Volume 17 Number 1 Article 2 Fall 10-15-1990 What I Did For Love Diana Paxson Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore Part of the Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons Recommended Citation Paxson, Diana (1990) "What I Did For Love," Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: Vol. 17 : No. 1 , Article 2. Available at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol17/iss1/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Mythopoeic Society at SWOSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature by an authorized editor of SWOSU Digital Commons. An ADA compliant document is available upon request. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To join the Mythopoeic Society go to: http://www.mythsoc.org/join.htm Mythcon 51: A VIRTUAL “HALFLING” MYTHCON July 31 - August 1, 2021 (Saturday and Sunday) http://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-51.htm Mythcon 52: The Mythic, the Fantastic, and the Alien Albuquerque, New Mexico; July 29 - August 1, 2022 http://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-52.htm Abstract Guest of Honor speech Mythcon 21. Follows the conference theme, “Aspects of Love in Fantasy,” and discusses various kinds of love and their appearance in fantasy. Concludes those “which appear most strongly in modern mythopoeic fantasy” are comradeship/ caritas, love of place, and “the attraction towards the numinous, or Divine.” Additional Keywords Love in fantasy This article is available in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol17/iss1/2 Page 4 Autumn 1990 C D yT HLORe 63 bar II Bid IFo r TLdvc 21st CDychopocIc ConfeRence Cjuesc of HonoR AddRess Diana Rgeson or a number of years now I have been listening to Guests In order to make sense of the subject, we need a few Fof Honor arise from among the coffee cups at the end definitions. First, it is essential to distinguish between sex of the banquet to deliver their orations and been and love, which have been so consistently confused in astonished by their eloquence and erudition. This was contemporary culture. I once heard of a Romance Writers especially unnerving last year, when I realized that next convention to which everyone was instructed to wear pink time the person who was endeavoring to provide a dessert and which only at the last moment gave up the idea of course of intellectual nourishment at once scholarly, amus­ releasing a cage full of white doves at the banquet. I didn't ing, and inspirational, would be me. notice any doves in the audience, although there is indeed a heart on the Conference T-shirts. Whatever it is we are The prospect is particularly daunting when one doing here, I don't think romance is our primary purpose, considers the magnitude of the conference theme — except for the inherent romanticism involved in hankering Aspects of Love in Fantasy. Glen GooKnight got us off to after other times and ways. an excellent start yesterday morning by reading from C.S. Lewis' The Four Loves. Lewis is an even harder act to follow This is not to say that these Conferences and romance than the other Mythopoeic Conference Guests of Honor, are by any means mutually exclusive. I know of several but although the book lays down an essential groundwork couples, including the conference chair Jo Alida Wilcox for our consideration of love, there are aspects of love and Bill Welden, and Leigh Ann Hussey and David Oster, which are particularly important to us as readers of fantasy who met or fell in love at one of these Conferences. There which he was not able to treat in as much depth as they are others, no longer together, who through the Society deserve. For instance, the speech given last year by Guy have continued to be friends. But my guess is that if Eros Gavriel Kay could well have been given the title I've were all that they have in common, they would not still be chosen for mine. His work on the Tolkien papers was done together, which leads up to the point I am aiming for. for love, and which one of us, given freedom and the Tonight I'd like to talk about what love in this larger opportunity, wouldn't have dropped everything to do the sense means, and how these meanings have been explored same? Kay was motivated by one of the kinds of love in mythopoeic fantasy. Madeleine L'Engle has stated that which is responsible for all of us beings here tonight— the Fantasy is about the power of Love versus the love of love of literature. Power. But what kind of love? And so, thank goodness, there is still something left for C.S. Lewis' analysis of the four loves provides a useful me to say. beginning. His Typology consists of: Affection, Friendship, Not only is good fantasy literature worthy to be loved, Eros and Caritas. To this list one might add love of country but all aspects of love are represented within it. However, or place, love of family, love of one's work — as in in fantasies written in the mid to late twentieth century in Campbell's "follow your bliss, and love of the Divine. general, and the work of the Inklings in particular, it seems Clearly, the word "love" must refer to something other than to me that the kind of human love featured most often and genital arousal, although sexual attraction, being one of the effectively is the love of comrades, and it is just that kind most universal and powerful drives, provides some of the of Love which fuels the Mythopoeic Society. most powerful metaphors of love's expression. All kinds of love a capable of becoming transcendent, Given that assumption, it is possible to make a connec­ and all of them can be perverted — thus providing the tion between the original theme suggested for this con­ writer of fantasy with an inexhaustible source of conflict ference, which was "coming of age" and the one eventual­ ly chosen. Love has certainly contributed to my matura­ and character. Sam once pointed out to Frodo that an adventure is someone else having an uncomfortable time tion as a writer. If I have a unique value as an Author Guest of it. In emotional terms, it is someone else's trauma that of Honor for this Conference, it is because I "grew up" as makes the best story. Affection uncultivated slips into a writer while participating fully as a fan of fantasy. I know complacency; Parental love all to easily becomes posses­ the passion with which one grabs the newest work of a siveness; Eros can descend into Lust; Friendship contort favorite author, and I know what drives people through the trauma of creating a Mythopoeic Conference — again into co-dependency or the mentality of the mob. Unex­ amined Patriotism may become the chauvinism that fuels and again! Writing and reading books or working on the Conference are both things that one does "for love" ... war; love of one's work may lead to blindness to human needs, or a heart attack; and the love of God, which should But what islove? be the noblest of all, becomes the worst when it CPgT HLORe 63 Autumn 1990 Page 5 degenerates into the fanatic compulsion to tell others how be united entangles them. In The Lord o f the R ings, the love to believe. Any virtue, even love, becomes an evil when it between Aragorn and Arwen is part of the background, is unbalanced, wrongly applied, or carried to an extreme. and that between fiowyn and Faramir, mere icing, and no one ever misses the romance. The fact that Tolkien's char­ One see all kinds in fantasy. acters are most bachelors saves them, and the reader, a lot Let us look for a moment at how our favorite literature of distractions. got that way. Fantasy's most direct literary ancestor is the Since the protagonists in C. S. Lewis' Narnia books are Fairy Tale. Although fairy tales and medieval romance juveniles, erotic love is irrelevant and the author is free to both come out of the same cauldron, romance has become concentrate on the adventures of the children and their the ancestor of mainstream fiction, while fairy tales were companions. In the space trilogy, Jane Studdock's problem consigned to what Dr. Elizabeth Pope in her Guest of is not passion but responsibility. Perelandra is only one of Honor speech called the "Attic of Faerie," and considered the Powers who descends upon St. Anne's, although when fit only for children. However a happy by-product of this she appears she does have very nearly the last word. juvenile focus is the fact that Young Adult writers have been forced to deal with relationships other than the erotic Charles Williams is the only one of the major Inklings affairs that dominate "adult" fiction, (or perhaps they have who focuses on romantic love, both as a metaphor and as been freed from the convention that adult heterosexual a means to spiritual union. Despite his Theology of attraction is the only valid or desirable human relation­ Romantic Love, in his fiction, erotic attraction is used to ship). The contemporary focus on love=romance=sex in direct attention to something for which the feeling for the popular music and culture is tragically limiting.