posted
Hello, I was just wondering if anyone one knew the origin of Card's Native Americans, specifically the green song. I only ask because I recently came across this passage from another author.
"Ah the green smell! It is better than much sleep. Let us run!"
and
"Only [he] stepped as lightly as ever, his feet hardly seeming to press the grass, leaving no footprints as he passed...he found all the sustenance he needed and he could sleep, if sleep it could be called by Men, resting his mind in the strange paths of dream, even as he walked open-eyed in the light of the world."
I removed the key words as to not yet reveal the source. This passage seemed to me to almost be a description of the Greensong.
The passage in full is:
"Only Legolas stepped as lightly as ever, his feet hardly seeming to press the grass, leaving no footprints as he passed; but in the waybread of the Elves he found all the sustenance he needed and he could sleep, if sleep it could be called by Men, resting his mind in the strange paths of dream, even as he walked open-eyed in the light of the world."
For credits sake, though I'm sure all of you know now where it came from, that is a passage from JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (roughly page 22 or a little less than halfway through the chapter The Riders of Rohan, second chapter of the book).
It seemed to me that the resemblance is too similar to be completely a coincidence, so to restate my question:
Was Card's Greensong of loosely based off of the nature of Tolkien's Elves?
I remember that passage now, and the similarity is rather striking, but I don't have any knowledge of its potential influence on OSC.
There are a handful of fictional concepts so elegant and so well-described that I absolutely WANT them to be real. The Greensong is one of those.
Posts: 105 | Registered: Oct 2005
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posted
Wow.... that's weird. I'm rereading the Alvin Maker series now so I can finally read the complete series, and was planning on LOTR next. That's really exciting.
Posts: 349 | Registered: Oct 2007
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posted
I always thought it reminded me just a little bit of Legolas! It seems likely that the Greensong could have had a conscious or subconscious origin in the Elves from LOTR. What fantasy writer hasn't been subtly (or not so subtly) influenced by Tolkien at one point or another?
Posts: 1006 | Registered: Jun 2006
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posted
I think it's far more likely that both Tolkein and Card were influenced by "nature lore" in general. After all, we see things about how being "in tune" with nature can give humans extraordinary powers all over the place. Now, it is odd that both Card and Tolkein chose "green" as part of it, and that might be subconscious influence, but Dune, StarWars, and many other series's include natural superpower elements as well.
Posts: 1321 | Registered: Jun 2006
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posted
It's true that that particular quote from LOTR sounds a lot like the Greensong, but I don't think there's that much else about the elves that's similar to Alvin. The whole feeling of the elves' power to me is totally different. I think it's much more likely OSC was influence by Native American lore.
Posts: 930 | Registered: Dec 2006
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posted
Based on the 20% of the Silmarillion that I was able to get through, along with the LOTR novels, I do think the mythology of Tolkien's elves is quite different from the way OSC described the native americans' magic.
Posts: 4287 | Registered: Mar 2005
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posted
That's because you live in California... Here in SouthTexas the predominat color when I think of nature is a hue of golden brown.... A few years ago when we had all the floods I remember being struck, afterwards, by how truly GREEN everything looked. Usually our wild grass, even in spring, has a sort of yellowish-green hue. By summer everything is so parched that we're back to golden brown.
However, I'll concede that in general you are right. Biology text books are usually green, and in the old fashioned kids trivial pursuit the nature questions were green too. I just don't have a particularly "green" feeling of nature in my own mind, so I guess I missed the fact that it too was a logical choice.
Posts: 1321 | Registered: Jun 2006
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posted
don't forget in his Treason book they can basically shut down their mind and just keep on keepin' on with their running through time and space. It seems he just readapted that for the greensong as well, with more pagaen/ naturalist beliefs thrown in.
Posts: 3 | Registered: Jan 2008
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posted
don't forget in his Treason book they can basically shut down their mind and just keep on keepin' on with their running through time and space. It seems he just readapted that for the greensong as well, with more pagaen/ naturalist beliefs thrown in.
Posts: 3 | Registered: Jan 2008
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posted
I think it has more to do with the shared experience that I imagine many people (including Tolkein and Card) have had. I can recall some experiences when hiking in the wilderness or otherwise enjoying 'nature' where I have felt a modicum of refreshment and renewed vitality. It would not be hard, then, to imagine a world in which this effect is much more pronounced for some people.
Posts: 1099 | Registered: Apr 2005
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posted
-sigh- I've had bits and pieces of this series and finally I've completed it... and it's been gathering dust for the past 2 months. I really do need to get around to reading this. :/
Philip Pullman said in the acknowledgments of The Amber Spyglass, "I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read. My principle in researching for a novel is, 'Read like a butterfly, write like a bee,' and if this story contains any honey, it's entirely because of the quality of nectar I found in the works of better writers."
I think this applies so much to every writer. It's so likely to find repeated patterns (because in 2000 years, it's likely ideas repeat) because they pick and choose. Inspiration crops up everywhere. It's not important what they copied, it's important how they changed it becuase that is what they are actually saying (they being writers).
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