On the Question of Whether Mountains Forgive

We met in a garden that belonged to neither of them. Some sort of college grounds — flagstone paths, an old yew, benches placed at angles that discouraged conversation between strangers. Le Guin had chosen it. Tolkien had objected to it, then arrived early.

When I found him, he was studying the bark of the yew with the attention of a man reading an inscription. He had a pipe, unlit, turning in his fingers. Le Guin was sitting on a bench thirty feet away, watching a cat navigate the wall above the garden. They had not greeted each other. I had the impression that they’d been there for some time, separately, and that this parallel silence constituted an opening negotiation.

“The question,” Tolkien said without looking up from the bark, “is whether we are building a world or merely describing one.”

“The question,” Le Guin said, from her bench, “is who lives in the world, and what it costs them.”

I introduced myself. Neither seemed particularly interested. I mentioned the combination — multi-POV political fantasy, systemic oppression rendered as geological force, mythopoeic grandeur, Taoist restraint. Le Guin raised an eyebrow at the word “Taoist” being applied to her. Tolkien’s expression at “multi-POV political fantasy” suggested he had bitten into something unripe.

“I don’t write political fantasy,” Tolkien said. “I write about the relationship between power and the will. Those are not the same thing.”

“They have always been the same thing,” Le Guin said, “for everyone except the powerful.”

There was a silence. The cat on the wall paused to lick its shoulder. I wrote something in my notebook that I thought was a useful observation and later discovered was just the word “geology” underlined three times.

“Let me try,” I said. “The earth itself is a political system. Layers of compressed history — literal strata — and the people who live on the surface have built their civilizations on top of old catastrophes they can’t remember but that shape everything about their lives. The geology isn’t metaphorical. It’s actual. The ground moves. Seasons of upheaval, centuries apart, and the cultures that survive have organized themselves around managing that violence.”

“Yes,” Tolkien said. “That’s called Numenor.”

Le Guin laughed — not at Tolkien, exactly, but at the scale of the claim. “Every mythology has its drowned land. The interest isn’t in the drowning. It’s in who decides which people get to the boats.”

“That is precisely what makes it a fallen world rather than a merely damaged one,” Tolkien said, and he said “fallen” with the particular weight of a man for whom the word had theological content. “The catastrophe reveals character, certainly. But it also reveals — forgive me — the condition of the world as a place in which catastrophe is possible. The earth shakes not because of politics but because something in the fundamental order of things has been broken.”

“Something was broken,” Le Guin said, “or something was built wrong from the start?”

The question hung between them for longer than was comfortable. I wanted to say something about how both could be true, but I had the good sense, for once, to keep quiet.

Tolkien turned the unlit pipe over twice. “If you build a world in which the order was always unjust, you have written a polemic. If you build a world in which the order was once sound and has been corrupted, you have written a tragedy. Tragedy is larger than polemic.”

“Tragedy is more comfortable for the audience, you mean.” Le Guin’s voice was mild, which was how I was learning to recognize her at her sharpest. “A fallen world implies there was something to fall from. An Eden. A golden age. That’s consoling. It means the suffering has a narrative — it’s a departure from something better. But if the world was constructed on exploitation from the first stone laid, if the mountain range itself is a scar from an act of conquest so old it’s become geography, then there’s no golden age to mourn. There’s only the question of what happens next.”

“The absence of consolation is not the same as truth,” Tolkien said.

“No,” Le Guin said. “But the presence of consolation should make you suspicious.”

I wrote that down.

We walked for a while after that — the garden was larger than it had appeared, or maybe we were walking slowly. Le Guin and Tolkien fell into step with each other, which surprised me, and for several minutes they discussed trees. Not metaphorical trees. Actual trees. The yew’s age, the way the roots had buckled the flagstones, whether it had been deliberately planted or had seeded itself. Tolkien knew the species history. Le Guin knew the ecology. They disagreed about nothing for nearly five minutes, and it was during this conversation about nothing that the shape of the thing we were building began to come into focus.

“The problem with George’s approach,” Le Guin said — and I realized she meant Martin, the multi-POV political structure we’d been asked to engage with — “is that power is treated as the only interesting question. Who has it. Who wants it. Who schemes and betrays to get it. The smallfolk exist to suffer. The land exists to be fought over. It’s a chess game played on a living board, and the board’s agony is scenery.”

Tolkien nodded, which startled me. “The land must matter in its own right. The Shire matters not because it is strategically significant but because it is good. Hobbits are not pieces on a board. They are gardeners.”

“Yes,” Le Guin said, and then: “But.”

The “but” carried the weight of several decades of thinking about whose gardens get plowed under, and who gets to be a gardener, and whether the garden ever belonged to the gardeners or whether it was lent to them by whoever owns the deed.

“The Shire is lovely,” she said. “It is also an enclosure. A place that exists in innocence because someone else — Gandalf, Aragorn, the Rangers — patrols its borders. The hobbits don’t know the cost of their peace. That’s the condition of their innocence. Now. Jemisin — the geology of oppression, the earth literally retaliating — that’s what happens when you write a world where the board has feelings. Where the ground remembers what was done to it. That interests me more than who sits on which throne.”

“It interests me as well,” Tolkien said, and his voice had shifted in a way I couldn’t immediately identify. Lower. More careful. “The Silmarillion is nothing if not a record of the earth remembering what was done to it. Morgoth poured his malice into the very matter of Arda. The ground is corrupted. Not merely damaged — marred. The earth’s hostility is not rebellion. It is disease.”

“Disease implies a doctor,” Le Guin said. “Someone whose job it is to heal. I’m interested in the possibility that the earth’s hostility is — and this will offend you — justified.”

“It offends me less than you imagine.”

I looked up from my notebook. That concession had cost him something. His mouth was set in a way that suggested he was holding a longer argument in reserve, choosing not to deploy it. Le Guin noticed too, and, to her credit, did not press the advantage.

“So,” I said, finding my voice. “A world where the geology is alive with grievance. Where the strata are literal records of old conquests — maybe old peoples, old civilizations, compressed into the earth. And the cultures on the surface have built their political systems around managing the earth’s anger. Some through appeasement. Some through force. Some through denial.”

“And some,” Le Guin said, “through complicity. Through agreeing to forget.”

“That’s the most common kind,” Tolkien murmured. “The forgetting.”

He stopped walking. We were near a stone wall that bordered the garden’s eastern edge, and he put his hand against it as if steadying himself or reading the masonry. “One does not need to go to fantasy for this. The Roman roads in England run over older paths. The churches stand on pagan sites. Every layer of civilization is built on the bones of the one before it, and we drive our motor-cars over all of them without a thought. If your world makes that literal — if the bones are actual bones, if the strata contain actual memory — then you’ve done something worth doing. You’ve made visible what is always true and usually ignored.”

“The question is whether visibility changes anything,” Le Guin said. She had found a stick somewhere and was drawing an absent pattern in the gravel. “In Jemisin’s world, the orogenes can feel the earth’s pain. They can channel it. And the society’s response is to enslave them, because the power that could heal the rift is the same power that could break the continent. Control masquerading as protection.”

“That’s where the multi-POV becomes essential,” I said, suddenly sure of something. “Not because it’s fashionable but because the people inside the system and the people crushed by it genuinely cannot see each other’s reality. They’re not lying about what the world is. They are each reporting accurately from their stratum.”

Le Guin looked at me with something that might have been approval. “Yes. That. Don’t make the surface people villains. Make them people who live on the surface.”

“Multiple viewpoints,” I continued, feeling the structure solidify. “Different factions. A mother in one of the ruling cultures who knows more about the earth’s nature than she should. A functionary in the system of suppression. Someone from below — from the compressed layers, or the margins, or whatever we call the underclass in a world where ‘underclass’ is literal.”

“Be careful with the functionary,” Tolkien said. “The temptation is to make him wicked. The more interesting thing is to make him loyal. A man who serves a corrupt order not because he is corrupt himself but because loyalty is his highest virtue, and he has not yet been forced to choose between loyalty and something larger.”

“A man who pours his identity into his role,” Le Guin said. “Yes. Until the role requires him to do something his identity cannot survive.”

“That is Boromir,” Tolkien said quietly.

“That is every soldier in every empire,” Le Guin said, equally quietly.

There was a pause. A bird sang something complicated from the yew. Tolkien tilted his head to listen to it, and Le Guin waited for him, and I realized this was its own kind of courtesy — that she understood what listening meant to him.

“The mother,” Le Guin said. “Talk to me about the mother.”

I started to answer, but she held up a hand. “Not what she does in the plot. What does she want at three in the morning?”

The question stopped me. I had been thinking about the mother as a narrative function — the character who crosses between strata, who carries dangerous knowledge. Le Guin was asking me to think about her as a person lying awake in the dark.

“She wants her child to be safe,” I said. “But she’s beginning to understand that the safety she can offer — the kind her culture provides — requires a bargain she can no longer stomach. Safety built on suppression. A good school in a good district in a city that exists because something underneath it was buried alive.”

“Now you’re writing,” Le Guin said.

Tolkien, who had been watching the bird, turned back. “The rage of a mother is a different thing from the rage of a revolutionary. A revolutionary can be reasoned with — there are demands, conditions, a platform. A mother whose child has been taken, or threatened, or made complicit in a system she has come to see as monstrous — that rage has no platform. It merely burns.”

“You’re thinking of Nienna,” Le Guin said.

“I’m thinking of several people,” Tolkien said, and his face did something private that I chose not to describe.

“And when you write from the suppressed people’s viewpoint,” Le Guin said, turning to me, “their oppression should not be their only characteristic. They have songs. They have arguments about cooking. They have a joke they tell about the people who live on the surface, and the joke is funny, and it is also a knife.”

We had reached the far end of the garden. There was a wall, and beyond it the sound of traffic. The cat had followed us and was now sitting on the wall looking at Tolkien with the expression of a creature considering whether to permit itself to be admired.

“The ending,” I said. “We’ve been given a constraint. Ambiguity. Two or more interpretations, equally supported. The central tension doesn’t resolve.”

The silence that followed was the longest yet.

“I don’t believe in unresolved endings,” Tolkien said. He said it the way someone says I don’t believe in ghosts — meaning not that he denied their existence but that he found them morally untenable. “A story that refuses to resolve its tension has refused its responsibility to the reader. The eucatastrophe — the sudden turn from despair to grace — is not a trick. It is the structure of reality as I understand it. The gospel is a eucatastrophe. To deny the reader that turn is to deny them something true.”

“The gospel is your eucatastrophe,” Le Guin said. “Not everyone’s.”

“I am speaking of narrative structure, not theology.”

“You have never in your life separated the two, and I mean that as a compliment.”

He looked at her sidelong. The pipe turned in his fingers.

Le Guin pulled her jacket tighter. The afternoon had gone cold without anyone remarking on it. “A story that resolves cleanly tells the reader that suffering has an endpoint. That if you endure long enough, the eagle comes. For the mother who’s lost her child to the system of suppression, for the people whose ancestors were ground into the geology — to tell them that resolution is coming, that the arc bends, that grace will arrive at the eucatastrophic moment — that can be its own form of cruelty.”

“And to tell them that it won’t?”

“Is honest.”

“Honest is not the same as true.”

They were circling each other now, and I could feel the meeting pulling toward a resolution that the meeting itself was not supposed to have. I stepped in, clumsily.

“What if the ending supports both readings?” I said. “The functionary does something — an act that could be read as betrayal of his order or as the highest expression of his loyalty. The mother reaches the place where the earth’s memory is accessible, and what she finds there could be an answer or could be another question. The suppressed people rise, or don’t — or rise in a way that looks like collapse from one vantage point and like liberation from another.”

“That’s three endings,” Le Guin said. “Pick one.”

“No — the same ending, seen from different positions in the structure. The same event, and one reading says: the world has cracked open and something new is coming. And the other says: the world has cracked open and now nothing is holding it together.”

Tolkien was quiet for a long time. The cat had descended from the wall and was threading between his ankles.

“Ragnarok,” he said finally. “The destruction of the world that is also the birth of the world that will be. I have always found it less satisfying than the Christian account, but I will concede — ” He paused. “I will concede that it is not dishonest.”

“High praise,” Le Guin said drily.

“It is, rather.”

She looked at him and something passed between them that I couldn’t have named — two people who had spent their lives building worlds from opposite foundations, and who found in this particular corner of the conversation that the foundations were, if not the same, at least adjacent. Roots of different trees, tangled underground.

“The ambiguity must be structural,” Le Guin said to me. “Not decorative. Not a trick where you leave the last page blank and call it literary. The two readings must both be earned. The reader who believes the world is being reborn and the reader who believes the world is finally dying must both be able to point to specific scenes and say: here, this is where the story told me the truth.”

“And neither reader should be comfortable,” Tolkien added. “The hopeful reader should have reason to doubt. The despairing reader should have reason to hope. That is not ambiguity for its own sake. That is” — he searched for the word — “that is the condition of living inside a story whose ending you cannot see.”

Le Guin stood up from the bench where she’d been resting. The cat startled and vanished over the wall into whatever territory cats maintain on the other side of things.

“You should write the geology first,” she said to me. “Before the characters. Before the politics. Understand what the earth remembers and why it is angry. Everything else is built on that.”

“The languages,” Tolkien said. “Not all of them. But the suppressed people need a language for the earth’s memory that the surface cultures have outlawed or forgotten. The act of speaking it should be dangerous. The act of hearing it should change the listener.”

“And the mother,” Le Guin said, walking toward the garden gate. “The mother should have a word in that language. One word. Something she learned from her child before the child was taken. And she should not know what it means for most of the story.”

“When does she learn?”

Le Guin opened the gate. She looked back at both of us.

“That’s the question the ending doesn’t answer.”