Epic Victoria Goddard 1: A New Project!
Still related to Tolkien, I promise!
Another NEW project!
One of my mottos is that “everything connects,” which is the only way to [kinda sorta] make sense of my so-called “research agenda.” University administrators *lurve* that phrase, and what they make it mean: just search for the term online to see what they think it means. I’m not at all opposed to people having a research agenda, whatever they call it; it’s just that in my experience the plans I made often take surprising turns and pivots in terms of topic.1
My experience of the phenomenon is that all of a sudden, I have to write (meaning, it feels as if I am being dictated to, in both meanings of the word!, and am compelled to write about that topic even if I had another project in progress!). I cannot stop writing about the topic (until/unless the Dictator switches to another topic).2 I should make it clear that I enjoy writing in that rather manic state; I like writing; it’s how I make sense of the world (and it’s not tied to just one genre or type of writing—I’ve experienced with poetry, plays, fanfiction, less often the “litfic” I was pushed into writing by my creative writing classes in the 1970s where my peers freaked out at the sf, and yes, even scholarly essays including bibliographic essays).
So, long-winded explanation of why my post this week is about Victoria Goddard’s epic fantasy which has recently taken over my brain. Luckily, I can still edit other people’s work which is taking up a large part of my time; that’s a different part of my brain than writing my own.
I’ve given two presentations on her work this spring; and I have even more ideas about her worldbuilding that I need to explore. I may be doing some of that in WfI!
Below are the opening sections of the two presentations I’ve given (no spoilers), followed by my working bibliography.
There are some repeated paragraphs in the two presentations (which were presented as separate papers but will be eventually joined into a longer project!). After the bibliography come some notes about the next topics I want to write about (I’ll also be expanding the presentations which run about 8-9 pages).
Part 1: Wide Seas Islander, Autist, and Asexual: The Intersectional Mythopoeic Characterization of Cliopher (Kip) Mdang3
Mythopoeic OMS 2024, February 17-18
My project analyzes Victoria Goddard’s Nine World Series as a tour de force of mythopoeic worldbuilding, genre-blending, and intersectional queer characterizations which writes back to Tolkien’s legendarium. Dallas John Baker defines “writing back” as "a commonly used literary strategy employed by feminist, postcolonial, and queer writers to reclaim, re-imagine and complicate normative or marginalizing narratives that are colonial or widely disseminated" (133). Today, I focus on the intersectional queer characterization of Cliopher (Kip) Mdang, while hoping to convince you that, as Alexandra Rowland argues, “You [all] Should Really Be Reading Victoria Goddard’s Nine Worlds Series” because there is:
a most wonderful journey—there’s beautiful magic and splendid worldbuilding and fantastic characters; there are dragons and a dungeon crawl through a magical puzzle-labyrinth and a baby unicorn the size of a cat. There is gloriously socialist government reform and implementation of universal basic income; infamous treasonous poets whose songs everyone secretly loves even though they are extremely banned; sweet, kind men trying hard to be good and the kickass women they adore—not just lovers, but family members, mentors, companions. And most of all, the core thread running through every book in the series: the depiction over and over again of deep, meaningful, intense friendships profound enough to change the course of history.
Most of the books in the series are set after the Empire of Astandalas (consisting of five of the nine worlds) is destroyed by a cataclysm known as the Fall, capital F. The Fall shattered the Magic of the Empire and the five worlds' different magical systems, causing massive destruction and deaths through tornados, erupting volcanos, and sinking lands; it disrupted the flow of time, and relocated the Palace of Stars from Astandalas, the capital city, on Ysthar, to Solaara on Zunidh. As a result of the Fall, Goddard's characters have all, to varying degrees depending on location and age, struggled with the effects of trauma while a common theme in their narrative arcs is making their homes and worlds more just. The series is post-apocalyptic but in the fantasy rather than science fiction or dystopian modes. Goddard explains that the Nine Worlds are "'worlds,' not 'planets'--more "Narnia than Pern" (Reddit). In addition to the worlds, characters know of and sometimes visit the world of Fairy, the Borderlands between the worlds, and various Divine Lands whose gods also exist and visit one or more of the worlds.4
Cliopher (Kip) is a protagonist and point of view character in the Hearth-Fire sub-series that consists of The Hands of the Emperor, and At the Feet of the Sun. He is one of the two protagonists in this series whose "deep, meaningful, intense [friendship is] profound enough to change the course of history" on their world (Rowland). "Cliopher" is the character's given name, but his family nickname is "Kip." For much of the series, he is known as "Cliopher" at the Palace, and "Kip" at home, and the distance between his two personas shape his character arc. Three intersecting aspects of his identity are his ethnicity as a Wide Seas islander, his autism, and his asexuality. While the terms "autism" and "asexuality" never appear in the stories, Cliopher (Kip)'s dialogue, actions, and internal perspectives as well as what other characters say about and to him support my reading. Goddard's intersectional characterization meets Alexander Doty's sixth definition of “queer," specifically:
those aspects of. . . textual coding that seem to establish spaces not described by, or contained within, straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual or transgendered understandings and categorizations of gender and sexuality—this is a more radical understanding of queer, as queerness here is something apart from established gender and sexuality categories, not the result of vague or confused coding or positioning (6-7).
I do not argue that Cliopher (Kip) is coded as "queer," meaning "Othered," only in the culture of hierarchical Astandalan Empire which categorizes Islander culture as "primitive" and "barbaric." Kip has always been considered queer in the sense of failing to conform to his home culture's norms which include a matrilineal kinship system; respect for elders, especially older women; and equal acceptance of same-sex relationships (including same-sex spouses and parenting).
The queerness of Cliopher (Kip)'s characterization and the ways in which his actions contribute to the two major plots of the series, the political and the personal, are shaped by interactions between his Islander culture, his autism, and his asexuality. His sense of personal failure haunts him despite his public achievements, but I argue that his perceived failure and his political successes, originate in the interactions. The narrative techniques Goddard uses to convey the complicated layers of Kip's life include his actions in the present of the story; extended flashbacks to his past (including the Fall, and the impact of the Fall); the experience of leaving his world of Zunidh for an alternate Zunidh; and an extended journey into the Divine Land of his culture, the Sky Ocean, where he meets some of his heroes from the Lays of the Wide Seas Islands. The Lays are the oral histories of those who settled in the Vangavaye-ve (pronounced: Vang-a-vay-a-vay), ("an archipelago in the Middle of the Wide Seas," on Zunidh (Nine Worlds Wiki, "Vangavaye-ve"; "Pronunciation Guide.").
Part 2: Victoria Goddard's Nine World Series: Interleaving and Resonating with J.R.R. Tolkien's Mythopoeic Worldbuilding
Tolkien at the University of Vermont (UVM), April 13, 2024
Let’s start with some information about Goddard and her fiction. She is a Canadian author with a doctorate in Medieval Studies from the University of Toronto (About). She has taught at universities, but is "currently the sexton of an Anglican church in Nova Scotia, which means I am keeper of the keys and opener of doors (and shutter-off of alarms)" (Goodreads). Her favorite writers include: Patricia McKillip; Lois McMaster Bujold; Neil Gaiman; Connie Willis; C. S. Lewis; Dante; J.R.R. Tolkien; Barry Hughart; and Robin McKinley.
Her Nine World Series consists of seven interwoven sub-series consisting of twenty-four longer works [novels and novellas] plus four collections of stories. Most of the works are set after an apocalyptic Fall that broke Empire of Astandalas (which consisted of five of the nine mortal worlds: Zunidh, Ysthar, Alinor, Colhélhé and Voonra) apart although some stories are set pre-Fall. Goddard's worldbuilding interleaves and resonates with Tolkien's legendarium through the transformative re-imagining of her secondary worlds that are a tour de force of mythopoeic worldbuilding.
The larger project this paper is part of will argue in addition, that her work "writes back" to Tolkien's legendarium. Writing back is "a commonly used literary strategy employed by feminist, postcolonial, and queer writers to reclaim, re-imagine and complicate normative or marginalizing narratives that are colonial or widely disseminated" (Baker, 133).
A significant body of scholarship on Tolkien's worldbuilding exists, grounded in "On Fairy Stories," but scholars also draw on Mark Wolf's founding work, Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation (2012), which applies Tolkien's theory to a variety of science fiction and fantasy works. An essay by Wolf is the first one in Dimitra Fimi's and Thomas Honegger's Sub-creating Arda: World-Building in J.R.R. Tolkien's Work, Its Precursors, and Its Legacies.
Wolf argues that a sub-created Secondary World "relies on the Primary World for its raw materials, as well as for whatever elements and features make it able to be understood by, and related to, an audience" (1). Sub-creation involves a writer choosing to combine what Wolf calls the "Primary World defaults" with invented elements. He identifies four levels, or types, of invention: the nominal [which involves "giving new names to existing things"]; the cultural ["which deals with all things made by humans or other creatures. . . (such as) objects, artifacts, technologies, customs, institutions, ideas, and so forth"]; the natural [which "includes new land masses, planets, plants and animals, entire ecosystems, and other aspects of the natural world itself which are changed or invented"]; and the ontological [which "determines the parameters of a world's existence. . . the materiality and laws of physics, space, time. . . .which can differ from the universe of the Primary World] (2-3).
I compare some of Goddard's sub-created inventions in two novels from The Lay of the Hearth-Fire series: The Hands of the Emperor and At the Feet of the Sun. The Fall that shattered the Schooled Magic of the Empire of Astandalas also destroyed the five worlds' different magical systems and caused massive destruction and deaths through tornados, erupting volcanos, and sinking lands; it disrupted the flow of time, and relocated the Imperial Palace of Stars from Astandalas, the capital city, on Ysthar, to Solaara on Zunidh. The series is post-apocalyptic but in the fantastic rather than science fictional or dystopian mode. Goddard explains that the Nine Worlds are "'worlds,' not 'planets'--more "Narnia than Pern" (Reddit). In addition to the nine mortal worlds, characters know of and sometimes visit the world of Fairy, stumbling into Borderlands between the worlds which are often Woods, as well as various Divine Lands whose gods not only exist in the narratives but can, on occasion, visit mortal worlds.
I have started to identify a number of what, using Wolf's taxonomy, are Goddard's sub-creative inventions, in order to compare them with Tolkien's inventions which, arguably, became primary conventions of high/epic and mythopoeic fantasy.These inventions so far include: adventures & quests; status of Ancestors; magic & wizardry; small m music (the music created by the characters in the secondary world) and capital M Music (the Music of Creation); mythologies & religions; poetry & song; tales & stories; the nature of Time; and Woods as liminal/borderlands.
Because of the time limits, I'll briefly discuss five of the inventions: the status of Ancestors; magic & wizardry; tales & stories (all of which I categorize as cultural inventions), and Time and Music of Creation which I categorize as "ontological" inventions.
Working Bibliography: Epic Victoria Goddard
Secondary Sources
Baker, Dallas John, "Writing Back to Tolkien: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in High Fantasy." Recovering History Through Fact and Fiction: Forgotten Lives, edited by Dallas John Baker, Donna Lee Brien, and Nike Sulway, Cambridge Scholars' Publishing, 2017, pp. 123-43.
Benjamin, Ruha. "Racial Fictions, Biological Facts: Expanding the Sociological Imagination through Speculative Methods." Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, vol. 2, no. 2, 2016, pp. 1-28.
Canning, Dominique A. "Queering Asexuality: Asexual-Inclusion in Queer Spaces," McNair Scholars Research Journal, vol. 8 , article 6, 2015, pp. 55-74, https://commons.emich.edu/mcnair/vol8/iss1/6
Croft, Janet Brennan. ‘Nor am I Out of It’: The Comic Bureaucratic Hell on Page and Screen." 2023. Academia.edu. https://www.academia.edu/105391021/Nor_am_I_Out_of_It_The_Mo dern_bbureaucratic_Hell_on_Page_and_Screen .
Autism Research News, 18 Sept. 2020, https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/gender-and-sexuality-in-autism-explained/.
---. "Largest study to date confirms overlap between autism and gender diversity." Spectrum: Autism Research News, 14 Sept. 2020, https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/largest-study-to-date-confirms-overlap-between-autism-and-gender-diversity/.
Doty, Alexander. Flaming Classics, Queering the Film Canon. Routledge, 2000.
Dugan, Owen and Krasner, James. "Soup, Bones, and Shakespeare: Literary Authorship and Allusion in Middle-earth," Mythlore, vol. 40, no. 2, Article 8, 2022. https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol40/iss2/8.
Fimi, Dimitra, and Thomas Honegger, editors. Sub-Creating Arda: World-Building in J. R. R. Tolkien's Work, its Precursors, and its Legacies. Comarë Series No. 40. Walking Tree Publishers, 2019.
Fotopoulou, Aristea. "Intersectionality Queer Studies and Hybridity: Methodological Frameworks for Social Research." Journal of International Women's Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, 2012, pp. 19-32. https://vc.bridgew.edu/jiws/vol13/iss2/3.
Goddard, Victoria. "About." VictoriaGoddard. https://www.victoriagoddard.ca/pages/about-victoria.
Goddard, Victoria. "Victoria Goddard." Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8218462.Victoria_Goddard
Goddard, Victoria. "I'm Victoria Goddard, author of THE HANDS OF THE EMPEROR - Ask Me Anything today!" Reddit, r/Cozy Fantasy, 2022, https://www.reddit.com/r/CozyFantasy/comments/vzlnre/im_victoria_goddard_author_of_the_hands_of_the/?rdt=54635.
The Nine Worlds by Victoria Goddard Wiki. https://nineworlds.miraheze.org/wiki/Main_Page.
Robison, John Elder. "Autism in the South Pacific: A Different Way of Seeing?" Psychology today, 26 Feb. 2017, "https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/my-life-with-aspergers/201702/autism-in-the-south-pacific-a-different-way-of-seeing.
Rowland, Alexandra. “You Should Really Be Reading Victoria Goddard’s Nine Worlds Series.” Tor.com. Oct. 20, 2021. https://www.tor.com/2021/10/20/you-should-really-be-reading-victoria-goddards-nine-worlds-series/.
Scarlett, Alice Olivia. "Asexuality is the Queerest Thing." News, 27 Oct. 2020, https://www.stonewall.org.uk/about-us/news/asexuality-queerest-thing.
Shippey, Tom. J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. Houghton Mifflin, 2002.
Wolf, Mark J. P. Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation, Routledge, 2012.
Primary Sources5
Goddard, Victoria. "Reading Order." Victoriagoddard.ca, https://www.victoriagoddard.ca/pages/reading-order.
Notes
Fractal Worldbuilding: Tom Shippey analyzes the narrative/plot structure of the last two volumes of LOTR (after the Fellowship breaks) as one of interlace (with the points of view shifting back and forth between the different groups of characters after the “Breaking of the Fellowship,” and chronological differences), analyzing how the complex time slips between the two, then three, narrative threads are connected through clues Tolkien provides (such as the phase of the moon different characters see!) (Author of the Century). It’s a lovely image (based on the idea of Celtic interlace), but I don’t think it works to describe one of the ways in which Goddard weaves her worldbuilding throughout multiple series (many of the same characters appear in them but in different roles — a secondary character in one story becomes the point of view/protagonist in another). She uses the metaphor of weaving/interleaving on her “reading order” webpage. And while I argue that her world-creation (Sub-Creation) is, like Tolkien’s, mythopoeic, I also think that one of her narrative elements involves making connections between a fairly minor event/short scene in one book can is expanded upon and made much more significant in another book. I’m collecting examples, but of course they’ll all be spoilers to some extent so I’m not going to post them here (later, I might use rot.13 to post them which gives people the choice of reading, or not). I’m thinking of the concept of “fractal” to describe this narrative(s) structure(s), though not in the mathematics meaning, more the general idea of how patterns repeat at all levels, and how the shapes of the larger and smaller versions are related.
Religion as institution; religion as belief system; religion as ideology; religion as mythology; religion as intellectual (theology?) structure; and religion as personal experience (miracle; or meeting with a god in the moral world; or visiting the Divine Lands). One of the major differences in Goddard’s and Tolkien’s worldbuilding is that Goddard’s worlds have a wealth of different religions, mythologies, divinities, alongside systems of magic. Just started thinking about this today while re-reading one of my favorite of the shorter pieces, The Saint of the Bookstore.
For instance, after ten years in a tenure-track/tenured job (six years in the tenure-track, then the next four years as tenured) I suddenly switched from a “research agenda” that focused on feminist speculative fiction to one that focused on “Tolkien” (meaning his work, the films, and, eventually, the fandom). The switch came after I fell in love with The Fellowship of the Ring and watched it 45 times before it left the theatres in the NE Texas area. I also started writing fanfiction at this time. This shift confused my friends in feminist SFF (and some of my colleagues); luckily for me, the Admins at my university didn’t really care what sort of research we did as long as we were doing it although various middle-level Admins, specifically Deans, over the years complained about the weird stuff I did; luckily my department firmly believed in academic freedom. And as far as the Admins were concerned, it was all weird: writing on feminist sf, editing the first encyclopedia on Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy, writing about Deep Space Nine as a Borderland, etc. etc. etc. In that context (one in which my department head told me the Dean asked *him* why I didn’t write on T. S. Eliot!!!11!—said Dean being a chemist—because it would be easier to evaluate my work every year), nobody even blinked at Tolkien.
The best description, and it’s only somewhat similar to my sense of it, that I have found is Alice W. Flaherty’s The Midnight Disease: The drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain. Until Covid (and a couple of years after), I never experienced a total writing block (I sometimes got stuck on a specific project, but could always switch to another one; when I admitted this fact out loud, a number of the people I knew in my department got very grumpy about it. Apparently, it’s one of the (many) ways in which I am weird. They also never believed me that it could be its own type of problem!
I am grateful to the feedback I received from friends who workshopped an early draft of this presentation (names redacted because of the nature of the internet).
Fitzroy notes that nature and inhabitants of the Divine Lands that they find in Sun differ from the Divine Lands he travelled to in the past and concludes that his earlier experience was shaped by his culture's myths.
Goddard’s work is epic in more than one meaning of the word: I’ll be pulling together the complete listing of all her published work at a later date in the process! For now, I’m linking you all to her “Reading Order” page (which offers two options: reading them in order of publication in each sub-series, and reading them in order of internal chronology).