War of the Rohirrim

February 16, 2025 / Rick Ellrod / 1 Comment

I finally got around to watching the 2024 film The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. Missed it in the theatres, but I caught it on streaming video while my wife (who is not quite so headlong a Tolkien fan as I am) was off on a storytelling adventure.

The movie is very good. Grim, but good. Of course, this came out recently enough that I should issue a

Canon and Its Discontents

I refrained from reading about the plot until I had seen the film, so as not to spoil anything for myself. When I went back to the source material—the tale of Helm Hammerhand, King of Rohan, about 200 years before the War of the Ring—I was surprised to see how closely the screenwriters had actually followed what Tolkien provided in Appendix A to The Lord of the Rings (section II, The House of Eorl). This isn’t essential—but it’s helpful.

At this point LotR has become a mythological wellspring of its own. I think it’s legitimate to treat the Tolkien materials as a basic canon that may still allow for some improvisation and variation, just as the stories around King Arthur are open to a variety of individual interpretations, and, generally, a powerful myth can be “malleable” in the right hands.

In other words, I’m not going to be scandalized just because a Middle-Earth tale isn’t entirely consistent with the canon. Firing salvos back and forth about canonicity isn’t very productive. What matters is what we do with the canon (or without it).

At the same time, if a work is worth adapting in the first place—book into movie, for example—then the adapters would do well to understand what made the source appealing. We can use a source simply as a convenient hook on which to hang a different story, but we’d be wasting what’s worthwhile in the original. Merely arbitrary or casual departures from the canon often degrade the result, rather than enhancing it. We have to look at the changes case by case. (The Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies themselves are full of examples both good and bad—but that’s a subject for a much longer dissection, one of these days.)

Thus—to take an SF example—when Gregory Benford wrote one of the sequels to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, Foundation’s Fear, Benford threw in a new means of interstellar travel—via wormholes—in addition to the “hyperspatial jump” that was standard in Asimov’s works. This addition made the story seem a little more up-to-date, since wormholes had come into fashion in SF after Asimov wrote the original stories. But inserting these wormholes into the background created unnecessary tensions in the worldbuilding, since events in the original series might have played out quite differently if these wormholes had been around as Benford assumes. And it added nothing much to the actual interest of the novel. It wasn’t a big deal, but it was an annoyance.

Thus, we can evaluate War of the Rohirrim fairly by looking at how well it used the original Tolkien material, and how effectively it went beyond.

Adding and Expanding

I thought the screenwriters here did a good job. The Riders of Rohan as pictured in the movie are recognizably the same civilization we saw in the book and the LotR movies. Helm Hammerhand is not at all the same character as Theoden, but he comes from the same culture. Rohan’s relationship with Gondor is consistent with what we see in the books, allowing for two hundred years’ difference.

When the movie brings in LotR’s “oliphaunts,” or mûmakil (appropriately, only the latter name is used, since the former is more of a hobbitish coinage), that may seem an anticipation of the LotR storyline, but it’s plausible enough, drawing on Tolkien’s worldbuilding to add a danger and a challenge to the bare-bones tale of Helm in the books’ appendix. The Wikipedia article on the movie makes some good observations here, and I’m inclined to agree.

The writers’ key decision, I think, was to use Helm’s daughter as the primary viewpoint character for this story. She’s mentioned in the book, but her name is never given. The screenwriters’ choice of “Héra” rather unfortunately invites confusion with the Greek goddess of the same name (less an accent), but it does fit her appropriately into a family containing Helm, Haleth, and Hama.

Telling the story as Héra’s tale allows the movie to create a sense of continuity that would be hard to achieve otherwise, since Helm and his two sons all die in the course of this war, one by one. None of them survive to carry the viewer through to the end. It is plausible, though, for Héra to come out alive. And that also enables the screenwriters to give us something more like a happy ending than would have been possible if the focus had been on, for example, Helm himself. Helm’s nephew Fréaláf takes the throne, and that’s fine. Héra, however, can continue forward unconstrained and free. The writers have wisely left her tale open-ended, rather than resolving it with a romance or other specific commitment. That open prospect—“the Road goes ever on”—seems an appropriate conclusion for a story that is wound almost too tightly around one set of royal family conflicts and geographic environments.

I’ve found Amazon’s The Rings of Power somewhat disappointing; I’m cheered by this modest, but enjoyable, alternative venture into Middle-Earth. Who knows: someday (if the intellectual property rights align) we might even see the stories of the First Age, the Silmarillion, come to the big screen—and wouldn’t that be a sight to see!

The Good King (reprise)

October 20, 2024October 20, 2024 / Rick Ellrod / Leave a comment

Watching The Lord of the Rings movies again recently, to share the experience with my wife, brought to mind this post from eight years ago. Here it is again, with minor updates.

I began to wonder some years back about the curious preference for monarchy in futuristic settings. In the world at large, monarchies have been retreating in favor of republics and democracies, at least in theory, since 1776. Why are SF writers so fond of equipping future societies with kings, emperors, and aristocracies?

Star Kingdoms

We can pass lightly over the old-time, pulp-type stories where royal rule is merely part of the local color: Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars (1912), Edmond Hamilton’s The Star Kings (1949), E.E. Smith’s The Skylark of Space (1928) with its Osnomian royal families. Here, like flashing swords and exotic costumes, monarchy is simply part of a deliberately anachronistic setting. Similarly in high fantasy, where aristocracy comes naturally in the typical pseudo-medieval milieu.

But we see royal or aristocratic governments in more modern stories too. Asimov’s Foundation stories are centered around a Galactic Empire. (See also the more recent Apple+ series of the same name.) Since that series was based on Gibbons’ The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, an Empire was inevitable. Similarly in Star Wars, which draws heavily on Asimov. Jerry Pournelle’s CoDominium future history has a First and a Second “Empire of Man.” David Weber’s heroine Honor Harrington serves the “Star Kingdom of Manticore” (later “Star Empire”), modeled closely on England around 1810. Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga contains a number of polities with different forms of government, but many of the stories focus on Barrayar, which has an Emperor. Anne McCaffrey’s popular Pern series has no monarch, but has two parallel aristocracies (the feudal Holders and the meritocratic dragonriders). It got to the point where I began to feel a decided preference for avoiding monarchical or imperial governments in SF storytelling.

The Lure of Kingship

There’s something that attracts us in royalty—or we wouldn’t see so much of it. I encountered this puzzlement directly. As a kid reading The Lord of the Rings, I was as moved as anyone by the return of the true King. I asked myself why. If I don’t even approve of kingship in theory, why am I cheering for Aragorn?

The reasons we’re drawn to monarchy seem to include—

Kings are colorful. (So are princesses.)
Stability
Personal loyalty
Individual agency

The first point is obvious, but the others are worth examining.

Stability

It’s been pointed out that even in a constitutional government, a monarch provides a symbolic continuity that may help to hold a nation together. British prime ministers may come and go, but the King, or Queen, is always there. This gives some plausibility to the idea of a future society’s returning to monarchy.

Something like this stabilizing function is behind commoner Kevin Renner’s half-embarrassed harangue to Captain Rod Blaine, future Marquis of Crucis, in Niven & Pournelle’s The Mote in God’s Eye: “maybe back home we’re not so thick on Imperialism as you are in the Capital, but part of that’s because we trust you aristocrats to run the show. We do our part, and we expect you characters with all the privileges to do yours!” (ch. 40)

Unfortunately, relying on the noblesse oblige of the aristocrats doesn’t always work out well. It depends on who they are. For every Imperial Britain, there’s a North Korea. When the hereditary succession breaks down, you get a War of the Roses or Game of Thrones.

Too much depends on getting the right monarch. By the law of averages, it doesn’t take long before you get a bad ruler, whether by inheritance or by “right of conquest”—and you’re up the well-known creek.

Personal Loyalty

Personal loyalty appeals to us more strongly than loyalty to an institution. One can pledge allegiance to a state—but even the American Pledge of Allegiance starts with a symbol: the flag, and then “the Republic for which it stands.” Loyalty to an individual moves us more easily.

This kind of loyalty doesn’t have to be to a monarch. Niven & Pournelle’s Oath of Fealty explores how loyalty among, and to, a trusted group of managers can form a stronger bond than the mere institutional connections of a typical modern bureaucracy. One can be faithful to family (the root of the hereditary element in kingship), to friends, or even an institution or a people. But it’s easiest with an individual. This loyalty is the basis for the stability factor above.

Individual Agency

The vast machinery of modern government sometimes seems to operate entirely in the abstract, without real people involved. “Moscow said today . . .”

In fact it’s always people who are acting. But it’s easier to visualize this when you have a single person to focus on. “When Grant advanced toward Richmond . . .” In the extreme case, we have the ruler who claims to embody the state in his own person: “L’état, c’est moi” (attributed to Louis XIV, the “Sun King” of France).

In a fascinating 2008 essay, Jo Walton quotes Bujold on political themes in SF: “In fact, if romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, I would now describe much SF as fantasies of political agency.” A science fiction character is frequently involved in effecting a revolution, facing down a potential dictator, or establishing a new order—exercising autonomous power. Walton links this notion of political agency to the fact that SF illustrates change: “SF is the literature of changing the world.” The world-changers can be outsiders, or they can be the rulers themselves—as in a number of the examples above.

It’s not surprising that we’re attracted to characters who act outside the normal rules. We (especially Americans, perhaps) are fond of the idea that good people can act in ways that are untrammeled by the usual conventions. I’ve already mentioned Robin Hood. And the whole concept of the superhero—the uniquely powerful vigilante who can be relied on to act for the good—is powered by this attraction.

But this idealization of individual initiative is also dangerous. Too much depends on getting the right hero—or the right monarch. It can only work if the independent agent is seriously and reliably good: virtuous, in the classical sense of virtue as a well-directed “habit” or fixed character trait. Even then, we may be reluctant to give any hero unlimited power. Too much is at stake if it goes wrong.

The Rule of Law

Our admiration for the powerful ruler is always in tension with our dedication to the rule of law: “a government of laws, not of men,” in the well-known phrase attributed to John Adams. We can see this as far back as Aristotle: “law should rule rather than any single one of the citizens. And following this same line of reasoning . . . even if it is better that certain persons rule, these persons should be appointed as guardians of the laws and as their servants.” (Politics book III, ch. 16, 1287a)

No human being can be trusted with absolute authority. This is the kernel of truth in the aphorism that “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” But we can’t get along without entrusting some power to someone. When we do, it had better be someone who’s as trustworthy as possible.

The Ideal of the Good King

Thus the true king must be a virtuous person—a person of real excellence. This is the ideal of an Aragorn or a King Arthur, whose return we’re moved to applaud (even against our better judgment). It should be obvious that the same principles apply to the good queen—or emperor, empress, princess, prince, president, prime minister: the leader we follow. But I’ll continue using “king” for simplicity’s sake.

What virtues do we look for in a good monarch—aside from the obvious ones of justice, wisdom, courage, self-control?

If the ruler or rulers are going to be “servants of the laws,” they require humility. A king who serves the law can’t claim to be its master. Arrogance and hubris are fatal flaws in a ruler. For example, we should always beware of the leader who claims he can do everything himself and is unable to work with others.

The good king is also selfless—seeking the common good of the people, not his own. Self-aggrandizement is another fatal flaw.

In effect, what we’re looking for is a ruler who doesn’t want to rule: a king who believes in the sovereignty and the excellence of common people.

It’s significant that Aragorn, our model of the good king, is introduced in LotR as “Strider,” a scruffy stranger smoking in a corner of a common inn. Even when he’s crowned in victory, he remembers to exalt the humble. The movie has him tell the four hobbits, “You kneel to no one.” Tolkien’s text is more ceremonious: “And then to Sam’s surprise and utter confusion he bowed his knee before them; and taking them by the hand . . . he led them to the throne, and setting them upon it, he turned . . . and spoke, so that his voice rang over all the host, crying: ‘Praise them with great praise!’” (Book VI, ch. 4, p. 232)

We see the same essential humility and selflessness in other admirable leaders, kings or not: Taran in the Chronicles of Prydain, and the revolutionary princess in Lloyd Alexander’s Westmark trilogy; Niven & Pournelle’s Rod Blaine; Jack Ryan in Tom Clancy’s novels; “Dev” Logan, head of Omnitopia Inc. in Diane Duane’s Omnitopia Dawn—the unpretentious opposite of the “imperial CEO.” America was fortunate enough to have such an example in the pivotal position of first President, George Washington.

The Alternative

At the other end of the spectrum, the most dangerous person to trust is an unprincipled and unscrupulous autocrat—someone convinced of his personal superiority and infallibility. Giving power to an individual who has no interest in serving the common good, but only in self-aggrandizement, puts a nation in subjection to a Putin, a Mussolini, a Kim Jong-un.

The antithesis of the good king is the tyrant, who, however innocently he may start out, figures in our stories mainly as the oppressor to be overthrown. It’s much better, if possible, to intercept such a potentially ruinous ruler before the tyranny comes into effect: Senator Palpatine before he becomes Emperor, Nehemiah Scudder before he wins his first election. Allowing the tyrant to gain power may make for good stories, but it generates very bad politics.

If we must have strong leaders, then in real life as well as in stories, character is key—and hubris is deadly.

The Amateur Hero

August 13, 2023August 13, 2023 / Rick Ellrod / 1 Comment

At the end of the previous post, we noted that, depending on the kind of story authors want to tell, they may choose to deploy either a professional hero—someone whose job it is to face perils and challenges, like a military officer or police officer—or, on the other hand, someone who is dragged unwillingly or unexpectedly into a crisis. But I didn’t actually say much about how that difference plays out in a story. This post, then, is a kind of afterthought to the last one.

“You Are Not Prepared”

The first expansion for the online game World of Warcraft greeted players with the ominous declaration, “You Are Not Prepared.” That’s exactly the situation of the individual who didn’t expect to be called upon to be a hero. The lack of preparation may manifest itself in several ways, any of which can help to shape the story.

Competence. The main character (MC) may lack the skills or expertise to deal with the kind of crisis that’s occurring. Maybe there’s fighting involved, and the MC isn’t skilled with fists or swords or rayguns or whatever the weapon of choice happens to be. It’s a lot easier if they do happen to have the pre-existing skill: Glory Road’s Oscar, for example, was already experienced at fencing. If they don’t, then one can expect an extended period of training, since this sort of skill isn’t one that can be picked up in a day. Luke’s training montage in The Empire Strikes Back is a classic example, taking him from someone with potential and the occasional burst of unexpected powers (“Use the Force, Luke”) to someone who can face off against Darth Vader at the end of Empire and present himself as a full-fledged Jedi Knight at the beginning of the sequel.

Information. The amateur hero may be drawn into an environment where they aren’t familiar with the geography, the factions, the customs, the people and powers. In Anne McCaffrey’s Restoree, for example, the heroine is kidnapped by aliens, then rescued by others, all in an unconscious state, and “comes out of it” to find herself in a thoroughly incomprehensible situation. Glory Road reflects the same struggle by a MC to cope with an unfamiliar environment, though in this case the hero has all the assistance one could desire in learning to deal with the new circumstances.

The same kind of thing occurs in the classic fantasy trope where MCs from a backwater locale are sent into a wider world with which they’re only vaguely acquainted, as in The Lord of the Rings or The Wheel of Time. One of the advantages of this setup is that the MCs will need to have many things explained to them by more knowledgeable characters; they are the “ignorant interlocutors” whose presence is so convenient for exposition.

Even in more mundane cases, the MC may be placed in conditions where they don’t know their way around. The eponymous TV series hero Chuck Bartowski is suddenly pitched into the world of intelligence operations and secret agents; he and other characters spend much of the first three seasons learning the ropes. In a similar way, but much faster (in a two-hour movie rather than a long-running series), the hero of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest must learn the players and the goals of the spy game into which he has been drawn.

Confidence and maturity. The MC may also be personally unprepared to deal with the crisis posed by the plot. My favorite example is Romancing the Stone, in which the shy, introverted heroine suddenly has to travel far from home, ally with an unexpected stranger, fight her way through a jungle, and match wits with smugglers and thugs. Much of the fun of the story is in watching the ironically-named Joan Wilder gain in courage and self-reliance as she overcomes these progressively more dramatic challenges.

Other aspects. The MC may be unprepared in other respects. The elemental fact of facing death will be a shock to those of us brought up in more placid situations. The hero may lack equipment or resources to deal with the new challenges—or, conversely, may happen to have exactly the right resources available; this may actually bring about the adventure, as with the spacesuit in Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. Moreover, the homebody hero probably has not yet come to terms with the degree to which the adventure might impact family or personal connections—unlike the hero-by-trade, who has probably reconciled spouse or family with a dangerous career.

The Character Arc

The need to cope with such challenges almost automatically sets up an arc of character development for the MC, reflected in the examples above. The MC can be expected to grow in confidence and independence. They may also be tempered by tragedy or suffering; this is the primary course for the young graduate-school characters in Gay Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry.

The developing hero may become more street-savvy, more knowledgeable in the ways of the world. This sort of practical wisdom is a common theme, given the age of the characters, in young adult-targeted stories or the bildungsroman. For example, Rod Taylor, the MC of Heinlein’s young adult novel Tunnel in the Sky, becomes the informal leader of a band of marooned students by a gradual process. A group of older students, schooled in political theory and more alert to how groups can be manipulated, ease him out and take over control—with the best of intentions, to be sure. By the end of the story Rod, once again in command, has become a bit more canny in dealing with the group. In a similar way, Don Harvey in Between Planets starts out as a fairly naïve high-schooler who learns some hard lessons about political realities as he becomes embroiled in an interplanetary revolution.

Finally, if the MC learns new skills or abilities in the course of the story, they will have grown in that respect too. The new abilities may qualify the MC for new roles or positions, and perhaps to actually become a professional hero in the end. We see this in superhero origin stories, where a MC is initially unskilled in managing their superpowers, but gradually takes on the role of a professional do-gooder. Spider-Man is the classic example, a teenager who didn’t expect to become super-powered and takes a while to become used to his new potential; unlike, say, Iron Man or the Fantastic Four, who start out as grownups and adapt fairly quickly.

As we saw in the last post, an amateur hero almost by definition rises to the occasion. This is a sufficiently satisfying theme that I suspect adventure stories may tend more to this approach than to that of the professional hero—though I haven’t attempted to take a count.

The Professional Hero

July 23, 2023August 13, 2023 / Rick Ellrod / 5 Comments

Glory Road

A couple of comments by Kevin Wade Johnson in connection with my last blog post (now a long way back!) triggered a line of thought about heroes and the hero business.

Robert A. Heinlein’s 1963 novel Glory Road looks like a swashbuckling fantasy at first blush, but it turns into something entirely different. Our hero, E.C. “Oscar” Gordon, kicking around the world after leaving the military, is recruited by an incredibly gorgeous woman to assist her with a quest that involves traveling to other universes and swordfighting. This is just the kind of adventure he was craving.

As Kevin observes, the first three-quarters of the book are action-adventure, with sizable side dishes of comedy, scandalous liaisons, and cynical social commentary. At that point the quest is fully resolved—at page 208 out of 288, in my copy. What, then, occupies the rest of the book?

Gordon returns with “Star,” the beautiful woman he’s now married, to her home universe. It turns out she’s the empress of a multiuniversal polity that is in some respects a high-tech Utopia. All Gordon has to do is relax, allow himself to be fêted by the population, and sleep with anyone he finds interesting (the late Heinlein’s polyamory is fully on display here).

He hates it.

What Utopia doesn’t satisfy is Gordon’s lust for adventure. He doesn’t want to be a dilettante or a “kept man.” He wants wonder, excitement, the stimulus of danger. He likes being a hero, with all the occasional discomforts and perils of that role. The placid happy ending of a retired hero holds no attraction for Gordon.

It’s unclear whether Star feels the same way. She’s willing to consider going in on a kind of adventuring “business” with her slightly tarnished knight. But first, she says, she’d have to train a replacement for her unique position—and that would take many years.

The solution is for Gordon to head off again on the Glory Road without Star. He’ll pop back in now and then, but not to take up residence in the Twenty Universes utopia on a permanent basis. He and Star will remain in love with each other, perhaps, in some sense of the term—but not in a sense that requires fidelity on either’s part. In Heinlein’s polyamorous world-view, passing romantic involvements are just part of the adventure: “Knights errant spend their nights erring” (p. 271). Gordon’s happy ending is the continuing adventure.

The Unsettled Adventurer

This idea comes up from time to time in adventure stories: the hero (or heroine) who seeks out danger and isn’t content without it. John Carter of Mars displays a little of this, though in the violent world of Barsoom, he seems to be able to get his fill of trouble while still remaining home-based with the enthralling Dejah Thoris in her city of Helium. There’s something like this idea in the conclusion of The Good Place—boredom with utopia—as we’ve seen.

The really extreme case can be found in an old-time fantasy by E.R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros (1922). The swashbuckling nobles of Eddison’s imagined world fight the good fight against their sinister enemies, the Witchlanders. At the end of the novel, those adversaries are conclusively defeated. Cue the victory feast. And yet . . . Our Heroes are not quite satisfied. Things just won’t be as interesting without the Witchlanders constantly scheming and warring against them. At the very end, the heroes’ fanciful wish is somehow granted: a herald announces the arrival of an emissary from the bad guys—the same event with which the novel opened. (Hence the title: the legendary serpent that swallows its own tail.)

The Series Protagonist

I’ve previously expressed some doubts about whether happy endings really need to be static and boring—so let’s not adopt the Glory Road doctrine too hastily. (In its extreme form, Eddison’s circular epic, one may feel the opposite dissatisfaction in the sense that all the heroes’ striving and suffering has been for nothing.) But these examples highlight a difference among types of action heroes.

In a long-running action series, unless a hero is improbably falling into one adventure after another against their will, we have to assume that the hero likes what they’re doing. James Bond seems to be pretty content with his secret-agent life. Indiana Jones yearns for opportunities to climb out the window of his stuffy professorial office and strike out on some treasure-hunting chase—even at an advanced age, as we’ve recently seen. Captain Kirk, who’d been promoted to admiral by the beginning of Star Trek II, isn’t suited for a desk job. At the end of the three-movie cycle he’s demoted to captain again—ostensibly as a punishment for flagrant violations of Starfleet regs, but we’re to see this as a step forward for him, his best destiny. Yoda accuses Luke of this kind of unrest in The Empire Strikes Back: “Adventure! Excitement! A Jedi craves not these things.”

The same is true of almost all superheroes. Retirement is almost unheard-of. The occasional counter-example makes for an interesting tale precisely because it runs against type: Hank Pym in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Jack-in-the-Box in Astro City. In a somewhat similar way, continuing campaigns in Dungeons & Dragons or similar games tend to assume the existence of a class of professional adventurers who enter willingly into a life of battle and treasure-hunting, as distinct from an assembled-for-one-purpose group like the Fellowship of the Ring.

This character trait does make things convenient for the writers. They have a believable rationale for the main character’s continuing adventures. Otherwise, after a while it would start to seem implausible for one person to keep getting drawn into danger purely by accident.

The Hero By Trade

The Star Trek captains, and other officers, illustrate a type of case where the character really is a professional hero—one who’s taken up a profession or vocation where danger and challenge, and hence the opportunity for heroism, come with the territory. Anyone pursuing a military or quasi-military career fills that bill. Honor Harrington, for example, reflects more than once that she’s good at war; it’s her calling, what she was born to do. Professional police officers, firefighters, or rescue workers—first responders generally—also fall into this category. (John McClane of Die Hard fame, mentioned above, is in a danger-prone profession, though it’s probably rare for a cop to run into the kinds of major crises he does.) Unsung heroes like medical personnel may find themselves in the same position. They may not categorize what they’re doing as heroism (it looks better on them if they don’t); but they are putting themselves “in harm’s way” where acts of heroism are constantly called for.

This is why military SF lends itself so easily to long-running series like Honor Harrington’s. (The same is true outside the SF genres, as we can see, for example, in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin sea stories.) The same is true of private detectives, secret agents, and the like.

The Reluctant Hero

But not all heroes are professional heroes. An equally perennial favorite is the reluctant or accidental hero—the person who answers the call to adventure, but does wish to return to a peaceful life afterward.

Jim Butcher’s Introduction to Jim Butcher & Kerrie L. Hughes, Heroic Hearts (NY: Ace Books, 2022), puts it this way:

Real heroes . . . [are] the everyday humans who happen to be standing there when something bad happens, and when there is a sudden need for skill, courage, or intelligence. They’re the regular people in irregular circumstances who find themselves considering others first and standing up to do whatever needs to be done.” (p. xi)

Some do manage to go back to their ordinary lives after the crisis has passed. Cincinnatus, and George Washington, are famous for pulling off the transition: they took over the reins of the state when they had to, but willingly ceded power afterwards. On a more modest scale, the “citizen soldier” concept, as in the American National Guard, aims at the same thing. It’s part of the mystique of the American World War II armies, the so-called “Greatest Generation” model. You rise up to serve when necessary, but happily return to civilian life when it’s done. Contemporary discussions are more likely to emphasize post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the difficulty of the return to civilian life; but it remains an ideal with considerable drawing power.

In fiction, the contrast between heroic acts and ordinary life provides rich soil in which to grow interesting stories and characters. Tolkien, for example, gives us some characters who do manage the return to everyday existence—Sam Gamgee—and others who find it impossible, such as Frodo. Of course Frodo does in the end find peace in Valinor, but that requires a literal removal from the circles of the world, a transcendence not available to the average hobbit-in-the-street.

The situations can become fairly complex. In the Song of Roland, after the heroic deeds of the story are finished, a weary Charlemagne at the end finds himself called back unwillingly to new conflicts. In the TV series Chuck, the eponymous Chuck Bartowski is initially appalled to find himself embroiled in spy activities, but the sheer coolness of it all grows on him, and by the fifth season he wants to start his own secret-agent business. Scott Lang (Ant-Man) at the beginning of Quantumania is resting comfortably on his laurels, and has to be dragged back into action in the name of helping others.

Detectives in mystery stories fall into both camps. We have professional private eyes like Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe. But then we also have amateurs like Chesterton’s Father Brown and Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, who always just seem to be in the right place at the right time.

The Author’s Choice

If we want to write a heroic adventure story, one of the early decisions we have to make is what kind of hero we want to feature. Sometimes the tale may call for someone who’s automatically in a position to encounter danger, like a military officer. Sometimes we may prefer to drag the hero into action against their wishes, or by happenstance. The whole point of Roger Thornhill’s predicament in North by Northwest, for example, is that he has no desire to become involved in skulduggery and is baffled by the strange things that are happening to him. Like so many other accidental heroes, however, he rises to the occasion. This is a narrative arc that may be both more interesting and more inspiring than that of the professional hero; because most of us live relatively ordinary lives and can only hope that if called upon, we too could become the kind of hero we admire.

Little Did I Know

March 7, 2021March 7, 2021 / Rick Ellrod / 9 Comments

Foreshadowing

Stories vary in how they hint at what’s to come. “Foreshadowing” provides the reader with more or less vague clues about things that will happen later on. As the Wikipedia article notes, even the title of a chapter or an entire work can give us such a hint. (I once changed the title of a novel—House of Stars, currently seeking a publisher—because the original working title gave away too much of the plot.)

One particularly overt way of foreshadowing is to have the narrator tell us straight out about something they didn’t find out until later. I think of this as the “little did I know” trope, based on the hackneyed formula for introducing such a hint in old-time books. That method strikes me as rather heavy-handed, and I’m dubious about whether it’s really a good idea.

”I Was Soon To Find That Out”

A classic example occurs in Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961). Mentor-figure Jubal Harshaw (not the titular Martian), as a side business, ghost-writes the kind of ‘confessional’ novels popular in the early twentieth century. Every now and then in Stranger, he’s motivated to dictate a bit of purple prose for such a tale. So in ch. 17 (p. 157 in my battered old paperback copy), we hear, as part of the opening for “I Married a Martian”: “In those carefree childhood days I did not dream to what strange bittersweet fate my tomboy ambition would . . .”

The fragmentary example is classic because it’s supposed to be a sample of hack writing; Harshaw is contemptuous of the potboilers he turns out. Of course, not every “little did I know” example needs to be so trite.

Romantic suspense novels are given to this trope, since a primary purpose of the foreshadowing is to build anticipation and suspense. For example, Elizabeth Peters was a master of the witty, light-hearted romantic suspense story. In Summer of the Dragon (1979), we see a whole series of such hints.

It was like a game.
But it wasn’t a game, and I was soon to find that out.” (ch. 7, p. 150)

I know now what it was that woke me at the crack of dawn next morning; but at the time I was amazed at myself. (ch. 9, p. 181)

Every passing moment made me more and more uneasy; it was as if some part of my mind knew something awful was about to happen, something I couldn’t prevent. (ch. 9, p. 194)

The fact is, my compassion was stupid. I didn’t know how stupid until it was almost too late (ch. 10, p. 213)

If I believed in premonitions I would claim that I knew the next day was going to see some sort of climax. Since I don’t believe in them, I will only claim I was nervous. (ch. 11, p. 249)

“My second impulse canceled the first; and I still maintain, in spite of what resulted, that it was a rational decision.” (almost at very end: ch. 12, p. 285)

After being hit over the head repeatedly with such ominous notes, one feels they’ve begun to lose their effectiveness. And, although the individual lines are well written, the cumulative effect is to give the story a sort of “pulp” atmosphere. In fact, that may have been just what the author was going for. (Her laugh-out-loud description of the cover of a Gothic romance at the beginning of The Camelot Caper shows that she knew exactly what she was poking fun at.)

Some authors are particularly fond of this technique. Andrew Greeley, for example, regularly warns us that something bad’s going to happen. In A Christmas Wedding (2000), the hero and heroine agree that her father is a sick man, and the hero adds: “And, as we would later find out to our dismay, dangerous too.” (ch. 19, p. 235) In a later book in the same series, September Song (2001), ch. 5 ends bluntly with: “The future would be a lot worse than I expected.” Oddly enough, in many cases the foreshadowing seems to overstate the result: what ultimately happens is less awful than we’ve been led to expect.

The “little did I know” trope isn’t confined to older works. Emily Devenport’s fascinating Medusa in the Graveyard (2019) seems to concentrate such hints in the midsection of the story: “That was about to change, but I didn’t know it” (ch. 14). “I didn’t know we were about to be confronted by . . .” (ch. 14). Or, deploying one of my favorite stock phrases: “Famous last words” (ch. 15).

As the examples indicate, this particular type of open foreshadowing by the narrator tends to occur especially in first-person narratives. It can also be used in the third person (“Little did she know…”), but in that case the quasi-presence of a narrator other than the main character becomes apparent—almost like “breaking the fourth wall.”

Similar Techniques

There are less obvious methods than “little did I know” to telegraph what’s coming up in a story, sharing some of the same weaknesses and strengths.

When the Fellowship of the Ring reaches Lothlorien, Frodo sees Aragorn lost in memory of meetings with Arwen there in days long past. He comes out of his reverie and, taking Frodo’s hand, “left the hill of Cerin Amroth and came there never again as living man.” (end of Book Two, ch. 6, p. 367) We wonder whether this third-person statement by the narrator means that Aragorn will die on the quest. But that doesn’t happen. (I think everyone is familiar with that spoiler.) Aragorn survives; but there’s no particular reason why he should come back to that particular spot (unless he and Arwen wanted to reminisce on their honeymoon), and it happens that he never does. When we reread the story, we may wonder why Tolkien makes such a point of telling us that Aragorn doesn’t come there again “as living man,” when nothing comes of it. (We’re not told that he visits as a ghost, either.)

We see a similar effect when an author doesn’t merely hint at, but shows us, the future: when a story starts at a later point and ‘doubles back’ to earlier events. This is a classic technique, as for example in The Aeneid; the fact that the story opens with Aeneas telling Dido about his escape from Troy means that we don’t have any suspense about whether he escapes when we later read those scenes. But sometimes the later-placed-earlier scene seems to be designed to set up our expectations, more or less explicitly.

First volume of Book of the Ancestor

For example, in Mark Lawrence’s Book of the Ancestor series, the very first book of the trilogy suggests that certain things are going to happen before the end. But (minor spoiler here) that scene, which is presented in several places during the story, is always incomplete and carefully limited; and when it finally occurs, the context makes it quite different from what we were led to expect. I found myself feeling that the author had sort of cheated – although that didn’t diminish my enjoyment of the story; it led me to wonder whether the foreshadowing scenes were really necessary at all.

In the limiting case, any first-person story gives us a pretty good idea that the narrator will survive at least to the end of the story, as noted in TV Tropes’ article on First-Person Perspective. Although it’s been known to happen that the hero dies at the end; the tale may conclude there, or may drop back to a third-party coda for the conclusion.

Similarly, the spoiler effect is already present in any classic tale where one already knows the conclusion—the Arthuriad, for example. Most ancient literature was written this way; Homer’s readers already knew that Troy lost the war. In such cases, our anticipation is not to learn the outcome of the story, but to find out how the author is going to get us there—as is also the case with many genre stories, such as romances and mysteries, and with historical fiction.

The Function of Foreshadowing

As noted above, foreshadowing of any type serves the purpose of shaping our expectations and building suspense. The mere glimpse attracts more attention than a complete revelation—a principle every fashion designer knows. The Wikipedia article also suggests that foreshadowing can make later events seem more plausible, since we’re already conditioned to expect them.

Plausibility can also be served by the lampshading function of a character’s anticipatory retrospective reflections. When Peters’ heroine in Summer of the Dragon comments on her own reaction—“ my compassion was stupid. I didn’t know how stupid until”—we are a little less inclined to excoriate the character for being an idiot, since the reflection makes clear that they now know they were an idiot.

So, if “little did I know” has legitimate functions, what’s the problem with it?

Looking Through a Character’s Eyes

Woman sits on wall looking out over a city

Viewpoint
(Image by Pexels from Pixabay)

There’s a strong trend these days toward choosing the viewpoint of a story to encourage the reader to identify as closely as possible with the main character(s). If a story isn’t told in first person, then one is advised to use “close” or “deep” third person, where the reader’s point of view is tightly limited to that of a particular character. There may be more than one viewpoint character, but while we’re in a given person’s head, we see only what they see, know only the things they know, experience their feelings as we face their challenges with them.

Presumably this is intended to make the reading experience more engaging and immersive. The frequent use today of present tense (“I open the door”) rather than the usual “narrative past” (“I opened the door”)—for example, in the Hunger Games trilogy—appears to be another means to the same end.

Now, I’m not slavishly devoted to the “close third” option. Plenty of the stories I read growing up were told in “omniscient” third person, where the author felt free to give the reader information the characters were not privy to. In the lost world-ship story Orphans of the Sky, for example, Heinlein fills us in on things that the characters, given the boundaries of their experience, cannot understand. Or consider Victor Hugo’s notorious disquisition on the Paris sewer system in Book the Second of Volume Five in Les Misérables. I’m comfortable with a more ‘distant’ viewpoint; I can read The Silmarillion as well as The Lord of the Rings.

The Downside of Knowing

Image by Helmut Strasil from Pixabay

But to my mind, the heavy-handed “little did I know” sort of foreshadowing does tend to pull one out of the story. We now know something the viewpoint character doesn’t; we are no longer sharing their feelings in the moment, but rather their retrospective evaluation based on later knowledge. We are not quite in the internal time of the story, but viewing it sub specie aeternitatis, from a point of view that is not time-bound. This distances us to some degree from the story.

The specific foreshadowing typical of these hints, as distinct from a general air of ominousness, builds dramatic tension; but it also reduces surprise. Of course, this kind of surprise is lost the second time you read any book. We already know what’s going to happen. Still, the building up of expectations proportionately reduces even the apparent freshness of the experience when the foreshadowed event finally takes place. We may find ourselves thinking more about the later events that are being implied than being “mindful” about the current action.

That diversion from the ‘narrative present’ may be particularly distracting when we don’t feel that the author makes good on the implied threat of the foreshadowing. If we’re told that something terrible is in the offing, and then it turns out not to be so bad after all, we may feel disappointed or cheated. Greeley’s stories are especially subject to this problem; on the second read-through, we may feel we’re being manipulated when the author earnestly warns us to expect something awful, but we know the outcome won’t live up to the warning. After a while, we may begin to take the author’s insinuations with a grain of salt, since we know their habit of overthreatening and not delivering.

The not-delivering can actually be a relief, rather than a letdown: ‘Whew, that wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be.’ That reaction makes me ambivalent about the faux foreshadowing. The release of dramatic tension in a positive way may be as satisfying as the fulfillment in a negative way. Perhaps overthreatening actually is a useful device—particularly if we want the reader to be relieved rather than appalled.

My sense, in the end, is that “little did I know” is a technique to be used with care. Foreshadow away; but be sure of exactly what you’re trying to achieve and how the language used will accomplish it.

Rick Ellrod's Observatory