>You wrote LOTR into UF canon.

Well... sort of. I mean, The Lord of the Rings exists as a book in the UF universe, and is customarily held to be a work of 20th-century Earth fiction, just as it is here in the real world (by people not suffering from delusional fandom syndrome, anyway). It remains a popular and influential work of literature, albeit one blessed with a fandom that tends toward a rather alarming level of intensity and stridency, into the 25th century, and there is still that little hard core who fold their arms and grump privately that they enjoyed The Hobbit considerably more.

What I'm doing in adapting it to UF is to take literally the sly metacontinuity that Tolkien himself sometimes invoked. Tolkien claimed, with a bit of a wink, that The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were both English translations from the ancient Red Book of Westmarch, and that some details had probably been lost in translation.

The thing is, he presented the Red Book as a history of events that occurred on a pre-historic Earth, in some ancient epoch that happened so long ago it isn't reflected in the archæological record. That won't really wash, so my take on it for UF purposes is that it was a blind, intended as another sly wink to the knowing reader. The Red Book isn't an account of events in ancient Midgard at all, and Professor Tolkien knew it: it's an account of events in ancient Vanaheim and Alfheim, from an era before the rise of the current Æsir and Vanir - probably back during the lifetime of Búri, Odin's grandfather, the original king of the gods.

Why do I like this concept? Simple - it's classic early sci-fi. Victorian SF writers, especially, loved to present their works as "memoirs" of witnesses to "actual events", as did H.P. Lovecraft. There's nothing in the text that actually contradicts this, and it gives our fictional take on Tolkien a pleasantly Lovecraftian sort of feel; the quiet English professor of ancient languages becomes a traveler of the planes and historian to the gods who presented his research as fiction because The World Wasn't Ready for the Truth, a classic literary device and a piece of own-tail-eating metacontinuity that appeals to me tremendously.

(Presumably he got to Vanaheim and Alfheim to conduct his research through the good offices of his close friend and associate, the wizard C.S. Lewis.)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
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