Love and thunder

Crossposted from Dreamwidth

It’s official: in a couple of years’ time there’s going to be a fourth Thor movie in the MCU, and it’s going to be titled Thor: Love and Thunder, and it’s going to feature Natalie Portman as the Mighty Thor and be directed by Taika Waititi. I can’t wait.

There’s a contingent of YouTubers who see it as their bounden duty to pour vitriol on anything with the faintest whiff of “political correctness,” which in practice includes all female-led fantasy, science fiction, and superhero movies. Some disavow any misogyny and I guess quietly hope we won’t go look up what they’ve said about Captain Marvel and Mad Max: Fury Road and Rey in Star Wars and the latest Ghostbusters and the Thirteenth Doctor on Doctor Who. Others are louder and less coherent – “liberals are ruining my childhood, literally no-one asked for this, let’s burn Marvel to the ground!” style of thing.

I mean, one of the complaints is true: Portman isn’t anywhere near as big and muscular as the Mighty Thor. But if that’s your main problem, I have something devastating to tell you about Mark Ruffalo.

If you’re even less familiar with Marvel comics than I am and not clear how Natalie Portman can play Thor, what with him being male, here’s the basics. In the comics, unlike either the Norse myths before them or the movies after them, anyone who can lift Thor’s hammer Mjolnir gains not only his powers but his identity. The usual Thor is a guy called Donald Blake, but there have been several others, including an alien called Beta Ray Bill and a frog and, in a comics run in 2014–2015 titled The Mighty Thor, Blake’s on-again off-again love-interest Jane Foster, i.e. Natalie Portman’s character from the first two Thor movies.

The let’s burn political correctness to the ground! brigade of course hated The Mighty Thor and campaigned for it to be cut short, and some of them claim credit for it ending – which it did with the completion of its story arc, making that claim roughly as plausible as most of the other things these people say. They also say, for instance, that no-one liked Captain Marvel either, a movie which made over a billion dollars at the box-office; and that everyone hated the bit in Avengers: Endgame where all the female heroes band together, a scene which I’ve elsewhere seen criticized only for being too little too late.

So why am I looking forward so eagerly to Thor: Love and Thunder? Most people who write enthusiastically about the MCU seem to have started as comics fans. I suppose I might have been one if things had gone slightly differently, but in fact I never got into any comic as a kid; I was a Tolkien geek instead. And it’s not far to go from Tolkien to Norse mythology. So with most MCU characters the movies are my first sight of them – but not with Thor and his associates.

I did become aware, obviously, that Thor had been reinterpreted as a cartoon character, and I was enough of a purist (you’ll be shocked to hear) that I found this mostly annoying. It didn’t help that the cartoon character was blond, clean-shaven, and a bit of an airhead, where the god is supposed to be ginger-bearded and short-tempered. Worse, not all comics writers have any clue about Shakespearean English, and you’d get sentence constructions like “he didst goeth,” which to me is chalkboard-nails, microphone-feedback, corner-of-tabletop-in-the-elbow-nerve infuriating.

(Not that Thor should technically have been speaking Shakespearean English at all, of course, but even I can forgive comics writers for not filling their dialogue bubbles with Old Norse.)

Were Māori the first New Zealanders?

(Spoilers: Yes. Yes, they were. Unequivocally, yes.)

In this time of resurgent racism and “alternative facts”, I suppose we should have expected to see yet another version of the “Māori Were Not Here First” myth bob up to the surface. And so it has. First, a couple of months ago, one Jaylene Cook posed nude for photos high up Mt Taranaki, which is sacred to the local Māori people, and so sparked a comment-war on Instagram. I’m not going to pass judgement on the photoshoot – I haven’t seen the photos and don’t know how sexual or otherwise disrespectful they were. I mention it because, during the comment-war, Cook stated that “Maori are not indigenous you ignorant t...” (redaction by Stuff).

Not long after that, some guy called Noel Hilliam dug up some Māori skulls and reportedly sent them to an Edinburgh University pathologist, who told him they were three thousand years old and Welsh. Whether he told the pathologist where they came from is a critical, and unanswered, question. See, if I were a pathologist and somebody sent me a skull, I’d assume they’d found it somewhere near my place of work and contacted me because I was local, and I’d start my search for matching features in nearby collections. To determine the age, you might first think of carbon-dating, but bones can easily be contaminated with ancient carbon and no archaeologist trusts an uncorroborated carbon-date anyway. I’d most likely look at the teeth, get some idea of what the person ate, and match it to a place and period when people seemed to be eating a similar diet – to a standard of “close as we’re going to get, probably”. So even if the nameless pathologist was an actual qualified pathologist (Edinburgh University denies having had any such contact), Hilliam’s ignorance of scientific procedure would pretty much guarantee a worthless result.

But, being so demonstrably ignorant of scientific procedure, Hilliam of course drew sweeping conclusions about New Zealand’s prehistory from this one piece of data. Or rather, he had already drawn those conclusions and desecrated a Māori burial site merely to confirm them. He went public with a “reconstruction” of one of the skulls:

There is of course no such thing as a distinctive “Welsh skull”, but there are some characteristic features you can use, if you come across a skeleton in the South Pacific, to tell whether it belonged to an Islander or an early European visitor. In this case, I have to say those are an awfully wide, rounded jaw-line and robust cheek-bones for a European woman; they would be entirely unremarkable in a Polynesian face. The hair, skin tone, nose profile and thin lips are all guesses on the part of the sketch artist. I gather Hilliam claims his “expert” told him this person had blond hair, which means that either he or the “expert” are talking nonsense. You can’t tell hair colour from a skull.

Hilliam didn’t get his notion of white pre-Māori New Zealanders from the facts, but he didn’t get it out of the blue either. These “alternative prehistory” ideas have been going around since at least the 1990s in certain sectors of the Pākehā (white New Zealander) population. No surprise, they’re closely correlated with racist politics. Hypothetically, it should be possible to believe that someone else settled New Zealand before the Māori did and still support Māori rights under the Treaty of Waitangi, since nothing in the Treaty is predicated on Māori being indigenous. But no-one actually seems to take that position. Conversely, people who publicly maintain that Māori are unfairly privileged by the Treaty disturbingly often turn out, in unguarded conversation, to also believe that Māori are a bunch of primitive savages who couldn’t possibly have navigated the oceans by themselves.

The false meaning of Christmas

’Tis the season to be sappy. Twee cartoon reindeer and Santas, pointy trees and beribboned boxes, tinsel wreaths and spray-painted snow, and above all, inescapably, in every shop, that dreary treacly music that is the aural equivalent of sitting in a bath as it goes lukewarm. The fact that late December is midsummer in New Zealand gives all the doggedly wintry imagery an extra edge of falseness. You can tell that people are feeling it, because the other thing you get this time of year is movies and TV specials offering to reveal the true meaning of Christmas, which evidently is hard to find otherwise.

Well, if it’s hard to find, then the true meaning can’t be money worries and time pressure. Which is pretty much what Christmas is nowadays, if you’re an adult: a time to lavish gifts and food and hospitality on your friends and family or they’ll think you don’t love them. Even that wouldn’t be so bad, if only the gifts were things that were useful, beautiful, thought-provoking or informative. But no. As George Monbiot recently noted, businesses ravage the environment and sweat poor workers half to death so that we can present each other with

a solar-powered waving queen; a belly button brush; a silver-plated ice cream tub holder; a “hilarious” inflatable zimmer frame; a confection of plastic and electronics called Terry the Swearing Turtle... a Scratch Off World wall map... An electronic drum-machine t-shirt; a Darth Vader talking piggy bank; an ear-shaped iPhone case; an individual beer can chiller; an electronic wine breather; a sonic screwdriver remote control; bacon toothpaste; a dancing dog...

Monbiot’s right. These things amuse us for a day or two and then we compound the damage done in their manufacture by adding them to the world’s overflowing landfills. They end up in the ocean. Plastic doesn’t rot. Tools exist that we can use to clean it up, but not at the rate it keeps arriving. And once we’ve cleaned it up, what do we do with it? Burn it, and release the carbon to the atmosphere? Another bad idea. The best I can think of is to recycle it as building materials – say, underfloor insulation – since that’s at least something we would like to have last forever.

It’s become a kind of society-level addiction: better to buy cheap plastic crap than be that one guy who doesn’t give Christmas presents. And of course, the more people who behave like this, the more of a Scrooge you’ll look like if you don’t join in as well – ironically, considering Dickens’ original Scrooge was motivated by profit maximization just like the businesses foisting the cheap plastic crap on us. I don’t know how long the cycle of guilt and cheap plastic crap would go on if it weren’t regularly given a kick along by all the advertising.

This commercialism has even managed to infect the “true meaning” stories. Back in 1956, Ted Geisel (aka Dr Seuss) could write How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, in which the townsfolk of Whoville wake to find all their presents and decorations gone and still sing for joy that it’s Christmas. Contrast that with the 2011 movie Arthur Christmas, whose plot-driving problem is that a single present has fallen off the sleigh, destined for a child who already has lots of presents from her family but will apparently nevertheless be absolutely devastated if she doesn’t get something from Santa as well. Hear that, parents? Better nip out and buy one more just in case.

Reason is not the property of the West

The University of Otago’s second semester ends in October. I knew there were Summer School classes in January and February, because I’ve taken notes in them. I never knew there were also classes in November and December. But here I am. Turns out there’s a five-week course on titled “Introduction to the Māori World”, and one of the students taking it wants notes. My first class was last Tuesday. The lecture was about fundamental concepts in Māori culture, such as tapu and mana, and the polytheistic cosmology which underpins them.

A quick summary of that class. Tapu is of course the origin of the English word taboo, but it’s pronounced differently – both syllables are short and the stress is on the first one. Tapu is the presence or influence of an atua, a god. The gods are present everywhere, and one must treat them with deference and caution. But sometimes it is necessary to lift the tapu so that we humans can go about our ordinary lives without having to worry about it. Then, it becomes noa, which is simply the converse of tapu.

Which gods? On Tuesday we were introduced to four: Papa-tū-ā-nuku, Mother Earth; Tāne-mahuta, god of light and life and the forest; Tangaroa, god of all water, including the water in people’s bodies; and Ranginui, the Sky, Papa-tū-ā-nuku’s lover, who was separated from her by Tāne-mahuta to create the world of light. The gods are the ancestors of all life, including human beings. Most iwi (chiefdom-nations, though the word is usually translated “tribe”) trace their genealogy back to Tāne-mahuta. The chiefs belong to the elder line in each case.

Tangaroa’s dominion over water seems to be responsible for the tapu of blood, which in turn explains why women have a special power over tapu. A man can lift tapu by saying an incantation (a karakia) or using water, but a woman can lift it simply by virtue of being a woman, because women handle blood every month. When you enter or leave a marae – the space built at the hub of every Māori community to house formal gatherings – you pass through a gateway that symbolizes a woman’s legs, so that you don’t bring in any tapu you may have picked up on the outside.

Having just come back from Japan, I can’t help noticing the parallels with Shintō. There again, the kami are immanent in water, earth, and forests. Again, the kami are ancestors rather than creators of the human race, and the Imperial Family is the elder line of descent. And again you have that detail of the symbolic gateway, the torī in front of the shrine, through which you enter or leave the presence of divine power.

But there’s also a big difference. Japan is much more centralized than traditional Māori society, and you might expect to see that reflected in their religions – that Māoritanga would have lots of local spirits and Shintō would have a few big, important gods, like the pre-Christian Greek or Norse pantheons. In fact it’s the other way around. Each mountain, lake, river, and ancient tree in Japan has its own personal kami, but in tikanga Māori it is Tāne-mahuta in every patch of bush and Tangaroa in every body of water.

Mana is the other Māori word, besides tapu / taboo, that has been borrowed into English outside of New Zealand. Both syllables are short, so that to a New Zealand English speaker it sounds like “munna” – “monna” to an American. It’s been appropriated in crap fantasy books and games to denote a limiting resource for magic-users, like pixie-dust but slightly more badass. In fact mana is prestige, charisma, honour, dignity, authority; social power, not magical power. It’s about one’s standing with the gods. Duties and privileges in Māori culture are doled out entirely according to who has what kind of mana.

What are we escaping?

If you’re wondering why you haven’t heard from me in a while, it’s not the usual reason (i.e. procrastination plus Nearly Finished Syndrome) this time. It’s because I’m in Japan on the last day of my first ever overseas holiday, and I didn’t spend much of it sitting in hotel rooms typing. I have picked up enough of the language to compose a few simple sentences and say them, but I still need a lot of help understanding what other people are saying to me. So far I have not experienced anything like what people call “culture shock”. Maybe this is because, with my social disability, I have never found that my own culture makes all that much sense either.

I guess it’s the same principle as learning to pronounce other languages. People have commented with favourable surprise on how quickly I master the pronunciation of Norwegian and Finnish – my choir had a Scandinavian-themed concert recently. The secret is quite simple: English is not the centre. The sound of the Norwegian word meg (“me”), for instance, is halfway between the sound of the English words may and my. It is quite comfortable there. It is not trying to be one or the other, as if English vowels were the underlying structure and Norwegian vowels had to be propped up between them.

I’ve been here two weeks now, which obviously isn’t enough time to have gained any deep ethnographic insight into Japanese culture. Still, superficial as they are, I have found the cultural differences I’ve observed quite easy to adapt to, simply because I wasn’t assuming that the way things are done in New Zealand is the most sensible or obvious way to do them. For example, in Japan, aesthetic and artistic sensibilities aren’t felt to be unmanly. Why should they be? In New Zealand, a real man drinks crappy beer, watches rugby avidly, and is disgusted by any form of entertainment that requires more than a kindergarten education to understand. This is presented as a “low-key” or “easy-going” or, of course, “un-PC” way to live; in fact it’s aggressively policed with homophobic ridicule.

But it’s not a difference between Japanese and New Zealand culture that’s really grabbed my attention this last couple of weeks – it’s a similarity. New Zealand and Japan are both modern countries, with advertising and traffic lights and shopping malls and, in Japan’s case, public transport. And both have that quintessentially modern phenomenon: abundant fantasies about not being modern. In amongst its narrow high-rise boxes, Japan has magnificent temples and shrines and old market areas, all clearly preserved with close attention. In New Zealand, of course, an “old” building is at most Victorian, but we made the Lord of the Rings movies, and we like to go out into what little remains of our wilderness areas and pretend we’re conquering undiscovered territory.

Why couldn’t we have had a movie about Lúthien?

I gather the Tolkien family have put their foot down and said “no” to any more Middle-Earth movies after The Hobbit is completed. I’m disappointed, but only mildly. The days are now past when any attempt to depict high fantasy on screen was bound to fail ignominiously. I don’t begrudge the Tolkiens their decision – apparently their father’s fame has been the bane of their privacy for half a century, not to mention that the movie companies have been very stingy about passing any of their profits on to his estate. And I understand completely why Peter Jackson and Weta Workshop went for The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit first. But I think Tolkien himself was a bit embarrassed by The Hobbit. It wasn’t originally supposed to be part of the mythos at all – he just helped himself to the name of a character (Elrond) and a place (the lost city of Gondolin) to give it a bit of atmosphere, and then filled out the connections over the twelve years it took to write The Lord of the Rings. (Which then took six more years to publish. And George R. R. Martin fans complain about waiting five for A Dance with Dragons.)
Those two were the only Middle-Earth books J. R. R. Tolkien got published in his lifetime. All right, those and a small collection of verse under the title The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. His son Christopher is still, I think, collecting and transcribing the giant mass of manuscripts he left when he died, some of them going right back to his time in the trenches of World War I. The first published was The Silmarillion, a collection of the whole mythos condensed down to one chapter per story, which many people understandably find tough going. Jackson has had to stretch and pad out The Hobbit to make three movies of it; The Silmarillion would fill at least a dozen.
Of all Jackson’s padding, the single element that has raised the most fan complaints so far is the most necessary one: the invention of the female elf-ranger Tauriel among Thranduil’s people in Mirkwood. I have a sneaking suspicion Jackson is going to kill her off in the third movie. The Hobbit was a boys’ adventure story, and like many boys’ adventure stories of the time it had no female characters. The Lord of the Rings has seven named female characters, eight if you count Shelob the spider. Two, Lobelia Sackville-Baggins and Ioreth of Minas Tirith, are old-lady stereotypes. One is Rosie Cotton, who doesn’t show up until Sam Gamgee needs a happy ending. The remaining four are all idealized models of femininity – Goldberry, Arwen Evenstar, Galadriel, and Éowyn of Rohan. Goldberry, like Tom Bombadil her husband, appears only in a disconnected episode near the beginning; her character is too sketchily drawn to tell us much about her author’s values. Arwen, Galadriel, and Éowyn each warrant further investigation.

The Last Battle

        

Up far beyond [Jove]

Goes Saturn silent

in the seventh region,

The skirts of the sky.

Scant grows the light,

Sickly, uncertain

(the Sun’s finger

Daunted with darkness).

Distance hurts us,

And the vault severe

of vast silence;

Where fancy fails us,

and fair language,

And love leaves us,

and light fails us

And Mars fails us,

and the mirth of Jove

Is as tin tinkling.

In tattered garment,

Weak with winters,

he walks forever

A weary way,

wide round the heav’n,

Stoop’d and stumbling,

with staff groping,

The lord of lead.

He is the last planet

Old and ugly.

His eye fathers

Pale pestilence,

pain of envy,

Remorse and murder.

Melancholy drink

(For bane or blessing)

of bitter wisdom

He pours for his people,

a perilous draught

That the lip loves not.

        

The Magician’s Nephew

        

In the third region

Venus voyages...

but my voice falters;

Rude rime-making

wrongs her beauty,

Whose breasts and brow,

and her breath’s sweetness

Bewitch the worlds.

Wide-spread the reign

Of her secret sceptre,

in the sea’s caverns,

In grass growing,

and grain bursting,

Flower unfolding,

and flesh longing,

And shower falling

sharp in April.

The metal copper

in the mine reddens

With muffled brightness,

like muted gold,

By her fingers form’d.

        

The Silver Chair

Lady Luna,

in light canoe,

By friths and shallows

of fretted cloudland

Cruises monthly;

with chrism of dews

And drench of dream,

a drizzling glamour

Enchants us – the cheat!

changing sometime

A mind to madness,

melancholy pale,

Bleached with gazing

on her blank count’nance

Orb’d and ageless.

In earth’s bosom

The shower of her rays,

sharp-feathered light

Reaching downward,

ripens silver,

Forming and fashioning

female brightness,

– Metal maidenlike.

Her moist circle

Is nearest earth.

        

The Horse and His Boy

        

Next beyond her [Luna]

Mercury marches; –

madcap rover,

Patron of pilf’rers.

Pert quicksilver

His gaze begets,

goblin mineral,

Merry multitude

of meeting selves,

Same but sundered.

From the soul’s darkness,

With wreathèd wand,

words he marshals,

Guides and gathers them –

gay bellwether

Of flocking fancies.

His flint has struck

The spark of speech

from spirit’s tinder,

Lord of language!

He leads forever

The spangle and splendour,

sport that mingles

Sound with senses,

in subtle pattern,

Words in wedlock,

and wedding also

Of thing with thought.

        

The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”

        

Far beyond her [Venus]

The heaven’s highway

hums and trembles,

Drums and dindles,

to the driv’n thunder

Of Sol’s chariot,

whose sword of light

Hurts and humbles;

beheld only

Of eagle’s eye.

When his arrow glances

Through mortal mind,

mists are parted

And mild as morning

the mellow wisdom

Breathes o’er the breast,

broadening eastward

Clear and cloudless.

In a clos’d garden

(Unbound her burden)

his beams foster

Soul in secret,

where the soil puts forth

Paradisal palm,

and pure fountains

Turn and re-temper,

touching coolly

The uncomely common

to cordial gold;

Whose ore also,

in earth’s matrix,

Is print and pressure

of his proud signet

On the wax of the world.

He is the worshipp’d male,

The earth’s husband,

all-beholding

Arch-chemic eye.

        

Prince Caspian

        

But other country

Dark with discord

dims beyond him [Sol],

With noise of nakers,

neighing of horses,

Hammering of harness.

A haughty god

Mars mercenary,

makes there his camp

And flies his flag;

flaunts laughingly

The graceless beauty,

grey-eyed and keen,

– Blond insolence –

of his blithe visage

Which is hard and happy.

He hews the act,

The indifferent deed

with dint of his mallet

And his chisel of choice;

achievement comes not

Unhelped by him;

– hired gladiator

Of evil and good.

All’s one to Mars,

The wrong righted,

rescued meekness,

Or trouble in trenches,

with trees splintered

And birds banished,

banks fill’d with gold

And the liar made lord.

Like handiwork

He offers to all –

earns his wages

And whistles the while.

White-feathered dread

Mars has mastered.

His metal’s iron

That was hammered through hands

into holy cross,

Cruel carpentry.

He is cold and strong,

Necessity’s son.

        

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

        

Soft breathes the air

Mild, and meadowy,

as we mount further

Where rippled radiance

rolls about us

Moved with music –

measureless the waves’

Joy and jubilee.

It is Jove’s orbit,

Filled and festal,

faster turning

With arc ampler.

From the Isles of Tin

Tyrian traders,

in trouble steering

Came with his cargoes;

the Cornish treasure

That his ray ripens.

Of wrath ended

And woes mended,

of winter passed

And guilt forgiven,

and good fortune

Jove is master;

and of jocund revel,

Laughter of ladies.

The lion-hearted,

The myriad-minded,

men like the gods,

Helps and heroes,

helms of nations

Just and gentle,

are Jove’s children,

Work his wonders.

On his wide forehead

Calm and kingly,

no care darkens

Nor wrath wrinkles:

but righteous power

And leisure and largesse

their loose splendours

Have wrapped around him –

a rich mantle

Of ease and empire.

        

Explaining the internet to C. S. Lewis

I always loved the Narnia series as a kid. It took a back seat when I read The Lord of the Rings, mind you, but it never fell off the bus altogether. I read the Cosmic Trilogy and the Screwtape Letters in due course. Then, as a teenager, being nerdy and a Christian, I got heavily into C. S. Lewis’s apologetic writings – I think his argument for the supernatural in Miracles (the relevant chapter is reproduced here, and I’ll deal with it in depth in an Imponderable some time) may have delayed my atheism by about five years. Lewis became one of my heroes, and I strove to emulate him. Various people have been kind enough, through the years, to praise my writing for its clarity; they have Lewis to thank.
During that time, I got into the habit of having imaginary conversations with C. S. Lewis. This isn’t so unusual. I tend to have imaginary conversations a lot with Richard Dawkins or Steven Pinker or whoever I’ve been reading lately (though mainly only non-fiction; I don’t do this with Terry Pratchett). But I read so much Lewis that it became ingrained. When I became an atheist, the conversations became distinctly more adversarial, but they continued.

Dear creationist

First of all, please note carefully that I am addressing you in the singular, Bodie Hodge, in answer to your “Dear atheists...” open letter over at Answers in Genesis. I am not assuming that all creationists are the same. I was one for four or five years, after all. Admittedly I was a teenager at the time and I think I was mostly doing it as a theologically-approvable gesture of independence from my theistic-evolutionist parents. Still, creationism got me into the habit of questioning what I read, without which I would not be an atheist today. Though, come to think about it, you’re not likely to find that a positive thing.

Which way you face

I don’t have the Discworld books handy right now, and I don’t remember which one it was, but at one point Granny Weatherwax says something along the lines of “It doesn’t matter where you stand; what matters is which way you face.”
I’m pretty sure Granny Weatherwax is speaking for her author here, and I think I have an inkling what Pratchett might have meant. And a few different things have reminded me of it recently. (Spoilers for The Lord of the Rings and the Narnia series below the cut, though if you haven’t read The Lord of the Rings or the Narnia series I’m not sure what you’re doing reading my blog.)