Elf and Bear: Thornbriar's Grouch

 

Chapter One: Goblins (Part 2)

The cold north wind cut through Thornbriar’s coat, but he paid it little heed.  He stumped along the dirt road, kicking the piles of leaves that drifted into his path.  Now and then he would pick up a stray branch, toy with it, then snap and throw it aside in anger.  Around him the day was more impressive than beautiful, with dark masses of clouds being driven along and the oak trees moaning and singing in the wind.

It was nothing to the elf, who merely hugged his thin arms closer and made his way deeper into the woods, muttering and grumbling to himself about stupid bears and paying no attention to where he was going.

With a start of surprise he found himself in a clearing by the roadside, with the rambling stone house of Dr. Gilpin suddenly before him.  It occurred to Thornbriar that this was exactly where he had been headed, in order to explain to someone who would understand the iniquity of bears and the folly of sharing a house with one.  He went up to the door and rang the bell.

Dr. Gilpin was a human, and it is unusual for any of the Field Folk to have anything to do with humans, but Thornbriar was a little eccentric by elvish standards.  Most magical creatures consider humans dull and tedious when not downright dangerous, but Thornbriar always found Dr. Gilpin full of fascinating lore about distant lands and stories about the stars, and there was little the tall old man didn’t know about the properties of herbs and roots.  The elf himself could only work Small Magics, but the doctor was so impressed when Thornbriar did that it was rather flattering.  Now Dr. Gilpin seemed the perfect ally to hear his troubles.

The elf rang the bell again, glancing absently at the multi-colored bottles in the shop window as the last echoes of the bell faded inside the building.

Elf and Bear Begins

 

As I recall, I was in my Junior English class in high school when I made this little drawing. This would have been 1980. I was highly pleased with it, somehow; it had more movement than my usually highly static pictures, and I saw potential character there. The bear should have been bigger or the elf smaller, of course; more of a Mowgli-to-Baloo proportion, I decided. It haunted me long afterwards. I made a clay model of the Bear once and somewhere along the line I decided the elf was named Thornbriar. But for almost twenty years, that's where things stood.

Finally in 1999 I decided that I would buckle down and write a novel, and I chose Elf and Bear to be my subject. I had been thinking about them for almost twenty years and I thought I had a handle on their characters. I didn't have any clear direction for the book: each chapter would be a separate adventure, a short story in itself. I would begin writing, at least a page a day, and see where it went. At the end of the year, I reasoned, I would have at least have a 365-page manuscript. I started to fill up a series of red-covered composition note books.

I was coming to the end of the story when Mom passed away. That knocked me into a depression that lasted quite a while. I put the finished first draft away, with the sense of 'Now what?' and 'So what?' overwhelming me. When I got my first computer, the on-again-off-again transcribing of 'Elf and Bear' was one of the many scattered projects I attempted. When I lost that file when my computer crashed I was too despondent to try again right away, but by 2005, with Mike's help, I finally had a complete edited version of the book. And then Mike passed away, and the world was again turned on its head. Another decade went by before I started my second book, "A Grave on Deacon's Peak" and had that published.

Looking at it now, I can definitely see that in needs more structural work (and certainly a better title than Elf&Bear"). Parts of it I think are pretty good and some of it I wince to read. I'm going to put the better parts up here, re-reading it a bit at a time myself as I do so, and try to come to some conclusion if it is worthy of the time and labor of a complete overhaul. Without further prologue, here is Part 1 of Chapter One.

 Chapter One:  Goblins 

     Oak trees rattled their bare branches in the sharp, November wind outside Thornbriar the Elf's underground home.  A hail of scattered leaves tapped and skittered against the door and windows.  Inside the house the fire was going merrily and the kettle was whistling.  Thornbriar looked into the pantry and frowned.

     "Bear," he said, his nose twitching with annoyance, "Do you know what happened to the apple pie I baked last night?  I made it especially for today's tea."

     There was a guilty silence from the overstuffed chair where the bear was resting his shaggy bulk in front of the fire.  He pretended (not too convincingly) to be absorbed in a book on the magic of fireflies, pressing his big, snuffly nose almost to the page.

     Thornbriar shut the pantry door with a snap that made the bear drop his book and look up startled at his friend.  At three feet tall the elf was less than half the height of Bear standing on his hind legs, but the enormous bruin began to shuffle his paws and look nervously away as Thornbriar turned and advanced on him.

The elf’s long forefinger pointed accusingly right between Bear’s black, nearsighted eyes.

“Well?” the elf demanded.

“Er…ah…well, to tell the truth, old fellow,” Bear stammered, closing his book.  “The truth of the matter is…uh…I ate it, last night, after you went to bed.  It smelled so good I had to have a slice.”  His smile was appeasing.

“A slice,” said Thornbriar.

“Well, one thing led to another, that is to say, one slice led to another, and by the time I realized what was happening, there was only a tiny bit left. It seemed embarrassing to leave just that for you, almost insulting.”  He gulped.  “So I ate it too.”

“This won’t do, Bear,” the elf said.  “If you go on like this we’ll be out of food before winter’s half gone.”

“I can’t help it,” Bear said.  “It’s the nature of bears to eat a lot at this time of year to get ready for the long winter’s sleep.”

Thornbriar snorted.  “Don’t give me that rubbish.”

He went over to the coat rack in the corner by the door.  “You never spend that much time sleeping anymore.  You don’t have to, with me feeding and housing you.  Out raiding smokehouses every other night is more like it.  Well, I’ve had just about enough of it.”

He whirled his dark blue coat off of the rack and onto his back, then jammed a tall, peaked blue hat on his head.

“Where are you going?” asked Bear anxiously.

“Out.”

“But what about the tea?”

“You can finish it off yourself,” said the elf, angrily winding a muffler around his neck.  He opened the door and paused dramatically to face the confounded bruin.

“As for me, I am going to get some fresh air, as far away from greedy bears as I can get.  Good day to you!”

With a flourish he slammed the door and was gone, leaving Bear to contemplate the half-set table with a long face.

Tolkien's Ordinary Virtues

Today I determined that after about a year of staying away from our local public library I'd drop in for a quick visit, mainly to browse their little used bookstore. I've found some good things for very reasonable prices at the place.

What I found there today was what I call a 'peripheral' Middle-earth book. It is not a work by Tolkien. It does not even examine Tolkien's work for its own sake, or the literary phenomenon that Tolkien is. Instead it studies the Middle-earth stories for their spiritual themes, as if a fine loaf of bread were being examined for its vitamin and mineral content.

While such an approach is possible (and I have several other books that show it has been done), I am not sure if it something Tolkien himself would have approved of. He once called such an approach like cutting up a ball in search of its bounce. I get the feeling that this book exists for the discussion of 'ordinary virtues', and Middle-earth is the sauce that helps them go down.

However, I will never not buy a Tolkien-related book that I do not have, especially if it only costs one dollar. I have long-ago sussed out the moral (even Christian) content,  and do not mind having it gone over again. “Hobbits delighted in such things, if they were accurate; they liked to have books filled with things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions.” I even have hopes that it may reveal a fact or two that I never considered before, or show a connection that I never occurred to me.

New DVDs and Books

 This Sunday, for the first time in months, my brother John and I went to the Half-Price Books in San Marcos. That has been our usual stomping grounds for years. Many is the time we spent a few hours combing the shelves. The book store was much changed, with fewer shelves spread out to give space and the chairs where people could rest from their browsing removed. Although the pickings seemed slimmer, I did manage to find some good things.

A mini-series based on the life of my favorite Founding Father ever since I watched the movie "1776". The life of that thorny, businesslike, principled man was of course more complicated than any musical could express, and "John Adams" goes a far way to exploring it in more depth. Paul Giamatti is perhaps one of our best actors and his portrayal of Adams as a common man negotiating his way around such men as Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson, not to mention the kings of France and Great Britain, as he tries to help establish a country ruled not by great men or by mobs, but by law. It doesn't hurt (for me) that when he is on his farm in his vest and with a stick in his hand, he strongly resembles a hobbit! 

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

For years I resisted watching this movie, then finally saw it and wondered why I had. I suppose it was because I had an unreasonable aversion to George Clooney. Anyway, I found it to be a mythical, mystical, musical adventure as three fugitives make their way through the seedily visionary landscape of 1930's America, recapitulaing (in a sense) the homeward voyage of Ulysses. I always miss parts of it when it comes on TV, so I'm glad to finally have a copy I can watch any time.

How I explained this book to my brother: "[Peter] Ackroyd is a beautiful "cherry-picker" when it comes to biographical detail, by which I mean you don't get all the bugs and stems and unripe fruit in his basket that might clutter a more overly-enthusiastic biographer's work. He doesn't undersell Charlie's accomplishments but there is little hero-worship or excuses, especially when it comes to his private life. I hope that doesn't make it sound like a slash job; it isn't. Ackroyd presents facts and statements without interpretation, mostly."

I've been seeing this book (or one like it) for over forty years, and I seem to have finally found my way into it at last. I anticipate at least a solid week of reading through the stories, then who knows how many decades digesting them.

I read a good lump of "The Ickabog" when it was being published chapter by chapter online. I found it techically fascinating, rather than engaging as a story. Here Rowling was dealing with a pure fantasy or fairy tale for the first time (if you don't count the in-world "Tales of Beedle the Bard"), as opposed to the somewhat 'urban fantasy' of the Harry Potter books. An imaginary land and a 'once upon a time' period do not really seem to be her cup of tea; in fact it reminded me of Stephen King's unsatisfactory foray into pure fantasy, "The Eyes of the Dragon". I think her writing is too blatantly psychological, sociological, and allegorical for the form of Fantasy she is using. And allowing her young readers to illustrate the volume seems a bit 'twee' to me and something of a lazy affection grab. I suppose I bought this book more as an artifact than as a promising read. 

A Few Things That Remind Me of McQueeney

 

A Momentous Date

 

Taking a break today to wish my sister Susan a Happy Birthday. Also known in her day as Miss Mouse, Smooch, and Swee-Swah, do not call her Sue! That's her in the hat.

My First Grade Teacher

[Mrs. Edith Roberts]

They say that almost everyone hates their First Grade teacher. I have to say that although I was not particulary fond of her, I don't harbor any major resentments against the woman, at least not from the days I spent in her classroom. I was pathetically eager to please and had a compunction to learn, or to at least excel my classmates. I think I can say she wasn't particularly fond of me, either; she had her pets and favorites among the "richies" of the lakeside resort area. We were firmly poor, but not exactly of the redneck community, and so rather hard to pigeonhole. I was fairly intelligent but emotionally more immature than my classmates. I'm sure most educators of the day weren't happy with hard to categorize cases like myself. 

I did have several run-ins with her later when I was in other classes and she was taking her shifts as schoolyard monitor. One time one of her favorites accused me of knocking her off of the monkey bars (a charge I deny to this day, and still feel the injustice). Another time, just for fun, I closed my eyes and started walking towards the train tracks at the end of the schoolyard. I was peacefully lost in my mind when suddenly Mrs. Roberts grabbed me from behind and hauled me back in. What with the wind I had not heard her calling and blowing her whistle. It seemed to me that what she thought of as my ignoring her was what made her more upset than any danger I might have been in. She thought I was flouting her authority instead of just being lost in my stupid-ass dreams.

Well, as I say, I don't really bear any hard resentment to Mrs. Roberts. Now if you ask my brother John, he can tell you the tale of their epic conflicts and confrontations. But that is not my story.