come from 'the last wine-shop open'), The Queen of the Black Coast, Shadows in Zamboula, The Hour of the Dragon and Wolves Beyond the Border). That's a quarter of his published stories and most of the others are set in remote areas beyond civilisation or in lands that were not based on western culture.
While in Tolkien we can merely assume taverns were Numenorean in origin and preserved in the prosperous rural locals of the Shire and Bree, in Howard they are widespread in the civilised west.
I'm of the mind that Tolkien may have included inns because hobbits were based on his slightly idealised view of the English rural working and middle classes whereas Howard, writing in Prohibition-gripped America, included them because tawdry drinking dens were a staple of cities in his civilisation . . .
But while I do think the tavern is more prevelant in Howard than Tolkien and so he probably set the trend earlier (though I doubt Tolkien had him in mind at all), I suspect the vast raft of Tolkien imitators, especially those who initiated fantasy role-playing games, Messrs Arneson and Gygax, played a yet greater part in turning drinking-houses from background detail to trope.
(Mark is still having issues getting our little house here on Blogger to let him in. He asked me to post this.)
Pongo:
Thanks for proving my point. Tolkien's use of the tavern created a groundswell of imitation in the years since. The over-use, and ill-use since created the trope claim that plagues the genre in critical arene.
Minas Tirith was a shell of its former self, had been on a war footing for a generation, and at the time of the story the need for inns as over. One could argue the guest house where Bergil and Pippin met served a similar purpose. Tying the tavern notion to the Numenorean culture doesn't wash to me.
No matter the source, in the end, the tavern in JRRT's material serves an essential purpose that connects history, culture and plot
harmoniously. When those variables aren't well articulated, we get the trope claim and rightly so.
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