Several people have asked me about the literary influences on me as I came to write Gryphon’s Heir, and that’s an easy one to answer: J.R.R. Tolkien, the master himself, and to a lesser extent, C.S. Lewis. (Although I’m a bigger fan of his Christian apologetics works, Narnia has its place in my heart, too. But if you’re looking for simple yet profound works on Christian theology, you need go no further than his Mere Christianity or his especially brilliant Screwtape Letters, which is my personal favourite of his.) But Tolkien was the primary influence for me, like so many others. Here’s my nerd confession for today: I first read The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) in the summer of 1970, shortly after my 12th birthday. And I was utterly enthralled. I was a fairly bookish boy who had loved to read ever since the first grade (I still remember dashing home with my initial primer, an eponymous literary tome about a dog named Tip, shouting excitedly to my mother as I crossed the threshold of our house that I could read!), and perhaps I was also a wee bit precocious, which probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise to those who know me... although I deny that I was a troll. My mother had bought The Hobbit for me some time earlier, and it had actually taken me one or two tries to sink my teeth into it, along with the encouragement of a family friend. But when I had finished it, I just had to go after its big brother, LOTR. And so, that summer, as my family and I went off on our summer holiday trip to B.C. and the Olympic peninsula in Washington state, there was I in the back seat of our new car, ensconced with Professor Tolkien’s masterpiece. (The car, a dark blue 1970 Pontiac Strato Chief, purchased by my father for the then-princely sum of $2000, was as large as the Queen Mary and probably weighed nearly as much. I learned to drive in it --- the car, that is, not the ocean liner --- a few years later while we were on another summer trip to Jasper National Park, where, in a gesture of either supreme confidence or unbelievable naïveté, my father allowed me to roar at high speeds on the narrow, twisty mountain byways with treacherous drop-offs of several hundred feet beside the road. How my mother didn’t have a heart attack, I don’t know to this day. But I digress.)
From my back seat perch that summer of 1970, I read. And read. And read. I just could not put LOTR down --- to the strange annoyance of my parents, who couldn’t understand why I wasn’t looking out at the endless forested vistas as we drove (ah, the simplicity of life back in the Dark Ages before cell phones and in-car DVD players). Actually, I WAS looking at those trees and mountains every once in a while. They provided great atmosphere, like the rainforests in our campgrounds each night as I sat by the campfire’s vermillion glow and read some more. I could look up from my book and gaze around, and it wasn’t much of a stretch to believe I was in the Old Forest or Mirkwood or Fangorn. That’s how it started.
(I also bought the little wooden figure pictured in the accompanying photograph while on the Olympic peninsula, and named him Thorin Oakenshield in honour of... well, you know who he was named for. Granted, he doesn’t much resemble Richard Armitage, but in my defence, my little wooden guy has been playing the role for much longer.)
(And I guess, since we went all around the Olympic peninsula that summer, that we must also have driven through Forks. But it had not yet achieved its literary notoriety, and I have absolutely no recollection of it. Was probably too busy being in Lothlorien, anyway. Thank goodness.)
From that initial exposure to Middle Earth, it really wasn’t too much of a stretch to want to write my own stories. I actually still have some of those early attempts still in my files. I take them out and look at them once in a while, peering back over a distance of more than 40 years, and I smile. It’s a smile of wistful nostalgia, not scorn, because even in those embryonic efforts, the desire to create something powerful and believable and wonderful is clearly evident. I think that’s how it often is with creativity: coming across something that we fall in love with, we want to create our own versions of it. We desire more. Now, my Arrinor is not Middle Earth (either Tolkien’s or Jackson’s version). Let’s be perfectly clear about that. There are a few similarities, but a lot of fundamental differences. There’s a big difference between being inspired by something and merely doing slavish imitation.
But it’s ultimately as C.S. Lewis has said, and I’ll leave you for now with his words: “Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”
God bless you, Jack. Because I have certainly tried to tell the truth in the story of Rhiss and his Arrinor.
From my back seat perch that summer of 1970, I read. And read. And read. I just could not put LOTR down --- to the strange annoyance of my parents, who couldn’t understand why I wasn’t looking out at the endless forested vistas as we drove (ah, the simplicity of life back in the Dark Ages before cell phones and in-car DVD players). Actually, I WAS looking at those trees and mountains every once in a while. They provided great atmosphere, like the rainforests in our campgrounds each night as I sat by the campfire’s vermillion glow and read some more. I could look up from my book and gaze around, and it wasn’t much of a stretch to believe I was in the Old Forest or Mirkwood or Fangorn. That’s how it started.
(I also bought the little wooden figure pictured in the accompanying photograph while on the Olympic peninsula, and named him Thorin Oakenshield in honour of... well, you know who he was named for. Granted, he doesn’t much resemble Richard Armitage, but in my defence, my little wooden guy has been playing the role for much longer.)
(And I guess, since we went all around the Olympic peninsula that summer, that we must also have driven through Forks. But it had not yet achieved its literary notoriety, and I have absolutely no recollection of it. Was probably too busy being in Lothlorien, anyway. Thank goodness.)
From that initial exposure to Middle Earth, it really wasn’t too much of a stretch to want to write my own stories. I actually still have some of those early attempts still in my files. I take them out and look at them once in a while, peering back over a distance of more than 40 years, and I smile. It’s a smile of wistful nostalgia, not scorn, because even in those embryonic efforts, the desire to create something powerful and believable and wonderful is clearly evident. I think that’s how it often is with creativity: coming across something that we fall in love with, we want to create our own versions of it. We desire more. Now, my Arrinor is not Middle Earth (either Tolkien’s or Jackson’s version). Let’s be perfectly clear about that. There are a few similarities, but a lot of fundamental differences. There’s a big difference between being inspired by something and merely doing slavish imitation.
But it’s ultimately as C.S. Lewis has said, and I’ll leave you for now with his words: “Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”
God bless you, Jack. Because I have certainly tried to tell the truth in the story of Rhiss and his Arrinor.
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